Product Description: Ranging from Chretien de Troyes to Shakespeare, this study proposes that the chivalric romance is characterized by a centerless structure, self-conscious fictionality and a propensity for irony. The form is tied to historical reality, yet represents the archetype of imaginative literature, declaring its fictional status without claiming to embody fixed truths...read more

Product Description: The Medieval Risk-Reward Society offers a study of adventure and love in the European Middle Ages focused on the poetry of authors such as Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg—showing how a society based on sacrifice becomes a society based on wagers and investments...read more

Product Description: This work comprehensively examines the manifold relationships between the written and oral in Medieval literature. An international team of medievalists discusses theoretical issues in a variety of areas, from oral poetry research to new, performance-oriented approaches, addressing the various genres and literary traditions of the Medieval era both in Europe and the Middle East...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: The literature of the European Middle Ages attends closely to the relationship of brother and sister, laying bare sibling behaviours in their most dramatic forms as models to emulate, to marvel at or to avoid. The literary treatment of siblings opens up multiple perspectives on brothers' and sisters' emotions: love, hate, rivalry, desire, nurturing and ambivalence underlie sibling stories...read more

Product Description: The first-of-its-kind, Games and Gaming in Medieval Literature explores the depth and breadth of games in medieval literature and culture. Chapters span from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and cover England, France, Denmark, Poland, and Spain, re-examining medieval games in diverse social settings such as the church, court, and household...read more

Ginny Thornton has lost her husband and her family estate on the brink of the twentieth century, but when she wakes up on New Year's Eve, she has been propelled 100 years into the future where she now has a chance to start over. Original.

Product Description: A Companion to Alain Chartier: Father of French Eloquence brings together fourteen contributions that offer a range of perspectives and insights into the works of this exceptional late medieval author. As heir to the past and herald of the future, Chartier reinvented the traditional, whether in Latin or French, verse or prose...read more

Product Description: Medieval writers such as Chaucer, Abelard, and Langland often overlaid personal story and sacred history to produce a distinct narrative form. The first of its kind, this study traces this widely used narrative tradition to Augustine's two great histories: Confessions and City of God ...read more

Product Description: An ugly subject, but one that needs to be treated thoroughly and comprehensively, with a discreet wit and no excessive relish. These needs are richly satisfied in Larissa Tracy's bold and important book. DEREK PEARSALL, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University...read more

Product Description: The role of commentary as a basic method of research used broadly in both Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages still awaits further analysis. Commentary as a research and didactic method becomes especially interesting in a multicultural perspective: were Buddhist and Arabic texts commented in the same way as it was done by late antique and medieval scholars? The extensive medieval commentary literature still awaits scholarly assessment from the perspective of theory of literature as well as methodology and history of various scientific disciplines...read more

Product Description: This book examines the sustained interest in legends of the pagan and peripheral North, tracing and analyzing the use of an ‘out-of-Scandinavia’ legend (Scandinavia as an ancestral homeland) in a wide range of medieval texts from all over Europe, with a focus on the Anglo-Saxon tradition...read more

Product Description: The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill. Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of ""heritage tourism"" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also aboutmodernity...read more

“Offers a welcome vade mecum to the Chaucer reader, whether a student or teacher. Impressively interweaving a lifetime of teaching Chaucer with a deep knowledge of his texts, Pugh compresses into one elegantly written, slim handbook the essential Chaucer. A college course in a book! And not a dull moment in it.”—Jane Chance, author of The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women“Offers clear synopses of the poet’s entire corpus, an engaging description of Chaucer’s life and times, a trenchant analysis of his sources, an engaging assessment of his relation to contemporary poets, and a provocative consideration of his subsequent influence upon English literature, including our own (post-) modern pop-culture. Pugh is particularly insightful regarding matters of genre and gender. His introduction to Chaucer serves as both a tight, bright manual for new students of Middle English as well as an excellent review text for all confirmed lovers of Chaucer.”—William A. Quinn, author of Chaucer’s Rehersynges“Focusing on genre theory and contemporary cultural connections, Pugh has produced a fresh and stimulating introduction to Chaucer’s oeuvre.”—Kathleen Forni, author of The Chaucerian Apocrypha“Always engaging and lucid, An Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer will help even beginners understand and appreciate the poet’s writing.”—David Raybin, coeditor of Chaucer: Contemporary ApproachesGeoffrey 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.Tison Pugh, professor of English at the University of Central Florida, is the author of several books, including Queering Medieval Genres.

Product Description: The Cosmographia is one of the most inventive and enigmatic works of medieval literature. Mark Kauntze argues that this allegory of creation is best understood as a product of the vibrant intellectual culture of twelfth-century France...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Lisa H. Cooper offers new insight into the relationship of material practice and literary production in the Middle Ages by exploring the representation of craft labor in England from c.1000-1483. She examines genres as diverse as the school-text, comic poem, spiritual allegory, and mirror for princes, and works by authors both well-known (Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton) and far less so...read more

Product Description: The late-medieval adaptions and compilations of the Arthurian story are a European phenomenon that has sparked both mystification and controversy. Often dismissed as nostalgic recreations that attempt to halt the literary tide, these ambitious projects saw adaptors from across Western Europe combining a vast array of prose and verse sources from different languages into encyclopedic narrative chronologies of King Arthur and his court...read more