Faces of Love
by Shams al-Din Mohammad Hafez, Jahan Malek Khatun, and Obayd-e Zakani
Acclaimed translator Dick Davis breathes new life into the timeless works of three masters of 14th-century Persian literature Together, Hafez, a giant of world literature; Jahan Malek Khatun, an eloquent princess; and Obayd-e Zakani, a dissolute satirist, represent one of the most remarkable literary flowerings of any era. All three lived in the famed city of Shiraz, a provincial capital of south-central Iran, and all three drew support from arts-loving rulers during a time better known for it...
The New Life is the masterpiece of Dante’s youth, an account of his love for Beatrice, the girl who was to become his lifelong muse, and of her tragic early death. An allegory of the soul’s crisis and growth, combining prose and poetry, narrative and meditation, dreams and songs and prayers, The New Life is a work of crystalline beauty and fascinating complexity that has long taken its place as one of the supreme revelations in the literature of love. The New Life is published here in the bea...
Selected Canterbury Tales (Unabridged Classics in MP3) (Thrifty Classic Literature, #89)
by Geoffrey Chaucer
In the tradition of Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Marie Borroff's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sheila Fisher's The Selected Canterbury Tales is a vivid, lively, and readable translation of the most famous work of England's premier medieval poet. Preserving Chaucer's rhyme and meter and faithfully articulating his poetic voice, Fisher makes Chaucer's tales accessible to a contemporary ear while inviting readers to the Middle English original on facing pages. Renowned for its astute character...
Medieval children lived in a world rich in poetry, from lullabies, nursery rhymes, and songs to riddles, tongue twisters, and nonsensical verses. They read or listened to stories in verse: ballads of Robin Hood, romances, and comic tales. Poems were composed to teach them how to behave, eat at meals, hunt game, and even learn Latin and French. In Fleas, Flies, and Friars, Nicholas Orme, an expert on childhood in the Middle Ages, has gathered a wide variety of children's verse that circulated in...
This powerful 7316-line sermon in rhyming couplets dramatically rehearses God's power and man's vulnerability, capturing Man's wretchedness and the world's instability before contemplating Man's journey from death to the anguish of purgatory, hell, or ultimately the joys of heaven.The presentation is informed by sensational descriptions directed to shock, inform, and inspire its audience into religious zeal. Biblical quotations and exegesis precisely reinforce the serious message of salvation an...
Composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, these virtually unknown erotic and satiric poems lie at the root of the Western comic tradition. Passed down by the anticlerical middle classes of medieval France, The Fabliaux depicts priapic priests, randy wives, and their cuckolded husbands in tales that are shocking even by today’s standards. Chaucer and Boccaccio borrowed heavily from these riotous tales, which were the wit of the common man rebelling against the aristocracy and Church...
Beowulf
Part of a new series Legends from the Ancient North, Beowulf is one of the classic books that influenced JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings 'So the company of men led a careless life, All was well with them: until One began To encompass evil, an enemy from hell. Grendel they called this cruel spirit...' J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his life studying, translating and teaching the great epic stories of northern Europe, filled with heroes, dragons, trolls, dwarves and magic. He wa...
Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance - Scholar's Choice Edition
by H Belloc
Cliges is generally thought to be the second of Chretien's Arthurian romances, probably written between 1185-87. This critical edition of Cligesis the first since Wendelin Foerster's in (1884) to take account of all the manuscripts. Based on the Guiot manuscript, it contains many emendations, producing a text closer to that of Chretien's original. Variant apparatus, notes, glossary, and editorial comment on the manuscripts accompany the text. STEWART GREGORY is in the Department of French, Le...
The Ruodlieb (Classical Texts)
The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Volume 2
by Geoffrey Chaucer and Nicholas Harris Nicolas
The Finnish language belongs to a non-Indo-European group of languages whose origins have been traced to a region just west of the Urals. During the first milennium of our era, Uralic-speakers in the Baltic region developed the oral poetry which is the basis of the Kalevala, the epic poem of Finland which was assembled only 150 years ago as a portrait of an ancient people in war and peace. This poem, which has often been compared with the epics of Homer, played a central role in the process towa...
As both layman and Franciscan friar, the Catalan writer known as Francesc Moner (ca 1463-1495) is one of the leading exponents of the bilingual (Catalan-Castilian) culture that flourished in Barcelona in the late 1400s. In his approach to Sepultura d'amor (Burial of Love), Moner's longest poem, Peter Cocozzella focuses on the author's ingenious version of a kind of parody that desacralizes but does not desecrate the celebration of the funeral Mass. Cocozzella discovers the aspects of Moner's unc...
The Complete Old English Poems (The Complete Old English Poems) (The Middle Ages)
From the riddling song of a bawdy onion that moves between kitchen and bedroom to the thrilling account of Beowulf's battle with a treasure-hoarding dragon, from the heart-rending lament of a lone castaway to the embodied speech of the cross upon which Christ was crucified, from the anxiety of Eve, who carries "a sumptuous secret in her hands / And a tempting truth hidden in her heart," to the trust of Noah who builds "a sea-floater, a wave-walking / Ocean-home with rooms for all creatures," the...
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can be regarded as the most important work written in English in pre-Norman times: the beginnings of English prose are found in the annals, written in an age when Latin was the language of documentation. This book presents the text and a study of the Chronicle.