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  3. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

This series of critical books seeks to cover the whole area of literature written in the major medieval languages - the main European vernaculars, and medieval Latin and Greek - during the period c.600–1500. Its chief aim is to publish and stimulate fresh scholarship and criticism on medieval literature, special emphasis being placed on understanding major works of poetry, prose, and drama in relation to the contemporary culture and learning which fostered them.

  • General Editors: Marisa Galvez, Stanford University, California, Daniel Wakelin, University of Oxford
  • Editorial Boards: Anthony Bale, Birkbeck, University of London, Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Cambridge, Christopher C. Baswell, Barnard College and Columbia University, New York, Mary Carruthers, New York University, Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania, Roberta Frank, Yale University, Connecticut, Alastair Minnis, Yale University, Connecticut, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University, New York

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95 results in Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

Page 2 of 5

Chaucer's Scribes
  • London Textual Production, 1384–1432
  • Lawrence Warner
  • Published online:
    24 August 2018
    Print publication:
    13 September 2018
  • The 2004 announcement that Chaucer's scribe had been discovered resulted in a paradigm shift in medieval studies. Adam Pynkhurst dominated the classroom, became a fictional character, and led to suggestions that this identification should prompt the abandonment of our understanding of the development of London English and acceptance that the clerks of the Guildhall were promoting vernacular literature as part of a concerted political program. In this meticulously researched study, Lawrence Warner challenges the narratives and conclusions of recent scholarship. In place of the accepted story, Warner provides a fresh, more nuanced one in which many more scribes, anonymous ones, worked in conditions we are only beginning to understand. Bringing to light new information, not least, hundreds of documents in the hand of one of the most important fifteenth-century scribes of Chaucer and Langland, this book represents an important intervention in the field of Middle English studies.

The European Book in the Twelfth Century
  • Edited by Erik Kwakkel, Rodney Thomson
  • Published online:
    03 July 2018
    Print publication:
    26 July 2018
  • The 'long twelfth century' (1075–1225) was an era of seminal importance in the development of the book in medieval Europe and marked a high point in its construction and decoration. This comprehensive study takes the cultural changes that occurred during the 'twelfth-century Renaissance' as its point of departure to provide an overview of manuscript culture encompassing the whole of Western Europe. Written by senior scholars, chapters are divided into three sections: the technical aspects of making books; the processes and practices of reading and keeping books; and the transmission of texts in the disciplines that saw significant change in the period, including medicine, law, philosophy, liturgy, and theology. Richly illustrated, the volume provides the first in-depth account of book production as a European phenomenon.

Middle English Mouths
  • Late Medieval Medical, Religious and Literary Traditions
  • Katie L. Walter
  • Published online:
    26 June 2018
    Print publication:
    21 June 2018
  • The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.

Chaucer and the Subversion of Form
  • Edited by Thomas A. Prendergast, Jessica Rosenfeld
  • Published online:
    16 May 2018
    Print publication:
    31 May 2018
  • Responding to the lively resurgence of literary formalism, this volume delivers a timely and fresh exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Advancing 'new formalist' approaches, medieval scholars have begun to ask what happens when structure fails to yield meaning, probing the very limits of poetic organization. While Chaucer is acknowledged as a master of form, his work also foregrounds troubling questions about formal agency: the disparate forces of narrative and poetic practice, readerly reception, intertextuality, genre, scribal attention, patronage, and historical change. This definitive collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on Chaucer and a varied analysis of these problems, asking what happens when form is resisted by author or reader, when it fails by accident or by design, and how it can be misleading, errant, or even dangerous.

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia
  • Retying the Bonds
  • Jonas Wellendorf
  • Published online:
    23 March 2018
    Print publication:
    12 April 2018
  • The coming of Christianity to Northern Europe resulted in profound cultural changes. In the course of a few generations, new answers were given to fundamental existential questions and older notions were invalidated. Jonas Wellendorf's study, the first monograph in English on this subject, explores the medieval Scandinavian reception and re-interpretation of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. This original work draws on a range of primary sources ranging from Prose Edda and Saxo Grammaticus' History of the Danes to less well known literary works including the Saga of Barlaam and the Hauksbók manuscript (c.1300). By providing an in-depth analysis of often overlooked mythological materials, along with translations of all textual passages, Wellendorf delivers an accessible work that sheds new light on the ways in which the old gods were integrated into the Christian worldview of medieval Scandinavia.

