2012-02-09T17:20:00.000+02:00

Early Medieval Northumbria Kingdoms and Communities, AD 450-1100
D. Petts, S. Turner (eds.)

XIV+332 p., 66 b/w ill. + 6 colour ill., 20 b/w tables, 156 x 234 mm, 2012
ISBN: 978-2-503-52822-9
Languages: English

This fascinating volume brings together essays which deploy a variety of historical methods in order to explore the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the Anglo kingdom of Northumbria, which had a major impact on medieval Europe. Read more
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The Middle English text of The Artof Hunting by William Twiti.
Edited from an uncatalogued Manuscript in aPrivate Collection, Ashton-under-Lyne, with a Parallel Text of the Anglo-NormanL'Art de Venerie by William Twiti. Edited from Cambridge, Gonville and CaiusCollege, MS 424/448. Middle English Texts 40.

David Scott-Macnab (Editor)

This volume presents the first scholarly edition of a little-known fifteenth-century translation of William Twiti's Anglo-Norman prose treatise on hunting, 'L 'art de venerie', the earliest manual on the sport to be composed in England. The text in question, extant in a single manuscript held in a private collection in Ashton-under-Lyne, is far superior to the only other Middle English translation of Twiti's treatise that has hitherto been known to scholars: the amplified, but debased and at times incoherent, version found in BL, MS Cotton Vespasian B XII; it is also a far more accurate rendition of Twiti's Anglo-Norman original than the much altered redaction known as 'The Craft of Venery', a text that has recently become confused with Twiti's treatise. Former editors of Twiti's work, such as Gunnar Tilander and Bror Danielsson, were unaware of the existence of the Ashton translation, and therefore founded their editions on the Cottonian text or 'The Craft of Venery', both of which are problematic in a number of ways. In this volume, the Ashton translation is printed opposite a parallel Anglo-French text edited from Gonville and Caius College MS 424/448, and is followed by freshly corrected editions of the amplified Cottonian text and 'The Craft of Venery'. All three texts are provided with their own comprehensive notes, complemented by an integrated glossary that improves on many definitions currently in the 'Oxford English Dictionary' and the 'Middle English Dictionary'. Read more

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The Cambridge

Paperback

(ISBN-13: 9780521726450)

Also available in Hardback

Published January 2012

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Nicholas of Cusa –
A Companion to his Life and his Times

Morimichi Watanabe, Long Island University, USA
Edited by Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki
October 2011 • 426 pages
Hardback • 978-1-4094-2039-2 • $134.95 / £75.00

This work is a guide to the life, thought and activities of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), the great fifteenth-century philosopher, theologian, jurist, author of mystical and ecclesiastical treatises, cardinal and reformer. It is intended not only for advanced scholars, but also for beginners and those simply curious about a man who has been called "one of the greatest Germans of the fifteenth century" and a "medieval thinker for the modern age." The book provides a series of detailed but readable essays on ideas, persons, and places, a work developed over the course of nearly three decades. Read more
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JOANNE FINDON
Lady, Hero, Saint: The Digby Play's Mary Magdalene

Studies and Texts 173. 2011. viii, 232 pp.
ISBN 978–0–88844–173–7 • Cloth • $85.00

This study examines the late medieval Digby Mary Magdalene play, which is dominated by its female protagonist. Recalling genres as varied as lyric poetry, romance, fabliau, sermons, meditations, and hymns, the play presents an especially complex version of the popular saint. More information?

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K. Rooney

Mortality and Imagination
The Life of the Dead in Medieval English Literature

Approx. X+341 p., 13 b/w ill. + 8 colour ill., 160 x 240 mm
ISBN: 978-2-503-52431-3
Languages: English, Old English, French
Hardback
The publication is in production. (05/2011)
Retail price: approx. EUR 90,00

More than any single volume has so far attempted, Mortality and Imagination is devoted to the history and literary 'life' of the dead in medieval writing.

There have been many books on the medieval culture of death, but this book is the first devoted to the use and representation of the dead in English medieval writing. Mortality and Imagination is a history of the literary ‘life’ of the dead — in their narrative, aesthetic, and ideological formulation — a theme which up to now has been explored only fragmentarily, available only in studies of particular genres. Kenneth Rooney’s book explores a wider range of texts and genres than has been attempted before, and reads the vernacular representation of the dead against the impact of one of the most intriguing cultural phenomena of the Middle Ages — the macabre — a rhetorical and artistic idiom designed to evoke the dead at their most horrifying. Tracing the models for the representation of the dead available to English writers, he offers fresh readings of texts both familiar and neglected, including sermons, tale collections, romances, drama, lyrics, and other genres in the period c.1100—1550. This book is a stimulating appraisal of the impact, in medieval insular contexts, of an international idea of great longevity and significance, and makes an important contribution to the study of death, belief, and society in pre-modern Europe.

