Medium Aevum articles from September 2002

Medium Aevum archives from September 2002

Literary practice in eleventh-century music theory: the colores rhetorici and aribo's de musica.
September 22, 2002... A survey of the literary sources of late eleventh-century Germany reveals the degree to which the ars dictandi was used by clerks. The publication in 1948 of Leonid Arbusow's Colores rhetorici highlighted the practice of this period in the...

Women's devotional reading in late-medieval England and the gendered reader.
September 22, 2002... The topic of medieval female readers has elicited a great deal of scholarly interest since the work of pioneering feminist critics such as Susan Groag Bell and Susan Schibanoff in the 1980s. (1) Part of a greater shift in medieval literary...

Collaborative communities: the manuscript context of Alain Chartier's Belle Dame sans mercy.
September 22, 2002... Within the community formed by the forty manuscripts which collect the numerous sequels and imitations of Alain Chartier's controversial poem La Belle Dame sans mercy of 1424 are contained a number of other texts that have close semantic and...

`Brjans saga'.(historicity of Icelandic sagas discussed)
September 22, 2002... One of the many interesting problems connected with the medieval Icelandic sagas has been the question of their value for history. Extreme views that either accepted the sagas as archives of contemporary historical records or else rejected all...

Der basler dialog zwischen seele und leib.(text in German)
September 22, 2002... Der seit der Antike andauernde Diskurs uber das Verhaltnis von Seele und Leib findet im Mittelalter Ausdruck in Form einer Anrede der Seele an den Leib oder eines (Streit-) Gesprachs zwischen den beiden. Korper und Geist geraten in...

A previously unlisted manuscript of the Latin Brut chronicle with Sherborne continuation.
September 22, 2002... This article has three aims. First, it seeks to advertise the existence and establish the provenance of a previously unlisted manuscript of the Latin prose Brut chronicle, which may be added to the nineteen recently catalogued by Lister...

`And shold have been oderwyse understond': the disenchanting of Sir Gromer Somer Joure.(The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle for the Helping of King Arthur)
September 22, 2002... The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle for the Helping of King Arthur, (1) a mid- to late fifteenth-century romance written in the dialect of England's East Midlands and extant in only one early sixteenth-century manuscript, (2) has been...

The ending of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale.
September 22, 2002... The last three lines of the Nun's Priest's Tale contain an interpretative crux. (1) The Nun's Priest says that even those who do not like his tale can benefit from it, because, as St Paul says, everything that is written is written for our...

Further evidence for Chaucer's representation of the Pardoner as a womanizer.(in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales)
September 22, 2002... Twenty years ago I argued that the hints of effeminacy to be found in Chaucer's portrait of the Pardoner should not be taken to indicate either homosexuality or a physical condition (whether that of a eunuch or a hermaphrodite), but rather an...

R. M. Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... with a contribution on the bindings by Michael Gullick (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, on behalf of the Dean and Chapter of Worcester Cathedral, 2001). xlviii + 256 pp.; coloured dust-jacket and frontispiece, 50 plates. ISBN 0-85991-618-9. 95.00...

Lynne Long, Translating the Bible from the 7th to the 17th Century.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Theology and Biblical Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), viii + 230 pp. ISBN 0-7546-1411-5. 40.00 [pounds sterling]. This book uses the discipline of translation theory to focus on the issues involved in...

Kathleen L. Scott, Later Gothic Manuscripts 1390-1490.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 6 (London: Harvey Miller, 1996). Vol. I: Text and Illustrations, 234 pp. Vol. II: Catalogue and Indices, 434 PP. 17 colour plates; 36 figures; 505 black and white illustrations. ISBN...

David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), vii + 168 pp.; 2 plates. ISBN 0-85991-624-3. 35.00 [pounds sterling]. David Salter examines the function and characterization of animals in three groups of texts seen as...

Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle, and Scopic Economy.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). ix + 231 pp.; 80 plates. ISBN 0-8122-3599-1. $55.00. This is an ambitious book that attempts three goals: to read medieval iconography of women within a theoretical framework of...

Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xv + 489 pp. ISBN 0-521-40192-5. 55.00 [pounds sterling]/$80.00. This is a comprehensive study of the Latin school curriculum in medieval and Renaissance Italy. Its principal focus is on the...

Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 288 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3600-9. 35.00 [pounds sterling]. The standard view of the medieval Welsh Arthurian tradition is that from Geoffrey of Monmouth on it is appropriated to bolster the...

