This comparative study examines Floire and Blancheflor and shows how medieval writers from Spain, France, Italy, England, and Scandinavia reworked this story from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries to develop and emphasize social, political, religious and artistic goals. It shows the influence of a little-known medieval Spanish version, especially as a precursor to Boccaccio's Il Filocolo, and examines important issues of the development of prose fiction in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

This book first appeared in German in 1985, and set a new agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. While Haug focuses primarily on medieval German writers, the principles underlying his argument are equally relevant to medieval literature in English or any other European language. This ground-breaking study is now available in English for the first time.

Patrick Boyde argues that the way in which Dante represents what he (or his fictional self) saw and felt was profoundly influenced by the thirteenth-century science of psychology. Professor Boyde offers an authoritative account of the way in which vision and the emotions were understood in Dante's lifetime. He rereads many of the most dramatic and moving episodes in the Comedy, and shows how knowledge of Dante's philosophical ideas can help us to understand the meaning of his journey toward the source of goodness and truth.

This is the first major study of the cultural role of grammatica, the central discipline concerned with literacy, language, and literature in early medieval society. Martin Irvine draws together several aspects of medieval culture--literary theory, the nature of literacy, education, Biblical interpretation, linguistic thought--in order to reveal the more far-reaching social effects of grammatica in medieval culture. The book is based on new and previously neglected sources, many of which have been edited from medieval manuscripts for the first time.

This book offers new insights into the rich and varied Dutch literature of the Middle Ages. Sixteen essays written by top scholars consider this literature in the context of the social, historical and cultural developments of the period in which it took shape. The collection includes studies of the most representative authors, genres and works of the time. A comparative chronological survey provides an overview of the main cultural, historical and literary events in Europe and the Netherlands between 1150 and 1500, and the bibliography lists English translations of medieval Dutch texts...

This is the first literary study of the career of Richard Rolle (d. 1349), a Yorkshire hermit and mystic who was one of the most widely-read English writers of the late Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson proposes a new chronology of Rolle's writings, and offers the first literary analyses of a number of his works. He shows how Rolle's career, as a writer of passionate religious works in Latin and later in English, has as its principal focus the establishment of his own spiritual authority. The book also addresses wider issues, suggesting a new way of looking at mystical writing in general, and...

This book is devoted to a full and lucid exposition of Boyde's ideas.

In this full-length study of the early history of greed Richard Newhauser challenges the traditional view that avarice only became a dominant sin with the rise of a money economy. He shows that avaritia, the sin of greed for possessions, was dominant in a wide range of theological and literary texts from the first century CE, and that by the early Middle Ages avarice headed the list of vices for authors aiming to convert others from pagan materialism to Christian spirituality.

This wide-ranging study examines the role of the dream in medieval culture with reference to philosophical, legal and theological writings as well as literary and autobiographical works. Stephen Kruger studies the development of theories of dreaming, from the Neoplatonic and patristic writers to late medieval re-interpretations, and shows how these theories relate to autobiographical accounts and to more popular treatments of dreaming. He considers previously neglected material including one important dream vision by Nicole Oresme, and arrives at a new understanding of this literary genre,...

Chaucer's Legend of Good Women is a testament to the disparate views of women prevalent in the Middle Ages. Dr. Percival contends that the complex medieval notion of Woman informs the structure of the poem: in the Prologue Chaucer praises conventional ideas of female virtue, while in the Legends he demonstrates a humorous skepticism, apparently influenced by a contemporary antifeminist tradition. This is a comprehensive account of the Legend's interpretative puzzles, which does not ignore the element of political writing and adds to a close and nuanced reading of the text an examination of...