Drawing on an array of archival evidence from court records to the poems of Chaucer, this work explores how medieval thinkers understood economic activity, how their ideas were transmitted and the extent to which they were accepted.

Giants are a ubiquitous feature of medieval romance. As remnants of a British prehistory prior to the civilization established, according to the Historium regum Britannie, by Brutus and his Trojan followers, giants are permanently at odds with the chivalric culture of the romance world

Sandra Summers investigates these two major variants of female voyeurism in exemplary didactic and courtly literature by medieval German authors. Setting the motif against the period's dominant patriarchal ethos and its almost exclusive pattern of male authorship, Summers argues that the maternal gaze was endorsed as a stabilizing influence while the erotic gaze was condemned as a threat to medieval order.

This collection of translated stories from the classic work of Japanese medieval literature, the "Konjaku Monogatari shu", contains powerfully entertaining tales that reveal striking aspects of the imagination, fantasy, and creativeness of the Japanese.

Often misleadingly called the Dark Ages, the period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance was a time of great creativity. The Middle Ages gave rise to some of the world's most enduring and influential literary works, including Dante's Commedia, Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and a large body of Arthurian lore and legend. This reference is a comprehensive guide to literature written between 500 and 1500.

Medieval Literature, Style and Culture brings together in one volume 14 essays by medievalist Charles Muscatine, author of Chaucer and the French Tradition and The Old French Fabliaux. In this collection, Muscatine focuses mainly on style, meaning and culture in Chaucer, his English contemporaries, and in French fabliaux and romance.

What does it mean to speak for nature? Contemporary environmental critics warn that giving a voice to nonhuman nature reduces it to a mere echo of our own needs and desires; they caution that it is a perverse form of anthropocentrism. And yet nature's voice proved a powerful and durable ethical tool for premodern writers, many of whom used it to explore what it meant to be an embodied creature or to ask whether human experience is independent of the natural world in which it is forged.

One of the most common ways of setting the arts in parallel, at least from the literary side, is through the popular rhetorical device of ekphrasis. The original meaning of this term is simply an extended and detailed, lively description, but it has been used most commonly in reference to painting or sculpture.

The theme of Adam's Grace is the interplay of theology and literature across a wide range of genres and vernaculars: in particular, the use of medieval literary texts to explain the balance ofthe Fall and Redemption, the universality of original sin, and the identity of mankind with its first parents, Adam and Eve.

In these spirited essays, contributors across a broad spectrum reassess the study of the Middle Ages in the context of today's rapidly changing world. They address concerns ranging from the impact of the end of the cold war on medieval studies to the relationship between philology and twentieth-century poetry, to new views of the long-term history of sexuality.

The chapters of this book form an essay in a type of history I call 'verse history, ' a concept not covered by any of the usual terms applied to the study of literature.

Catullus (84-54BCE) couples consummate poetic artistry with intensity of feeling. Tibullus (c. 54-19 BCE) proclaims love for "Delia" and "Nemesis" in elegy. The beautiful verse of the Pervigilium Veneris (fourth century CE?) celebrates a spring festival in honour of the goddess of love.

In the early 1990s, Stephen Nichols introduced the term 'new medievalism' to describe an alternative to the traditional philological approach to the study of the romantic texts in the medieval period. While the old approach focused on formal aspects of language, this new approach was historicist and moved beyond a narrow focus on language to examine the broader social and cultural contexts in which literary works were composed and disseminated.

This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England.

This book analyses the narrative and psychological functions of seasonal settings in the literatures of medieval England and Iceland from the eighth to the fourteenth century, including such important texts as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Geoffrey Chaucer is widely considered the father of English literature. This introduction begins with a review of his life and the cultural milieu of fourteenth-century England and then expands into analyses of such major works as The Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and, of course, the Canterbury Tales, examining them alongside a selection of lesser known verses.

In this fascinating study, Geoffrey Russom traces the evolution of the major English poetic traditions by reference to the evolution of the English language, and considers how verse forms are born, how they evolve, and why they die.

Sarah Elliott Novacich explores how medieval thinkers pondered the ethics and pleasures of the archive. She traces three episodes of sacred history - the loss of Eden, the loading of Noah's ark, and the Harrowing of Hell - across works of poetry, performance records, and iconography in order to demonstrate how medieval artists turned to sacred history to think through aspects of cultural transmission

Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true.