Medium Aevum articles from March 1995

Medium Aevum archives from March 1995

Moses and the princess: Josephus' 'Antiquitates Judaicae' and the chansons de geste.
March 22, 1995... The story of the Saracen princess who aids the Christian hero in his fight against her compatriots, who converts to Christianity, and whose alliance with the hero is often consummated in marriage, is a familiar theme in the chansons de geste.(1)...

The songs of entertainers and the song of the angels: vernacular lyric fragments in Odo of Cheriton's 'Sermones de festis.'
March 22, 1995... In the seventh chapter, 'Love sacred and profane', of his Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric, Siegfried Wenzel discusses the attitudes of medieval English preachers to secular love-lyric, and asks: 'How... do we know whether a quoted...

'Pearl' and the liturgical 'Common of Virgins.'
March 22, 1995... 1 The presentation of the Pearl-maiden In the Middle English poem Pearl, the symbol of the pearl itself operates, critics agree, on many levels. On one level, Pearl is the maiden who appears to the narrator in his dream-vision, and identifies...

Chaucer's tomb: the politics of reburial. (medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer)
March 22, 1995... The place where someone is buried may or may not be important, but the place where someone is reburied is always important, not of course in this latter case to the person reburied, but to the reburier. The movement of someone's remains...

Thomas Hoccleve's 'Mother of God' and 'Balade to the Virgin and Christ': Latin and Anglo-Norman sources.
March 22, 1995... The tide of critical appreciation has been turning in favour of Thomas Hoccleve's poetry in recent decades. One of the first scholars to write more positively of Hoccleve's work than had been customary was Jerome Mitchell, whose major...

Gradissa: a fictional female reader in/of a male author's text.
March 22, 1995... Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Hispanists began to recognize the sentimental romance as a sub-genre of the romance (libros & caballerias or libros de aventuras in Spanish).(1) Critical consensus on the relationship of sentimental to...

William Taylor's 1406 sermon: a postscript.
March 22, 1995... William Thorpe in 1407 asserted that the notorious sermon that his co-religionist William Taylor had preached at St Paul's Cross in London on 21 November 1406 was 'writun bothe in Latyn and in Engelisch, and many men haue it and thei setten greet...

The Bible in the Latin West.
March 22, 1995... This is the first of a series meant to illustrate and explain the related changes in the contents and visual design of different kinds of text in manuscripts and early printing. The scope of the whole series will presumably be similar to the...

Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages.
March 22, 1995... Henry Ansgar Kelly's study in historical semantics draws upon an enormous range of materials. It offers a new insight into the variety of meanings that authors throughout the Middle Ages attributed to the word tragoedia as 'a literary or dramatic...

Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock.
March 22, 1995... Spiritual marriage, 'in which sexual relations have been remitted by the consent of both parties for reasons of piety' (p. 3), may sound idiosyncratic, and at times its medieval devotees were driven to make odd claims: for instance, an...

Les Chiens de Dieu: La representation du loup-garou en Occident (XI-XX siecle).
March 22, 1995... Even medievalists are not immune to the fascination of werewolves, and the striking, full-colour dust-jacket of this volume, showing a fine example of one of these predatory man-beasts, immediately catches the eye. The liveliness of the cover is...

Talking Animals: Medieval Latin Beast Poetry, 750-1150.
March 22, 1995... A book in English on medieval Latin beast poetry will be welcomed by many, and Jan M. Ziolkowski must be congratulated for providing such a learned and wide-ranging contribution to this field. In the introduction he offers a definition of...

Vitae sanctae Katharinae
March 22, 1995... Katharine of Alexandria and Elisabeth of Hungary may seem at first to share little beyond accredited sanctity and the coincidence of these recent editions of the lives. Katharine appears on the hagiographic scene only five or six hundred years...

Die Vita der heiligen Elisabeth des Dietrich von Apolda.
March 22, 1995... Katharine of Alexandria and Elisabeth of Hungary may seem at first to share little beyond accredited sanctity and the coincidence of these recent editions of the lives. Katharine appears on the hagiographic scene only five or six hundred years...

Zeit, Zahl und Bild: Studien zur Verbindung von Philosophie und Wissenschaftbei Abbo von Fleury.
March 22, 1995... At the end of her book, Eva-Maria Engelen suggests that, in important respects, the position of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646-1716) about the relations between science and theology concluded a development in thought which began with Abbo of...

