Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Medieval

A resolution to the vexed problem whether a troubadour's love is erotic or spiritual is offered by Paolo Cherchi through a new reading of Andreas Capellanus' De Amore (written around 1186-1196). He suggests that Andreas, using a rhetorical strategy that creates ambiguity, condemns courtly love because its claim that passion generates virtue is untenable and deceitful. Although Andreas grasped the core of the courtly love 'system, ' namely, the relation between passion and ethics, he failed to consider the notion of mezura, that courtly virtue through which troubadours...

This volume, the work of a group of Chaucerians from the University of Adelaide, is the latest in the University of Toronto Press's Chaucer Bibliography series, a series which aims to provide annotated bibliographies for all of Chaucer's works. It summarizes twentieth-century commentary on the three fabliaux of Fragment 1 of The Canterbury Tales the Miller's, the Reeve's, and the Cook's tales. There are separate sections for editions, translations and modernizations, sources and analogues, lexicographical and linguistic studies, for the tales considered...

During the later Middle Ages, new optical theories were introduced that located the power of sight not in the seeing subject, but in the passive object of vision. This shift had a powerful impact not only on medieval science but also on theories of knowledge, and this changing relationship of vision and knowledge was a crucial element in late medieval religious devotion. In Seeing through the Veil, Suzanne Conklin Akbari examines several late medieval allegories in the context of contemporary paradigm shifts in scientific and philosophical theories of vision.

After a survey on...

Medieval Icelandic authors wrote a great deal on the subject of England and the English. This new work by Magn's Fjalldal is the first to provide an overview of what Icelandic medieval texts have to say about Anglo-Saxon England in respect to its language, culture, history, and geography.

Some of the texts Fjalldal examines include family sagas, the shorter ttir, the histories of Norwegian and Danish kings, and the Icelandic lives of Anglo-Saxon saints. Fjalldal finds that in response to a hostile Norwegian court and kings, Icelandic authors - from the early thirteenth century...

The first of three volumes, this book is an edition of forty psalters written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England, half of which are glossed in Old English. The work is an invaluable tool for comparative gloss scholarship, for the study of the influence of vocabulary, the interpretation of glosses, the study of relations among psalters, and the study of the Latin text of the psalms in Anglo-Saxon England. It also presents new insights on the development of centres of learning and the impact of the psalter on literary tradition. Each volume addresses a group of fifty psalms.

This landmark...

The Pardoner's Tale is unique among the Canterbury Tales in that it showcases a character who also makes several other appearances throughout the Tales. One of only three pilgrims to be given a full-length prologue by Chaucer, the Pardoner takes on a dramatic force unequaled among the pilgrims.

A research tool for specialist and graduate student alike, this volume on Chaucer's Pardoner's Prologue and Tale offers an exhaustive collection of material from the period 1900 to 1995, abstracting and cross-referencing book-length and chapter-length studies,...

M.R. James was prompted to characterize the Egerton Genesis as 'the most puzzling, and also, in view of the wonderful qualities of its drawing and colouring, one of the most fascinating' of all manuscripts he had ever seen. Questions of date, iconographical and stylistic character, artist's training, provenance, purpose, and patronage, largely unanswered since James' time, surround this manuscript.

The Egerton Genesis is a pictorial narrative of the biblical Genesis, supplemented by legendary material. It was commissioned in the fourteenth century for the entertainment of a...

Tools of Literacy is a thorough and ground-breaking examination of thirteenth-century skaldic verse or dr?ttkv?tt, the literary production of Iceland in the thirteenth century, and of the textual culture which nurtured the poets. Nordal demonstrates the connection between thirteenth-century skaldic verse and the formal study of grammatica in schools, and establishes that skaldic verse was treated much like a Nordic equivalent of classic texts. She also reevaluates and reemphasizes the versatility of skaldic verse, and demonstrates the link between Icelandic authors and...

Thomas Usk, a contemporary of Chaucer, was a figure of political and literary importance who became involved in the tempestuous politics of late fourteenth-century London. In 1384 he took part in John Northampton's agitations against the mayor of London and was imprisoned. While in custody, he had an apparent conversion experience and wrote a detailed accusation against Northampton and his followers. Shortly thereafter, while still in custody, he wrote The Testament of Love, which contains an allegorical apologia for his change of heart, a meditation on the fickle nature of worldly fortune...

