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Starting from the assumption of a far greater cultural gulf between the learned and the lay in the medieval world than between rich and poor, Elf Queens explores the church's systematic campaign to demonize fairies and infernalize fairyland and the responses this provoked in vernacular romance.
"Green's work is of the greatest importance for the understanding of a crucial period in the history of English writing and institutions, and a crucial shift in patterns of cognition."—Derek Pearsall, Harvard University
Breaking new ground in interdisciplinary scholarship of late medieval England, this collection of essays celebrates and addresses the work of renowned medieval scholar A.G. Rigg. George Rigg's interests span medieval Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English literature and philology; the contributors to this volume are an international group of colleagues, students, and friends of Rigg's, whose essays are as wide-ranging as Rigg's own interests. The contributions include: new editions of Middle English texts; an overview of the editions of Chaucer from the nineteenth century to the present which expounds editorial trends through the years; studies of major Middle English writings which cross boundaries into social history and the history of the book; a codicological study of the literary and material evidence for the use of scientific and utilitarian texts in late medieval English manuscripts; and related historical studies. Each essay is anchored in the textual realities that grounded Rigg's own scholarship, and bridge the boundaries between traditional academic disciplines - a crossing of interstices in homage to a teacher, friend, and colleague.
How have our emotions shaped the course of human history? And how have our experience and understanding of emotions evolved with us?
This volume is intended as a belated but heartfelt thank-you and Gedenkschrift to the late Larry Syndergaard (1936-2015), long-time professor of English at Western Michigan University and Fellow of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (International Ballad Commission). Larry’s contributions down the decades to ballad studies--particularly Scandinavian and Anglophone--included dozens of papers and articles, as well as his supremely useful book, English Translations of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballads. As David Atkinson and Thomas A. McKean of the Kommission have written (May 2015): “Larry... was a sound scholar with a penetrating mind which he used to support, encourage and befriend others,...
Represents the first time that disciples of history and English literature have joined forces to present new interpretations of late fourteenth-century English society.
A wide-ranging survey of the most important medieval authors and genres, designed for students of English.
It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poet's words and the lawyer's world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal "makyngs" in England's great Middle English poem by William Langland. Focusing on Piers Plowman's preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions' representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explor...
The Singer and the Scribe brings together studies of the European ballad from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century by major authorities in the field and is of interest to students of European literature, popular traditions and folksong. It offers an original view of the development of the ballad by focusing on the interplay and interdependence of written and oral transmission, including studies of modern singers and their repertoires and of the role of the audience in generating a literary product which continues to live in performance. While using specific case studies the contributors systematically extend their reflections on the ballad as song and as poetry to draw broader conclusions. Covering the Hispanic world, including the Sephardic tradition, Scandinavia, The Netherlands, Greece, Russia, England and Scotland the essays also demonstrate the interconnections of a European tradition beyond national boundaries.