Medium Aevum articles from March 1994

Medium Aevum archives from March 1994

Finding time for romance: medieval Arthurian literary history.
March 22, 1994... Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae may have scandalized a circle of fellow-historians, but the work quickly established itself as the authoritative account of the Arthurian past. As Christopher Dean has shown, its status as...

Two bardic themes: the Virgin and Child, and Ave-Eva.
March 22, 1994... In early Welsh poetry, two Marian themes are treated with remarkable originality: the Virgin and Child, in poems before c. 1300; and, in later poems, the play on Eva and the Ave of Gabriel's greeting to Mary at the Annunciation. Since Welsh...

Shaping a saint's life: Frideswide of Oxford.
March 22, 1994... From the twelfth to the sixteenth century the church known today as Oxford Cathedral housed a shrine dedicated to the memory of Frideswide, the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon saint. Following the Reformation, the shrine was destroyed, but the...

Inside and outside: fact and fiction in 'Fouke le Fitz Waryn.'
March 22, 1994... The historical basis for the tale of Fouke le Fitz Waryn, which we have in a prose redaction of the fourteenth century of a possibly rhymed antecedent, is the politically volatile situation in the Welsh marches in the early years of the...

A thirteen-line alliterative stanza on the abuse of prayer from the Audelay MS.
March 22, 1994... John Audelay's broad familiarity with the alliterative style can be surmised by perusing the contents of the Audelay MS (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 302),(1) but an important piece of evidence has yet to be recognized and described....

Jacques Legrand, Christine de Pizan, et la question de la 'nouvelete.'
March 22, 1994... Lors de recherches sur la mort dans la litterature du XVe siecle, j'entrepris de lire Le Livre de bonnes meurs de Jacques Legrand, puisque la derniere partie de cette oeuvre etait presentee dans les mots suivants: 'Cy parle de la mort et...

Truncated topoi in 'The Vision of Edmund Leversedge.'
March 22, 1994... Although mediaeval visions of the afterlife are often classified as legends,[1] they may be said to form a specific genre because they show a tendency to conform to a certain type. They have a literary framework that ultimately goes back to the...

An onomastic pun in a tenth-century Anglo-Latin poem.
March 22, 1994... Although few Anglo-Saxonists would characterize tenth-century hermeneutic Latin as |light' or |jocular', many works of the period do offer glimpses of wit. For example, the pedantic Altercatio magistri et discipuli, probably composed at...

'Comed, conde': the Cid's use of parody.
March 22, 1994... The concluding section of the first Cantar of the Poema de Mio Cid narrates an important incident involving the Cid's defeat and capture of the count of Barcelona, Berenguer Ramon II, the count's short-lived hunger-strike, and his subsequent...

Sedulii Scotti carmina.
March 22, 1994... Sedulius can be wearisome. Much of his writing praises Carolingian rulers. The queens are invariably pious and beautiful (C. 20), the kings and prelates wise and bold. His metrics are manneristic; he is overfond of epanalepsis. The classical is...

Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West.
March 22, 1994... This book provides us with a systematic account of the development of punctuation systems in the West from classical antiquity to modern times. Most of it is devoted to the evolution of such systems down to the Renaissance, when printing led to...

Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts.
March 22, 1994... What contemporary woman could with eagerness or even equanimity propose to read a book mainly concerned with the defamation of women? No doubt Alcuin Blamires considered the needs of such a reader in choosing texts and preparing editorial...

Dictionary of Old English: Fascicle B.
March 22, 1994... The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) is a magnificent contribution to Old English scholarship, and continues to be produced on a truly monumental scale. These fascicles include some z820 headwords, which are treated lavishly and comprehensively...

Fascicle AE, BEON: Abbreviations for Latin Sources and Bibliography of Editions.
March 22, 1994... The Dictionary of Old English (DOE) is a magnificent contribution to Old English scholarship, and continues to be produced on a truly monumental scale. These fascicles include some z820 headwords, which are treated lavishly and comprehensively...

