Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

This book presents an interesting approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, drawing on medieval theories of reading and understanding a text.

This is the first book-length study of English writing in the period between Old and Middle English. For lecturers and students alike, it reveals exactly what happened to English in a period necessarily covered on introductory literary history courses and on courses in the history of the English language.

The contributors to this volume offer a ground-breaking investigation into the birth of new literatures in the vernacular languages of medieval Europe. Essential for scholars of medieval literature, the book opens new perspectives for specialists in specific languages and national literatures through a comparative, transnational approach.

The importance of scribes in the production of Chaucer's poetry has become increasingly apparent. Challenging widely accepted narratives and conclusions of recent scholarship through meticulously detailed argument, Lawrence Warner delivers an important intervention in the field of Middle English studies.

Through new readings of canonical Middle English texts in relation to broader traditions and practices of the body and the senses, knowledge and ethics, this study offers an original contribution towards a history both of the human body and of medieval Christianity.

The first monograph in English on the medieval Scandinavian reception and re-interpretation of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. Contextualizes the canonical Prose Edda by drawing on a range of less well known texts. Translations are provided of all quotations from medieval texts.

This exploration of literary form in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer delivers a timely and fresh approach to the study of one of the best known medieval English poets. This definitive collection of essays offers a variety of approaches to Chaucer and to the analysis of form.

The first comprehensive study of how European books were made and used in the historical period known as the 'long twelfth century' (1075-1225). The book takes a multidisciplinary approach, blending book history (codicology, palaeography, art-history) and contextual studies (reading, libraries) with text-based investigations in such fields as medicine, classics, and philosophy.

This engaging study explores how early medieval writers reflected on the nature of education and the acquisition of wisdom. By studying representations of teaching and learning in five early English texts, Irina Dumitrescu sheds light on the underappreciated emotional and cognitive complexities of Anglo-Saxon instruction.

Virginie Greene explores the influence of philosophy and logic on major works of medieval literature, including those by Anselm of Canterbury, Abelard, and Chretien de Troyes. Greene examines these Old French 'logical fictions' as essential objects of thought and modes of thinking in Western philosophy.

Daniel Wakelin's authoritative survey of manuscripts and their corrections combines challenging ideas about medieval scribes and about medieval attitudes to literature. Focusing particularly on the works of Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, this book will change the way in which both medieval literature and the history of the book are studied.

Lawrence Warner explores the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman. He examines the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics manufactured an archive, over 500 years, which was then regarded as providing factual data about the poem. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Books Online and via Knowledge Unlatched.

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England is the first book combining literary, linguistic and historical evidence from Old English and Latin to offer a new account of who Anglo-Saxon poets were and how they worked, showing the crucial importance of poets' social roles and their engagement in poetic communities.

This wide-ranging study is the first to demonstrate how English literature continued to engage with crusading from the medieval tales of Richard the Lionheart all the way to Shakespeare. It provides a richer understanding of the impact of the crusades on narrative patterns and the beginning of the modern era.

D. H. Green challenges the prevailing view of the Middle Ages as a static period in which attitudes to women were uniformly negative. Focusing on the great German romances Erec, Tristan and Parzival he explores strategies used by vernacular writers to debate and challenge the undoubted antifeminism of the day.

This book is an extended investigation of the anticlericalism of the medieval English poem Piers Plowman.

In this book Nicole Rice analyses late medieval prose guides that disseminated the idea of religious discipline to a lay audience. By considering the themes of spiritual discipline, religious identity, and orthodoxy in Langland and Chaucer, the study also sheds new light on Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales.

The first full-length examination of the influential cultural and religious exchanges which took place between England and Bohemia following Richard II's marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. This initially enabled new ideas of religion to flourish in both countries but eventually led the English authorities to suppress heresy.

This book explores the representation of artisans - masons, carpenters, blacksmiths, and more - in medieval English literature from c.1000-1483. It reveals that craft labor plays a central role in texts as varied as school-books, comic poems, spiritual literature, and works of political advice.

Explains how the late medieval Church encouraged the practice of fraternal correction, which involved the injured party confronting the wrong-doer directly and privately; and explores how John Wyclif and others expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against clerical authority and wealth.

This is a study of the love poetry of late medieval Europe, looking in particular at the ways in which the Ethics of Aristotle, newly translated, influenced the ideas and expressions of courtly love.

This book provides a new perspective on the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition through the close investigation of a single codex, written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, that preserves rare and unique texts of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. As such, it offers a major contribution to manuscript studies and a new portrait of Boccaccio.

A major study of translations into the vernacular in late medieval Italy, and their impact on literature and culture. Vernacular translation was a phenomenon with which all authors in this period - from Brunetto Latini to Giovanni Boccaccio - had to contend.

This book explores a wide range of English and Scottish court poetry of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, including work by Skelton, Dunbar and others, and examines the ways in which the desire of court poets for legitimation tended to subvert the authority they claimed for their poetry.

Analyzes fifteenth-century ideas about religious images, focusing on the period between the Wycliffite critique of images and Reformation iconoclasm. Shannon Gayk argues that many writers used vernacular writing to explain, mediate, and reform the use of religious images in lay devotion and education.

This book offers a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the centuries that gave us the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, courtly love, and Arthurian lore. Though most texts of the period denounce sodomy, this book shows how some also endorse it.

Examining the concept of habitus - acquired patterns of thought, behaviour and taste that result from internalizing culture or objective social structures - Katharine Breen argues that the adaptation of elite, clerical forms of habitus for lay audiences established the conceptual foundations for a reading public in medieval England.

Chretien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary traditions to a highly sophisticated literary cultivation of the Old French verse romance.

This study will appeal to scholars interested in medieval religious and intellectual history.