Bøger udgivet af Medieval Institute Publications

Malory's use of myth and magic to explore his themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but his views on and thematic use of Christianity have long needed a closer look.

Essays in this volume offer non-Italian scholars a representative sample of current European research and a summary of recent debates regarding the historical evolution of those republics that posed the most formidable obstacles to the extension of Florentine hegemony.

This sourcebook is designed to introduce students to the everyday lives of the Jews who lived in the German Empire, northern France and England from the 11th to the mid-14th centuries. The volume consists of translations of primary sources written by or about medieval Jews.

Focusing on the ninth-century beginnings of Byzantine writings against the Latin addition of the Filioque to the creed, illuminates several aspects of Byzantine thought-their self-definition, their theology, their uniquely constituted state.

The Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors; given the English connection, no story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Chettle, etc., looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War.

Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer¿s style. Indeed, Chaucer¿s decision to write in Middle English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is, however, the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer¿s Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer¿s tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other ¿ conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of ¿shadow¿ chapters that speak to or against the four ¿central¿ chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.

This volume offers the author¿s central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography and illustrates the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes world maps and travel accounts in relation to mapped spaces. A third examines land surveying, cartographical practices of exploration, and the production of Portolan atlases.

A "e;blind spot"e; suggests an obstructed view, or partisan perception, or a localized lack of understanding. Just as the brain "e;reads"e; the "e;blind spot"e; of the visual field by a curious process of readjustment, Shakespearean drama disorients us with moments of unmastered and unmasterable knowledge, recasting the way we see, know and think about knowing. Focusing on such moments of apparent obscurity, this volume puts methods and motives of knowing under the spotlight, and responds both to inscribed acts of blind-sighting, and to the text or action blind-sighting the reader or spectator. While tracing the hermeneutic yield of such occlusion is its main conceptual aim, it also embodies a methodological innovation: structured as an internal dialogue, it aims to capture, and stake out a place for, a processive intellectual energy that enables a distinctive way of knowing in academic life; and to translate a sense of intellectual "e;community"e; into print.

This volume considers the reception in the early modern period of four popular medieval myths of nationhood ¿ the legends of Brutus, Albina, Scota and Arthur ¿ tracing their intertwined literary and historiographical afterlives. The book thus speaks to several connected areas and is timely on a number of fronts: its dialogue with current investigations into early modern historiography and the period¿s relationship to its past, its engagement with pressing issues in identity and gender studies, and its analysis of the formation of British national origin stories at a time when modern Britain is seriously considering its own future as a nation.

Cognitive approaches to early medieval texts have tended to focus on the mind in isolation. By examining the interplay between mental and physical acts deployed in Old English poetry and prose, this study identifies new patterns and offers new perspectives. In these texts, the performance of right or wrong action is not linked to natural inclination dictated by birth; it is the fruit of right or wrong thinking. The mind consciously directed and controlled is open to external influences, both human and diabolical. This struggle to produce right thought and action reflects an emerging democratization of heroism that crosses societal and gender boundaries, becoming intertwined with socio-political, soteriological, and cultural meaning. In a study of influential prose texts, including the Alfredian translations and the sermons of Ælfric, alongside close readings of three poems from different genres - The Seafarer, The Battle of Maldon, and Juliana -, Ponirakis demonstrates how early medieval authors create patterns of interaction between the mental and the physical. These provide hidden keys to meaning which, once found, unlock new readings of much studied texts. In addition, these patterns of balance, distribution, and opposition, reveal a startling similarity of approach across genre and form, taking the discussion of the early medieval conception of the mind, soul, and emotion, not to mention conventional generic divisions, onto new ground.

This book addresses the status and relevance of iconography and iconology in the contemporary scholarly study of medieval art. There is a widespread tendency among art historians today to regard the study of iconography and iconology in the tradition of Erwin Panofsky as an outmoded and trivial pursuit. Nonetheless, Panofsky's three-level interpretative model sits firmly in the methodological toolkit of art history and remains a common point of reference among adherents and adversaries alike. Iconography and iconology demand to be taken seriously as a feature of continued praxis in the discipline. The book contains a collection of essays on the validity of various approaches toward the interpretation of meaning in medieval art today. These essays either demonstrate the continued usefulness of iconography and iconology as analytical strategies, or propose alternative approaches to the investigation of meaning in the art of the Middle Ages.