Originally published by J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1934.

In this volume Gordon presents the four great medieval versions of the love of Troilus and Criseida: Benoit de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, written in approximately 1160 and the earliest surviving version of the story; Giovanni Boccaccio's It Filostrato (c 1338), which drew on Benoit's tale for one of its two main sources; Georffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde c 1385), for centuries considered his best work; and Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid (c 1490), which functions as a...

If a reader of Chaucer suspects that an echo of a biblical verse may somehow depend for its meaning on traditional commentary on that verse, how does he or she go about finding the relevant commentaries? If one finds the word 'fire' in a context that suggests resonances beyond the literal, how does that reader go about learning what the traditional figurative meanings of fire were?

It was to the solution of such difficulties that R.E. Kaske addressed himself in this volume setting out and analyzing the major repositories of traditional material: biblical exegesis, the liturgy, hymns...

Marie de France, one of the best-known medieval women, is justly famous for her Lais, but her longer work, the Fables, has been newly discovered by modern audiences. This collection of 103 tales is the earliest extant vernacular collection of fables from western Europe.

Marie de France's sources are not clear; she appears to claim a unique source, but that is obviously not true; the first forty tales are part of the Latin tradition, specifically the Romulus Nilantii, but the other sixty-three seem to come from all over: other Greek and Latin works, fabliaux, monks' tales, the...

Selections from English Wycliffite Writings gathers together the main sources for the study of the Lollard movement, the documents of the Lollards themselves. Inspired and influenced by the writings of the heretical fourteenth century Oxford professor John Wyclif, Lollardy was the spiritual predecessor of the sixteenth century Reformation movement in England. Persecuted for their radical beliefs after 1425, the Lollards were well known for their possession of books, quires, and pamphlets in English, and left behind a considerable body of literature discussing religious and...

This collection of commissioned essays explores women's vernacular theology through a wide range of medieval prose and verse texts, from saints' lives to visionary literature. Employing a historicist methodology, the essays are sited at the intersection of two discursive fields: female spiritual practice and female textual practice. The contributors are primarily interested in the relation of women to religious books, as writers, receivers, and as objects of representation. They focus on historical approaches to the question of women's spirituality, and generically unrestricted...

Breaking new ground in interdisciplinary scholarship of late medieval England, this collection of essays celebrates and addresses the work of renowned medieval scholar A.G. Rigg. George Rigg's interests span medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English literature and philology; the contributors to this volume are an international group of colleagues, students, and friends of Rigg's, whose essays are as wide-ranging as Rigg's own interests.

The contributions include: new editions of Middle English texts; an overview of the editions of Chaucer from the nineteenth century to the...

The study of saints in medieval biblical drama has often been neglected in favour of the study of sinners - the villains and the rogues. In Saints and the Audience in Middle English Biblical Drama, Chester N. Scoville takes a different tack, examining the language and rhetoric of saintly characters in Middle English biblical plays. Scoville contends that the plays focus attention on the interaction between the divine realm and the human realm, that the saintly characters are key to seeing this interaction, and that the overall function of the plays is to instill in the audience a...

Of all the stories that comprise The Canterbury Tales, certain ones have attracted more attention than others in terms of literary scholarship and canonization. The Monk's Tale, for instance, was popular in the decades after Chaucer's death, but has since suffered critical neglect, particularly in the twentieth century. The opposite has occurred with the Nun's Priest's Tale, which has long been one of the most popular and widely discussed of the tales, cited by some critics as the most essentially 'Chaucerian' of them all.

This annotated bibliography is a record of all...

As one of the most prolific and influential scholars in the field, Thomas D. Hill has made an indelible mark on the study of Old English literature. In celebration of his distinguished career, the editors of Source of Wisdom have assembled a wide-ranging collection of nineteen original essays on Old English poetry and prose as well as early medieval Latin, touching upon many of Hill's specific research interests.

Among the topics examined in this volume are the Christian-Latin sources of Old English texts, including religious and 'sapiential' poetry, and prose translations of...