Emily Albu, The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2001). xii + 260 pp. ISBN 0-85115-656-8. 50.00 [pounds sterling]/$90.00. The unfortunate subtitle to Emily Albu's book should not put off the reader from this interesting study of the image of the Normans in the...

De la saintete a l'hagiographie: genese et usage la `Legende doree'.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Barbara Fleith and Franco Morenzoni (Geneva: Droz, 2001). 325 pp.; 28 illustrations. ISBN 2-600-00491-2. Sw. Fr. 60.00. These proceedings of a 1999 conference `Lire, ecouter et voir la Legende doree' reflect the most recent...

Stephani de Borbone Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus. Prologus. Prima pars: De dono timoris.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. and with an introduction by Jacques Berlioz and Jean-Luc Eichenlaub, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 124; Exempla Medii Aevi I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). xci + 638 pp. ISBN 2-503-04241-4. Eur. 295.00. This edition of the...

Jeff Rider, God's Scribe: The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001). vii + 360 pp. ISBN 0-8132-1018-6. $59.95. This is Jeff Rider's companion volume to his edition of Galbert of Bruges, De multro, traditione, et occisione gloriosi Karoli...

Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 241 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001). [viii] + 188 pp. ISBN 0-8669-8283-3. $28.00/24.00 [pounds sterling]. In 1981 Helmut Gneuss published `A preliminary list of...

Ananya J. Kabir, Paradise, Death and Doomsday in Anglo-Saxon Literature.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xi + 210 pp. ISBN 0-521-80600-3. 45.00 [pounds sterling]. This is a fascinating discussion of a concept that, until now, had scarcely been...

Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700-1500.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), viii + 288 pp. ISBN 0-85991-623-5. 50.00 [pounds sterling]/$85.00. In this considered history of medieval English pilgrimage based largely on theological and literary sources, Dee Dyas is concerned to show...

Noel James Menuge, Medieval English Wardship in Romance and Law.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), viii + 149 pp. ISBN 0-85991-632-4. 40.00 [pounds sterling]. Wardship has been of interest to legal and social historians of the Middle Ages for some time now. Here it becomes...

Jim Rhodes, Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-Poet.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), xi + 324 pp. ISBN 0-268-03870-8. 20.95 [pounds sterling]. This accessible study explores the ways in which fourteenth-century English poetry engages contemporary theological...

The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Neil Cartlidge (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). liv + 202 pp.; 2 plates. ISBN 0-85989-690-0. 14.99 [pounds sterling]. The Owl and the Nightingale is widely taught to undergraduates; reading the poem, however, has never been...

Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), ix + 278 pp. ISBN 0-85991-622-7. 45.00 [pounds sterling]/$75.00. In Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England Sarah Salih focuses on what she designates as the `strategies of chastity', in the sense...

Mary Clemente Davlin, OP, The Place of God in `Piers Plowman' and Medieval Art.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). x + 208 pp.; 25 black and white illustrations. ISBN 0-7546-0270-2. 40.00 [pounds sterling]. Mary Clemente Davlin's thoughtful, reflective, even elegant study will engage all who are interested in the specifically...

D. Vance Smith, The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Medieval Cultures 28 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). xiii + 295 pp. ISBN 0-8166-3760-1. $34.95/29.00 [pounds sterling]. In spite of the odd absence of Piers Plowman from the title of this book, it is firmly grounded in...

Ipomadon.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Rhiannon Purdie, EETS, os 316 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), lxxxix + 366 pp. ISBN 0-19-722319-2. 45.00 [pounds sterling]. Readers of the Middle English romance known as Ipomadon (A), the stanzaic rendition of Hue de...

A Companion to Chaucer.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Peter Brown (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). xvii + 515 pp. ISBN 0-631-21332-5. 80.00 [pounds sterling]/$99.95. One might wonder if another guide to Chaucer were really necessary, but Peter Brown's Companion should be commended for trying...

Kathryn Jacobs, Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), viii + 181 pp. ISBN 0-8130-2102-2. $59.95. Kathryn Jacobs's book is intended `to compare and contrast the very different literary reactions to a common stimulus: the successive...

Thomas Hoccleve: `My Compleinte' and Other Poems.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Roger Ellis, Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001). x + 293 pp. ISBN 0-85989-700-1, 47.50 [pounds sterling] (hard covers); 0-85989-701-X, 15.99 [pounds sterling] (p/b). The booming Hoccleve...

