Bøger i Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture serien

Modern readers will welcome a Jungian psychoanalytical approach to Dante's Divine Comedy, which traces both instinctual and spiritual impulses in the human psyche.

When James VI of Scotland and I of England proclaimed himself King of Great Britain he proposed a merger of parliaments as he had joined two crowns in his own person ascending the throne of England in 1603. For James, the Cambro-Celtic past led to an Anglo-Scottish present, and Wales stood as the ideal.¿Although the parliamentary union of Great Britain was not initiated for another 100 years, Parliament¿s denial failed to deter James from wanting a Great Britain, and R. A.¿s play The Valiant Welshman became part of the public spectacle of unity required to nurture James¿s dream. The Valiant Welshman, the Scottish James, and the Formation of Great Britain¿considers national, regional and linguistic identity and explores how R.A.¿s play promotes Wales, serves King James and reveals what it means to be Welsh and Scots in a newly forming "Great Britain."

This study examines the various means of becoming empathetic and using this knowledge to explain the epistemic import of the characters¿ interaction in the works written by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries. By attuning oneself to another¿s expressive phenomena, the empathizer acquires an inter- and intrapersonal knowledge that exposes the limitations of hyperbole, custom, or unbridled passion to explain the profundity of their bond. Understanding the substantive meaning of the characters¿ discourse and narrative context discloses their motivations and how they view themselves. The aim is to explore the place of empathy in select late medieval and early modern portrayals of the body and mind and explicate the role they play in forging an intimate rapport.

This volume considers the reception in the early modern period of four popular medieval myths of nationhood ¿ the legends of Brutus, Albina, Scota and Arthur ¿ tracing their intertwined literary and historiographical afterlives. The book thus speaks to several connected areas and is timely on a number of fronts: its dialogue with current investigations into early modern historiography and the period¿s relationship to its past, its engagement with pressing issues in identity and gender studies, and its analysis of the formation of British national origin stories at a time when modern Britain is seriously considering its own future as a nation.

Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer¿s style. Indeed, Chaucer¿s decision to write in Middle English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the emergence of romance and of the modern novel. As a result, if Chaucer cannot be thought of as the father of English poetry, he is, however, the father of English prose and one of the main artisans of what Mikhail Bakhtin called the polyphonic novel.

Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer¿s Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer¿s tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other ¿ conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like the macabre sprawl of conflict in the Canterbury Tales, this book brings together a number of conflicting modes of thinking and writing through the surprising and perhaps disconcerting use of ¿shadow¿ chapters that speak to or against the four ¿central¿ chapters, creating both dialogue and interruption.

This volume offers the author¿s central articles on the medieval and early modern history of cartography for the first time in English translation. A first group of essays gives an overview of medieval cartography and illustrates the methods of cartographers. Another analyzes world maps and travel accounts in relation to mapped spaces. A third examines land surveying, cartographical practices of exploration, and the production of Portolan atlases.

In medieval England, women in labor wrapped birth girdles around their abdomens to protect themselves and their unborn children. These parchment or paper rolls replicated the "girdle relics" of the Virgin Mary and other saints loaned to queens and noblewomen, extending childbirth protection to women of all classes. This book examines the texts and images of nine English birth girdles produced between the reigns of Richard II and Henry VIII. Cultural artifacts of lay devotion within the birthing chamber, the birth girdles offered the solace and promise of faith to the parturient woman and her attendants amid religious dissent, political upheaval, recurring epidemics, and the onset of print.

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of the self associated with the development of humanism in England, and to strategies for both inclusion and exclusion in structuring the early modern nation state. It addresses writings about rhetoric and behavior from 1495-1660, beginning with Erasmus' work on sermo or the conversational rhetoric between friends, which considers the reader as an 'absent audience', and following the transference of this stance to a politics whose broadening democratic constituency needed a legitimate structure for governance-at-a-distance. Unusually, the book brings together the impact on behavior of these new concepts about rhetoric, with the growth of the publishing industry, and the emergence of capitalism and of modern medicine. It explores the effects on the formation of the 'subject' and political legitimation of the early liberal nation state. It also lays new ground for scholarship concerned with what is left out of both selfhood and politics by that state, studying examples of a parallel development of the 'self' defined by friendship not only from educated male writers, but also from women writers and writers concerned with socially 'middling' and laboring people and the poor.

