Bücher der Reihe Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture

This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval - musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception - have worked together to produce and sustain the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.

Long takes advantage of the fifteenth century's intense interest in the Virgin Mary, the best-documented mother of the medieval period, to examine the constructions and performances of her maternity in devotional texts. This results in revisionist readings that consider maternity as a literate practice and devotional literacy as a maternal one.

This innovative volume harnesses the interdisciplinarity and flexibility of 'encounter' to provide dynamic readings The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century. Incorporating thirteen original chapters and a critical introduction, it offers myriad exciting approaches to this important and ever-surprising medieval text.

This book addresses the vexed status of literary value, focusing on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, using Chaucer studies as a case in point. It explores how we may reconcile literary value's inevitability with its uncertainties and complicities, seeking to forge a viable rationale for literary studies generally.

This study investigates the affective agency of the book, through the emotional literacy training that a single codex provided a late-medieval English household. It demonstrates how MS Ashmole 61 affirms both the physical and moral agency of nonhumans, who fashion spiritually generous and socially mindful human household members. -- .

This critical study of medieval English romances uses ideas from anthropology and critical theories of the gift to shed light on narratives ranging from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Written in a style accessible for students as well as scholars, it engages with questions about storytelling, agency, gender and material objects. -- .

The chapters of Painful pleasures offer new and worthwhile pathways of examination into medieval culture and invite further analyses into the kinkier side of human sexualities, a side that in fact could not be more central to a study of our culture. -- .

Medieval literary voices explores literary voice in relation to its authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It reveals how literary voices evoke voices lurking beyond the text - the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the aural soundscape of the uttered text - and how they mediate embodied life and material presence. -- .

Bestsellers and masterpieces: The changing medieval canon offers a comparative critique of the development of the 'modern canon' of medieval literature across European and Middle Eastern medieval studies. -- .

The narrative grotesque introduces a new framework for reading medieval texts that rupture conventional poetic boundaries and create unsettling fusions of poetic forms and narratological subjectivities. -- .

This book examines major literary texts by and about the Irish in the Middle Ages, providing an analysis of a spatial poetics developed over 600 years. It argues that the Irish theorised anew the concept of 'place' and developed a 'spatial turn' that reconfigured how communities in the Irish Sea region thought about writing, place and identity. -- .

This innovative volume harnesses the interdisciplinarity and flexibility of 'encounter' to provide dynamic readings The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century. Incorporating thirteen original chapters and a critical introduction, it offers myriad exciting approaches to this important and ever-surprising medieval text. -- .

Practicing shame explores how the literature of medieval England encouraged women to secure their honour by cultivating hypervigilance against shame. The book transforms our understanding of the construction of femininity in the past and offers a new framework for thinking about honourable womanhood now and in the years to come. -- .

This book examines the 'fall of the angels' tradition in early medieval sermons, saints' lives, legal documents and Old English biblical poetry. It argues that Anglo-Saxon authors adapted apocryphal and patristic accounts in ways that allowed them to express their ideas concerning ecclesiastical and secular power. -- .

Transfiguring medievalism explores medieval literature, modern poetry and theologies both medieval and modern to show how bodies can become apparent to the attentive eye as more than they first appear. Bringing together medieval sources with modern lyric medievalism, the book argues for the surprising porousness of time and flesh. -- .

This book presents an important re-theorisation of gender and anti-Semitism in medieval biblical drama. It charts conflicts staged between dramatic personae in plays that represent theological transitions, including the Incarnation, Flood, Nativity and Bethlehem slaughter. Interrogating the Christian preoccupation with what it asserted was a superseded Jewish past, it asks how models of supersession and typology are subverted when placed in dramatic dialogue with characters who experience time differently. The book employs theories of gender, performance, anti-Semitism, queer theory and periodisation to complicate readings of early theatre's biblical matriarchs and patriarchs. Dealing with frequently taught plays as well as less familiar material, the book is essential reading for specialist, undergraduate and postgraduate researchers working on medieval performance, gender and queer studies, Jewish-Christian studies and time.

This study brings new methodologies of literary geography to bear upon the unique contents of a codex known as British Library MS Harley 2253. The Harley manuscript was produced upon England's Welsh March, by a scribe whose generation died in the Black Death. It contains a diverse set of writings: love-lyrics and devotional literature, political songs and fabliaux, saints' lives, courtesy texts, bible stories and travelogues. These works alternate between languages (Middle English, Anglo-Norman and Latin) but operate in conversation with one another. The introduction explores how this fragmentary miscellany keeps being sutured into 'whole'-ness by commentary upon it. Individual chapters examine different genres and social groupings and demonstrate that there are many Harley landscapes still waiting to be discovered. It will be of great value to those studying literary history, medieval studies, cultural geography, gender studies, Jewish studies and book history.

This book argues that the image of medieval England created by writers of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries was deeply informed by medieval and modern Scandinavia. Protestant and monarchical, the Scandinavian region became an image of Britain's noble past and an affirmation of its current global status. -- .

Visions and ruins explores the production of cultural memory in the Middle Ages and the uses the medieval past has been put to in modernity. Working with texts in Old English, Middle English and Latin, as well as visual and material culture, it traces connections in time, place, language and media to explore the temporal complexities of cultural production and subject formation. The book interrogates critical, poetic, artistic and political archives to reveal exchanges of cultural energy and influence between past and present, offering new ways of knowing the medieval past and the contemporary moment.

This study explores how writers reconciled provocative biblical stories with late-medieval culture. Highlighting the many variations and points of conflict across renditions of the same story, the book unfolds a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. -- .

The book argues that the temporal privilege of the medieval masks the extent to which the medieval and medievalistic are mutually constitutive and ultimately dependent not on absolutist epistemological claims but on how feelings and temperaments affect the way we approach the Middle Ages. -- .

This book explores the voices of nonhuman things in Anglo-Saxon literature and material culture, making a valuable contribution to 'thing theory'. -- .

This study places the Scottish compilation of saints' legends within the hagiographic landscape of medieval Britain. -- .

This book places us at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what it meant to them and why. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches, it examines the interplay of vernacular literature, ritual and material culture at the centre of parish life. -- .

This book traces affinities across the digital-medieval divide to explore how reading functioned as a nexus for concerns about literacy, audiences' agency, literary culture and media formats. Interactive reading offered writers ways to make readers work to their benefit, even as these practices enabled audiences to make reading work for themselves. -- .

Explores and explains stories about the mythic outlaw, who from the middle ages to the present stands up for the values of natural law and true justice. -- .

Examines the teaching of the theology of Christ's ascension in Anglo-Saxon literature, offering the only comprehensive examination of how patristic ascension theology is transmitted, adapted and taught to Anglo-Saxon audiences -- .

The story of Noah's Flood is one of the Bible's most popular stories, and other flood myths are preserved by cultures across the world. This book presents the first comprehensive study of the incorporation of the Flood myth into the literary and historical imagination of the Anglo-Saxons, ranging from the works of Bede to Beowulf. -- .

Greenery blends current ecological concerns with informed analysis of medieval literature to arrive at new readings of late medieval English texts, some canonical (eg Malory's Morte D'Arthur, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Chaucer's Knight's and Franklin's Tales) some less frequently studied (lyrics, Patience, Sir Orfeo).