The Three Kings of Cologne, Edited from London, Lambeth Palace MS 491.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Frank Schaer, Middle English Texts 31 (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), 203 pp. ISBN 3-8253-1122-8. Eur. 46.00. This volume presents a careful, clearly presented, and capably noted edition of a previously unedited Middle English translation...

Douglas Kelly, The Conspiracy of Allusion: Description, Rewriting and Authorship from Macrobius to Medieval Romance.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Studies in the History of Christian Thought 97 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), xiv + 313 pp. ISBN 90-04-11560-0. $100.00. This latest book from one of the great authorities on French romance makes a dense, illuminating, but at times somewhat...

Anna Maria Finoli, Prose de romanzi: raccolta di studi. (1979-2000).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Milan: Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere, Economia, Diritto (LED), 2001), 208 pp. ISBN 88-7916-152-0. Eur. 18.59. La citation dantesque (Purgatoire, XXVI.118), qui offre son titre a ce volume, est significative. On sait, en effet, que la...

Marcabru: A Critical Edition.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Simon Gaunt, Ruth Harvey, and Linda Paterson, with John Marshall as philological adviser, and with the assistance of Melanie Florence (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), xi + 609 pp. ISBN 0-85991-574-3. 95.00 [pounds sterling]. The number...

Corinne Pierreville, Gautier d'Arras: l'autre Chretien.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Paris: Honore Champion, 2001). 380 pp. ISBN 2-7453-0311-2. Eur. 73.20. This study of the two romances of Gautier d'Arras is based on the author's thesis, as the many footnotes and appendices might suggest. Anyone interested in medieval...

The Life of Saint Douceline, a Beguine of Provence.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... trans. from the Occitan with introduction, notes, and interpretative essay by Kathleen Garay and Madeleine Jeay (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 180 pp. ISBN 0-85991-629-4. 40.00 [pounds sterling]/$75.00. The blessed Doucelina of Digne...

Eighteen Anglo-Norman Fabliaux.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Ian Short and Roy Pearcy, Plain Text Series 14 (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2000). 42 pp. ISBN 0-905474-40-6. Free to members of the society. This first collection of Anglo-Norman fabliaux redresses a neglect both individual and...

Pierre d'Aubernon of Fetcham: La Lumere as lais.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Vol. III: Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. Glynn Hesketh, Anglo-Norman Text Society 58 (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2000), x + 218 pp. ISBN 0-905474-39-2. 30.00 [pounds sterling]. This third and final volume now enables the...

Histoire de la reine Berthe et du roi Pepin: mise en prose d'une chanson de geste.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Piotr Tylus, Textes litteraires francais (Geneva: Droz, 2001). 348 pp. ISBN 2-600-00498-X. Sw. Fr. 45.00. La reeriture anonyme en prose faite a partir de Berthe aus grans pies d'Adenet le Roi (XIIIe siecle) est transmise par un...

Alastair Minnis, `Magister amoris': The `Roman de la Rose' and Vernacular Hermeneutics.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), xv + 352 pp. ISBN 0-19-818754-8. 50.00 [pounds sterling]. To ask `What is this book about?' is neither to be flippantly sarcastic nor to admit to dull incomprehension. While the title might suggest...

Christine de Pizan 2000: Studies on Christine de Pizan in Honour of Angus J. Kennedy.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. John Campbell and Nadia Margolis, Faux Titre 196 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 429 pp. ISBN 90-420-1244-7. $72.00. The latest in a sequence of excellent collections on Christine, this volume contains much to interest scholars of...

Deborah A. Fraioli, Joan of Arc: The Early Debate.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000). x + 235 pp. ISBN 0-85115-572-3. 45.00 [pounds sterling]. This book is unique by its concentration on the lively debate which went on chiefly in 1429 around the theological principles of the doctrine...

Rene d'Anjou: The Book of the Smitten Heart.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. and trans. Stephanie Viereck Gibbs and Kathryn Karczewska (New York: Routledge, 2001). lviii + 283 pp.; 16 plates. ISBN 0-8153-3858-9. 90.00 [pounds sterling]. What a pleasure it is to welcome this astonishingly handsome volume:...

