Medium Aevum articles from September 1994

Medium Aevum archives from September 1994

Allegorical buildings in mediaeval literature.
September 22, 1994... The landscape of mediaeval allegory is rich in architecture -- edifices such as the Tower of Truth, the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, the House of Fame, the Castle of Perseverance. What particularly interests me about the allegorical building is the...

Enite's dominion over the horses: notes on the coalescence of Platonic and hagiographic elements in an episode from Hartmann's 'Erec.' (Hartmann von Aue)
September 22, 1994... It is generally agreed that interpolations, excursuses and amplifications of source material by a later adapter warrant close examination as a guide to the adapter's -- and, frequently, the original author's -- interpretative aims. It sometimes...

Patience in adversity: the courtly lover and Job in Machaut's motets 2 and 3. (Guillaume de Machaut)
September 22, 1994... Guillaume de Machaut has long been recognized for his intellectualization of love poetry. In his oeuvre, love is a rarefied and sublimated meditation, in which sexual consummation plays but a minor role.(1) Machaut's narrative poetry in...

What the manuscripts tell us about the Parson's Tale. (in Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales')
September 22, 1994... A consensus has long existed that the Parson's Tale and the Retraction were intended by Chaucer to bring The Canterbury Tales to an end. A superficial reading of the manuscripts would tend to confirm this consensus, and only one modern edition,...

Reading the spaces: pictorial intentions in the Thornton MSS, Lincoln Cathedral MS 91, and BL MS Add. 31042. (Robert Thornton manuscripts in Lincoln Cathedral Library and British Library)
September 22, 1994... Manuscripts containing Middle English narrative texts which have been provided with programmes of illustration are comparatively rare.(1) Very few vernacular biblical narratives, for example, have picture cycles; nor do most English romances....

'Proud Gallants and Popeholy Priests': the context and function of a fifteenth-century satirical poem.
September 22, 1994... The 'gallant' is a late mediaeval villain whose appearance and offences are well known to readers of moral and satirical literature. He is thought to be first named in England in the late fourteenth-century satirical poem 'On the Times'.(1)...

The metrics of Ausias March in a European context. (15th-century Catalan poetry)
September 22, 1994... Of the 128 poems attributed to Ausias March (1397--1459) all but three are entirely in lines of ten syllables up to and including the last accented syllable. March was the first poet whose surviving work was composed in Catalan, as distinct...

An addendum to Beowulf's last words. (source in Book of Proverbs)
September 22, 1994... In an impressively documented and well-argued article, Joseph Harris has related the final speech of the hero Beowulf to the early Germanic genre of the death-song, a genre that Harris proceeds to describe in convincing detail.(1) Although...

The Poetry of Boethius.
September 22, 1994... Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy is read by many different readers: philosophers, students of Latin literature, mediaevalists and historians. Its very form, a late and schematic type of satura Menippea (mixed prose and verse) have assured it...

The Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture.
September 22, 1994... What concepts of the male and the female emerge from mediaeval writings on natural philosophy and medicine, and how closely do such concepts fit the period's broader cultural assumptions about gender? The premise of this fascinating study is...

The Rise and Decline of the Scholastic 'Quaestio Disputata' with Special Emphasis on Its Use in the Teaching of Medicine and Science.
September 22, 1994... Brian Lawn here continues to explore the territory he first claimed in 1963: 'the spread of Salernitan physica... and... the influence of the questions... in the progress of the natural sciences and medicine' (The Salernitan Questions...

The 'Summa musice': A Thirteenth-Century Manual for Singers.
September 22, 1994... As the English title suggests and the mediaeval author expressly states, the Summa musice avoids the drier speculative issues of music theory and aims to equip novices with basic theoretical and practical skills. The result is a text founded on...

Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction.
September 22, 1994... In the Preface to his book John Wesley Harris hopes that it will 'prove a useful introduction for both students of the drama and members of the general public' (p. ix). I assume by this juxtaposition that he means undergraduate students;...

A History of Anglo-Latin Literature: 1066-1422.
September 22, 1994... Not only does this interesting book deliver an account of just about everyone with any claim, however tenuous, to Latin literary stature during the late Middle Ages in England, but it also delivers it with both skill and grace. As is proper for...

