A companion to chivalry

A comprehensive study of every aspect of chivalry and chivalric culture.Chivalry lay at the heart of elite society in the Middle Ages, but it is a nebulous concept which defies an easy definition. More than just a code of ethical behaviour, it shaped literary tastes, art and manners, as well as s...

A companion to the gawain-poet

`Provides an excellent one-volume guide to the works of the anonymous Gawain-poet.' CHOICEThe essays collected here on the Gawain-Poet offer stimulating introductions to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness and Patience, providing both information and original analysis. Topics inclu...

A critical companion to beowulf

A generous, energetic, engaging work... will be important to Beowulf study for years to come. THE MEDIEVAL REVIEWBeowulf is the best known and most closely studied literary work surviving from Anglo-Saxon England, and the modern reader is faced with a bewildering number and variety of interpretat...

A dictionary of fabulous beasts

Mythical creatures drawn largely from medieval travellers' tales, but encompassing civilisations from the Sumerians to the Wild West.A dictionary? No, this is really an astonishing ark filled with beasts from a fabulous zoo far more varied and entertaining than anything from ordinary natural hist...

A history of old norse poetry and poetics

Accessible guide to and description of the medieval poetic tradition in Scandinavia.This is the first book in English to deal with the twin subjects of Old Norse poetry and the various vernacular treatises on native poetry that were a conspicuous feature of medieval intellectual life in Iceland a...

A new companion to malory

A comprehensive survey of Malory's Morte Darthur, one of the most important texts of the Middle Ages.Malory's Morte Darthur is now a canonical and widely-taught text. Recent decades have seen a transformation and expansion of critical approaches in scholarship, as well as significant advances in ...

An introduction to english runes

Introduction to the use of runes as a practical script for a variety of purposes in Anglo-Saxon England.Runes are quite frequently mentioned in modern writings, usually imprecisely as a source of mystic knowledge, power or insight. This book sets the record straight. It shows runes working as a p...

Arthurianism in early plantagenet england

First full-scale account of the use of the Arthurian legend in the long twelfth century.The precedent of empire and the promise of return lay at the heart of King Arthur's appeal in the Middle Ages. Both ideas found fullness of expression in the twelfth century: monarchs and magnates sought to re...

Authority, gender and space in the anglo-norman world, 900-1200

SHORTLISTED for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain's Hitchcock Medallion. A ground-breaking interdisciplinary approach to the medieval manor pre- and post-Conquest.Medieval manors have long been the subject of academic study, though the ways in which these houses reflected a...

Bad medievalism and the modernity problem

Challenges the assumptions made over the medieval/modern divide by examining the medieval roots of modern racism Humanists have long insisted on a chasm separating modernity and the Middle Ages. In Bad Medi­evalism and the Modernity Problem, Kathy Lavezzo demonstrates how the temporal divide scho...

Beds and chambers in late medieval england

First full-length interdisciplinary study of the effect of these everyday surroundings on literature, culture and the collective consciousness of the late middle ages.The bed, and the chamber which contained it, was something of a cultural and social phenomenon in late-medieval England. Their int...

Birds in medieval english poetry

First full-length study of birds and their metamorphoses as treated in a wide range of medieval poetry, from the Anglo-Saxons to Chaucer and Gower.Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people's lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is s...

Black metaphors

In the late Middle Ages, Christian conversion could wash a black person's skin white—or at least that is what happens when a black sultan converts to Christianity in the English romance King of Tars. In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker examines the rhetorical and theological moves through which ...

Chronicles of the investiture contest

The first English translation of Frutolf of Michelsberg's Chronicle, one of the most significant chronicles of the Middle Ages.

Confronting crisis in the carolingian empire

This is the translation of an extraordinary and enigmatic narrative of Carolingian history, which should interest historians of politics, religion and literature in equal measure. Radbertus’ ‘Epitaph for Arsenius’ is both a personal and a political text, written with twenty years of hindsight, by...

Dante

An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine ComedyFor all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are therefore never far away in this autho...

Dante's divine comedy

The life and times of Dante’s soaring poetic allegory of the soul’s redemptive journey toward GodWritten during his exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy describes the poet’s travels through hell, purgatory, and paradise, exploring the state of the human soul aft...

