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Essays bringing out the richness and vibrancy of pre-modern textual culture in all its variety.
The five hundred years from the 1450s to the 1950s represent an extraordinarily rich quarry for evidence of incunabula sales, collecting, and use. What book lists reveal about publishing and reading habits in late-fifteenth-century Venice, how a Scottish librarian went about acquiring incunabula during World War II, and the international workshop connections glimpsed through early Hungarian bindings are among the topics explored in this volume. Library professionals aim spotlights on French plague tracts, Deventer as a printing place, the use of incunabula in learned societies in the nineteenth century, and incunabula collecting by monks and universities in England and Scotland.
Essays considering how information could be used and abused in the service of heresy and inquisition. The collection, curation, and manipulation of knowledge were fundamental to the operation of inquisition. Its coercive power rested on its ability to control information and to produce authoritative discourses from it - a fact not lost on contemporaries, or on later commentators. Understanding that relationship between inquisition and knowledge has been one of the principal drivers of its long historiography. Inquisitors and their historians have always been preoccupied with the process by which information was gathered and recirculated as knowledge. The tenor of that question has changed ov...
This volume continues the series' engagement with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Texts analysed here range in date from the late ninth or early tenth centuries to the fifteenth century, and in provenance from the eastern part of the Hungarian kingdom to the British Isles. European understandings of the world are explored in several essa...
Essays illuminating how medieval cultures and identities have influenced later authors, texts, and communities. How did medieval literary cultures shape, and how were they shaped by, their received textual traditions? And how have cultures continued to respond to the inherited medieval tradition in later eras? This volume explores these important questions, considering how language and literature mediate the narration of history or culture - especially the culture and identity of Britain. In addressing the overarching concern of the conception of the past in the literatures of medieval Britain, and the later reception of medieval texts, the contributors' essays respond to the diverse areas o...
Examines manuscripts of Langland, Chaucer, Gower, Nicholas Love and Arthurian tales, alongside other devotional works and archival evidence. Professor Kathryn Kerby-Fulton's scholarship has transformed the study of medieval manuscripts and readers, particularly in the areas of devotional literature, professional scribal production and clerical writing. The essays collected here celebrate and reflect her influence and practice of giving careful attention to material contexts and archival sources when reading literature produced in late medieval England. They offer new interpretations of scribal practices, professional readers' activities, documentary evidence and challenging material and cultural contexts. They also reconsider scholarly practices and assumptions, while demonstrating how manuscript and archival studies can energize scholarship on such varied topics as authority, reader reception, modern editorial perspectives, gender and religious activities.
Reform of the script was central to the humanist agenda - this book suggests a new explanation of its international success.
The cults of the saints were central to the medieval Church. These holy men and women acted as patrons and protectors to the religious communities who housed their relics and to the devotees who requested their assistance in petitioning God for a miracle. Among the collections of posthumous miracle stories, miracula, accounts of holy healing feature prominently and depict cure-seekers successfully securing their desired remedy for a range of ailments and afflictions. What can these miracle accounts tell us of the cure-seekers' experiences of their journey from ill health to recovery, and how was healthcare presented in these sources? This book undertakes an in-depth study of the miraculous c...
A magical, long-forgotten masterpiece, The Romance of William and the Werewolf is the story of two princes who overcame their wicked family to reclaim their inheritance and build a society based on tolerance and equality. Originally titled William of Palerne, it was first translated from French and then converted into an alliterative Middle English romance by an obscure Gloucestershire scribe in c. 1350. It has never been translated into modern English – until now. Written over 600 years ago, it is a multi-layered tale of poverty, justice, exile and 'otherness'; its themes of inheritance, the freedom of women, fairness and forgiveness, familial responsibility and social class, speak to us just as clearly today, and challenge us to reflect upon our class-driven politics and the corruption, entitlement and indifference which underlie it. As with Michael Smith’s other translations – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and King Arthur’s Death – The Romance of William and the Werewolf will feature a detailed historical introduction, a comprehensive glossary and notes, and Michael’s own rich and beautiful linocut illustrations.
Essays exploring the great religious and devotional works of the Middle Ages in their manuscript and other contexts.