Medium Aevum articles from September 1993

Medium Aevum archives from September 1993

The style and authorship of the Otho revision of Layamon's 'Brut.'
September 22, 1993... On at least thirty different occasions the Otho MS of Lazamon's Brut (London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii) contains half-lines not present in the Caligula MS (London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix) of that text.(1) These...

History in the 'political sagas.' (medieval Icelandic sagas)
September 22, 1993... History When Isidore of Seville defined historia as 'narratio rei gestae',(1) he went on to emphasize its origins in eyewitness accounts: 'None of the ancients would write history unless he had been present and seen what he narrated...

'Joglars' and the professional status of the early troubadours.
September 22, 1993... It has long been an accepted critical commonplace that there were two main types of troubadour: the talented, aristocratic amateurs for whom the art of trobar was a serious hobby, but additional to their mission in life, as Martin de Riquer...

Langland's 'corlew': another look at 'Piers Plowman' B xiv.43.
September 22, 1993... After Conscience, at the beginning of Passus XIV, explains to Hawkyn how he can 'clawe' his 'cote of alle kynnes filpe'(1) through contrition, Patience proceeds to tell Hawkyn how he will give him that food which is best for human souls....

Malory and 'Perlesvaus.' (Old French source for Chapel Perilous episode of 'Mort Darthur')
September 22, 1993... Most of the episodes in Malory's 'Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake', the third tale in his Morte Darthur, are based on the 'Agravain' section of the Old French Prose Lancelot,(1) but its Chapel Perilous episode derives from the corresponding...

Malory's 'Book of Huntynge': the Tristram section of the 'Mort Darthur.'
September 22, 1993... Of all the sections of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, that which narrates the adventures of Sir Tristram has proved the most difficult to appraise. Comprising one-third of the entire work, it is marked by a disturbing quality of repetition,...

An Anglo-Norman-Middle English glossary of tree and bird names.
September 22, 1993... Folio [216.sup.r] of Cambridge, St John's College, MS E.17 (James120), datable to about 1275,(1) preserves a little-known Anglo-Norman-Middle English glossary of (primarily) tree, fruit and bird names, transcribed below.(2) The St John's...

A Chaucerian reader of Trevisa. (source of annotations in a 15th-century manuscript)
September 22, 1993... Cambridge, St John's College, MS 204 (H.1) is a particularly handsome copy of Trevisa's translation of the Polychronicon(1) produced in London in the early fifteenth century.(2) The text has been carefully annotated throughout in a small,...

Wenceslas Clemens' homage at the tomb of Chaucer, 1636.
September 22, 1993... An early visitor to the tomb of Chaucer in Westminster Abbey, in the mid-1630s, was the Czech neo-Latin poet Wenceslas Clemens. Clemens's account of his visit, published in 1636, which so far as I am aware has escaped the notice of...

Alain de Lille and the prologue to 'Patience': a bibliographical correction. (response to Medium Aevum, vol. 61, p. 87, 1992)
September 22, 1993... In Medium AEvum, LXI.I (1992) a note entitled 'Alain de Lille and the prologue to Patience' appeared (pp. 87-91). It claimed (after some preliminaries, pp. 87-8) to be bringing to light a 'work that offers parallels for the poet's ideas in...

Towards a Medieval Poetics.
September 22, 1993... It looks as though the publication of Paul Zumthor's book' in a clear and scholarly new English translation, approved and prefaced by the author, will be an important event for British mediaevalists with an interest in the literature of mediaeval...

Passions et positions: Contribution a une semiotique du sujet dans la poesie lyrique medievale en langues romanes.
September 22, 1993... It looks as though the publication of Paul Zumthor's book' in a clear and scholarly new English translation, approved and prefaced by the author, will be an important event for British mediaevalists with an interest in the literature of mediaeval...

Esthetique et manuscripture.
September 22, 1993... It looks as though the publication of Paul Zumthor's book' in a clear and scholarly new English translation, approved and prefaced by the author, will be an important event for British mediaevalists with an interest in the literature of mediaeval...

