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This translation brings the complete works of three minor but important Italian poets - Dante's contemporaries at the turn of the 14th century - to English speakers for the very first time. Taken together, the three authors sketch an idealized portrait of courtly life juxtaposed to the gritty, politically fractured world of northern Italy's mercantile urban centers in which they lived. One poet, Folgore di San Gimignano, idealizes court life during the period; the second, Cenne da la Chitarra, l...

Originally published in 1985. This impressive research tool offers four different indexes to cross-reference works on the sources of Chaucer. The user can look up sources by author, genre type or title, or look up the title of one of Chaucer’s works to find which bibliographic entries they are mentioned within. This is a useful reference work on Chaucer source and analogue scholarship, including 1477 entries.

The period after the Norman Conquest saw a dramatic reassessment of what it meant to be English, owing to both the advent of Anglo-Norman rule and increased interaction with other cultures through trade, travel, migration, and war. While cultural contact is often thought to consolidate national identity, this book proposes that these encounters prompted the formation of intercultural regional identities. Because of these different cultural influences, the meaning of English identity varied from...

Why has the medievalist impulse- as manifested in an attraction to the traditions of courtly love and chivalry- been ignored or marginalized in the context of American literature, especially given its prominence in studies of British literature? Kim Moreland sets out to answer this and other questions, providing close readings of a variety of texts, both familiar and unfamiliar, while drawing eclectically on theoretical approaches such as feminism, deconstruction, cultural criticism, and psychob...

As a convenient source of wide-ranging critical opinion on early literature, this series contains excerpts from criticism through the ages on the works of philosophers, poets and playwrights, political leaders, scientists, mathematicians and writers from other genres. Students writing a term paper on an author, work, topic, theme or idea -- or anyone wanting to become better acquainted with the classics -- will find this series a helpful first resource. Approximately 90-95% of critical essays ar...

Thomas Hahn's work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies - careful attention to texts and their co...

Why devote a Companion to the "mirrors of princes", whose very existence is debated? These texts offer key insights into political thoughts of the past. Their ambiguous, problematic status further enhances their interest. And although recent research has fundamentally challenged established views of these texts, until now there has been no critical introduction to the genre. This volume therefore fills this important gap, while promoting a global historical perspective of different “mirrors of...

Winner of the 2018 Premio internazionale Francesco Saverio Nitti per il Mediterraneo in the category "Storia, Letteratura", awarded annually by Universita degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples, Italy. The Vita coaetanea (A Contemporary Life) is an autobiographical account of Ramon Llull's life dictated by himself to a friend in 1311 when he was seventy-nine years old. In it Llull reviews his works in the context of a life dedicated to God and motivated by the desire to disseminate the messag...

Castration and castrati have always been facets of western culture, from myth and legend to law and theology, from eunuchs guarding harems to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century castrati singers. Metaphoric castration pervadesa number of medieval literary genres, particularly the Old French fabliaux - exchanges of power predicated upon the exchange or absence of sexual desire signified by genitalia - but the plain, literal act of castration and its implications are often overlooked. This co...

The collection of essays in Translation Theory and Practice in the Middle Ages arose from a translation symposium at the twenty-eighth International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. The authors treat a wide range of topics: translation between Latin and romance languages, the rise of vernacular canonicity, the interplay of Latin and French in the court of France, the theory of translation evident in Alfred the Great's ambitious program of translation of religious works from L...

Brill's Companion to the Reception of Socrates, edited by Christopher Moore, provides almost unbroken coverage, across three-dozen studies, of 2450 years of philosophical and literary engagement with Socrates - the singular Athenian intellectual, paradigm of moral discipline, and inspiration for millennia of philosophical, rhetorical, and dramatic composition. Following an Introduction reflecting on the essentially "receptive" nature of Socrates' influence (by contrast to Plato's), chapters addr...