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The essays assembled in this new volume explore the fascination of the Middle Ages with the mystery of light, and its central role in the period's thought and creativity. Spanning medieval theology, literature, science and material culture, the topics covered include the history of light (and, inseparably, darkness) as a literary figure, from the Latin Bible to Geoffrey Chaucer; theoretical speculations on colour, sight and blindness, and their unexpected fertilization of fields such as poetic imagery; medieval preachers' evocations of light as much more than merely figuring the moral and religious, from St. Simeon in the ninth century to John Fisher in the early sixteenth; indeed the belief that light possessed not only reality but physical materality, as manifested in artefacts such as the Gloucester Candlestick. On Light thereby reveals not only the importance of this phenomenon to diverse aspects of medieval culture, but profound and unremarked ways in which it helped to bind these into a whole.
Preliminary material /Editors Reading La3amon's -- INTRODUCTION /ROSAMUND ALLEN , JANE ROBERTS and CAROLE WEINBERG -- DID LAWMAN NOD, OR IS IT WE THAT YAWN? /ROSAMUND ALLEN -- THE BRUT AS SAXON LITERATURE: THE NEW PHILOLOGISTS READ LAWMAN /HARUKO MOMMA -- “ÞE TIDEN OF ÞISSE LONDE” - FINDING AND LOSING WALES IN LA3AMON'S BRUT /SIMON MEECHAM-JONES -- THE SEVERN: BARRIER OR HIGHWAY? /ANDREW WEHNER -- THE POLITICAL NOTION OF KINGSHIP IN LA3AMON'S BRUT /ERIC STANLEY -- QUEER MASCULINITY IN LAWMAN'S BRUT /JOHN BRENNAN -- LA3AMON'S LEIR: LANGUAGE, SUCCESSION, AND HISTORY /KENNETH J. TILLER -- LOSING THE PAST: CEZAR'S MOMENT OF TIME IN LAWMAN'S BRUT /JOSEPH D. PARRY -- LAWMAN, BEDE, AND THE CO...
This book showcases the variety and vitality of contemporary scholarship on Old Norse and related medieval literatures and their modern afterlives. The volume features original new work on Old Norse poetry and saga, other languages and literatures of medieval north-western Europe, and the afterlife of Old Norse in modern English literature. Demonstrating the lively state of contemporary research on Old Norse and related subjects, this collection celebrates Heather O’Donoghue’s extraordinary and enduring influence on the field, as manifested in the wide-ranging and innovative research of her former students and colleagues.
An examination of sixteenth-century quest narratives, focussing on their conscious use of a medieval tradition to hold a mirror up to contemporary culture. Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblemof shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failure...
Explains the methods and knowledge to understand how and why paper was used in medieval writing and beyond.
Devotion to the Name of Jesus in Medieval English Literature, c. 1100 - c. 1530 offers a broad but detailed study of the practice of devotion to the Name of Jesus in late medieval England. It focuses on key texts written in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English that demonstrate the way in which devotion moved from monastic circles to a lay public in the late medieval period. It argues that devotion to the Name is a core element of Richard Rolle's contemplative practice, although devotion to the Name circulated in trilingual England at an earlier stage. The volume investigates to what extent the 1274 Second Lyon Council had an impact in the spread of the devotion in England, and beyond. It also offers illuminating evidence about how Margery Kempe and her scribes used devotion, how Eleanor Hull made it an essential component of her meditative sequence seven days of the week, and how Lady Margaret Beaufort worked towards its instigation as an official feast.
An exploration of the relations between medical and religious discourse and practice in medieval culture, focussing on how they are affected by gender.
The theme of weaving, a powerful metaphor within Anglo-Saxon studies and Old English literature itself, unites the essays collected here. They range from consideration of interwoven sources in homiletic prose and a word-weaving poet to woven riddles and iconographical textures in medieval art, and show how weaving has the power to represent textiles, texts, and textures both literal and metaphorical in the early medieval period. They thus form an appropriate tribute to Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker, whose own scholarship has focussed on exploring woven works of textile and dress, manuscripts and text, and other arts of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.
In Roads to Health, G. Geltner demonstrates that urban dwellers in medieval Italy had a keen sense of the dangers to their health posed by conditions of overcrowding, shortages of food and clean water, air pollution, and the improper disposal of human and animal waste. He consults scientific, narrative, and normative sources that detailed and consistently denounced the physical and environmental hazards urban communities faced: latrines improperly installed and sewers blocked; animals left to roam free and carcasses left rotting on public byways; and thoroughfares congested by artisanal and commercial activities that impeded circulation, polluted waterways, and raised miasmas. However, as Ge...
Reading the Runes in Old English and Old Norse Poetry is the first book-length study to compare responses to runic heritage in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England and medieval Iceland. The Anglo-Saxon runic script had already become the preserve of antiquarians at the time the majority of Old English poetry was written down, and the Icelanders recording the mythology associated with the script were at some remove from the centres of runic practice in medieval Scandinavia. Both literary cultures thus inherited knowledge of the runic system and the traditions associated with it, but viewed this literate past from the vantage point of a developed manuscript culture. There has, as yet, been no...