Historisches Worterbuch der Rhetorik, vol. 1, A-Bib.
September 22, 1993... As the preface indicates, this new handbook sets out to fill one of the major gaps of literary scholarship in providing a comprehensive modern presentation of all aspects of rhetoric, thereby serving the needs not just of literary critics but...

Dreaming in the Middle Ages.
September 22, 1993... There are already many books about the history of Western attitudes to dreaming, and critical studies of dream poetry. This book has a narrower theme: the influence of late antique dream theory, especially schemes for classifying dreams...

Petrarch's 'Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul': A Modern English Translation of 'De Remediis utriusque Fortune,' with a Commentary, 5 vols.
September 22, 1993... Rawski's translation of Petrarch's largest moral work, a collection of allegorical dialogues on tempering emotional disturbances brought upon us by good or bad luck, is a landmark in Petrarch studies. It is the first modern English translation,...

A Grammar of Old English, vol. 1, Phonology.
September 22, 1993... Written out of the wise recognition of the fundamental theoretical and empirical developments in the linguistics of Old English over recent decades, the first volume of a two-part handbook of Old English phonology and morphology comes out as...

The Battle of Maldon AD 991.
September 22, 1993... Tribute to the men who died in the Battle of Maldon in 991 is indirectly the theme of every work that comes out on the eponymous poem. Rightly so, as now that the millennial anniversary is over, the focus may move away from historicity towards...

The Battle of Maldon: Text and Translation.
September 22, 1993... Tribute to the men who died in the Battle of Maldon in 991 is indirectly the theme of every work that comes out on the eponymous poem. Rightly so, as now that the millennial anniversary is over, the focus may move away from historicity towards...

The Battle of Maldon: The Meaning, Dating and Historicity of an Old English Poem.
September 22, 1993... Tribute to the men who died in the Battle of Maldon in 991 is indirectly the theme of every work that comes out on the eponymous poem. Rightly so, as now that the millennial anniversary is over, the focus may move away from historicity towards...

The English Alliterative Tradition.
September 22, 1993... 'Alliterative tradition' is commonly taken to signify the tradition of 'strong-stress' verse with structural alliteration, covering both Old English verse and that of the Alliterative Revival as well as, more problematically, early Middle...

'Culhwch and Olwen': An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale.
September 22, 1993... The appearance of this modern edition of the Middle Welsh tale of Culhwch ac Olwen is a major event in Arthurian as well as Welsh studies. Hitherto the only available printed versions were the 'diplomatic' editions of the two main manuscripts,...

Ystoria Taliesin.
September 22, 1993... Ystoria Taliesin was included by Lady Charlotte Guest in her translation (1838-49) of the Welsh Mabinogion stories, but most later translators have omitted this story from their collections, not simply because, unlike the other tales, there is...

Ystoryaeu Seint Greal, Rhan I: Y Keis.
September 22, 1993... The Welsh Seint Greal is a composite text, translated in the fourteenth century from La Queste del Saint Graal and Perlesvaus; the portion here edited corresponds to the former. Last edited in 1874, it was re-edited by Thomas Jones and more or...

'Piers Plowman': A Guide to the Quotations.
September 22, 1993... This book contains a complete annotated list of Latin and French quotations and tags, geared to the B-Text, but with Z, A and C fully documented, and indexes of the scriptural quotations in Bible-book order and of all the quotations in...

'Piers Plowman' and the Problem of Belief.
September 22, 1993... This is a book which should not be ignored by anyone interested in Piers Plowman. For me, its main fascination lies in the way it displays an immensely erudite and sensitive intelligence engaging with an extraordinarily powerful and exploratory...

The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium V: Papers Read at the Devon Centre, Dartington Hall, July 1992.
September 22, 1993... In The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, John Clark explores the links between late fourteenth-century Cambridge theology and contemporary English mystics; Tarjei Park compares the role of the body in Walter Hilton and in Julian of...

Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages.
September 22, 1993... Frances Beer's Women and Mystical Experience is a feminist study of Hildegard of Bingen, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Julian of Norwich, emphasizing both the ways in which they 'managed to transcend the virulent misogyny that so dominated their...

