In what varieties of ways is late medieval literature inflected by spiritual insight and desires? What weaves of literary cloth especially suit religious insight? In this collection dedicated to Elizabeth D. Kirk, Emeritus Professor of English at Brown University, several renowned scholars assess those related issues in a range of Medieval texts.
Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.
Julian of Norwich the best-known of the medieval mystics today. The text of her Revelation has circulated continually since the fifteenth century, but the twentieth century saw a massive expansion of her popularity. Theological or literary-historical studies of Julian may remark in passing on her popularity, but none have attempted a detailed study of her reception. This collection fills that gap: it outlines the full reception history from the extant manuscripts to the present day, looking at Julian in devotional cultures, in modernist poetry and present-day popular literature, and in her iconography in Norwich, both as a pilgrimage site and a tourist attraction.
Little attention has been focused the representation of Muslims in medieval Germany. Proceeding from a grounded use of contemporary cultural theory and close textual analysis, this study focuses Muslims in several core texts representing drama, epic, and lyric written by the most important writers of medieval Germany. Far from simply adding medieval Germany to the growing scholarly list of the 'pre-post-colonializing' European cultures, the study provides important new perspectives.
The letters of Heloise and Abelard will remain one of the great, romantic and intellectual documents of human civilization while they, themselves, are probably second only to Romeo and Juliet in the fame accrued by tragic lovers. Here for the first time in Mart Martin McLaughlin's edition is the complete correspendence with commentary.
Margaret, saint and 11th-century Queen of the Scots, remains an often-cited yet little-understood historical figure. Keene's analysis of sources in terms of both time and place – including her Life of Saint Margaret , translated for the first time – allows for an informed understanding of the forces that shaped this captivating woman.
This volume brings together contemporary popular entertainment, current political subjects, and medieval history and culture to investigate the intersecting and often tangled relations between politics, aesthetics, reality and fiction, in relation to issues of morality, identity, social values, power, and justice, both in the past and the present.
These essays take advantage of a new, exciting trend towards interdisciplinary research on the Charlemagne legend. Written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, these essays focus on the multifaceted ways the Charlemagne legend functioned in the Middle Ages and how central the shared (if nonetheless fictional) memory of the great Frankish ruler was to the medieval West. A gateway to new research on memory, crusading, apocalyptic expectation, Carolingian historiography, and medieval kingship, the contributors demonstrate the fuzzy line separating "fact" and "fiction" in the Middle Ages.
Through close readings of both familiar and obscure medieval texts, the contributors to this volume attempt to read England as a singularly powerful entity within a vast geopolitical network. This capacious world can be glimpsed in the cultural flows connecting the Normans of Sicily with the rulers of England, or Chaucer with legends arriving from Bohemia. It can also be seen in surprising places in literature, as when green children are discovered in twelfth-century Yorkshire or when Welsh animals begin to speak of the long history of their land s colonization. The contributors to this volume seek moments of cultural admixture and heterogeneity within texts that have often been assumed to belong to a single, national canon, discovering moments when familiar and bounded space erupt into unexpected diversity and infinite realms.
The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.