The Cambridge History of the English Language, vols. 1-2.
September 22, 1994... The General Editor describes the policy for the whole set thus: 'Contributors have been chosen purely on the grounds of expertise and knowledge, and have been encouraged to write their contributions in the way they see most fitting, whilst at...

A History of Old English Meter.
September 22, 1994... The scholarly endeavour to map out a relative and, if possible, an absolute chronology for the surviving Old English poems on the basis of variations in their metrical and phonological features was seemingly brought to an abrupt end by A. C....

The Ruthwell Cross: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 8 December 1989.
September 22, 1994... The Ruthwell Cross is the most important sculptural monument to survive from early Northumbria. Nevertheless, good photographs of the monument, and an up-to-date bibliography, are hard to come by. This reasonably priced and beautifully produced...

Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343.
September 22, 1994... This lavish edition of seven homilies from twelfth-century MS Bodley 343 supplants that of Belfour. As AElfric's authorship of the first four homilies has already been established, the main focus of the general introduction is a detailed...

Liturgy and the Ecclesiastical History of Late Anglo-Saxon England: Four Studies.
September 22, 1994... This book is, as the title indicates, a collection of four separate studies. The first two are on kalendars -- the kalendar of the Junius Psalter, and the reconstruction of the kalendar of Glastonbury; the last two studies are more general...

The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature.
September 22, 1994... The identification of the nature and extent of Irish influence on Old English literature is a large and complex task, made all the more difficult, as Wright notes (p. 271), by the relative inaccessibility of Irish materials. It is Wright...

A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry.
September 22, 1994... This is a thoughtful and sensitively written book which brings together two traditions of gnomic verse. The sections on Havamal and Hugsvinnsmal are judicious, and deserve wide attention. Other chapters deal with the eddic poems concerning the...

Between Languages: The Uncooperative Text in Early Welsh and Old English Nature Poetry.
September 22, 1994... The title-page of this book advertises both its strengths and its weaknesses. The main title suggests an investigation of the points of similarity and difference between two contiguous traditions; the sub-title adumbrates a belief in the text...

Cornish Literature.
September 22, 1994... This book was needed. It gives a clear, accurate and up-to-date account of a subject which has never before had the treatment it deserves. Murdoch's study at once becomes the book on Cornish literature, essential for anyone concerned with...

Women and Literature in Britain: 1100-1500.
September 22, 1994... Carol Meale's collection of essays centres on women's access to, position in and use of mediaeval literary culture. Such themes raise important and topical questions regarding the freedom of women in the realm of literary authority, the...

Women's Lives in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook.
September 22, 1994... Carol Meale's collection of essays centres on women's access to, position in and use of mediaeval literary culture. Such themes raise important and topical questions regarding the freedom of women in the realm of literary authority, the...

Langland's Fictions.
September 22, 1994... A paradox: the simplest of sentences, 'I believe' (or a variation on it), qualifies much of the argument of this book (particularly the last chapter), written by one who professes himself an unbeliever. A resolution: by its power to 'haunt the...

Of Love and Chivalry: An Anthology of Middle English Romance.
September 22, 1994... These two books represent a further extension of Everyman's excellent policy of publishing new scholarly editions at moderate prices, so bringing texts that were previously inaccessible on account of rarity or cost within the scope of...

The Piers Plowman Tradition.
September 22, 1994... These two books represent a further extension of Everyman's excellent policy of publishing new scholarly editions at moderate prices, so bringing texts that were previously inaccessible on account of rarity or cost within the scope of...

The Fabliau in English.
September 22, 1994... This book is a helpful if uneven introduction to an important mediaeval genre. Hines states in his preface that the only thesis he has to promote is that the pleasure derived from reading English fabliaux 'is often sophisticated in a way that...

Two Wycliffite Texts: The Sermon of William Taylor, 1406; The Testimony of William Thorpe, 1407.
September 22, 1994... This volume is the latest of Professor Hudson's fundamental contributions to the study of Wycliffite thought. She provides critical editions of two shorter Middle English texts, William Taylor's sermon (1406) and the testimony of William Thorpe...

Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England.
September 22, 1994... This volume offers a brilliant reassessment of the Chaucerian tradition during the fifteenth century, which C. S. Lewis had disparaged as the 'Drab Age'. Described as 'a book about endings' (p. 209), in which Chaucer's envoy is construed as...