Troilus and Criseyde.
September 22, 1993... After the Oxford Guide to The Canterbury Tales, by Helen Cooper, we have now the Oxford Guide to Troilus and Criseyde. The volume on the shorter poems, by A. J. Minnis, is to follow. The idea of such a series of 'Guides' is a traditional and on...

Boccaccio, Beauvau, Chaucer: 'Troilus and Criseyde,' Four Perspectives on Influence.
September 22, 1993... It has long been known to Chaucerians that there was a French prose version of the Filostrato by Beauveau, Seneschal of Anjou, entitled Le Roman de Troyle et de Criseide. But since Beauveau was supposed to have lived in the fifteenth century,...

Chaucer's Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in 'The Canterbury Tales.'
September 22, 1993... Many metaphors have been used to describe the tales which Chaucer collected in the frame of narratives related by a group of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. We may find them either illuminating or inadequate in so far as they may capture an...

Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender.
September 22, 1993... This is a deliberately provocative and challenging book; it sets its face from the outset against 'the attempt to recuperate a feminist Chaucer who does not threaten the humanist Chaucer' (p. 12). Hansen claims that, so far from exhibiting the...

Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature.
September 22, 1993... The eleven 1990 J. A. W. Bennett lectures published here are: Jill Mann, 'The authority of the audience in Chaucer'; A. J. Minnis, 'Theorizing the rose: commentary tradition in the Querelle de la Rose'; Charles A. Owen, Jr, 'Fictions living...

Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context.
September 22, 1993... Nowadays historians -- and this reviewer can speak only for them -- are increasingly sensitive to the value of literary evidence. They have learned to use it, not just as a convenient bran-tub of illustrative material, but in a more informed...

Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts.
September 22, 1993... After an introduction to its author's form of writing cultural history, the book presents seven fascinating chapters addressing a remarkably broad range of late fourteenth-century texts produced in London. It concludes with two appendices, an...

Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh.
September 22, 1993... This is the first book-length study of Margery Kempe informed by contemporary theories of gender and textuality, especially as these pertain to reconceptualizations of the 'cultural category of the body' as 'the domain upon which other symbolic...

Culture and History: 1350-1600, Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing.
September 22, 1993... This volume suggests that English and American mediaevalists can speak across the Atlantic to develop a common critical idiom, one that is both theoretically literate and historically informed. It features three scholars working in the United...

Dunbar the Makar.
September 22, 1993... This is the first major study of Dunbar, a poet who has attracted more attention than most Middle Scottish writers, yet rarely of the calibre he deserves. Critical appreciation has clustered around his longer or set-piece works and religious...

Il trovatore Raimon Jordan.
September 22, 1993... Raimon Jordan, Viscount of Saint-Antonin, is now perhaps best known from the Monk of Montaudon's 'literary gallery', and for a poem containing an attack on Marcabru (PC 404.5) falsely attributed to R. Jordan and in fact written by a woman. His...

Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen hofischen Lyrik, Edition der Gesamtkorpus.
September 22, 1993... This long-awaited critical edition marks a major advance in the study of the women troubadours and will be an essential feature of any library concerned with the mediaeval lyric, Occitan history and literature, or women's studies. Its value...

Raoul de Cambrai.
September 22, 1993... The last editors of Raoul de Cambrai, Meyer and Longnon (1882), hoped that their work would give a firm foundation for subsequent research. Sarah Kay's edition should achieve the same. It matches theirs in thoroughness and accuracy whilst...

The Romance of Tristran by Beroul.
September 22, 1993... In the preface to this volume, Stewart Gregory makes especial allusion to the work of Reid and Sandqvist and indicates his intention of producing a new edition which will fully incorporate the important critical findings of recent years. It...

Himmel und Holle: Heilswissen fur Zisterzienser, Der 'Lucidaire en vers' des Gillebert de Cambres.
September 22, 1993... A project initiated by the Sonderforschungsbereich 226 seeks to trace intellectual and theological trends as reflected in mediaeval translations of Latin didactic works. To this end Ernstpeter Ruhe has produced his study and edition of an early...

