Medieval

The legend of Melusine examined in a pan-European context. Readers have long been fascinated by the enigmatic figure of Melusine - a beautiful fairy woman cursed to transform into a half-serpent once a week, whose part-monstrous sons are the ancestor...

A strikingly original approach to Beowulf, linking its structure to the dynastic life-cycle. The original audience of Beowulf was steeped in ancient Scandinavian royal legend. But for modern readers of the poem, these traditions are frustratingly...

John Lydgate's The Siege of Thebes, written c. 1421-22, is the only Middle English poetic text that recounts the fratricidal struggle between Oedipus's sons Eteocles and Polynices as they contend for the lordship of Thebes. The text reflects the problem...

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...

Gower's imaginative French poetry is now available in a new edition with facing page translation, annotations, and introduction. Gower's Traitie employs the French poetic form of balade, typically used for courtly verses, to avow instead the virtues of...

Mythical creatures drawn largely from medieval travellers' tales, but encompassing civilisations from the Sumerians to the Wild West. A dictionary? No, this is really an astonishing ark filled with beasts from a fabulous zoo far more varied and...

This study explores ways in which Dante presents liturgy as enabling humans to encounter God. In Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's "Commedia," Helena Phillips-Robins explores for the first time the ways in which the relationship between humanity...

This collaborative two-volume literary history of Europe, the first yet attempted, unfolds through ten sequences of places linked by trade, travel, topography, language, pilgrimage, alliance, disease, and artistic exchange. The period covered, 1348-1418,...

Traveling through Text compares religious ravel writing by Muslims, Christians and Jews in later Middle Ages. This comparative approach allows us to see that writers in all three religious communities used travel writing in the same way, to shape the...

An examination of how greatly the sagas and other literature of Iceland shaped the poems of William Morris. The work of William Morris (1834-1896) was hugely influenced by the medieval sagas and poetry of Iceland; in particular, they inspired his long...

The varied cultural functions of dress, textiles, and clothwork are used in this collection of essays to examine long-standing assumptions about the Middle Ages. At one end of the spectrum, questions of dress call up feminist theoretical investigations...

The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran are adherents of the last surviving Gnostic tradition from the period of Late Antiquity, and the Book of Kings is the capstone to one of their most sacred scriptures. A universal history in four parts, it concisely outlines...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780934977005Author Francesco PetrarchFormat PaperbackPage Count 224Imprint Italica PressPublisher Italica PressWeight(grams) 290gDimensions(mm) 216mm *...

The facts and fictions that continue to shape our understanding of Chaucer and his place in literary tradition Is Chaucer the father of English literature? The first English poet? Was he a feminist? A political opportunist? A spy? Is Chaucer's language...

This book discusses the largest and earliest medieval library of the Middle East for which we have documentation the Ashrafiya library in the very centre of Damascus and edits its catalogue.About the AuthorKonrad Hirschler is Professor of History of...

Modern English translations of a wide selection of troubadour poems. The poetry of the troubadours was famous throughout the middle ages, but the difficulty and diversity of the original languages have been obstacles to its appreciation by a wider...

Arthur and the grail stories appeared in this French prose cycle together for the first time; scholars explore its social, historical, literary and manuscript contexts and account for its enduring interest. The early thirteenth-century French prose...

This volume is the first book-length study of masculinities in the Sagas of Icelanders. Spanning the entire corpus of the Sagas of Icelanders-and taking into account a number of little-studied sagas as well as the more well-known works-it comprehensively...

Surveying exotic travel writing in Europe from late antiquity to the age of discover, The Witness and the Other World illustrates the fundamental human desire to change places, if only in the imagination. Mary B. Campbell looks at works by pilgrims,...

Lancelot is the central romance of the Vulgate Cycle, in which the chivalric elements in Arthur's court come to the fore. These chivalric elements contain the seeds of Arthur's destruction and the dissolution of the Round Table, as Lancelot's love for...

Continuum's "Introductions to British Literature and Culture" series provide practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in the series help to orientate students as they begin a new module or area of study, providing concise information on the...

In The Etiquette of Early Northern Verse, Roberta Frank peers into the northern poet's workshop, eavesdropping as Old English and Old Norse verse reveal their craft secrets. This book places two vernacular poetries of the long Viking Age into...

Focusing on songs by the troubadours and trouveres from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, Medieval Song from Aristotle to Opera contends that song is not best analyzed as "words plus music" but rather as a distinctive way of sounding words. Rather...

Next to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, William Langland's Piers Plowman is perhaps the best-known literary picture of fourteenth-century England. Langland's work, more socially concerned and critical than Chaucer's, reflected an age of religious...

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...

In Structuring Spaces: Oral Poetics and Architecture in Early Medieval England, Lori Ann Garner illuminates the idiomatic and traditional meanings invested in depictions of architecture within the vernacular verse of early medieval England, portrayals...

Recent scholarship concerning parish priests in medieval England, their professional training, and their daily pastoral work has produced a more complex and realistic picture of parish clergy in the High and Late Middle Ages which dispels many of the...

An analysis of the ways in which Chaucer uses details of costume, clothing and fabric, enhancing our understanding of and shedding fresh insights into his work. The use Chaucer made of costume rhetoric, and its function within his body of works, are...

Included among the sacred books of Judaism and Christianity alike, the Song of Songs does not mention God at all; on the surface it is a lyrical exchange between unnamed lovers who articulate the range of emotions associated with sexual love. Ann W...

In this outstanding new translation of Lancelot, Burton Raffel brings to English language readers the fourth of Chretien's five surviving romantic Arthurian poems. This poem was the first to introduce Lancelot as an important figure in the King Arthur...

This stimulating and controversial book suggests an original approach to the study of traditional literature, focussing on medieval romance and on folktale [especially fairytale]. Although a number of new and striking interpretations of such stories are...

A new, materialistic reading of the Alfredian corpus, drawing on diverse approaches from thing theory to Augustinian principles of use and enjoyment to uncover how these works explore the material world. The Old English prose translations...

Fresh approaches to one of the most important poems from medieval Scotland. John Barbour's Bruce, an account of the deeds of Robert I of Scotland (1306-29) and his companions during the so-called wars of independence between England and Scotland, is...

Using a dialogue format, contributors to this collection of essays outline key issues in the cultural history of medieval women. Many of the essays in this volume provide compelling evidence that women in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages achieved an...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781597522601Author Jane ChanceFormat PaperbackImprint Wipf & Stock PublishersPublisher Wipf & Stock Publishers

An investigation of English and Scottish dream visions written on the cusp of the "Renaissance", teasing out distinctive ideas of authorship which informed their design. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have long been acknowledged as a period of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780333145241Author John Julian AndersonFormat PaperbackPage Count 247Imprint Red Globe PressPublisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLCWeight(grams) 331g

A survey of the motif of the revenant, showing how medieval themes and motifs persist today. The proliferation of books and films about the "undead", those literally returning from the grave, in modern popular culture has been commented on as a recent...

Why would the sprawling thirteenth-century French prose Lancelot-Grail Cycle have been attributed to Walter Map, a twelfth-century writer from the Anglo-Welsh borderlands known for his stinging satire, religious skepticism, ghost stories, and...

This book provides an accessible, concise and intellectually stimulating introduction and guide to one of the richest, most challenging poems of pre-Reformation English. New to the internationally-renowned "Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies" series,...