Author: Dr Kenneth Rooney is lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. He has published widely on Middle English poetry and medieval romance. More information?

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Peter C. Herman
A Short History of Early Modern England: British Literature in Context

This book aims to give literature students the necessary historical and cultural background to study early modern British literature, and it runs from the deposition of Richard II through to the early Restoration. The book is available in both hardcover and paperback (I’m hopeful it will also be an e-book), it is beautifully printed, and has nice illustrations.

ISBN: 978-1-4051-9560-7

Hardcover

280 pages

April 2011, Wiley-Blackwell

Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700

Imprint: Ashgate
Illustrations: Includes 3 b&w illustrations
Published: December 2010
Format: 234 x 156 mm
Extent: 292 pages
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 978-0-7546-6903-6
BL Reference: 302.3'4'094'09031
LoC Control No: 2010031930

Edited by Daniel T. Lochman, Texas State University - San Marcos, USA, Maritere López, California State University at Fresno, USA, and Lorna Hutson, University of St Andrews, UK

Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection examines the varied and complex ways in which early modern Europeans imagined, discussed and enacted friendship, a fundamentally elective relationship between individuals otherwise bound in prescribed familial, religious and political associations. The volume is carefully designed to reflect the complexity and multi-faceted nature of early modern friendship, and each chapter comprises a case study of specific contexts, narratives and/or lived friendships. Contributors include scholars of British, French, Italian and Spanish culture, offering literary, historical, religious, and political perspectives.

Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 lays the groundwork for a taxonomy of the transformations of friendship discourse in Western Europe and its overlap with emergent views of the psyche and the body, as well as of the relationship of the self to others, classes, social institutions and the state.

More information here.

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Crusades – Medieval Worlds in Conflict

Imprint: Ashgate
Illustrations: Includes 12 b&w illustrations
Published: December 2010
Format: 234 x 156 mm
Extent: 226 pages
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-4094-0061-5
BL Reference: 909'.07-dc22
LoC Control No: 2010021524

Edited by Thomas F. Madden, James L. Naus, Vincent Ryan, St Louis University, USA

These essays, selected from papers presented at the International Symposium on Crusade Studies in February 2006, represent a stimulating cross-section of this vibrant field. Organized under the rubric of "medieval worlds" the studies in this volume demonstrate the broad interdisciplinary spectrum of modern crusade studies, extending far beyond the battlefield into the conflict and occasional cooperation between the diverse cultures and faiths of the Mediterranean. Although the crusades were a product of medieval Europe, they provide a backdrop against which medieval worlds can be observed to come into both contact and collision.

The range of studies in this volume includes subjects such as Muslim and Christian understandings of their wars within their own intellectual and artistic perspectives, as well as the development of memory and definition of crusading in both the East and West. A section on the Crusades and the Byzantine world examines the intersection of western and eastern Christian attitudes and agendas and how they played out - particularly in the Aegean and Asia Minor. The book concludes with three studies on the crusader king, Louis IX, examining not only his two crusades in new ways, but also the role of the crusade in his later sanctification. Read more.

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Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

Imprint: Ashgate
Illustrations: Includes 6 b&w illustrations
Published: February 2011
Format: 234 x 156 mm
Extent: 278 pages
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 978-1-4094-0547-4
BL Reference: 822.3'3-dc22
LoC Control No: 2010025850

Edited by Laura Tosi, University of Venice, Italy and Shaul Bassi, University of Venice, Italy.

Series : Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies

Despite the growing critical relevance of Shakespeare's two Venetian plays and a burgeoning bibliography on both The Merchant of Venice and Othello, few books have dealt extensively with the relationship between Shakespeare and Venice. Setting out to offer new perspectives to a traditional topic, this timely collection fills a gap in the literature, addressing the new historical, political and economic questions that have been raised in the last few years. The essays in this volume consider Venice a real as well as symbolic landscape that needs to be explored in its multiple resonances, both in Shakespeare's historical context and in the later tradition of reconfiguring one of the most represented cities in Western culture. Shylock and Othello are there to remind us of the dark sides of the myth of Venice, and of the inescapable fact that the issues raised in the Venetian plays are tremendously topical; we are still haunted by these theatrical casualties of early modern multiculturalism.

More information here.

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Peter W. Travis

Disseminal Chaucer

Rereading The Nun’s Priest’s Tale

Winner of the 2009 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism

Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is one of the most popular of The Canterbury Tales. It is only 646 lines long, yet it contains elements of a beast fable, an exemplum, a satire, and other genres. There have been countless attempts to articulate the “real” meaning of the tale, but it has confounded the critics. Peter Travis contends that part of the fun and part of the frustration of trying to interpret the tale has to do with Chaucer’s use of the tale to demonstrate the resistance of all literature to traditional critical practices. But the world of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is so creative and so quintessentially Chaucerian that critics persist in writing about it.