Allegory and Philosophy in Avicenna (Ibn Sina), with a Translation of the Prophet Muhammad's Ascent to Heaven.
March 22, 1995... 'Glory be to Him who carried His servant by night from the Holy Mosque to the Further Mosque the precincts of which We have blessed, that We might show him some of Our signs'. Details of the episode alluded to in those words of the Koran...

English Caroline Script and Monastic History: Studies in Benedictinism, A.D.950-1030.
March 22, 1995... The science of palaeography has, since its beginnings, been tied up with speculation about cultural events. David N. Dumville's scope in this book is in one sense quite narrow - a particular script, Anglo-Caroline, and its use in England in the...

A Comparative Study of Old English Metre.
March 22, 1995... Insufficiency characterizes this book, and the result is a reader's disappointment. 'Comparative' in the title means that Old English metre is compared with the metres of Greek, Latin, Celtic, and Germanic languages other than Old English. All...

The Origins of 'Beowulf' and the Pre-Viking Kingdom of East Anglia.
March 22, 1995... There are several compelling reasons to read Sam Newton's study of the origins of Beowulf. One is timeliness: it has been fifteen years since the conference on the dating of Beowulf was held at the University of Toronto, the published proceedings...

Die 'Regularis concordia' und ihre altenglische Interlinearversion.
March 22, 1995... The Regularis concordia (RC), the monastic code of regulations produced during the reign of Edgar (959-75), represents a culmination of the efforts of the tenth-century Benedictine reformers who sought to establish a uniform monastic observance...

From the 'De excidio Troiae historia' to the 'Togail Troi': Literary-Cultural Synthesis in a Medieval Irish Adaptation of Dares' Troy Tale.
March 22, 1995... De excidio Troiae historia, the allegedly eye-witness report of the siege and destruction of Troy attributed to Dares Phrygius, enjoyed great popularity and authority in the Middle Ages. Its adaptation into Middle Irish predates Benoit de...

Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings.
March 22, 1995... In this densely argued and rigorously conceived study, Sarah Beckwith uses the symbolism of Christ's body, and the systems of spirituality and lay piety that attached to this symbol, to inaugurate a cultural criticism of late medieval religious...

English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages.
March 22, 1995... Since the appearance of G. R. Owst's two magisterial works on preaching, in 1926 and 1933 respectively, the study of the sermons of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries has been transformed. True, Owst subtitled his first and fundamental volume...

The Authorship of 'The Equatorie of the Planetis.'
March 22, 1995... Ever since D. J. Price's discovery of The Equatorie of the Planetis in Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 75.1, scholars have debated whether or not it is an autograph work by Geoffrey Chaucer. In the present four-part volume, Kari Anne Rand Schmidt...

A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge.
March 22, 1995... The only extended consideration of religious drama in medieval English is a tract preserved in London, British Library, MS Add. 24202, fols 14-21; the text was edited as a whole in J. O. Halliwell and T. Wright in Reliquiae antiquae, II (1843)...

The Prose Works of Sir Gilbert Hay, vol. 3, The Buke of the Ordre of Knychthede, and The Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis.
March 22, 1995... This is the first volume issued in the STS's new three-volume edition of Hay's three prose translations. It includes the two shorter works, along with a brief introduction, and textual and explanatory notes. Volume II will contain the Buke of the...

Illustrations of the Stage and Acting in England to 1580.
March 22, 1995... This is a serviceable and uncontentious book that successfully digests and illustrates a great deal of basic information bearing upon visual remains relative to drama in England from Roman times down to the period documented in R. A. Foakes's...

Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire.
March 22, 1995... This review marks the paperback issue of this book, which contains seven essays that first appeared as articles in journals between 1973 and 1980 and have since been slightly revised and sandwiched between an introduction and conclusion. Given...

The Song in the Story: Lyric Insertions in French Narrative Fiction, 1200-1400.
March 22, 1995... This interesting study of a significant trend in later medieval French narrative finds its main weakness in its major strength. Although not every text listed in the appendix detailing texts with narrative insertions is dealt with in the body of...

Saints and Scribes: Medieval Hagiography in Its Manuscript Context.
March 22, 1995... The focus of this monograph is not the production of texts by authors, but their 'reception and transmission' by scribes. The ultimate goal, as stated in the introduction, is to 'uncover the principles of inclusion observed by scribes collecting...

Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth and Closure in Twelfth-Century FrenchFictions.
March 22, 1995... This study offers close readings of four romances (the Oxford Folie Tristan, Thomas's Tristan, Chretien's Charrete, and Partonopeu de Blois) and of Marie de France's Lais, concentrating on interpretation, truth and closure. A conclusion draws the...

The Manuscript Tradition of the 'Perceval' of Chretien de Troyes: A Stemmatological and Dialectological Approach.
March 22, 1995... The importance of this book, the author's 1993 doctoral dissertation for the Free University of Amsterdam, lies in its pioneer status as the first attempt to unravel a complex vernacular manuscript tradition with the aid of sophisticated computer...

The Anglo-Norman 'Folie Tristan.'
March 22, 1995... Ian Short indicates a dual purpose to this edition: to provide a linguistically more authentic record than has hitherto been available, and to make the Oxford Folie Tristan more readily and widely accessible. The second aim is perhaps the less...

Oaths, Vows and Promises in the First Part of the French Prose Lancelot Romance.
March 22, 1995... Lisa Jefferson's book (a slightly revised version of her 1991 thesis) examines the role of oaths, vows and promises (the 'given word') in the first third of the thirteenth-century Lancelot. In the manuscript tradition this part of the romance is...

'Lucidere vault tant a dire comme donnant lumiere': Untersuchung und Editionder Prosaversionen 2, 4 und 5 des 'Elucidarium.'
March 22, 1995... This weighty tome forms part of a full-scale investigation of the Elucidarium and its French translations being carried out under the aegis of an extraordinarily industrious and evidently productive Sonderforschungsbereich in Wurzburg. This study...

The 'Roman de la Rose': An Annotated Bibliography.
March 22, 1995... This book fills an obvious gap in the vast repertoire of publications on the Roman de la Rose. Its main focus is modern scholarship (1850-1992), although major studies from earlier periods are also covered. Over 80% of the items in the...

Hexachord, Mensur und Textstruktur: Studien zum franzosischen Lied des 14. Jahrhunderts.
March 22, 1995... A personal comment first, since I find myself taken to task (though in good company) in the introduction for having said in 1980 that, regarding fourteenth-century music, we were then in a position 'to be well acquainted with the entire surviving...

Nicolas Flamel: Des livres et de l'or.
March 22, 1995... This book will come as a considerable disappointment to what Nigel Wilkins calls the 'alchimistes': the occult industry which has made such play since the seventeenth century with Nicolas Flamel's alleged mastery of the 'Grand Oeuvre', with his...

Rene d'Anjou: Traite des tournois. Dresden, Sachsische Landesbibliothek, Mscr. Dresd. Oc 58.
March 22, 1995... This excellent microfiche reproduction, with introduction, is a welcome addition to the CIMA collection. Although the manuscripts of Rene of Anjou's Traite des tournois (probably composed c. 1450-60) now in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, are...

Commynes et les Italiens: Lettres inedites du memorialiste.
March 22, 1995... Seven previously unpublished letters, complemented by freshly edited documents drawn from a wide variety of state and city archives, provide the sources for Joel Blanchard's penetrating study of Philippe de Commynes's Italian connections in the...

Sir John Mandeville.
March 22, 1995... Sir John Mandeville, by the series general editor, M. C. Seymour, almost seems to be a send-up of the entire project. The first and longest of Seymour's two sections is entitled 'The facts', but, of course, there is little certainty when dealing...

John Trevisa.
March 22, 1995... David Fowler's John Trevisa is an altogether more satisfactory work. Drawing on previous work (much of it by himself), Fowler notes the evidence for Trevisa's Cornish origin and analyses information about his life and contemporaries at Oxford,...

Letture classensi: lettura del "Fiore."
March 22, 1995... The volume presents eight lectures dedicated to the Fiore by Dantists from the United Kingdom, given at the Biblioteca Classense in the spring of 1992. The poem's 232 sonnets were divided into groups of roughly thirty for each scholar, according...

Dante e la 'bella scola' della poesia: autorita e sfida poetica.
March 22, 1995... This volume takes its title from the famous episode in which Dante encounters the great classical poets of Limbo and is accepted into their ranks, as 'sesto tra cotanto senno', an act of inclusion which, as Amilcare A. Iannucci stresses in his...

