You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
'Sir Bevis of Hamton' is one of the most widespread and important Middle English romances. This book considers its historical and literary contexts, and its Welsh, Irish and Icelandic versions.
This volume of essays focuses on how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Drawing from a reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, each contributor shows how individual poets, ecclesiasts, legists, and institutions claimed Anglo-Saxon predecessors for rhetorical purposes in response to social, cultural, and linguistic change. Contributors trouble simple definitions of identity and period, exploring how medieval authors looked to earlier periods of history to define social identities and make claims for their present moment based on the political fiction of an imagined community of a single, distinct nation unified in identity by descent and religion. Contributors are Cynthia Turner Camp, Irina Dumitrescu, Jay Paul Gates, Erin Michelle Goeres, Mary Kate Hurley, Maren Clegg Hyer, Nicole Marafioti, Brian O’Camb, Kathleen Smith, Carla María Thomas, Larissa Tracy, and Eric Weiskott. See inside the book.
A new look at the way in which medieval European literature depicts torture and brutality.
Popular romance was one of the most wide-spread forms of literature in the Middle Ages, yet despite its cultural centrality, and its fundamental importance for later literary developments, the genre has defied precise definition, its subject matter ranging from tales of chivalric adventure, to saintly women, and monsters that become human. The essays in this collection provide contexts, definitions, and explanations for the genre, particularly in an English context. Topics covered include genre and literary classification; race and ethnicity; gender; orality and performance; the romance and young readers; metre and form; printing culture; and reception.
This Companion offers an introduction to key topics in the study of erotic literature from antiquity to the present.
These essays take advantage of a new, exciting trend towards interdisciplinary research on the Charlemagne legend. Written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, these essays focus on the multifaceted ways the Charlemagne legend functioned in the Middle Ages and how central the shared (if nonetheless fictional) memory of the great Frankish ruler was to the medieval West. A gateway to new research on memory, crusading, apocalyptic expectation, Carolingian historiography, and medieval kingship, the contributors demonstrate the fuzzy line separating “fact” and “fiction” in the Middle Ages.
Studies in the Age of Chaucer is the annual yearbook of the New Chaucer Society, publishing articles on the writing of Chaucer and his contemporaries, their antecedents and successors, and their intellectual and social contexts. More generally, articles explore the culture and writing of later medieval Britain (1200-1500). Each SAC volume also includes an annotated bibliography and reviews of Chaucer-related publications.
Sir Bevis of Hampton' is arguably one of the most important non-Arthurian romances in Middle English, but it is only comparatively recently that it has received much scholarly or critical attention. Originating in England, the story of Bevis was immensely popular and influential during the late medieval and early modern periods, both in the British Isles and in continental Europe. The Middle English Bevis was translated around 1300 from an Anglo-Norman original, which spawned versions, both written and oral, in a dozen or so languages; these range in date from the beginning of the fourteenth century to within living memory, when a version of the story was still being performed by Sicilian pu...
What did medieval readers think of romance? Their attitudes to it, and the implications for the genre, are explored in this provocative study. An important and powerful meditation on romance genre, reception and ethical/moral purpose -- amongst many other aspects of romance. Professor ROBERT ROUSE, University of British Columbia. Medieval readers, like modern ones, differed in whether they saw "noble storie, and worthie for to drawen to memorie" in romance, or "drasty rymyng, nat worth a toord". This book tackles the task of discerning what were the medieval expectations of the genrein England: the evidence, and the implications. Safe for monastic, trained readers, romances provided moral ex...