The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature
  • Irina Dumitrescu
  • Published online:
    01 February 2018
    Print publication:
    25 January 2018
  • Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these difficulties are understood to be part of the dynamic process of pedagogy, not simply a sign of its failure. The book demonstrates the enduring concern of Anglo-Saxon authors with learning throughout Old English and Latin poems, hagiographies, histories, and schoolbooks.

The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain
  • Sara Harris
  • Published online:
    29 September 2017
    Print publication:
    12 October 2017
  • How was the complex history of Britain's languages understood by twelfth-century authors? This book argues that the social, political and linguistic upheavals that occurred in the wake of the Norman Conquest intensified later interest in the historicity of languages. An atmosphere of enquiry fostered vernacular literature's prestige and led to a newfound sense of how ancient languages could be used to convey historical claims. The vernacular hence became an important site for the construction and memorialisation of dynastic, institutional and ethnic identities. This study demonstrates the breadth of interest in the linguistic past across different social groups and the striking variety of genre used to depict it, including romance, legal translation, history, poetry and hagiography. Through a series of detailed case studies, Sara Harris shows how specific works represent key aspects of the period's imaginative engagement with English, Brittonic, Latin and French language development.

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse
  • The Pursuit of a Medieval Meter
  • Ian Cornelius
  • Published online:
    27 July 2017
    Print publication:
    20 July 2017
  • The poetry we call 'alliterative' is recorded in English from the seventh century until the sixteenth, and includes Caedmon's 'Hymn', Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman. These are some of the most admired works of medieval English literature, and also among the most enigmatic. The formal practice of alliterative poets exceeded the conceptual grasp of medieval literary theory; theorists are still playing catch-up today. This book explains the distinctive nature of alliterative meter, explores its differences from subsequent accentual-syllabic forms, and advances a reformed understanding of medieval English literary history. The startling formal variety of Piers Plowman and other Middle English alliterative poems comes into sharper focus when viewed in diachronic perspective: the meter was in transition; to understand it, we need to know where it came from and where it was headed at the moment it died out.

The Evolution of Verse Structure in Old and Middle English Poetry
  • From the Earliest Alliterative Poems to Iambic Pentameter
  • Geoffrey Russom
  • Published online:
    04 May 2017
    Print publication:
    07 April 2017
  • In this fascinating study, Geoffrey Russom traces the evolution of the major English poetic traditions by reference to the evolution of the English language, and considers how verse forms are born, how they evolve, and why they die. Using a general theory of poetic form employing universal principles rooted in the human language faculty, Russom argues that certain kinds of poetry tend to arise spontaneously in languages with identifiable characteristics. Language changes may require modification of metrical rules and may eventually lead to extinction of a meter. Russom's theory is applied to explain the development of English meters from the earliest alliterative poems in Old and Middle English and the transition to iambic meter in the Modern English period. This thorough yet accessible study provides detailed analyses of form in key poems, including Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a glossary of technical terms.

Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England
  • History, Poetry, and Performance
  • Sarah Elliott Novacich
  • Published online:
    06 April 2017
    Print publication:
    10 March 2017
  • Sarah Elliott Novacich explores how medieval thinkers pondered the ethics and pleasures of the archive. She traces three episodes of sacred history - the loss of Eden, the loading of Noah's ark, and the Harrowing of Hell - across works of poetry, performance records, and iconography in order to demonstrate how medieval artists turned to sacred history to think through aspects of cultural transmission. Performances of the loss of Eden blur the relationship between original and record; stories of Noah's ark foreground the difficulty of compiling inventories; and engagements with the Harrowing of Hell suggest the impossibility of separating the past from the present. Reading Middle English plays alongside chronicles, poetry, and works of visual art, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England considers how poetic form, staging logistics, and the status of performance all contribute to our understanding of the ways in which medieval thinkers imagined the archive.