No one has followed the critical fortunes of Chauntecleer and his companions more closely over time than Peter Travis. One of the most important contributions of this book is his assessment of the tale’s reception. Travis also provides an admirable discussion of genre: his analysis of parody and Menippean satire clarify how to approach works such as this tale that take pleasure in resisting traditional generic classifications. Travis also demonstrates that the tale deliberately invoked its readers’ memories of specific grammar school literary assignments, and the tale thus becomes a miniaturized synopticon of western learning. Building on these analyses and insights, Travis’s final argument is that The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is Chaucer’s premier work of self-parody, an ironic apologia pro sua arte. The most profound matters foregrounded in the tale are not advertisements of the poet’s achievements. Rather, they are poetic problems that Chaucer wrestled with from the beginning of his career and, at the end of that career, wanted to address in a concentrated, experimental, and parapoetic way.

PETER W. TRAVIS is Henry Winkley Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Language and Literature at Dartmouth College. He is the author of many influential articles and Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle.

“ Disseminal Chaucer is an original work of criticism that breaks new ground in its treatment of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale in its approach to the tale and in its perspective on Chaucer’s poetry as a whole. It is very historicist based, which places it in the mainstream of current medieval practices, but its background material and authoritative reading will make it fresh and current for a very long time.” — Larry Scanlon, Rutgers University

“Peter Travis’s long-awaited study of The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is without a doubt the most comprehensive and thorough treatment of the tale that we have or are ever likely to have. It is a bravura performance, an extremely well argued study that marks it as a significant contribution to Chaucer studies, one that will be closely read and consulted by both students and scholars of Chaucer alike.” — James F. Rhodes, Southern Connecticut State University

“Peter Travis opens the Pandora’s box that is Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale by asking a disarmingly simple question about its genre. He proceeds to detail, brilliantly, the narrative’s status as a multiplex parody, a medieval Ulysses. By refusing to reduce the tale to a singular meaning, and by maintaining that its proliferative ardors are part of its formal structure, Travis provides a tour de force analysis not only of the work but of Chaucer’s ambitions throughout The Canterbury Tales. Lucid, engaging, and great fun to read, Dissemimal Chaucer provides a compelling model for doing theory-savvy work that is scrupulously attentive to medieval textuality.” — Jeffrey J. Cohen, George Washington University

“Travis performs the difficult feat of remaining continually aware of Chaucer’s comedy, while taking seriously the pedagogical system Chaucer is parodying. His rich book provides a genuine and valuable introduction to medieval practices of reading and writing, and at the same time takes us deep into Chaucer’s thinking about poetry.” — Winthrop Wetherbee, Cornell University

Reviews

“Offering stimulating, sometimes brilliant ‘high-intensity interrogations’ of ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,’ Travis looks at passages and elements of the tale in terms of rhetorical, logical, and political contexts. He links these with an overall claim for Chaucer’s ultra-self-consciousness about these elements, about producing a poetry that elicits thinking about thinking . . . a commentary on a single tale that ranks among the most searching and critically sophisticated studies to date of Chaucer.” — Choice

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The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453

Historiography, Topography, and Military Studies

Professor Marios Philippides, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA and Walter K. Hanak, Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, West Virginia, USA

This major study is a comprehensive scholarly work on a key moment in the history of Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. The result of years of research, it presents all available sources along with critical evaluations of these narratives. The authors have consulted texts in all relevant languages, both those that remain only in manuscript and others that have been printed, often in careless and inferior editions. Attention is also given to "folk history" as it evolved over centuries, producing prominent myths and folktales in Greek, medieval Russian, Italian, and Turkish folklore. Part I, The Pen, addresses the complex questions introduced by this myriad of original literature and secondary sources.

Part II, The Sword, applies the results of these researches, first to the topography of the wall areas and adjacent structures, surveying key areas that played a part in the defense of the imperial city. These investigations have resulted in new conclusions, compelling the acceptance of consequences that previous studies failed to consider. There then follows a fresh study of the land and sea operations during the siege, with particular attention given to Ottoman offensive strategies and methods, and to the defensive operations of the besieged.

This work is detailed in its evaluation of and presentation of sources, and it fills a gap in scholarship, as there is no comprehensive guide to these events. In addition, as a reference work, it will be essential as a starting point for any future studies of the siege and fall of Constantinople. More information.

BOOKS

Introduction to Milton

Series: Cambridge Introductions to Literature

Stephen B. Dobranski

Georgia State University

Paperback

Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700

Crusades – Medieval Worlds in Conflict

Visions of Venice in Shakespeare

The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453

Historiography, Topography, and Military Studies