This collection of essays by leading experts in manuscript studies sheds new light on ways to approach medieval texts in their manuscript context. Each contribution provides groundbreaking insight into the field of medieval textual culture, demonstrating the various interconnections between medieval material and literary traditions. The contributors’ work aids reconstruction of the period’s writing practices, as contextual factors surrounding the texts provide clues to the ‘manuscript experience’. Topics such as scribal practice and textual providence, glosses, rubrics, page lay-out, and even page ruling, are addressed in a manner illustrative and suggestive of textual practice of the time, while the volume further considers the interface between the manuscript and early textual communities. Looking at medieval inventories of books no longer extant, and addressing questions such as ownership, reading practices and textual production, Medieval Texts in Context addresses the fundamental interpretative issue of how scribe-editors worked with an eye to their intended audience. An understanding of the world inhabited by the scribal community is made use of to illuminate the rationale behind the manufacture of devotional texts. The combination of approaches to the medieval vernacular manuscript presented in this volume is unique, marking a major, innovative contribution to manuscript studies.

Written in honor of John E. Murdoch's seventieth birthday, the essays collected here focus on the interpretation of ancient and scientific texts not just as isolated intellectual productions but as responses to particular settings or contexts.

Readings in Medieval Texts offers a thorough and accessible introduction to the interpretation and criticism of a broad range of Old and Middle English canonical texts from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. The volume brings together 24 newly commissioned chapters by a leading international team of medieval scholars. An introductory chapter highlights the overarching trends in the composition of English Literature in the Medieval periods, and provides an overview of the textual continuities and innovations. Individual chapters give detailed information about context, authorship, date, and critical views on texts, before providing fascinating and thought-provoking examinations of crucial excerpts and themes. This book will be invaluable for undergraduate and graduate students on all courses in Medieval Studies, particularly those focusing on understanding literature and its role in society.

This collection brings together twelve original essays by prominent medievalists which address problems posed by contemporary literary and cultural theory. Taken together, the essays call into question the view that contemporary criticism has little to say about medieval literature and that medieval studies should remain isolated from the issues of contemporary criticism. The contributors apply a variety of critical methodologies to explore issues in textuality, intertextuality, and the role of the reader in works of medieval writers as diverse as Chaucer, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Anselm, and Talavera. Incorporating critical approaches such as deconstructionism, Marxism, feminism, new-historicism and reader-response criticism, the essays place these writers and their texts within a wider realm of cultural reference that embraces philosophy, religion, rhetoric, history, politics, and anthropology.

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies to achieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

This volume provides a comprehensive introduction to postcolonial medieval studies and examines the historical connections between postcolonial studies and medieval studies. Lisa Lampert-Weissig provides new readings of medieval texts including Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, Mandeville's Travels and Guillaume de Palerne, a romance about werewolves set in Norman Sicily. In addition, she examines Walter Scott's Ivanhoe from the perspective of postcolonial medieval studies, as well contemporary novels by Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali, Juan Goytisolo, and Amitav Ghosh.

This volume brings together a selection of the major articles of David Mills (1938-2013), which along with similar volumes by Alexandra F. Johnston, Peter Meredith and Meg Twycross makes up a set of "Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies". Mills was one of these four key scholars whose work has changed what is known about English medieval drama and theatre. He made major contributions to understanding English medieval theatre in the widest sense but more specifically to the nature and development of medieval plays and their performance at Chester. The scope of his work from manuscript to performance has created new knowledge and insights brought about by his remarkable technical skill as an editor and researcher. His texts of the Chester Cycle of Mystery Plays have become the standard works. In the light of this outstanding research the volume is comprised of four sections: 1. Editors and Editing; 2. Cultural Contexts; 3. Staging and Performance; 4. Criticism and Evaluation. An editorial introduction opens the work.

How is the medieval world depicted today? Two German museums serve as case studies for a vibrant, imaginative, and provocative enactment of twenty-first century medievalism: the Museum Wolfram von Eschenbach in Wolframs Eschenbach (1995) and the Nibelung Museum in Worms (2001). Emerging around the turn of the 20th century, the museums explore medieval German literature, cultural memory and local history. As the museums reconstruct and transform medieval narratives for the contemporary audience, they enact the process of medievalism: they reveal how memory, through the lens of the middle ages, shapes modern cultural identity and heritage. Medieval Literature on Display thereby contributes to important conversations about medievalism's role in constructing and affirming cultural identity, in conceptualizing and finding places for the future of the past. This unique book is vital reading for scholars of medieval literature and historians of medieval Europe, as well as scholars of visual culture and museum studies.

Rather than seeing American literature as beginning with the writings of English or Spanish colonists, Brander Rasmussen points to the wide variety of indigenous writing in the Americas prior to colonization. The study looks at writing between 1524 and the mid-19th century work of Herman Melville.