Sarah Elliott Novacich explores the ways in which the plots of sacred history were preserved and repurposed in Medieval English literature.

Exploring debt's permutations in Middle English texts, Anne Schuurman makes the bold claim that the capitalist spirit has its roots in Christian penitential theology. Her argument challenges the longstanding belief that faith and theological doctrine in the Middle Ages were inimical to the development of market economies, showing that the same idea of debt is in fact intrinsic to both. The double penitential-financial meaning of debt, and the spiritual paradoxes it creates, is a linchpin of scholastic and vernacular theology, and of the imaginative literature of late medieval England. Focusing on the doubleness of debt, this book traces the dynamic by which the Christian ascetic ideal, in its rejection of material profit and wealth acquisition, ends up producing precisely what it condemns. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

This volume brings together scholars of history, manuscript studies, and art and architectural history to examine in conversation the varieties of medieval archival acts, the heterogeneity of collections, and the motivations of collectors. It is united by the historically flexible concept of the archive, and contributors examine material from Seville to Prague, from the early Christian period through the Reformation. Premodern collections and archival practices are increasingly becoming the subject of academic inquiry. Chapter authors investigate how institutional, communal, and familial identity accrued to material culture, including illuminated manuscripts, ecclesiastic vestments, ancient sarcophagi, and reliquaries. Others examine the social impulses behind the documentation of such collections, namely through the creation of inventories, but also in the production, management, and use of parchment records, including cartularies, estate records, and legal documents. Finally, contributors question how medieval people evaluated historical age and outmoded artistic styles; shaped and promoted collective memory through preservation, display, and ritual; and attached value, both monetary and symbolic, to their collections. The volume is cross-disciplinary and will appeal to a variety of readers, both in and out of academia. Curators, librarians, and archivists working with medieval collections will find it valuable, as will heritage professionals and charities involved in the care of properties which presently or formerly contained medieval treasuries, libraries, and archives.

A new history of the origins of the English Bible, revealing the complex continuities between Latin commentaries and English translations.

First full-length study of the mouth's centrality to discourses of physical, ethical and spiritual 'good' in Middle English literature.

A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It discusses numerous neglected or unknown texts, focusing particularly on documents, chronicles and sermons. To tell the story of this pivotal period, it adopts approaches from both literary criticism and historical linguistics, finding a synthesis for them in a twenty-first century philology. It develops new methodologies for addressing major questions about twelfth-century texts, including when they were written, how they were read and their relationship to earlier works. Essential reading for anyone interested in what happened to English after the Norman Conquest, this study lays the groundwork for the coming decade's work on transitional English.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.

Firmly establishes the importance of early affective devotion in the hybrid poetics of the earliest English poetry.

This revisionist literary history of early court poetry illuminates late-medieval and early modern theories of literary production.

Emma O. Bérat shows the centrality of women's legacies to medieval political and literary thought in chronicles, hagiography, and genealogy.