The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study.
March 22, 1994... This first collected edition of the nine elegies (The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Riming Poem, Deor, Wulf and Eadwacer, The Wife's Lament, Resignation, The Husband's Message, The Ruin) surveys all previous work and makes its own substantial...

The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts.
March 22, 1994... Despite the manuscript's fame, the anonymous Vercelli homilies have made a belated appearance in print. Forster's edition of 1932 presented the first eight Homilies, and part of the ninth; his projected second volume, containing Homilies...

The Saxon Genesis: An Edition of the West Saxon Genesis B and the Old Saxon Vatican Genesis.
March 22, 1994... The relationship between the Old Saxon Genesis (Vatican Library, MS Palatinus Latinus 1447) and the Old English (West Saxon) text, usually entitled Genesis B (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius II), has been known to scholarship since 1894....

The South English Legendary: A Critical Assessment.
March 22, 1994... This collection of ten essays represents less a 'critical assessment' than, in the editor's own words, a |number of scholarly approaches' to the late thirteenth-century verse compilation of saints' lives known as the South English Legendary...

Counsel and Strategy in Middle English Romance.
March 22, 1994... In this study the close analysis of a single theme - that of counsel and strategy in Middle English romance - illuminates larger issues concerning the nature of English romance, its audience and its development. Emphasis on advice good and bad,...

'Piers Plowman': A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 104.
March 22, 1994... MS Douce 104 is a complete text of the C-version of Piers Plowman written in Hiberno-English in 1427-8, and possibly made in Ireland. It belonged to the lawyer Sir James Ley, first Earl of Marlborough, and was acquired by the collector and...

The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography.
March 22, 1994... The problems of writing a biography of Chaucer are well known: on the one hand, although the documentary material is voluminous enough to fill the 600 pages of Crow and Olson's Life-Records, not one of these documents so much as alludes to...

Chaucer's 'Boece' and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius.
March 22, 1994... Rendering the De consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius into English begins with the ninth-century version attributed to King Alfred, resumes with Chaucer in the late fourteenth century and was still a rational occupation for Queen Elizabeth I....

Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century.
March 22, 1994... James Wimsatt's standing as one of the foremost advocates in Chaucer studies for the study and appreciation of Chaucer's French contemporaries has been quietly but emphatically maintained for the last quarter of a century. His modestly written...

'Many a Song and Many a Leccherous Lay': Tradition and Individuality in Chaucer's Lyric Poetry.
March 22, 1994... Jay Ruud's book is the first full-length study of Chaucer's lyrics and as such it is to be welcomed. It is good that this part of Chaucer's output is getting the sort of extensive treatment it deserves. However, the book is in many ways...

Chaucer and the Tradition of the 'Roman Antique.'
March 22, 1994... A new book by the author of The Gothic Visionary Perspective must be an event, and proves to be a work that much enriches current interpretation of Troilus and the Knight's Tale. Chaucer's imaginative engagement with the pagan civilization of...

I racconti di Canterbury: un'opera unitaria.
March 22, 1994... This volume has the feel of a work composed some ten or fifteen years ago and then dusted off for publication. Updating extends to the bibliography (works from 1991 are cited) but not to the footnotes, and hence, one assumes, not to the text....

John Gower and the Structures of Confession: A Reading of the 'Confessio Amantis.'
March 22, 1994... All students of Confessio Amantis face the question of its coherence. Has the sheer diversity of material escaped Gower's grasp? Or has Gower successfully ordered a moral poetic? Professor Olsson seeks, with exemplary erudition and some...

Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays.
March 22, 1994... This book represents itself as feminist in its assumptions and attitudes, but the kind of feminism the editor imposes in the introduction, and which several (not all) of the contributors take up, is essentialist, confrontational and separatist,...

Women's Writing in Middle English.
March 22, 1994... A predictable reaction to this title is, what women's writing, beyond that of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe? Barratt's retort is challenging. Naturally she shows how the record properly includes other known names such as Eleanor Hull...