The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives.
September 22, 1994... A. C. Spearing's latest book joins the growing number of recent studies that explore aspects of vision in mediaeval literature. It contributes to an intriguing area of study that has already shed light on aspects of such topics as epistemology,...

The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory.
September 22, 1994... In the light of recent work, by students of both literature and history, it was probably time for an extended new look at Malory's identity and career. Mr Field has already published most of his more important points in articles, notably in...

Hunting in Middle English Literature.
September 22, 1994... Anne Rooney's learned and rigorous book brings a new focus to the study of literature and mediaeval hunting. Working exclusively with a composite, but simplified, concept of 'the hunt' of court culture, she systematically examines its...

The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden.
September 22, 1994... 'Avernus, Broceliande, Arden': as the three names suggest, this study ranges from Virgil to Shakespeare. The author traces three broad phases in the history of literary forests. In classical Latin, the forest is a site of 'portentous...

The Medieval Charlemagne Legend: An Annotated Bibliography.
September 22, 1994... The title of a book often promises more than the contents deliver; this book delivers more than its title suggests. It is a selective bibliography of historical and literary material relating to Charlemagne, for the literary scholar, and the...

Chretien de Troyes: Cliges.
September 22, 1994... These two volumes are remarkably similar in concept and approach. They represent the first truly critical editions of the respective texts, and there is an attempt in both to reach Chretien's original version via a chosen base manuscript...

Chretien de Troyes: Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, Edition critique d'apres tous les manuscrits.
September 22, 1994... These two volumes are remarkably similar in concept and approach. They represent the first truly critical editions of the respective texts, and there is an attempt in both to reach Chretien's original version via a chosen base manuscript...

The Art of Love: Amatory Fiction from Ovid to the 'Romance of the Rose.'
September 22, 1994... This book develops a theory to explain the self-contradictory nature of three seminal treatises on the art of love: Ovid's Ars amatoria coupled with his Remedia amoris, Andreas Capellanus' De amore, and Jean de Meung's Roman de la Rose. In the...

'L'Histoire des moines d'Egypte,' suivie de la 'Vie de saint Paul le Simple.'
September 22, 1994... This interesting edition presents a set of texts from the tradition commonly known as 'la vie des Peres'. The introduction deals as usual with the personality of the author of the collection (Wauchier de Denain) and the probable date of the...

Guillaume de Machaut: 'Le Confort d'ami' (Comfort for a Friend).
September 22, 1994... This is now the third by the same editor in an ambitious and still-continuing series of editions and translations of Machaut's poetry. Having begun with two of Machaut's best-known narrative poems -- Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne and Le...

Two Late Medieval Love Treatises: Heloise's 'Art d'Amour' and a Collection of Demandes d'Amour.
September 22, 1994... This is a good critical edition of two treatises that deserve attention not so much in their own right as for the light they have to shed on the fortunes of Andreas Capellanus, the debates on love which his work inspired, and the persistence of...

Guittone d'Arezzo: Lettere.
September 22, 1994... Like his much larger body of poems, the letters of Guittone d'Arezzo have never recovered from Dante's dismissal of their author (De vulgari eloquentia 11, vi, Purgatorio, XXIV.56). They were first edited, apparently in a manner that was...

The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante.
September 22, 1994... The correct title of Dante's masterpiece is the Commedia (or more strictly, as in the text itself, Comedia). From the mid-sixteenth century the addition of the ambiguous and perhaps misleading epithet divina has become canonical. This...

Petrarch's Laurels.
September 22, 1994... In this comprehensive, detailed and intricate, even labyrinthine, study of Petrarch's Canzoniere, the author builds on her previous work on intertextuality in Petrarch, and also incorporates a number of already published articles, thoroughly...

Las 'Estorias' de Alfonso el Sabio.
September 22, 1994... The Estorias of Dr Fernandez-Ordonez's title are the Estoria de Espanna and the Grande e general estoria. The former has attracted more critical attention, although the complexity of its manuscript tradition and the presence of numerous...

Begriffsglossar und Index zu Ulrichs von Zatzikhoven 'Lanzelet.'
September 22, 1994... This work has arisen from a sense of the inadequacies of alphabetical indexes and concordances as an aid to the analysis of literary content. Based on some ten years of development, the project offers an interesting and potentially important...

