Böcker i Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature-serien

This first comprehensive study in English of the many and variegated ways the afterlife was envisioned in the Middle Ages presents exciting new interpretations that will interest literary scholars, (art) historians, and theologians.

"Beyond merely examining debt in Middle English texts, Anne Schuurman shows how medieval literature, particularly Chaucer and Langland, engenders capitalism, a system rooted in penitential theology. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details"--

This book presents an interesting approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on medieval theories of reading and understanding a text.

Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages offers a literary history of the North-South divide, examining the complexities of the relationship - imaginative, material, and political - between North and South in a wide range of texts. Through sustained analysis of the North-South divide as it emerges in the literature of medieval England, this study illustrates the convoluted dynamic of desire and derision of the North by the rest of country. Joseph Taylor dissects England's problematic sense of nationhood as one which must be negotiated and renegotiated from within, rather than beyond, national borders. Providing fresh readings of texts such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads and the Towneley plays, this book argues for the North's vital contribution to processes of imagining nation in the Middle Ages and shows that that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism.

"This revisionist literary history of late-medieval and Renaissance poetry offers in-depth analyses of six major poets - Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, and Wyatt - and reconstructs their ideas about the proper way to write. It sheds new light on the question of what these poets thought literature itself was made from"--

Introduces readers interested in insular spirituality and hagiography to the major texts associated with the cult of the great northern English saint, Cuthbert. The first sustained analysis of this textual tradition from 690-1500, emphasizing his ascetic evolution, and association with changing perceptions of northernness and nationhood.

"This is the first monograph to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the Decameron's response to classical and medieval didactic traditions. Olivia Holmes unearths the rich variety of Boccaccio's sources, ranging across Aesopic fables, narrative collections of Islamicate origin, sermon-stories and saints' lives, and compilations of historical anecdotes. Examining the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents in relation to medieval notions of narrative exemplarity, the study also considers how they intersect with current critical assertions of fiction's power to develop empathy and emotional intelligence. Holmes argues that Boccaccio provides readers with the opportunity to exercise both what the ancients called "Ethics," and our contemporaries call "Theory of Mind." This account of a vast tradition of tale collections and its provocative analysis of their workings will appeal to scholars of Italian literature and medieval studies, as well as to readers interested in evolutionary understandings of storytelling"--

Focusing on one of the most influential poems in the European literary tradition, this collection brings together specialised chapters on medieval intellectual history, legal history, psychology, ethics, and logic. Re-evaluates the significance of the Roman de la Rose: indispensable reading for literary specialists and intellectual historians.

This is the first book-length study of English writing in the period between Old and Middle English. For lecturers and students alike, it reveals exactly what happened to English in a period necessarily covered on introductory literary history courses and on courses in the history of the English language.

The contributors to this volume offer a ground-breaking investigation into the birth of new literatures in the vernacular languages of medieval Europe. Essential for scholars of medieval literature, the book opens new perspectives for specialists in specific languages and national literatures through a comparative, transnational approach.

Focusing on the Clerk, Merchant, Franklin and Squire sequence in The Canterbury Tales, this book explores Chaucer's meditation on the fraught relation between the value of literature and the values underlying various non-literary ways of earning a living. It will appeal to scholars and students of medieval studies.

The importance of scribes in the production of Chaucer's poetry has become increasingly apparent. Challenging widely accepted narratives and conclusions of recent scholarship through meticulously detailed argument, Lawrence Warner delivers an important intervention in the field of Middle English studies.

Through new readings of canonical Middle English texts in relation to broader traditions and practices of the body and the senses, knowledge and ethics, this study offers an original contribution towards a history both of the human body and of medieval Christianity.

The first monograph in English on the medieval Scandinavian reception and re-interpretation of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. Contextualizes the canonical Prose Edda by drawing on a range of less well known texts. Translations are provided of all quotations from medieval texts.

This exploration of literary form in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer delivers a timely and fresh approach to the study of one of the best known medieval English poets. This definitive collection of essays offers a variety of approaches to Chaucer and to the analysis of form.

The first comprehensive study of how European books were made and used in the historical period known as the 'long twelfth century' (1075-1225). The book takes a multidisciplinary approach, blending book history (codicology, palaeography, art-history) and contextual studies (reading, libraries) with text-based investigations in such fields as medicine, classics, and philosophy.

This collection conducts an intersectional investigation of affects, feelings, and emotions in non-religious late Middle English literatures. From Geoffrey Chaucer to Gavin Douglas, eight chapters by leading scholars examine the coexistence of emotion and affect in Late Medieval representations of feeling.

This engaging study explores how early medieval writers reflected on the nature of education and the acquisition of wisdom. By studying representations of teaching and learning in five early English texts, Irina Dumitrescu sheds light on the underappreciated emotional and cognitive complexities of Anglo-Saxon instruction.

This book is for students and scholars of medieval literature and for readers interested in the public intellectuals of the past. It provides new accounts of major authors like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and invites readers to make comparisons with current debates about the public humanities.

Focusing on one of the most influential poems in the European literary tradition, this collection brings together specialised chapters on medieval intellectual history, legal history, psychology, ethics, and logic. Re-evaluates the significance of the Roman de la Rose: indispensable reading for literary specialists and intellectual historians.

This study discusses how depictions of etymology and ancient documents were employed by twelfth-century poets, translators, bureaucrats and historians to portray Britain's past. A series of detailed case studies demonstrate how the vernacular hence became an important site for the construction of dynastic, institutional and ethnic identities.

This revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition sheds new light on poems from Beowulf to Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and challenges the idea that the alliterative tradition falls into two halves divided by the Norman Conquest.

Virginie Greene explores the influence of philosophy and logic on major works of medieval literature, including those by Anselm of Canterbury, Abelard, and Chretien de Troyes. Greene examines these Old French 'logical fictions' as essential objects of thought and modes of thinking in Western philosophy.

Daniel Wakelin's authoritative survey of manuscripts and their corrections combines challenging ideas about medieval scribes and about medieval attitudes to literature. Focusing particularly on the works of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, this book will change the way in which both medieval literature and the history of the book are studied.

Lawrence Warner explores the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman. He examines the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics manufactured an archive, over 500 years, which was then regarded as providing factual data about the poem. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Books Online and via Knowledge Unlatched.