The Middle English Mystery Play: A Study in Dramatic Speech and Form.
March 22, 1994... Though published in German in 1973, Diller's book originated in 1968 as an Habilitationsschrift. It therefore forms part of the 1960s renaissance of mediaeval drama studies, which developed from O. B. Hardison's critique (1965) of the...

The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland.
March 22, 1994... This is a very good book on a neglected subject. It examines the development of a set of ideologies still at the heart of Scottish nationalism and writing: national identity, independence and a highly politicized sense of the past. Accompanying...

Le Roman de Tristan en prose, vol. 5, De l'arrivee des amants a la Joyeuse Garde jusqu'a fin de tournoi de Louveserp.
March 22, 1994... It is a pleasure to note that volumes in this series continue to appear regularly and that there is no falling-off in editorial standards. Our base-manuscript is still Vienna, Nationalbibliothek, MS 2542, and the wisdom of the original choice...

Silence: A Thirteenth-Century French Romance.
March 22, 1994... The Roman de Silence has been the subject of a wave of scholarly articles over the last ten years. Published for the first time in 1972, Silence has certainly struck a chord in the minds of modern readers, telling as it does the story of a girl...

Rethinking the 'Romance of the Rose': Text, Image, Reception.
March 22, 1994... This book comprises thirteen articles treating mediaeval and modern readings of the Roman de la Rose, divided among five sections: literary approaches to Guillaume de Lorris's Roman (I) and Jean de Meung's continuation (II), the iconographic...

La Vie de Saint Evroul: Poeme normand du XIV siecle.
March 22, 1994... Dr Sandqvist's latest edition adds to the series of mid-fourteenth-century Norman religious poems that he has been publishing steadily over the last ten years. As previously, his approach is strictly philological. Apart from a brief resume of...

'Le Voir-Dit' de Guillaume de Machaut: Etude litteraire.
March 22, 1994... The present study is the first of three instalments which will eventually produce the long-awaited edition of the Voir-Dit (to be published by the Societe des Anciens Textes Francais), and a modern French translation (to be published by...

Charles d'Orleans: Ballades et rondeaux, Edition du manuscrit 25458 du fonds francais de la Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, traduction, presentation et notes.
March 22, 1994... It is a great pleasure at last to possess a reliable edition of Charles d'Orleans's lyrics sufficiently inexpensive for student use. I have been unable to check the transcription against MS 25458, but a spot check shows that Muhlethaler's texts...

Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan.
March 22, 1994... This collection of seventeen essays on Christine de Pizan is the second major international tribute to be paid to an outstanding scholar who perhaps more than anyone else this century has helped to rehabilitate France's first professional woman...

La Farce du quinzieme siecle.
March 22, 1994... This volume consists of twelve papers by Konrad Schoell published in a variety of specialist comptes rendus of conferences taking place over the past ten years or so and now often difficult of access. It is therefore useful to have them...

Le Roman de messire Charles de Hongrie: Texte en prose de la fin du XVe siecle.
March 22, 1994... This is an admirable edition of a minor text preserved only in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, MS f. fr. 1467, a poorly executed, undated manuscript which once belonged to the library of Philippe Hurault de Cheverny, bishop of Chartres from 1598...

Guido Cavalcanti: The Complete Poems.
March 22, 1994... Cirigliano's aim in translating Cavalcanti is the familiar one of making him |accessible for an English-reading audience' (p. xi). This is a bilingual text, with the Italian based upon Contini's edition of 1960. Cirigliano provides notes to the...

The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book.
March 22, 1994... Dante apparently found the status of lyric poet a difficult one to sustain. He sought to regroup and reframe the work up to the Divina Commedia, his last solution being to see his beloved as |divine'. But his first problem, given his inspired...

Die deutsche Predigt im Mittelalter.
March 22, 1994... The editors introduce and present the papers from the International Symposium held in the Fachbereich Germanistik, Freie Universitat Berlin on 3-6 October 1989. The collection consists of sixteen excellent studies on the sermon in the mid- to...