Herzog Ernst D (wahrscheinlich von Ulrich von Etzenbach).
September 22, 1994... Herzog Ernst was an exceptionally popular story in mediaeval Germany, offering a heady mixture of imperial political intrigue and fabulous adventures in the East. No fewer than ten versions are known. The oldest -- called A by Karl Bartsch in...

Der 'guote vride': idealer Friede in deutscher Literatur bis ins fruhe 14. Jahrhundert.
September 22, 1994... This study provides a survey of the presentation of peace (vride) in mediaeval German literature, from the Old High German period to the fourteenth century, and including all genres in which the term vride occurs with any regularity. However,...

Repertorium van de Middelnederlandse Artes-Literatuur.
September 22, 1994... Artes 'literature'? There have been numerous attempts to impose new definitions on the books, poems, texts, works, treatises, compositions, writings with which mediaevalists are confronted, many of them stimulated by the observation that in the...

The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350.
September 22, 1994... This stimulating book recounts the story of European expansion in the high Middle Ages in terms popularized by historians of the American West. Professor Bartlett describes the motives and methods of those who left their homes to try their luck...

A State of Deference: Ragusa/Dubrovnik in the Medieval Centuries.
September 22, 1994... On the edge of several worlds, at the limes of Western Christendom, poised improbably between a barren mountain and the sea, stood the mediaeval city of Ragusa. In the outsider's perspective, its marginality has always been an essential...

English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475-1525.
September 22, 1994... The new bibliography has encouraged us to think of the sociological forces which lie behind book production. It has brought with it a new view of humanism. Lisa Jardine's recent Erasmus, Man of Letters presents its subject as a manipulator of...

Antitus: Poesies.
September 22, 1994... The attention of seiziemistes was first drawn to the existence of Antitus by Marc-Rene Jung in 1980 ('Maitre Antitus, rhetoriqueur', in Etudes seiziemistes offertes a V.-L. Saulnier (Geneva, 1980), pp. 181--92). Jung reviewed the scanty...

Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College Cambridge, vol. 5.i: Manuscripts (Medieval).
September 22, 1994... The eighth published volume of this catalogue series describes the thirty-eight pre-1500 manuscripts that were acquired by Pepys from various seventeenth-century sources (this number does not include the mediaeval fragments in Pepys's...

Old English Prose of Secular Learning.
September 22, 1994... The annotations of this volume cover prose proverbs, dialogues and romances, computistical texts and Byrhtferth's Enchiridion, as well as magico-medical literature and associated texts. Included are all specialist publications prior to 1989...

Aelfwine's Prayerbook (London, British Library, Cotton Titus D. xxvi+xxvii).
September 22, 1994... ed. Beate Gunzel, Henry Bradshaw Society 108 (Woobridge: Boydell Press, 1993). xii + 227 pp. ISBN 1-870252-04-7. 25.00 [pounds sterling]. Titus D xxvii+xxvi (the original order of what was probably one volume before the Cottonian rebinding) is...

The Language of Layamon's 'Brut.'
September 22, 1994... Haruo Iwasaki, (Tokyo: Kenyasha, 1993). x + 203 pp. ISBN 4-327-40107-2. [Yen] 3,500. In the continued absence of an introduction to the Brook and Leslie edition it is good to have some discussion of the `language of Lazamon's Brut', although,...

Amys and Amylion.
September 22, 1994... This is in many respects a welcome new edition of a romance of considerable thematic interest. The standard edition, MacEdward Leach's of 1937, used as its base the earliest and arguably the best, though incomplete, Auchinleck version. Dr Saux...

William Langland.
September 22, 1994... This dense and scholarly book contains twenty-four pages on what may, with varying degrees of plausibility, be deduced about the name, identity and biography of the author of Piers Plowman, including evidence for the dating of the versions of...

English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith.
September 22, 1994... The Virgin at the Annunciation, when told of the World become Flesh, was often shown as in the act of reading, and as reading Isaiah's contemplative prophecies concerning the Messiah. St Augustine in his Confessions spoke of his conversion...

The Complete Works of the Pearl Poet.
September 22, 1994... As the title-page indicates, this volume contains Andrew and Waldron's editions of the four main poems of the Pearl poet and Peterson's edition of St Erkenwald, together with a selection of their notes, Andrew and Waldron's glossary, and...

