"This is a splendid, rewarding book destined to reshape critical thinking about medieval poetry in English. Amodio combines groundbreaking theory with a deep, wide-ranging command of relevant scholarship to offer a uniquely inclusive perspective on an enormous and disparate collection of Old and Middle English poetry." John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia
This is a well-conceived, well-structured, and well-written book that fills a significant gap in current scholarly discourse. Amodio is extremely well-informed about current oral theory, and presents a beautifully...

By looking at the ways in which cultures in Northern Europe interpret lyric songs, Thomas A. DuBois illuminates both commonalities of interpretive practice and unique features of their musical traditions. DuBois draws on sets of lyric songs from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland to explore the question of meaning in folklore, especially the role of traditional audiences in appraising and understanding nonnarrative songs. DuBois's examples range from the medieval and early modern periods to the late twentieth century. He examines lyric songs embedded within prose...

In Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England, Lori Ann Garner illuminates the idiomatic and traditional meanings invested in depictions of architecture within the vernacular verse of early medieval England, portrayals that consistently demonstrate a shared aesthetic between literary texts and physical buildings. Through systematic exploration of the period's verbal and material culture as complementary art forms, Garner argues that in Anglo-Saxon England the arts of poetry and building emerged from the same cultural matrix. Not only did Anglo-Saxon builders...