Travel narratives and historical works shaped the perception of Muslims and the East in the Victorian and post-Victorian periods. Analyzing the discourses on Muslims which originated in the European Middle Ages, the first part of the book discusses the troubled legacy of the encounters between the East and the West and locates the nineteenth-century texts concerning the Saracens and their lands in the liminal space between history and fiction. Drawing on the nineteenth-century models, the second part of the book looks at fictional and non-fictional works of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century which re-established the "Oriental obsession," stimulating dread and resentment, and even more strongly setting the Civilized West against the Barbaric East. Here medieval metaphorical enemies of Mankind - the World, the Flesh and the Devil - reappear in different contexts: the world of immigration, of white women desiring Muslim men, and the present-day "freedom fighters."

This project presents the 700-year biography of a Latin chronicle codex, from the Abbey of St-Denis, through the collections of kings and dukes, to today's British Library.

Sacred Journeys in the Counter-Reformationexamines long-distance pilgrimages toancient, international shrines in northwestern Europe in the Catholic and CounterReformations.

This book follows the idea that although Geoffrey Chaucer, translator, rhetorician and courtly poet, has long been considered by the critics as the "father of English poetry," his style and use of languages ought to give him the title of "father of the English novel."

This book explores the symptomatic body in the Canterbury Tales through the spectacle of hysteria, the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and the psychosis of paranoia.

A characterological study of the standards of measure and the nature of fame of the renowned figures in Antony and Cleopatra, juxtaposed to the origins and nature of Shakespeare's fame.

This study demonstrates the influence ofDante Alighieri to be a subtle yet essentialpart of the poetic heritage of Sceve's Delie(1544).

A fresh contextual reading of the four Middle English "Gawain" poems that situates them within the rich tradition of fourteenth-century English anticlericalism.

The volume represents the second part of Rosenthal's cataloging of historical scholarship on Ricardian, Lancastrian, and Yorkist England, covering categories from political and legal history to social and intellectual history and the arts.

3 volume set parallel-text edition that contains all four versions of Piers Plowman specifically designed to facilitate study of the parallel text (Vol I) alongside both the textual notes (Vol II, Part 1) and the commentary/glossary (Vol II, Part 2), and is intended to make the entire edition available to as many students as possible.

Edition of the Latin letters of the late fifteenth-century German schoolmaster whose career spanned an era of radical curriculum reform in the arts faculties at schools and universities, where the centuries-old program of scholasticism was being replaced by a program based on the Italian studia humanitatis.

Study of twenty-eight French nonbiblical hagiographic mystery plays from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the approach is intended to strengthen a comparative analysis of relatively similar texts created within a particular cultural setting.

In this volume Beer demonstrates the sophisticated stylistic propensities of Early French prose, an effort long needed that does a great service to all French literary scholars.

New bibliographic guide to Occitan and troubadour literature provides a definitive survey of the field of Occitan literary studies - from the earliest enigmatic texts to the 15th-century works of Jordi de Sant Jordi. Will become the essential source for Occitan literary studies worldwide.

This study interrogates the figuration of women within the narrative of Spenser's culturally encyclopedic romance-epic, The Faerie Queene.

The first full translation of the final book of Giovanni Villani's important "Cronica Fiorentina" - includes introduction, annotations and index.

This collection critically examines translations of Boethius's "Consolatio" not only into English and German but also into Dutch, Italian, Polish, Hebrew, Greek and Korean.

Concepts of demon possession and exorcism provided a outlet for expressing the psychological, biological, and sociopolitical dysfunctions of society. A reexamination of the available sources describing the possessed and a study of the currently recognized medical and psychiatric conditions that may be relevant to and resemble medieval possession.