Skin is the parchment upon which identity is written; class, race, ethnicity, and gender are all legible upon the human surface. Removing skin tears away identity, and leaves a blank slate upon which
Who am I when I am dead? Several late-medieval French writers used literary representation of the dead as a springboard for exploring the nature of human being. Death is a critical moment for identity
The ballad genre, and its material, are frequently backward-looking in terms of subject and style: it is ideally suited to the reimagining of past events, both real and fictional. This volume addresse
Birds featured in many aspects of medieval people's lives, not least in their poetry. But despite their familiar presence in literary culture, it is still often assumed that these representations have
At the turn of the fifteenth century it must have seemed to many French people that the world was going mad. King Charles VI suffered his first bout of mental illness in 1392, and he underwent intermi
The essays here reconsider the protean nature of Middle English romance. The contributors examine both the cultural unity of romance and its many variations, reiterations and reimaginings, including i
Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie, dating to around 1165, is, along with the Roman de Thèbes and the Roman d'Eneas, one of the three "romances of antiquity" (romans d'antiquité).
Romances were immensely popular with medieval readers, as evidenced by their ubiquity in manuscripts and early print. The essays collected here deal with the textual transmission of medieval romances
The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill.
This work explores and untangles the theme of rape, and its counterpart ravishment, in Anglo-French cultural tradition between the disintegration of the classical world and the Renaissance. Tracing de
On 29 August 1816, Lord Amherst, exhausted after travelling overnight during an embassy to China, was roughly handled in an attempt to compel him to attend an immediate audience with the Jiaqing Empe
The prologue to Layamon's Brut recounts its author's extensive travels "wide yond thas leode" (far and wide across the land) to gather the French, Latin and English books he used as source m
Authors throughout history have relied on the emotional make-up of their readers and audiences to make sense of the behaviours and actions of fictive characters. But how can a narrative voice containe
Written in the 1130s, Geoffrey's imaginative history of the Britons from Brutus to Cadwallader, the first work to recount the woes of Lear and the glittering career of Arthur, rapidly became a bestse
For four hundred years Sir Francis Drake's exploits have fascinated, inspired and entertained. Every age has sought to reconstruct the narrative of the great Elizabethan seafarer: the basis of his fa
