Literary Criticism : Medieval

The study takes German and French texts to examine the development of the Philomela myth in the vernacular from the 12th to the 16th centuries. For this, it also considers Ovid's Philomela and its after-life in its medieval adaptations. Working from the individual literary studies, content nodes of the myth are analysed and their variance presented comparatively. Particular weight is attached here to the motif of weaving, as this is accorded central significance within the Philomela myth. more...

Price: $137.00

Alexandra Gillespie takes a new look at hundreds of neglected old books containing works by Chaucer, the 'father' of English poetry, and his much-maligned follower, John Lydgate. She demonstrates that the shift from manuscript to print was part of the controversial process by which Chaucer earned his exclusive place in English literary history. - ;Print Culture and the Medieval Author is a book about books. Examining hundreds of early printed books and their late medieval analogues, Alexandra Gillespie writes a bibliographical history of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer and his follower John Lydgate in the century after the arrival of printing in England. Her study is an important new contribution to the emerging 'sociology of the text' in English literary and historical studies. At the centre of this study is a familiar question: what is an author? The idea of the vernacular writer was already contested and unstable in medieval England; Gillespie demonstrates that in the late Middle Ages it was also a way for book producers and readers to mediate the risks - commercial, political, religious, and imaginative - involved in the publication of literary texts. Gillespie's discussion focuses on the changes associated with the shift to print, scribal precedents for these changes, and contemporary understanding of them. The treatment of texts associated with Chaucer and Lydgate is an index to the sometimes flexible, sometimes resistant responses of book printers, copyists, decorators, distributors, patrons, censors, owners, and readers to a gradual but profoundly influential bibliographical transition. The research is conducted across somewhat intractable boundaries. Gillespie writes about medieval and modern history; about manuscript and print; about canonical and marginal authors; about literary works and books as objects. In the process, she finds new meanings for some medieval vernacular texts and a new place for some old books in a history of English cult more...

Price: $110.00

Learning to read in medieval Germany meant learning to read and understand Latin as well as German. The manuscripts of the tenth-century scholar and teacher Notker Labeo display how the medieval pedagogic method combined Latin and vernacular literacy. This study has much to contribute to our knowledge of medieval reading. more...

Price: $107.00

Illuminates the pervasive interplay of 'sacred' and 'secular' phenomena in the literature, history, politics, and religion of the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. The essays gathered here constitute a way of applying a classic dichotomy to major cultural phenomena of the pre-modern era. more...

Price: $69.95

This interdisciplinary literary study takes as its subject the educationally resourceful instructional texts for women living in convents in the Late Middle Ages. This study pioneers the methodological constitution and establishment of a new text type for this sacred literature, the “Speculum sororum”. Compared with rules, statutes and vitae, the “Speculum sororum” displays a variety of literary forms and provides informative insights into the everyday life, mindscape and particular piety of the sisters from this age. The texts are edited in their entirety or in extracts with a commentary and are analysed and located within literary history and the history of piety. more...

Price: $207.00