Bücher der Reihe Manchester Medieval Literature

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.