English Alliterative Verse
  • Poetic Tradition and Literary History
  • Eric Weiskott
  • Published online:
    09 November 2016
    Print publication:
    27 October 2016
  • English Alliterative Verse tells the story of the medieval poetic tradition that includes Beowulf, Piers Plowman, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, stretching from the eighth century, when English poetry first appeared in manuscripts, to the sixteenth century, when alliterative poetry ceased to be composed. Eric Weiskott draws on the study of meter to challenge the traditional division of medieval English literary history into Old English and Middle English periods. The two halves of the alliterative tradition, divided by the Norman Conquest of 1066, have been studied separately since the nineteenth century; this book uses the history of metrical form and its cultural meanings to bring the two halves back together. In combining literary history and metrical description into a new kind of history he calls 'verse history', Weiskott reimagines the historical study of poetics.

Imagining Medieval English
  • Language Structures and Theories, 500–1500
  • Edited by Tim William Machan
  • Published online:
    18 December 2015
    Print publication:
    25 January 2016
  • Imagining Medieval English is concerned with how we think about language, and simply through the process of thinking about it, give substance to an array of phenomena, including grammar, usage, variation, change, regional dialects, sociolects, registers, periodization, and even language itself. Leading scholars in the field explore conventional conceptualizations of medieval English, and consider possible alternatives and their implications for cultural as well as linguistic history. They explore not only the language's structural traits, but also the sociolinguistic and theoretical expectations that frame them and make them real. Spanning the period from 500 to 1500, and drawing on a wide range of examples, the chapters discuss topics such as medieval multilingualism, colloquial medieval English, standard and regional varieties, and the post-medieval reception of Old and Middle English. Together, they argue that what medieval English is, depends, in part, on who's looking at it, how, when and why.

The Medieval Manuscript Book
  • Cultural Approaches
  • Edited by Michael Johnston, Michael Van Dussen
  • Published online:
    05 August 2015
    Print publication:
    10 August 2015
  • Traditional scholarship on manuscripts has tended to focus on issues concerning their production and has shown comparatively little interest in the cultural contexts of the manuscript book. The Medieval Manuscript Book redresses this by focusing on aspects of the medieval book in its cultural situations. Written by experts in the study of the handmade book before print, this volume combines bibliographical expertise with broader insights into the theory and praxis of manuscript study in areas from bibliography to social context, linguistics to location, and archaeology to conservation. The focus of the contributions ranges widely, from authorship to miscellaneity, and from vernacularity to digital facsimiles of manuscripts. Taken as a whole, these essays make the case that to understand the manuscript book it must be analyzed in all its cultural complexity, from production to transmission to its continued adaptation.

Romance and History
  • Imagining Time from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period
  • Edited by Jon Whitman
  • Published online:
    18 December 2014
    Print publication:
    08 January 2015
  • To what extent can imaginative events be situated in time and history? From the medieval to the early modern period, this question is intriguingly explored in the expansive literary genre of romance. This collective study, edited by Jon Whitman, is the first systematic investigation of that formative process during more than four hundred years. While concentrating on changing configurations of romance itself, the volume examines a number of important related reference points, from epic to chronicle to critical theory. Recalling but qualifying conventional approaches to the three 'matters' of Rome, Britain, and France, the far-reaching inquiry engages major works in a variety of idioms, including Latin, French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish. With contributions from a range of internationally distinguished scholars, this unique volume offers a carefully coordinated framework for enriching not only the reading of romance, but also the understanding of changing attitudes toward the temporal process at large.

