British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary works to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality, and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion.
"The three volumes of MS Harley 2253 present a complete edition and translation of a fourteenth-century English manuscript that contains secular love lyrics, contemporary political songs, religious lyrics, fabliaux, saints' lives, and other literary treasures in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin. The volumes also offer explanatory and textual notes, indexes of first lines, manuscripts cited, and proper names, and bibliographies." --
British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary works to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality, and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion.
British Library MS Harley 2253 is one of the most important literary works to survive from the English medieval era. In rarity, quality, and abundance, its secular love lyrics comprise an unrivaled collection. Intermingled with them are contemporary political songs as well as delicate lyrics designed to inspire religious devotion.
"The three volumes of MS Harley 2253 present a complete edition and translation of a fourteenth-century English manuscript that contains secular love lyrics, contemporary political songs, religious lyrics, fabliaux, saints' lives, and other literary treasures in Middle English, Anglo-Norman, and Latin. The volumes also offer explanatory and textual notes, indexes of first lines, manuscripts cited, and proper names, and bibliographies." --
Susanna Fein’s long and distinguished scholarly career has helped to redefine how we understand the role of scribes and manuscripts from late medieval England. She has carried out groundbreaking research on seminal manuscripts (e.g., Harley 2253, the Thornton Manuscripts, John Audley’s autograph manuscript, and the Auchinleck Manuscript). She has written extensively on the more complex and challenging metrical forms the period produced. And she has edited foundational primary texts and collections of essays. A wide range of scholars have been influenced by Fein’s work, many of whom present original research—much of it following trails first laid down by Fein—in this volume.
What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as “lyrics,” the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa. As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of “play,” in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight “new Middle English lyrics” by seven contemporary poets.
Studies in the Harley Manuscript is the first comprehensive examination of a manuscript that is of supreme value to literary scholars of medieval English literature. In an Introduction and fifteen essays a team of scholars considers many aspects of the 140 folios of this trilingual miscellany that preserves 121 items (or 122 depending on how one counts) from which we get a strange and privileged glimpse into the rich literary heritage that existed in England prior to the flourishing of vernacular poetry in the Richardian era. As the Contents indicates, the history and composition of the manuscript are considered, as are the Anglo-Norman, English, and Latin compositions that it preserves. This is a companion volume to the three volume complete edition of Harley 2253.
This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex—its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo—scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts—focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns’ libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book.
"This book explores Indigenous American literature and the development of an inter- and trans-Indigenous orientation in Native American and Indigenous literary studies. Drawing on the perspectives of scholars in the field, it seeks to reconcile tribal nation specificity, Indigenous literary nationalism, and trans-Indigenous methodologies as necessary components of post-Renaissance Native American and Indigenous literary studies. It looks at the work of Renaissance writers, including Louise Erdrich's Tracks (1988) and Leslie Marmon Silko's Sacred Water (1993), along with novels by S. Alice Callahan and John Milton Oskison. It also discusses Indigenous poetics and Salt Publishing's Earthworks series, focusing on poets of the Renaissance in conversation with emerging writers. Furthermore, it introduces contemporary readers to many American Indian writers from the seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, from Captain Joseph Johnson and Ben Uncas to Samson Occom, Samuel Ashpo, Henry Quaquaquid, Joseph Brant, Hendrick Aupaumut, Sarah Simon, Mary Occom, and Elijah Wimpey. The book examines Inuit literature in Inuktitut, bilingual Mexicanoh and Spanish poetry, and literature in Indian Territory, Nunavut, the Huasteca, Yucatán, and the Great Lakes region. It considers Indigenous literatures north of the Medicine Line, particularly francophone writing by Indigenous authors in Quebec. Other issues tackled by the book include racial and blood identities that continue to divide Indigenous nations and communities, as well as the role of colleges and universities in the development of Indigenous literary studies".