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, 'Subgit to alle Poesye': Essays in Criticism.
September 22, 1994... This collection of essays contains seven that have been previously published (by Stephen Barney, C. David Benson, Sheila Delany, Carolyn Dinshaw, John M. Fyler, J. P. Hermann and David Wallace) and nine new ones: Robert R. Edwards's 'Pandarus'...

Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments of the 'Canterbury Tales.'
September 22, 1994... Jerome Mandel regards each group of tales within The Canterbury Tales as 'a finished work of art' (p. 17). By analysing structure, theme and character, he aims to show the fundamental similarities, the parallels and contrasts, that link tales...

Arthurian and Other Studies: Presented to Shunichi Noguchi.
September 22, 1994... There is about some Festschriften a peculiar sense of intimacy which results from the combination of affection for the recipient and a measure of agreement among the contributors about the scholarly focus of their joint efforts. More of a...

Reader, Teller and Teacher: The Narrator of Robert Henryson's 'Moral Fables.'
September 22, 1994... This is a short study of the themes and structure of Henryson's Fables, notionally focused on the guiding role of the Narrator, but at its best when it looks beyond that concern. Greentree strongly affirms as authorial the order of the Fables...

I manoscritti della letteratura in lingua d'Oc.
September 22, 1994... This second edition of Avalle's classic La letteratura medievale in lingua d'oc nella sua tradizione manoscritta (Turin, 1961) is primarily a study of the troubadour chansonniers, the conditions of their production and their relation to each...

Christine de Pizan: Christine's Vision.
September 22, 1994... The Avision constitutes something of a test case for one's sense of the alterity of the Middle Ages. The oddity of its first book, which comprises a triple allegory of the state of the individual, France and the world, stands in bizarre...

Catalogue des manuscrits francais de la bibliotheque Parker (Parker Library), Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
September 22, 1994... This volume is an opportunity lost. It lacks both scholarly and cataloguing rigour, and is poorly presented, with unclear and sometimes inconsistent layout making it difficult to use. Comparison with the excellent recent catalogue of mediaeval...

Histoire de la litterature allemande du moyen age.
September 22, 1994... This history of mediaeval German literature, concentrating on the period from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, provides a learned and interestingly written conspectus of the subject for the non-specialist, rich in facts and providing...

La storiografia medioevale: introduzione e sguardo panoramico.
September 22, 1994... This short book offers what its title promises: an introduction to and panoramic overview of mediaeval historiography (from the eighth to the thirteenth century). After a brief introduction (which takes its points of departure from Benedetto...

Middle English Historiography.
September 22, 1994... This brief attempt to apply the insights of literary criticism to five Middle English texts situates itself in the current historiographical debate associated with such names as Michel Foucault, Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. An opening...

The Annals of Fulda.
September 22, 1994... This extremely valuable volume, published in the Manchester Medieval Sources series, follows on from that of the Annals of Saint-Bertin by J. L. Nelson (Manchester, 1991). The Annales Fuldenses cover 838--901 and give an instructive picture of...

Economy, Society and Lordship and Medieval Poland: 100-1250.
September 22, 1994... This study seeks to do for mediaeval Poland what Marc Bloch and George Duby have accomplished for France of the same period: that is, to establish the interrelationships of land-ownership, feudal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, market...

English Episcopal Acta VII: Hereford, 1079-1234.
September 22, 1994... This work, covering the episcopates of fourteen bishops of Hereford, contains details of 371 acta of which 137 are here printed for the first time, as well as 46 references to lost documents. The editor provides a thorough and lucid...

Women and Sovereignty.
September 22, 1994... This useful and well-conceived volume on the 'theory and practice of Western medieval and early modern queenship' (p. v) draws on papers from the Conference on Women and Sovereignty at St Andrews, Scotland in 1990. Anthropological methodologies...

Catalogue of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Yale University, vol. 3, Marston Manuscripts.
September 22, 1994... This well-produced and reasonably priced volume completes the three-part catalogue of over 730 manuscripts in the Beinecke Library. Volume III describes the 234 Marston MSS, most of which were collected by Thomas Marston during the 1940s and...

International Directory of Renaissance and Reformation Associations and Institutes.
September 22, 1994... This is a second edition of the 1990 Directory and is described as a revised, updated and augmented version of that work. In spite of its title it does include a number of organizations concerned with the study of the Middle Ages, but the lack...