Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first.

The Romance of the Rose was one of the most important and influential works of medieval vernacular literature. In this book, Sylvia Huot investigates how medieval readers understood the text, assessing the evidence to be found in well over 200 surviving manuscripts.

A study of the Divine Comedy, this book offers an interesting perspective on Dante's representation of the afterlife. Alison Morgan departs from the conventional critical emphasis on Dante's place in relation to learned traditions by undertaking a thorough examination of the poem in the context of popular beliefs.

An analysis of the representation of the holy city in some of the fourteenth century's most popular works, including romances, political treatises and travel writings. This study will be of great interest to scholars working on medieval literature, cities, travel, crusades, and the history of Jerusalem.

This book focuses on three major poets - Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun - within the context of medieval commentaries on the origin and history of language.

This erudite but accessible account by a leading scholar of medieval literature shows why the poetry of praise was once so popular, and why it is still worth reading today.

Isabel Davis identifies a medieval discourse of masculine selfhood which is preoccupied with the ethics of labour and domestic living in readings of Langland, Usk, Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve. Davis presents a genuinely fresh perspective on ideas about gender, labour and domestic life in medieval Britain.

This book first appeared in German in 1985, and set an agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. While Haug focuses primarily on medieval German writers, his arguments are equally relevant to medieval literature in any other European language.

Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the tradition of Laureate verse as it develops from the fourteenth century to Tudor times. This study sheds light on the relationships between poets and political power and reveals the importance of this verse for the course of English literary history.

Bale examines the ways in which English writers, artists and readers used and abused the Jewish image in the period following the Jews' expulsion from England in 1290. He examines how anti-semitic images developed and came to endure far beyond the Middle Ages.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the number of female readers was far greater than is commonly assumed. This fascinating study opens up the world of the medieval woman reader to new generations of scholars and students.

Laura Ashe argues that a genuinely distinctive national character can be found in the writings of England in the century and a half following the Norman Conquest. This study opens up new ways of reading early Medieval texts in relation to their political and legal contexts.

Focusing on the major poets of the late fourteenth century such as Chaucer and Langland, this study investigates the close relationship between artistic and political developments at a time when poets and parliamentarians were very close to one another in practices, concerns, and themes.

This interdisciplinary study analyses the political language and literature of the early Lancastrian period, particularly the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V. Jenni Nuttall's understanding of how political language functions in the late medieval period has far-reaching implications for both literary and political history.

Andrew Cole demonstrates how Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, Hoccleve and Lydgate were influenced by ideas though heretical in their time. Drawing on literary criticism, history, theology and law, this book revaluates the heresy of Wycliff and his followers as the most significant intellectual context for late medieval English writing.

This ambitious study links William Langland's great poem Piers Plowman to wider medieval enquiries into the nature of intellectual and spiritual desire. Zeeman's radical approach opens up a completely fresh reading of Piers Plowman and sheds light on the history of medieval psychology.

Emily Steiner describes the rich intersections between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late medieval England.

In the first study of the Wycliffite Bible for nearly a century, Mary Dove takes the reader through every step of the conception, design and execution of the first English Bible. Wyclif's work initiated a tradition of scholarly, stylish and thoughtful biblical translation, and remains a major cultural landmark.

A study of the Wycliffite heresy, otherwise known as Lollardy, which flourished in England in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Kantik Ghosh shows that, whatever the fate of Lollardy as a religious movement, the debates it initiated changed the intellectual landscape of England.

Little attention has been paid to the political and ideological significance of the medieval exemplum, a brief narrative form used to illustrate a moral. Through a study of four major works in the Chaucerian tradition, Professor Scanlon redefines the exemplum as a 'narrative enactment of cultural authority'.

In medieval society, gestures and speaking looks played an even more important part in public and private exchanges than they do today. In this, the first study of its kind in English, John Burrow examines the role of non-verbal communication in a range of narrative texts.

The fifty-plus manuscripts of Piers Plowman have always posed a puzzle to scholars. This 1996 book is an account of the editions of the poem which have appeared since 1550, examining the circumstances in which the editions were produced, the lives and intellectual motivations of the editors, and the relationship between one edition and the next.

This book examines how the medieval clergy tried to govern the day-to-day speech of Western Christians. It explores, for the first time, how Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the 'Patience' poet presented and judged these attempts to label Sins of the Tongue.

In this 1995 study of two great poems of the later medieval period, James Simpson examines the two kinds of literary humanism which dominated their cultural context and shows the very different modes of thought which lie behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.

This comparative 1997 study examines Floire and Blancheflor and shows how medieval writers from Spain, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia reworked this story from the twelfth to the sixteenth century to develop and emphasize social, political, religious and artistic goals.

This wide-ranging study examines the role of the dream in medieval culture with reference to philosophical, legal and theological writings as well as literary and autobiographical works.

This 1991 book is a literary study of Richard Rolle, one of the most widely read English writers of the late Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson proposes a chronology of Rolle's Latin and English writings and offers a literary analyses of a number of his works, showing how they focus principally on the establishment of his own spiritual authority.

Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's study of Arthurian verse romance was first published in German in 1985, but her radical argument that we need urgently to redraw the lines on the literary and linguistic map of medieval Britain and France is here made available in this 1998 English translation.

Inspired by the example of Chaucer and Gower, John Lydgate articulated the great political questions of his time in his poetry, prose and translations. Maura Nolan offers a major re-interpretation of Lydgate's work, his relationship to Chaucer, and his central role in the developing literary culture of the fifteenth century.

English literary culture in the fourteenth century was vibrant and expanding, with a strongly local focus. Ralph Hanna charts the development and the generic and linguistic features particular to London writing and shows how romance, administrative and theological writing underwrote the great pre-Chaucerian London poem, William Langland's Piers Plowman.