Eine volkssprachige Laienbibel des 15, Jahrhunderts, Untersuchung und Teiledition der Handschrift Nurnberg, Stadtbibliothek, Ms Solg. 16.2
March 22, 1994... This work is a well-written and scholarly study of a fifteenth-century German prose version of the Old Testament books of Joshua, Judges and Ruth. The introduction sets the manuscript in its context at the overlap between the age of manuscripts...

Les Saintes Reines du moyen age en occident: 6eme-8eme siecles.
March 22, 1994... This handbook on sainted queens is conceived as a companion volume to the author's own study of sainted kings, published in 1984. For each queen Folz provides a summary account of what is known of her natural life, followed by a discussion of...

Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church.
March 22, 1994... Limited by her patriarchal native culture, the Anglo-Saxon woman experienced the Conversion as liberating; it permitted her new authority within the Church, and offered an acceptable alternative to marriage. Only after the Norman Conquest was...

The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries: Cultural, Spiritual and Artistic Exchanges.
March 22, 1994... As the author herself readily admits, this volume cannot be considered a continuation of Wilhelm Levison's masterly study England and the Continent in the Eighth Century, although it does cover some similar ground in exploring exchanges and...

The Eadwine Psalter: Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury.
March 22, 1994... I have by me a great Folio which I borrowed out of Trinity College Library', wrote Humfrey Wanley to Arthur Charlett in 1699. |It contains the 3 Latin Versions of the Psalter made by St. Hierome, vizt. The Hebrew, Roman & Gallic. The Hebrew is...

The Image of Aristocracy in Britain: 1000-1300.
March 22, 1994... This lengthy but stimulating book is a study of the mediaeval nobility (or, as the author insists, aristocracy) from a fresh perspective, that of visual history. The heart of the book consists of two fascinating chapters on the use of insignia....

The Commercialisation of English Society: 1000-1500.
March 22, 1994... Richard Britnell's interesting and useful book is at once about rather more and rather less than its title suggests. Its central theme is the development of market relationships, a story which Britnell tells as broadly as possible, emphasizing...

The Origins of the English Legal Profession.
March 22, 1994... Paul Brand's impressive, scholarly investigation of the early history of the professionalization of legal expertise in both serjeants and attorneys in the period up to 1307 is sure to become an essential text for all interested in this area....

The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 2, Late Medieval Oxford.
March 22, 1994... This second volume of The History of the University of Oxford deals with the intellectual and institutional development of the University in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With the same editors as were responsible for the first volume...

The Anonimalle Chronicle: 1307-1334, From Brotherton Collection MS 29.
March 22, 1994... This edition gives the first part of the Anonimalle Chronicle, missing from the edition published over sixty years ago by V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927). The extensive introduction, almost as long as the text and translation combined, sets...

Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit im Mittelalter: Erscheinungsformen und Entwicklungsstufen.
March 22, 1994... This volume, incorporating the proceedings of a colloquium organized in 1989 at Munster by the Sonderforschungsbereich |Pragmatische Schriftlichkeit', contains twelve contributions in the fields of history, literature and law. As defined by...

Literatur, Artes und Philosophie.
March 22, 1994... This attractive and impressive book (the proceedings of the fifth of the Reisenburger Gesprache, 8-10 June 1990) consists of a series of studies examining connections between European literature and academic disciplines, notable philosophy,...

The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage.
March 22, 1994... A warm welcome is proffered to the paperback condition of Maria Rosa Menocal's well-known if not already notorious study. This book is not a straight forward examination of the European indebtedness to the Arab world. It is, to quote the...

Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, vol. 4, Paisley-York.
March 22, 1994... The publication of the fourth volume of Medieval Manuscripts in British Lib marks the near-completion of Neil Ker's remarkable project to describe mediaeval manuscripts in English, Scottish and Welsh collections that have been hitherto...