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Sir Isumbras, Octavian, Sir Eglamour of Artois, and Sir Tryamour are important works in a major literary development of the fourteenth century: the flourishing of Middle English popular romance. These four narratives were among the most popular; all survive in multiple manuscripts and continued to circulate in prints through the sixteenth century. All were composed in the northeast Midlands in the fifty years between 1325 and 1375, and they appear together in several manuscripts. The tale the romances tell-of exiled queens, orphaned children, and penitent fathers-was one of the most prevalent medieval stories. Sometimes called the Constance/Eustace legend (after two well-known pious versions), its influence can be seen in numerous romances.
Fitted with ample introductions, notes, and glosses, this volume will make an excellent text for a class of any level on Middle English romance. This excellent edition includes King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Bevis of Hampton, and Athelston. These romances all deal with the Matter of Britain-that is, they celebrate action and adventure tales taking place in England. Featuring all the hallmarks of a good romance, these works include disinherited nobles, thrilling battles, love stories, dragons, and all sorts of marvels and adventures. Spanning the mid thirteenth to the late fourteenth century, these works provide an excellent cross section of the wonderful world of Middle English romances featuring the escapades of their fantastical countrymen.
This Norton Critical Edition presents significant examples of one of the most important bodies of English poetry written before the Renaissance.
Our current ecological crises compel us not only to understand how contemporary media shapes our conceptions of human relationships with the environment, but also to examine the historical genealogies of such perspectives. Written during the onset of the Little Ice Age in Britain, Middle English romances provide a fascinating window into the worldviews of popular vernacular literature (and its audiences) at the close of the Middle Ages. Andrew M. Richmond shows how literary conventions of romances shaped and were in turn influenced by contemporary perspectives on the natural world. These popular texts also reveal widespread concern regarding the damaging effects of human actions and climate change. The natural world was a constant presence in the writing, thoughts, and lives of the audiences and authors of medieval English romance – and these close readings reveal that our environmental concerns go back further in our history and culture than we think.
In this book, Marijane Osborn translates into modern English nine lively medieval verse romances, in a form that both reflects the original and makes the romances inviting to a modern audience. All nine tales contain elements of magic: shapeshifters, powerful fairies, trees that are portals to another world, and enchanted clothing and armor. Many of the tales also feature powerful women characters, while others include representations of “Saracens.” The tales address issues of enduring interest and concern, and also address sexuality, agency, and identity formation in unexpected ways.
As one of the most important, influential and capacious genres of the middle ages, the romance was exploited for a variety of social and cultural reasons: to celebrate and justify war and conflict, chivalric ideologies, and national, local and regional identities; to rationalize contemporary power structures, and identify the present with the legendary past; to align individual desires and aspirations with social virtues. But the romance in turn exploited available figures of value, appropriating the tropes and strategies of religious and historical writing, and cannibalizing and recreating its own materials for heightened ideological effect. The essays in this volume consider individual romances, groups of writings and the genre more widely, elucidating a variety of exploitative manoeuvres in terms of text, context, and intertext. Contributors: Neil Cartlidge, Ivana Djordjevic, Judith Weiss, Melissa Furrow, Rosalind Field, Diane Vincent, Corinne Saunders, Arlyn Diamond, Anna Caughey, Laura Ashe
This book offers a much-needed consideration of Melusine within medieval and contemporary theories of space, memory, and gender. The Middle English Melusine offers a particularly rich source for such a study, as it presents the story of a powerful fairy/human woman who desires a full human life—and death—within a literary tradition that is more friendly to women’s agency than its continental counterparts. After establishing a “textual habitus of wonder,” Jan Shaw explores the tale in relation to a range of Middle English traditions including love and marriage, the spatial practices of women, the operation of individual and collective memory, and the legacies of patrimony. Melusine emerges as a complex figure, representing a multifaceted feminine subject that furthers our understanding of Middle English women’s sense of self in the world.
This Companion presents fifteen original and engaging essays by leading scholars on one of the most influential genres of Western literature. Chapters describe the origins of early verse romance in twelfth-century French and Anglo-Norman courts and analyze the evolution of verse and prose romance in France, Germany, England, Italy, and Spain throughout the Middle Ages. The volume introduces a rich array of traditions and texts and offers fresh perspectives on the manuscript context of romance, the relationship of romance to other genres, popular romance in urban contexts, romance as mirror of familiar and social tensions, and the representation of courtly love, chivalry, 'other' worlds and gender roles. Together the essays demonstrate that European romances not only helped to promulgate the ideals of elite societies in formation, but also held those values up for questioning. An introduction, a chronology and a bibliography of texts and translations complete this lively, useful overview.
This book presents linguistic evidence for many aspects of pre-Christian and early medieval European culture.
This book exposes the ways in which ostensibly normative sexualities depend upon queerness to shore up their claims of privilege. Through readings of such classic texts as The Canterbury Tales and Eger and Grime , Tison Pugh explains how sexual normativity can often be claimed only after queerness has been rejected.