Ebook (VitalSource) - £24.99

Publication date:

19 March 2021

Length of book:

229 pages

Publisher

D.S.Brewer

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9781800101630

Cutting-edge and fresh new outlooks on medieval literature, emphasising the vibrancy of the field.

New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined.
Essays in this volume engage with a wide range of subject matter, from as far back as Livy (d.c.AD 12/18) to Erwin Panofsky (d. 1968). They demonstrate that medieval textual cultures is a radically negotiable category and that medieval understandings of the past were equally diverse and unstable.They reflect on relationships between history, texts, and truth from a range of perspectives, from Foucault to "truthiness", a twenty-first-century media coinage. Materiality and the technical crafts with which humans engage withthe natural world are recurrent themes, opening up new insights on mysticism, knighthood, and manuscript production and reception. Analysis of manuscript illuminations offers new understandings of identity and diversity, while a survey of every thirteenth-century manuscript that contains English currently in Oxford libraries yields a challenging new history of script. Particular texts discussed include Chrétien de Troyes's Conte du Graal, Richard Rolle's Incendium amoris and Melos amoris, and the Middle English verse romances Lybeaus Desconus, The Erle of Tolous, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The seven essays in this collection maintain the high standard of scholarship that typifes the series [...] All the essays in this collection are the fruit of meticulous textual study and intense intellectual engagement. [...] This book will be of equal interest to students of European history, art buffs, textual and literary critics, and manuscript historians.