Dante's Vision and the Circle of Knowledge.
March 22, 1995... This is a new and exciting book. Its chief aim is 'to explore Dante's radical claims about poetry as nothing less than the foundation of all possible knowledge'. This entails asking a series of questions of the utmost interest. What kind of...

Methoden und Probleme der Edition mittelalterlicher deutscher Texte. Bamberger Fachtagung 26-29. Juni 1991, Plenumsreferate.
March 22, 1995... 'Wir erleben eine uppige - man ist versucht zu sagen: eine tropische Blute des altgermanistischen Editionswesens' (p. 4). So writes Karl Stackmann in his stimulating introductory essay to this collection of papers, and the validity of his...

Findebuch zum mittelhochdeutschen Wortschatz. Mit einem rucklaufigen Index.
March 22, 1995... The Findebuch is essentially a look-up index to the glossaries of the 106 Middle High German texts edited and published since 1878. It is worth emphasizing that the Findebuch is based on the glossaries to the texts and not the texts themselves,...

German Kinship Terms (750-1500): Documentation and Analysis.
March 22, 1995... This study is conceived as a contribution to historical lexicology, investigating three different aspects of the German terminology of kinship terms. The first, treated in chapter 1, is a synchronic analysis, as an example of the stability and...

Kommentar zur Artusepik Hartmanns von Aue. Im Anhang: Die Heilkunde und Der Ourobos.
March 22, 1995... Lambertus Okken is quite obviously more interested in the construction of lwein's shoes (p. 320) than in Hartmann's conception of fictional narrative. The ethical concerns of medieval French and German Arthurian romance are related directly to...

Suche nach Wahrheit: Gottfrieds 'Tristan und Isold' als erkenntniskritischerRoman.
March 22, 1995... Rudiger Schnell's book makes an oddly muddled attempt to resolve the question of the relationship in Gottfried's Tristan between excursus and narrative (pp. 13-56). Schnell believes that the society addressed in the commentaries is different from...

Wege durch erzahlte Welten. Intertextuelle Verweise als Mittel der Bedeutungskonstitution in Wolframs 'Parzival.'
March 22, 1995... There has been no shortage of work on Wolfram's allusions to contemporary authors: in general terms (B. Schirok), to Eilhart (H. Eggers), to Veldeke (J. F. Poag), to Hartmann (R. Schnell, C. Wand) and to Walther (M. G. Scholz). Of the book under...

Wolfram von Eschenbach: 'Willehalm.' Nach der Handschrift 857 der Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen. Mittelhochdeutscher Text, Ubersetzung, Kommentar.
March 22, 1995... The new Willehalm edition by Joachim Heinzle is a remarkable achievement: a new text (based on St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 857), a new translation, a detailed textual commentary, and additionally a set of colour reproductions of the...

Meister Eckhart: Werke, 2 vols.
March 22, 1995... This edition of Meister Eckhart's vernacular sermons and treatises and a small selection of his Latin writings is a masterpiece of compact printing on India paper. All the texts are provided with a facing modern German translation. The edition...

Das literarische Leben am kurpfalzischen Hof zu Heidelberg im 15. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Gonnerforschung des Spatmittelalters.
March 22, 1995... These two excellent volumes are both concerned with the cultural life at the court palatine at Heidelberg in the late Middle Ages, mainly the fifteenth century. The elegant study presented by Martina Backes deals with patronage and cultural life,...

Furstenhof und Geschichte: Legitimation durch Uberlieferung.
March 22, 1995... These two excellent volumes are both concerned with the cultural life at the court palatine at Heidelberg in the late Middle Ages, mainly the fifteenth century. The elegant study presented by Martina Backes deals with patronage and cultural life,...

Gesta Romanorum, 2 vols.
March 22, 1995... This ambitious study represents the first attempt at an overall survey of the Gesta Romanorum tradition since Hermann Oesterley's seminal edition of 1872. Brigitte Weiske's principal aim is to examine the relationship between the narratives of...

Fortaelling og Aere: Studier i Islaendingesagaerne.
March 22, 1995... The fundamental question posed in Preben Meulengracht Sorensen's massive work is: are we to read the sagas as history or as literature - and if as literature, how do we relate them to historical reality? To constitute the problem in terms of...