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Part Twenty Of all Chaucer’s tales in the Canterbury Group, The Prioress’s Tale of the Virgin Mary and the murdered child ranks among the most popular and surely the most admired for its artistry. Nonetheless, it has encountered its fair share of somewhat hostile criticism on purely social and cultural grounds, owing in part to a negative evaluation of the Prioress herself (she is seen by some as a shallow person who does not recognize the harmful implications of her utterances), in part to the anti-Semitic cast of the tale. Beverly Boyd’s tough-minded, crisp approach to the tale enables her to present an overview of the great diversity of scholarship in both the sympathetic and hostil...
Beowulf is the oldest and most complete epic poem in any non-Classical European language. Our only manuscript, written in Old English, dates from close to the year 1000. However, the poem remained effectively unknown even to scholars until the year 1815, when it was first published in Copenhagen. This impressive volume selects over one hundred works of critical commentary from the vast body of scholarship on Beowulf - including English translations from German, Danish, Latin and Spanish - from the poem's first mention in 1705 to the Anglophone scholarship of the early twentieth century. Tom Shippey provides both a contextual introduction and a guide to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship which generated these Beowulf commentaries. The book is a vital document for the study of one of the major texts of 'the Northern renaissance', in which completely unknown poems and even languages were brought to the attention first of the learned world and then of popular culture. It also acts as a valuable guide to the development of nationalist and racist sentiment, beginning romantically and ending with World War and attempted genocide.
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From early modern times rulers and politicians have sought to ground their legitimacy in ancient tradition - which they have often invented or rewritten for their own purposes. This issue of Studies in Medievalism presents a number of such cases.
This book brings together a variety of approaches to English corpus linguistics and shows how corpus methodologies can contribute to the linking of diachronic and synchronic studies. The articles in this volume investigate historical changes in the English language as well as specific aspects of Middle and Modern English and, moreover, of English dialects. The contributions also discuss the development of English corpus linguistics generally and its potential in the future. Special focus is given to the continuity between Middle and Modern English much in line with the linking in previous studies of Middle English and Old English under the generic term medievalism. This volume highlights the continual development of English from the medieval to modern period.
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