Dreaming of cockaigne

Imagine a dreamland where roasted pigs wander about with knives in their backs to make carving easy, where grilled geese fly directly into one's mouth, where cooked fish jump out of the water and land at one's feet. The weather is always mild, the wine flows freely, sex is readily available, and ...

Ecstasy in the classroom

Ecstasy in the Classroom analyzes the early thirteenth century theological discourse about Paul’s rapture and other modes of cognizing God. It reconstructs the perceptions of transformation and self they imply, and demonstrate their role in establishing the peculiar professional identity of schol...

Empire of magic

Empire of Magic offers a genesis and genealogy for medieval romance and the King Arthur legend through the history of Europe's encounters with the East in crusades, travel, missionizing, and empire formation. It also produces definitions of "race" and "nation" for the medieval period and posits t...

Federico garcía lorca

Feted by his contemporaries, Federico García Lorca's status has only grown since his death in 1936. This book shows just why his fame has endured, through an exploration of his most popular works.Feted by his contemporaries, Federico García Lorca's status has only grown since his death in 1936: p...

Form and foreskin

Why did Saint Augustine ask God to “circumcise [his] lips”? Why does Sir Gawain cut off the Green Knight’s head on the Feast of the Circumcision? Is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath actually—as an early glossator figures her—a foreskin? And why did Ezra Pound claim that he had incubated The Waste Land insi...

How the classics made shakespeare

From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare's imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having "small Latin and less Greek." But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classi...

Human agency in medieval society, 1100-1450

Argues the case for the individual as autonomous moral agent in the later Middle Ages."Of fundamental importance for any discipline dealing with past societies and cultures. One of the most wide-ranging, sophisticated and imaginative books on medieval history that I have read in a very long time....

Impossible recovery

Hannah Lucas explores the entanglement of illness and revelation in the writings of Julian of Norwich, illuminating the unexpected commonalities between the medical and the mystical and their significance for philosophies of health.

In light of another's word

Challenging the traditional conception of medieval Europe as insular and even xenophobic, Shirin A. Khanmohamadi's In Light of Another's Word looks to early ethnographic writers who were surprisingly aware of their own otherness, especially when faced with the far-flung peoples and cultures they ...

Lancelot-grail 10: chapter summaries for the vulgate and post-vulgate cycles and index of proper names

Lancelot-grail: 1. the history of the holy grail

Lancelot-grail: 3. lancelot part i and ii

Lancelot-grail: 4. lancelot part iii and iv

Lancelot-grail: 5. lancelot part v and vi

Lancelot-grail: 6. the quest for the holy grail

The Quest of the Holy Grail adds a spiritual dimension to the adventures of Arthur's knights. Galahad replaces Lancelot as the central figure, though he appears and disappears so often that many of the knights are engaged in a quest to find him rather than the Grail. The central concept of the Gr...

Lancelot-grail: 7. the death of arthur

Lancelot-grail: 8. the post vulgate cycle. the merlin continuation

Lancelot-grail: 9. the post-vulgate cycle. the quest for the holy grail and the death of arthur

Linked verse in medieval japan

This book is the most comprehensive work in English on premodern Japanese linked verse (renga).

Literature of the crusades

An interdisciplinary approach to sources for our knowledge of the crusades.The interrelation of so-called "literary" and "historical" sources of the crusades, and the fluidity of these categorisations, are the central concerns of the essays collected here. They demonstrate what the study of liter...

Lyric tactics

What shall we make of medieval English lyrics? They have no fixed line or meter, no consistent point of view, and their content may seem misaligned with the other texts in manuscripts in which they are found. Yet in Lyric Tactics, Ingrid Nelson argues that the lyric poetry of later medieval Engla...

Medieval and early modern murder

Drawing on a wealth of sources from different disciplines, the essays here provide a nuanced picture of how medieval and early modern societies viewed murder and dealt with murderers.Murder - the perpetrators, victims, methods and motives - has been the subject of law, literature, chronicles and ...

Medieval english lyrics and carols

A new and comprehensive anthology of medieval lyrics and carols, in new editions, with introduction and commentary.Lyrics and carols are two of the most important types of medieval literature. This anthology provides a generous and wide-ranging selection, beginning with the first lyrics in Englis...