Les Mysteres de la procession de Lille, Vol. I: Le Pentateuque.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Alan E. Knight, Textes litteraires francais 535 (Geneva: Droz, 2001). 630 pp. ISBN 2-600-00492-0. Sw. Fr. 80.00. The discovery some years ago of the manuscript of seventy-two short plays performed in Lille in the fifteenth century was...

Villon at Oxford: The Drama of the Text. Proceedings of the Conference Held at St Hilda's College, Oxford, March 1996.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Michael Freeman and Jane H. M. Taylor, Faux Titre 165 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), iv + 391 pp. ISBN 90-420-0475-4. $66.50. While some of the fifteen contributions to this volume resemble typical conference papers in their concision (Tony...

Carlo Papini, Valdo di Lione e i 'poveri nello spirito': il primo secolo del movimento valdese (1170-1270).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Turin: Claudiana, 2001). 542 pp.; 12 plates. ISBN 88-7016-378-4. Eur. 19.63. In this new consideration of the development of the Waldensian heresy, Carlo Papini provides a detailed narrative of the first century of the movement,...

Juliann Vitullo, The Chivalric Epic in Medieval Italy.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). xvi + 168 pp. ISBN 0-8130-1815-3. $55.00. As its title suggests, this volume aims to focus on the early history of the genre and to consider the changes and developments in subject matter...

Patrick Boyde, Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante's Comedy.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), x + 323 pp.; 2 illustrations. ISBN 0-521-66067-X. 40.00 [pounds sterling]. Human Vices and Human Worth in Dante's Comedy completes a trilogy in which Patrick Boyde locates Dante's ceuvre within...

Guglielmo Gorni, Dante prima della Commedia.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Florence: Cadmo, 2001). 290 pp. ISBN 88-7923-232-0. Eur. 21.00. As the title of this volume indicates, its thirteen essays deal with Dante's activity before the Commedia: the range of topics that Guglielmo Gomi is able to consider under...

Zygmunt G. Baranski, Dante e i segni: saggi per una storia intellettuale di Dante Alighieri.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Naples: Liguori, 2000), xii + 231 pp. ISBN 88-207-3129-0. Eur. 15.49. Uniting this somewhat disparate set of essays is the notion that Dante, faced with a choice between what amount to alternative epistemological and, by extension,...

Roger Wright, El Tratado de Cabreros (1206): estudio sociofilologico de una reforma ortografica.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 2000). 130 pp. ISBN 0-904188-59-0. 9.50 [pounds sterling]. Roger Wright has devoted much of his scholarly life to persuading us to look in new ways at Latin and...

Berceo's `Vida de Santa Oria': Text, Translation and Commentary.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Anthony Lappin (Oxford: EHRC, 2000), xi + 313 pp. ISBN 1-900755-17-3. 27.50 [pounds sterling]. This study attempts to debunk the work of major scholars of the poem, notably Isabel Uria Maqua and John K. Walsh, and to a lesser extent...

Vicenta Blay Manzanera and Dorothy S. Severin, Animals in `Celestina'.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar 18 (London: Department of Hispanic Studies, Queen Mary and Westfield College, 1999). 47 pp. ISBN 0-904188-51-5. 6.00 [pounds sterling]. Roja's Celestina is replete from prologue to epilogue...

Wolfram's `Willehalm': Fifteen Essays.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... ed. Martin H. Jones and Timothy McFarland (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), xxii + 344 pp.; 6 illustrations. ISBN 1-57113-211-2. 55.00 [pounds sterling]. The editors of this volume, who also acted as the initiators and organizers of the...

Elizabeth A. Andersen, The Voices of Mechthild of Magdeburg.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000). 255 pp. ISBN 3-906765-60-1. 26.00 [pounds sterling]. Mechthild von Magdeburg's thirteenth-century mystical text Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit is, in a new edition and translation, increasingly...

Annette Volfing, John the Evangelist and Medieval German Writing: Imitating the Inimitable.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 284 pp. ISBN 0-19-924684-X. 45.00 [pounds sterling]. A commonplace in commentaries on John the Evangelist was that, at the Last Supper, he imbibed the Wisdom Incarnate embodied by the Saviour that...

Shorter notices.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2002... Appropriating the Middle Ages: Scholarship, Politics, Fraud, ed. Tom Shippey with Martin Arnold, Studies in Medievalism II (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. 264 pp. ISBN 0-85991-626-X. 35.00 [pounds sterling]/$60.00. Like the previous two issues,...