In 1755 Richard Rawlinson bequeathed his vast collection of books and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. The manuscripts alone numbered over 5,000, and the 167 of these which contain Middle English
A Revelation of Purgatory was written by a female anchorite living in Winchester during the second decade of the fifteenth century; it provides an account of how a deceased member of her order appeare
The Matter of France, the legendary history of Charlemagne, had a central but now largely unrecognised place in the multilingual culture of medieval England. From the early claim in the Chanson de Rol
The Grail is one of the most enduring literary motifs in publishing history. In spite of an ever-changing world, the reading public has maintained a fascination for this enigmatic object, as well as t
The twenty-first century has witnessed the re-emergence of various kinds of literary formalism, and one project that characterizes most of these diverse formalisms is the effort to distinguish what is
The work of William Morris (1834-1896) was hugely influenced by the medieval sagas and poetry of Iceland; in particular, they inspired his long poems "The Lovers of Gudrun" and Sigurd the Volsung. Bet
How was Alexander the Great - controversial king, conqueror, explorer, and pupil of Aristotle, the subject of histories, romances, epic poetry, satires, and sermons in most of the languages of Europe
Given the impossibility of completely recovering the past, the issue of authenticity is clearly central to scholarship on postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages. The essays in the first part of thi
Direct speech between characters, or to the "reader", is a a major part of such Old English poems as Beowulf, but its impact and use have been neglected. This book uses linguistic theories t
"Distortion" of any kind, including the textual, is nearly always understood as negative: it can be defined as perversion, unnoticed alteration, impairment, caricature, twisting, corruption, misrepres
The relationship between that most popular of medieval genres, the saint's life, and the sagas of the Icelanders is investigated here. Although saga heroes are rarely saints themselves - indeed rather
The study of English literature, language, culture and creative writing is an important and dynamic enterprise. English: Shared Futures celebrates the discipline's intellectual strength, diversity and
The artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942-1994) had a lifelong appreciation of medieval culture. But with the possible exception of Edward II, Jarman's films have not been identified to date as maki
From the time when the writer J.T. Knowles first adapted Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur for a juvenile audience in 1862, there has been a strong connection between children and the Arthurian legend. Be
The dynamic fields of the history of the book and the sociology of the text are the areas this volume investigates, bringing together ten specially commissioned essays that between them demonstrate a
Ecoconcerns and ecocriticism are a rising trend in medievalism studies, and form a major focus of this collection. Topics under discussion in the first part of the volume include figurations in ninete
