Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

Until the Reformation, almost all sermons were written down in Latin. Based on the extant manuscripts, this is the first systematic description and analysis of such collections of Latin sermons from the golden age of medieval preaching in England, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Simon Gilson examines Dante's reception in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly his influence on Boccaccio and Petrarch, and on humanism. Ranging across literature, philosophy and art, Gilson's study fully illuminates for the first time Dante's central place in Italian Renaissance culture and thought.

In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, first published in 2000, Maddox considers the construction of identity in a range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood.

Until the twelfth century writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, but the second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre consciously conceived as fictional, the romance. Dennis Green explores how and why this shift occurred.

This 1998 book investigates the politics of vernacular translation in late medieval England the contemporary concerns of clerical corruption of authoritative texts, and the education of vernacular writers such as Langland, Trevisa and Wyclif.

This book examines the presumption that Chaucer invented literary English, and argues instead that his English is largely traditional. It provides a thorough history of every one of Chaucer's words and maps the origins and patterns of use that have made these words so compelling for 600 years.

Spence analyses key twelfth-century texts which articulate a subjective, often autobiographical, stance. She discusses issues such as the relation of subject to object, self to body, body to text, and text to language, and shows how the gap between Latin and the vernacular was crucial in creating the medieval 'self'.

Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cite des Dames (1405) is justly renowned for its full-scale assault on the misogynist stereotypes which dominated the culture of the Middle Ages. This study shows the text's underlying unity and its insistence on the moral, if not the social, equality of the sexes.

Taking as its model Virgil's Aeneid, this study examines the impact on medieval culture of an ancient text, through both its manuscript annotations and its reincarnation in vernacular versions such as the Roman d'Eneas and Chaucer's House of Fame.

Reinterpretation of the significance of the figure of St Bernard in Dante's Commedia.

This is a comprehensive account of the Legend of Good Women's interpretative puzzles, which does not ignore the element of political writing, and adds to a close and nuanced reading of the text an examination of literary, historical, and social contexts.

Troubadours and Irony re-examines the work of five early troubadours, namely Marcabru, Bernart Marti, Peire d'Alvernha, Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Giraut de Borneil, to argue that the courtly poetry of southern France in the twelfth century was permeated with irony and that many troubadour songs were playful, laced with humorous sexual innuendo and far from serious.

Through seven narratives of individual medieval women, prefaced by an overview of nuns' reading and of women who owned printed books, Mary Erler traces networks of female book ownership and exchange which have so far been obscure, and shows how women were responsible for both owning and circulating devotional books.

This is a major study of the cultural and social effects of grammatica, the main medieval discipline concerned with literacy, language and literature. Drawing on a variety of sources, Irvine reveals the implications of grammatica for literary theory and the making of textual culture in the medieval West.

This book investigates how people learnt to read in the Middle Ages. It uses medieval teachers' glosses on Latin texts to show how complex works were used in a very basic way in the classroom, and argues that this has profound implications for our understanding of medieval literacy and hermeneutics.

This book is about the place of pedagogy and the role of intellectuals in medieval dissent. Focusing on the medieval English heresy known as Lollardy, Rita Copeland shows how how radical teachers transformed inherited ideas about classrooms and pedagogy as they brought their teaching to adult learners.

'Tragedy' has been understood in a great variety of conflicting ways over the centuries, and the term has been applied to a wide range of literary works. In this book, H. A. Kelly explores the various meanings given to tragedy, from Aristotle, via Roman ideas and practices, to the middle ages.

This study introduces a new set of texts into the Arthurian canon and suggests a way to understand their place in that tradition. Unfamiliar works are summarized for the reader, and there are extensive quotations, with translations, throughout.

This book, first published in 2003, examines the relationship between poetry and music in medieval France. Butterfield describes the wide range of contexts in which secular songs were quoted and copied, including narrative romances, satires and love poems. The volume is well illustrated to demonstrate the rich visual culture of medieval French writing.

In this first full study of the early history of greed Richard Newhauser shows that avaritia, the sin of greed for possessions, was increasingly dominant in a wide range of theological and literary texts from the first century CE to the end of the tenth century.

Medieval literature contains many figures caught at the interface between life and death - the dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize or desire their own deaths. Jane Gilbert's original study examines the ways in which certain medieval literary texts, both English and French, use these 'living dead' to think about existential, ethical and political issues. In doing so, she shows powerful connections between works otherwise seen as quite disparate, including Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women, the Chanson de Roland and the poems of Francois Villon. Written for researchers and advanced students of medieval French and English literature, this book provides original, provocative interpretations of canonical medieval texts in the light of influential modern theories, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, presented in an accessible and lively way.

In the century before Chaucer a new language of political critique emerged. In political verse of the period, composed in Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English, poets write as if addressing the king himself, drawing on their sense of the rights granted by Magna Carta. These apparent appeals to the sovereign increase with the development of parliament in the late thirteenth century and the emergence of the common petition, and become prominent, in an increasingly sophisticated literature, during the political crises of the early fourteenth century. However, very little of this writing was truly directed to the king. As David Matthews shows in this book, the form of address was a rhetorical stance revealing much about the position from which writers were composing, the audiences they wished to reach, and their construction of political and national subjects.

The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual analysis with close attention to style and form, it offers a major contribution to the history of the medieval conscience.

Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender. Partly through fresh readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's position in relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality and reconstructs how medieval philosophers and literary writers approached psychological phenomena often thought of as distinctively modern. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire and their histories.

A comprehensive account of the English language from 500 to 1500, which integrates literary and linguistic approaches to explore how we think about language. Drawing on a wide range of examples, this collection of essays by leading academics is accessible to scholars and students of medieval English language, literature, and history.

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.

An important collection of essays by expert scholars in the field that explores the impact of the recent shift towards cultural approaches to manuscript studies. It offers practical and theoretical analysis of the medieval manuscript book in its cultural contexts, from production to transmission to its continued adaptation.

Romance is often thought to be largely removed from the concerns of history. This wide-ranging collection of essays by eminent scholars challenges this view by offering the first comprehensive investigation of the fascinating interplay between romance and history from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

This comprehensive study traces the evolution of verse structure in Old and Middle English poetry from the earliest alliterative poems to iambic pentameter. It provides a general theory of poetic form with a glossary of technical terms and explores how poetic form is perceived by the human mind.