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This book focuses on medieval legal history. The essays discuss the birth of the Common Law, the interaction between systems of law, the evolution of the legal profession, and the operation and procedures of the Common Law in England. All these factors will ensure a warm reception of the volume by a broad range of readers.
Pioneer catalogue for one of the most important collections of English legal manuscripts.
This volume provides a summary description of over three hundred western medieval manuscripts [excluding Greek] acquired by Cambridge University Library since the publication of the mid-nineteenth century printed catalogue; for the most part, no published descriptions have hitherto existed. Concentrating on contents and provenance, the catalogue covers manuscripts from a sixth-century fragment of Augustine to a translation by Erasmus of a work by Plutarch, and in Latin, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Welsh. The descriptions are complemented with an introductory survey of the collection and its history
This collection of essays by leading experts in manuscript studies sheds new light on ways to approach medieval texts in their manuscript context. Each contribution provides groundbreaking insight into the field of medieval textual culture, demonstrating the various interconnections between medieval material and literary traditions. The contributors’ work aids reconstruction of the period’s writing practices, as contextual factors surrounding the texts provide clues to the ‘manuscript experience’. Topics such as scribal practice and textual providence, glosses, rubrics, page lay-out, and even page ruling, are addressed in a manner illustrative and suggestive of textual practice of th...
Daniele Pevarello analyzes the Sentences of Sextus, a second century collection of Greek aphorisms compiled by Sextus, an otherwise unknown Christian author. The specific character of Sextus' collection lies in the fact that the Sentences are a Christian rewriting of Hellenistic sayings, some of which are still preserved in pagan gnomologies and in Porphyry. Pevarello investigates the problem of continuity and discontinuity between the ascetic tendencies of the Christian compiler and aphorisms promoting self-control in his pagan sources. In particular, he shows how some aspects of the Stoic, Cynic, Platonic and Pythagorean moral traditions, such as sexual restraint, voluntary poverty, the practice of silence and of a secluded life were creatively combined with Sextus' ascetic agenda against the background of the biblical tradition. Drawing on this adoption of Hellenistic moral traditions, Pevarello shows how great a part the moral tradition of Greek paideia played in the shaping and development of self-restraint among early Christian ascetics.
This seminal study addresses one of the most beautifully decorated 15th-century copies of the New Statutes of England, uncovering how the manuscript's unique interweaving of legal, religious, and literary discourses frames the reader's perception of the work. Taking internal and external evidence into account, Rosemarie McGerr suggests that the manuscript was made for Prince Edward of Lancaster, transforming a legal reference work into a book of instruction in kingship, as well as a means of celebrating the Lancastrians' rightful claim to the English throne during the Wars of the Roses. A Lancastrian Mirror for Princes also explores the role played by the manuscript as a commentary on royal justice and grace for its later owners and offers modern readers a fascinating example of the long-lasting influence of medieval manuscripts on subsequent readers.
A study of romance and the Orient in Chaucer and in anonymous popular metrical romances. The idea of the Orient is a major motif in Chaucer and medieval romance, and this new study reveals much about its use and significance, setting the literature in its historical context and thereby offering fresh new readings of anumber of texts. The author begins by looking at Chaucer's and Gower's treatment of the legend of Constance, as told by the Man of Law, demonstrating that Chaucer's addition of a pattern of mercantile details highlights the commercial context of the eastern Mediterranean in which the heroine is placed; she goes on to show how Chaucer's portraits of Cleopatra and Dido from the Le...
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The teaching of Latin remained important after the Conquest but Anglo-Norman now became a language of instruction and, from the thirteenth century onwards, a language to be learned. During this period English lexicographers were more numerous, more identifiable and their works more varied, for example: the tremulous hand of Worcester created an Old English-Latin glossary, and Walter de Bibbesworth wrote a popular contextualized verse vocabulary of Anglo-Norman country life and activities. The works and techniques of Latin scholars such as Adam of Petit Point, Alexander Nequam, and John of Garland were influential throughout the period. In addition, grammarians' and schoolmasters' books preserve material which in some cases seems to have been written by them. The material discussed ranges from a twelfth-century glossary written at a minor monastic house to four large alphabetical fifteenth-century dictionaries, some of which were widely available. Some material seems to connect with the much earlier Old English glossaries in ways not yet fully understood.