The popular genre of medieval romance explored in its physical, geographical, and literary contexts. The essays in this volume take a representative selection of English and Scottish romances from the medieval period and explore some of their medieval contexts, deepening our understanding not only of the romances concerned but also of the specific medieval contexts that produced or influenced them. The contexts explored here include traditional literary features such as genre and rhetorical technique and literary-cultural questions of authorship, transmission and readership; but they also extend to such broader intellectual and social contexts as medieval understandings of geography, the physiology of swooning, or the efficacy of baptism. A framing context for the volume is provided by Derek Pearsall's prefatory essay, in which he revisits his seminal 1965 article on the development of Middle English romance. Rhiannon Purdie is Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews; Michael Cichon is Associate Professor of English at St Thomas More College in the University of Saskatchewan. Contributors: Derek Pearsall, Nancy Mason Bradbury, Michael Cichon, Nicholas Perkins, Marianne Ailes, John A. Geck, Phillipa Hardman, Siobhain Bly Calkin, Judith Weiss, Robert Rouse, Yin Liu, Emily Wingfield, Rosalind Field

About the Author
The late Derek Pearsall was Emeritus Gurney Professor of Middle English Literature at Harvard University; he wrote extensively on Chaucer, Gower, Langland and Lydgate, including biographies of Chaucer and Lydgate, an edition of the C-text of Langland's Piers Plowman. JUDITH WEISS is a Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, UK. MARIANNE AILES is Professor of French at the University of Bristol. PHILLIPA HARDMAN is Reader in Medieval English Literature (retired) at the University of Reading. ROBERT ROUSE Associate Professor, Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Reviews
[T]his fine collection offers romance scholars much to think about. * ARTHURIANA *
[G]ives substantial (and much-welcomed) attention to Scottish romance in Scottish contexts, alongside a good range of other English and Anglo-Norman romances from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. * REVIEW OF ENGLISH STUDIES *
The papers assembled in this volume are a selection of those given at the biennal 'Romance in Medieval Britain' conference [...] and are a reminder of how influential those conferences have been in promoting the study of less-well known romances. * MEDIUM AEVUM *
D. S. Brewer's Studies in Medieval Romance series performs a valuable service for scholars of romance [...] The essays in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts offer extended engagements with particular romance texts, many of them rarely encountered even in romance scholarship, and with a range of meaningful contexts. Students of medieval English and Scottish romance will be turning to this collection for careful and informative readings of the particular texts. * THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW *



Book Information
ISBN 9781843842606
Author Professor Rhiannon Purdie
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint D.S. Brewer
Publisher Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Weight(grams) 470g