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This volume represents a contribution to comparative scholarship in Medieval and Renaissance studies in its investigation of the ingenious diversity of roguish practices found in Medieval and Renaissance literature and its recognition of the coherent normative function of tales of tricksters and pranksters. The wide variety of works analysed, from those forming part of the established canon of texts on undergraduate degree schemes to lesser-known works, makes the volume of interest to students and researchers alike. The roguish behaviour of women, priests, foxes and outlaws and the knavery of Eulenspiegel and Panurge are used to illustrate how rituals of inversion and humiliation typical of the medieval carnival are reflected in literary accounts of trickery, and to question whether the restorative function attributed to carnival celebration is equally to be found in the intra-textual and extra-textual outcomes of trickery. This analysis is supported by studies into the trickster in mythology, sociological investigations into the role of disorder, Bakhtinian theories of carnival and the carnivalesque, and theories of black humour.
This book is an entertaining, informative and enchanting introduction to its subject – just as those medieval banes of the farmyard, the Fox and the Vixen, were enchanting in escapades from fables and funny tales, from beastly epic poems and bestiaries, and from medieval material culture (in Danish wall-paintings and Dutch manuscript illustrations and statues, stained-glass and Italian mosaics). There exist books on medieval fox stories and on the animal’s iconography, which are important themes in this study, but this book is the first holistic approach to all types of manifestations of foxes in medieval culture – from medical recipes and fur trade, to Bible commentaries and hunting manuals.
The Sense of Sound is a radical recontextualization of French song, 1260-1330. Situating musical sound against sonorities of the city, madness, charivari, and prayer, it argues that the effect of verbal confusion popular in music abounds with audible associations, and that there was meaning in what is often heard as nonsensical.
Studies range over the whole field of Arthurian literature, in Europe and North America, with special focus on Malory and Morte Darthur.
Charles Williams' two cycles of poems, Taliessin through Logres and The Region of the Summer Stars, have been described as the major imaginative work about the Grail of the 20th century, praised for their spiritual reality and complex patterns of sound and haunting rhythms. In this new edition David Llewellyn Dodds collects together Williams' earlier poems on Arthurian themes, which both grew into and gave way to the final versions. This collection, which Charles Williams called The Advent of Galahad, was never published as such, though individual poems did appear in print. There are also later fragments, designed to form a sequel to The Region of the Summer Stars, which appear for the first time. Besides the publication of this new material, this edition aims to introduce new readers to William's lyrical pieces.
First English translations of later adaptions of Chrétien's romances: a vital source for the development of Arthurian romance. In the middle of the fifteenth century two anonymous writers "translated" into prose Chrétien de Troyes's first verse romances, Erec and Cligés (dating from the twelfth century), for the circle of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy. For a long time unfairly dismissed as trite and slavish renderings of Chrétien's masterful narratives, the prose Erec and Cligés actually merit careful study in their own right, for these Middle French reworkings adapt the earlier romances to fit the interests of the fifteenth-century public. The authors updated not only the language ...
The essays in this volume, some reprinted in their original form and some extensively revised, are concerned with the Arthurian traditions associated with Glastonbury Abbey. Certain of the essays are analytic and others provide editions of hitherto unknown texts. They all examine ways in which legendary materials and historical facts interconnected in the process by which Glastonbury Abbey came to present itself, nationally and internationally, as the custodian of King Arthur's relics and the burial place of Joseph of Arimathea, and the importance, political and ecclesiastical, that it derived from the connection. Professor JAMES CARLEY is the author of Glastonbury Abbey: The Holy House at t...
Malory's Morte Darthur text, history and reception -- expertly appraised by international scholars.
Studies showing the influence of the French Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes on German medieval literature.