Le Passionnaire francais au moyen age.
September 22, 1993... This interesting volume follows up the author's Sorbonne thesis of 1980, tracing the origins and formation of those compendia of saints' lives which provided staple fare for large sectors of the medieval population, but which have been...

The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century.
September 22, 1993... Professor Cazelles's generously conceived anthology offers translations of thirteen thirteenth-century lives of women saints and prose summaries of variant versions, introduced by an 83-page Commentary. Excellent idea though it is, the...

L'Archipel du Graal: Etude de l''Estoire del Saint Graal.'
September 22, 1993... This is an interesting study of an up till now somewhat neglected and undervalued text -- the first branch of the Lancelot--Grail cycle, added to an existing work. The Estoire del Saint Graal has often been criticized for lack of structure in...

False Roses: Structures of Duality and Deceit in Jean de Meun's 'Roman de la Rose.'
September 22, 1993... Stakel sets out to explain the unity of Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose, employing a methodology derived from the theories of Saussure and Duchacek. This consists of examining semantic fields of particularly high...

The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan's 'Cite des Dames.'
September 22, 1993... Maureen Quilligan has followed up her excellent article in Romanic Review, LXXIX (1988), on Christine de Pizan, with this full-length study which attempts to provide a page-by-page commentary on the Cite des dames. Her book is most successful...

Medieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry: An Anthology.
September 22, 1993... There has been a glut of new anthologies of the Galician-Portuguese lyric, in testimony to its abiding importance in Hispanic literature. This collection is the first prepared expressly for English readers, and will serve the useful purpose of...

'Heimskringla': An Introduction.
September 22, 1993... Diana Whaley describes her book on Heimskringla, Snorri Sturluson's great compendium of sagas about Norwegian kings from their mythical dynastic origins up to the last quarter of the twelfth century, as acting as 'a kind of base camp, a...

Latein und Volkssprache im deutschen Mittelalter: 1100-1500, Regensburger Colloquium 1988.
September 22, 1993... It is always difficult with a collection of papers both to assess the value of the complete work and to treat fairly the individual essays. With a topic as broad and as important as that of the Regensburg colloquium on Latin and German this is...

Tradition und Gattungsbewusstsein im deutschen Leich: Ein Beitrag zur Gattungsgeschichte mittelalterlicher musikalischer 'Discordia.'
September 22, 1993... One of the problems about the mediaeval German leich is that the word lei(c)h is considerably older than the courtly genre that flourished in Germany from the late twelfth century on. Its development has traditionally been seen in terms of...

Tristan in the Underworld: A Study of Gottfried von Strassburg's 'Tristan' Together with the 'Tristan' of Thomas.
September 22, 1993... This is an oddly anachronistic book. Neil Thomas sets out in pursuit of some old quarrels, and in the process activates some less than timely causes. He stoutly defends Gottfried against nineteenth-century charges of immorality, contradicts the...

Autorentypen.
September 22, 1993... The nine studies collected in this volume discuss various authorial types, ranging from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, and attempt to sketch some aspects of the prehistory of the modern view of the artist's autonomy. Literary history...

Medieval Literature of Poland: An Anthology.
September 22, 1993... The recorded history of Poland begins in 966, the year in which Mieszko I, by accepting Christianity and establishing links with Rome, opened his domains to Latin literacy. To begin with, the only language used in writing was Latin and, even...

The Irish Church in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries.
September 22, 1993... When Fr Gwynn died in 1983, he left many published and unpublished papers, written at various times between the 1940s and 1960s, which it had been his intention to assemble as a connected account of Irish church history between c. 1015 and at...

Angelic Monks and Earthly Men: Monasticism and Its Meaning to Medieval Society.
September 22, 1993... Anyone brought up on David Knowles's The Monastic Order in England can only read L. Milis's Angelic Monks and Earthly Men with a sense of shock. The author's intention is 'to gauge... to what extent monasticism influenced the conditions and...

Between Church and State: The Lives of Four French Prelates in the Late Middle Ages.
September 22, 1993... When a book arrives with glowing jacket reviews from Jacques Le Goff and Heiko Oberman, the reviewer who finds it somewhat dull must wonder where she is going wrong. Guenee presents the lives of four French bishops, spanning 230 years: Bernard...