This collection examines some of the people, places, and plays at the edge of early modern English drama. Recent scholarship has begun to think more critically about the edge, particularly in relation to the canon and canonicity. This book demonstrates that the people and concepts long seen as on the edge of early modern English drama made vital contributions both within the fictive worlds of early modern plays, and without, in the real worlds of playmakers, theaters, and audiences. The book engages with topics such as child actors, alterity, sexuality, foreignness, and locality to acknowledge and extend the rich sense of playmaking and all its ancillary activities that have emerged over the last decade. The essays by a global team of scholars bring to life people and practices that flourished on the edge, manifesting their importance to both early modern audiences, and to current readers and performers.

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of the book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction. Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the "Oriental obsession," stimulating dread and resentment, and even more strongly setting the Civilized West against the Barbaric East. Here medieval metaphorical enemies of Mankind - the World, the Flesh and the Devil - reappear in different contexts: the world of immigration, of white women desiring Muslim men, and the present-day "freedom fighters."

The Vikings Reimagined explores the changing perception of Norse and Viking cultures across different cultural forms, and the complex legacy of the Vikings in the present day. Bringing together experts in literature, history and heritage engagement, this highly interdisciplinary collection aims to reconsider the impact of the discipline of Old Norse Viking Studies outside the academy and to broaden our understanding of the ways in which the material and textual remains of the Viking Age are given new meanings in the present. The diverse collection draws attention to the many roles that the Vikings play across contemporary culture: from the importance of Viking tourism, to the role of Norse sub-cultures in the formation of local and international identities. Together these collected essays challenge the academy to rethink its engagement with popular reiterations of the Vikings and to reassess the position afforded to ¿reception¿ within the discipline.

When James VI of Scotland and I of England proclaimed himself King of Great Britain he proposed a merger of parliaments as he had joined two crowns in his own person ascending the throne of England in 1603. For James, the Cambro-Celtic past led to an Anglo-Scottish present, and Wales stood as the ideal.¿Although the parliamentary union of Great Britain was not initiated for another 100 years, Parliament¿s denial failed to deter James from wanting a Great Britain, and R. A.¿s play The Valiant Welshman became part of the public spectacle of unity required to nurture James¿s dream. The Valiant Welshman, the Scottish James, and the Formation of Great Britain¿considers national, regional and linguistic identity and explores how R.A.¿s play promotes Wales, serves King James and reveals what it means to be Welsh and Scots in a newly forming "Great Britain."

Anthony Munday (1560?-1633) published this English translation of a Spanish heroic romance in 1589; it follows the adventures of Palmendos on his journey to Constantinople. This is an original-spelling edition producing a reliable text, as close as possible to the author's original manuscript.

This volume contains the first critical edition of The Honourable, Pleasant and Rare Conceited Historie of Palmendos (London, 1589), a chivalric romance translated into English by Anthony Munday.

The aim of this annual journal is to provide a venue for work engaged with the methodology of using data drawn from analysis of a group or relationships between individuals to restore to view the lives of those who would otherwise remain unexamined or to yield new insight into the medieval past

Njáls saga is the best known and most highly regarded of all medieval Icelandic sagas and it occupies a special place in Icelandic cultural history. The manuscript tradition is exceptionally rich and extensive. The oldest extant manuscripts date to only a couple of decades after the sagäs composition in the late 13th century and the saga was subsequently copied by hand continuously up until the 20th century, even alongside the circulation of printed text editions in latter centuries. The manuscript corpus as a whole has great socio-historical value, showcasing the myriad ways in which generations of Icelanders interpreted the saga and took an active part in its transmission; the manuscripts are also valuable sources for evidence of linguistic change and other phenomena. The essays in this volume present new research and a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on the Njáls saga manuscripts. Many of the authors took part in the international research project "The Variance of Njáls saga" which was funded by the Icelandic Research Council from 2011-2013.

Four Middle English Charlemagne romances from the Otuel cycle: Roland and Vernagu, Otuel a Knight, Otuel and Roland, and Duke Roland and Sir Otuel of Spain. A translation of the romances' source, the Anglo-French Otinel, is also included.

ROMARD is an academic journal devoted to the study and promotion of Medieval and Renaissance drama in Europe. Previously published under the title of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama (RORD), the journal has been in publication since 1956. ROMARD is published annually at the University of Western Ontario.