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft
  • English Manuscripts 1375–1510
  • Daniel Wakelin
  • Published online:
    05 November 2014
    Print publication:
    06 November 2014
  • This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

Logical Fictions in Medieval Literature and Philosophy
  • Virginie Greene
  • Published online:
    05 November 2014
    Print publication:
    23 October 2014
  • In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new ways of storytelling and inventing fictions appeared in the French-speaking areas of Europe. This new art still influences our global culture of fiction. Virginie Greene explores the relationship between fiction and the development of neo-Aristotelian logic during this period through a close examination of seminal literary and philosophical texts by major medieval authors, such as Anselm of Canterbury, Abélard, and Chrétien de Troyes. This study of Old French logical fictions encourages a broader theoretical reflection about fiction as a universal human trait and a defining element of the history of Western philosophy and literature. Additional close readings of classical Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and modern analytic philosophy including the work of Bertrand Russell and Rudolf Carnap, demonstrate peculiar traits of Western rationalism and expose its ambivalent relationship to fiction.

The Cantar de mio Cid
  • Poetic Creation in its Economic and Social Contexts
  • Joseph J. Duggan
  • Published online:
    05 August 2014
    Print publication:
    28 July 1989
  • In this study, Joseph Duggan interprets the Cantar de mio Cid as a work that transmutes moral values first into the economic values of a gift economy, then into genealogical values. Considering the poem's distortions of history more significant than its retention of historical features, Duggan ascribes its depiction of the penurious hero who acquires wealth, power, and kinship alliances to the Castilian monarchy's preoccupations with furthering the victory of Las Navas de Tolosa. He maintains that the Cantar de mio Cid was composed around the year 1200 in substantially the form in which we have it now, in the course of a singer's performance. Arguing against a number of tendencies in Cid scholarship, Professor Duggan denies the necessity of assuming that the poet was a man of learning, that he was directly influenced by French literature, or that he was familiar with written law.

Narrating the Crusades
  • Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature
  • Lee Manion
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    24 April 2014
  • In Narrating the Crusades, Lee Manion examines crusading's narrative-generating power as it is reflected in English literature from c.1300 to 1604. By synthesizing key features of crusade discourse into one paradigm, this book identifies and analyzes the kinds of stories crusading produced in England, uncovering new evidence for literary and historical research as well as genre studies. Surveying medieval romances including Richard Cœur de Lion, Sir Isumbras, Octavian, and The Sowdone of Babylone alongside historical practices, chronicles, and treatises, this study shows how different forms of crusading literature address cultural concerns about collective and private action. These insights extend to early modern writing, including Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and Shakespeare's Othello, providing a richer understanding of how crusading's narrative shaped the beginning of the modern era. This first full-length examination of English crusading literature will be an essential resource for the study of crusading in literary and historical contexts.

The Myth of Piers Plowman
  • Constructing a Medieval Literary Archive
  • Lawrence Warner
  • Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    06 March 2014
  • Addressing the history of the production and reception of the great medieval poem, Piers Plowman, Lawrence Warner reveals the many ways in which scholars, editors and critics over the centuries created their own speculative narratives about the poem, which gradually came to be regarded as factually true. Warner begins by considering the possibility that Langland wrote a romance about a werewolf and bear-suited lovers, and he goes on to explore the methods of the poem's localization, and medieval readers' particular interest in its Latinity. Warner shows that the 'Protestant Piers' was a reaction against the poem's oral mode of transmission, reveals the extensive eighteenth-century textual scholarship on the poem and contextualizes its first modernization. This lively account of Piers Plowman challenges the way the poem has traditionally been read and understood. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Books Online and via Knowledge Unlatched.

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England
  • Emily V. Thornbury
  • Published online:
    05 February 2014
    Print publication:
    30 January 2014
  • Combining historical, literary and linguistic evidence from Old English and Latin, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England creates a new, more complete picture of who and what pre-Conquest English poets really were. It includes a study of Anglo-Saxon words for 'poet' and the first list of named poets in Anglo-Saxon England. Its survey of known poets identifies four social roles that poets often held - teachers, scribes, musicians and courtiers - and explores the kinds of poetry created by these individuals. The book also offers a new model for understanding the role of social groups in poets' experience: it argues that the presence or absence of a poetic community affected the work of Anglo-Saxon poets at all levels, from minute technical detail to the portrayal of character. This focus on poetic communities provides a new way to understand the intersection of history and literature in the Middle Ages.

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