Two Cartularies of Abingdon Abbey, 2 vols.
September 22, 1993... It is always good to see the publication of another monastic cartulary and particularly when the monastery concerned is one of the more important Benedictine houses in England. The Oxford Historical Society is to be warmly congratualted for...

The Medieval Surgery.
September 22, 1993... An elderly clerical academic was once asked how, years after publishing 'A Final Sermon', he could preach at the consecration of a bishop. He replied that the enquirer had not appreciated the significance of the indefinite article. So it is...

The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus.
September 22, 1993... The quincentenary of Columbus' discovery of the Americas became less a celebration of the man than a lament for the native culture doomed by his arrival. Valerie Flint's subject, however, is something of more particular interest to...

Les 'Exempla' medievaux: Introduction a la recherche, suivie des tables critiques de l''Index exemplorum' de Frederic C. Tubach.
September 22, 1993... Jacques Berlioz and Marie Anne Polo de Beaulieu, Les 'Exempla' medievaux: Introduction a la recherche, suivie des tables critiques de l''Index exemplorum' de Frederic C. Tubach, with an introduction by Claude Bremond, Jacques Le Goff and...

Nominalkomposita im Fruhmittelenglischen: Mit Ausblicken auf die Geschichte der englischen Nominalkomposition.
September 22, 1993... Hans Sauer, Nominalkomposita im Frubmittelenglischen. Mit Ausblicken auf die Geschichte der englischen Nominalkomposition (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1992). xxviii + 738 pp. ISBN 3-484-4213-4. DM 254. The study collects, discusses and...

Notes on 'Beowulf.'
September 22, 1993... P.J. Cosijn, Notes on 'Beowulf', trans. by Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, Jan van den Berg and David F. Johnson, Leeds Texts and Monographs, n.s. 12 (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1991). xxxvi + 120 pp. ISBN 0-9022-9622-1. [pound]28.00. Pieter Cosijn, who...

The 'Heliand': The Saxon Gospel.
September 22, 1993... The 'Heliand': the Saxon Gospel, trans. by G. Ronald Murphy, SJ. (New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). xviii + 238 pp. ISBN 0-19-507375-4; 0-19-507376-2. [pound]32.50 (hard covers); [pound]12.95 (p/b). This is a companion volume to...

John Wyclif: On Simony.
September 22, 1993... John Wyclif: On Simony, trans. by Terrence A. McVeigh. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992). xii + 179 pp. ISBN 0-8232-1344-8. $27.00. Translations of the numerous Latin writings of John Wyclif are few and far between, and, given the...

Le Roman de la Rose.
September 22, 1993... Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, edition d'apres les manuscrits BN 12786 et BN 378, traduction, presentation et notes par Armand Strubel, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992). 1276pp. ISBN 2-253-06079-8. No...

Joseph of Arimathea: A Romance of the Grail.
September 22, 1993... Robert de Boron, Joseph of Arimathea: a Romance of the Grail, trans. by Jean Rogers. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1990) x + 60 pp. ISBN 85440-426-0. No price given. This translation, based on the edition of W. A. Nitze in the Classiques...

The Coutumes de Beauvaisis.
September 22, 1993... Philippe de Beaumanoir, The Coutumes de Beauvaisis, trans. with an introduction by F. R. P. Akehurst. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). xxxiii + 750 pp.; I plate. ISBN 0-8122-3105-8. [pound]70.00. This is a most welcome...

A Bibliographical Guide to Old Frisian Studies.
September 22, 1993... Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, A Bibliographical Guide to Old Frisian Studies, North-Western European Language Evolution, Supplement 6 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1992). xvi + 197 pp. ISSN 0900-8675; 87-7492-906-2. xvi + 197 pp. D. Kr. 200. This...

Charles the Bald.
September 22, 1993... Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald (London; New York: Longman 1992). xiii + 349 pp. ISBN 0-582-05584-9; 0-582-05585-7. [pound]24.00 (hard covers); [pound]12.50 (p/b). Janet Nelson provides a full and stylish political biography of the...