No catches, no fine print just unadulterated book loving, with your favourite books saved to your own digital bookshelf.
New members get entered into our monthly draw to win £100 to spend in your local bookshop Plus lots lots more…
Find out moreUsing a combination of formalist and psychology-based approaches, this work examines the triple knowledge of subjectivity, body, and language in medieval imaginative literature.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This book explores the metaphor of topography as a mechanism for the inscription of gender roles in Arthurian romance.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This work examines a centuries-long intellectual tradition in the early Latin church linking the imagery associated with the opening of the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse with programs of ecclesiastical expansion and ascetic reform.
This book argues that far from preaching traditional, otherworldly ideals, the authors or these religious works were deeply engaged in the social, political, and spiritual issues that characterized the Holy Roman Empire at a time of radical transformation.
This book examines the method of meditative reading encouraged by John Cassian (c. 360-435) in his ascetic writings, the bulk of which are fictive dialogues that purportedly record the instruction he had received from Egyptial Christian monks. This instruction was at its core an interactive experience, depending upon both the discernment of the master and diligent application of instruction by the student. Driver examines Cassian's understanding of the act of reading and suggests the implications of this for Cassian's monastic teaching and it interprets Cassian's method of reading in light of contemporary discussions of reading and the self.
Traditional scholarship on the kings' sagas has tended to focus on the textual histories and interrelationships between the various twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scandinavian manuscripts. Thus previous scholars have striven to ascertain chronology, dating, and potential literary borrowings between the various native medieval manuscripts without considering the possibility of foreign textual influences on native literary traditions. Non-Native Sources for the Scandinavian Kings' Sagas prompts scholars to look beyond the borders of medieval Scandinavia in the attempt to account for seemingly inexplicable literary motifs and historical accounts.
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Nickolaus provides the readers with a concise critical discussion of the courtly love debate, broad historical and comparative analysis, and a model that explains, at the level of plot, rhetoric, and ideology, the proper place of amorous motifs in the context of prevailing Christian doctrines and attitudes.
This book studies the phenomena of monsters and marvels from the time of Pliny the Elder through the 14th century.
First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Using one man as a lens, a man known variously as Folquet, Folques, Folco, and Folc, it will examine some of the important changes and developments of the period from a new, more human, perspective.
Larson examines the changing relations between lords and peasants in post-Black Death Durham. This was a time period of upheaval and change, part of the transition from 'medieval' to 'modern.' Many historians have argued about the nature of this change and its causes, often putting forth a single all-encompassing model; Larson presses for the importance of individual choice and action, resulting in a flexible, human framework that provides a more appropriate explanation for the many paths followed in this period. The theoretical side is balanced by an 'on the ground' examination of rural life in Durham-- an attempt to capture the raw emotions and decisions of the period. No one has really examined this; most studies are speculative, relying on theory or statistics, rather than tracing the history of real people, both in the immediate aftermath of the plague, and in the longer term. Durham is fortunate in that records survive in abundance for this period; most other studies of rural society end at 1300 or 1348. As such, this book fills a major gap in medieval English history while at the same time grappling with major theories of change for this transformative period.
In his Plaint of Nature (De planctu Naturae), Alan of Lille bases much of his argument against sin in general and homosexuality in particular on the claim that both amount to bad grammar. The book explores the philosophical uses of grammar that were so formative of Alan's thinking in major writers of the preceding generations, including Garland the Computist, St. Anselm, and Peter Abelard. Many of the linguistic theories on which these thinkers rely come from Priscian, an influential sixth-century grammarian, who relied more on the ancient tradition of Stoic linguistic theory than the Aristotelian one in elaborating his grammatical theory. Against this backdrop, the book provides a reading of Prudentius' Psychomachia and presents an analysis of allegory in light of Stoic linguistic theory that contrasts other modern theories of allegorical signification and readings of Prudentius. The book establishes that Stoic linguistic theory is compatible with and likely partially formative of both the allegorical medium itself and the ideas expressed within it, in particular as they appeared in the allegories of Prudentius, Boethius, and Alan.
Pestilence in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature examines three diseases--leprosy, bubonic plague, and syphilis--to show how doctors, priests, and literary authors from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance interpreted certain illnesses through a moral filter. Lacking knowledge about the transmission of contagious diseases, doctors and priests saw epidemic diseases as a punishment sent by God for human transgression. Accordingly, their job was to properly read sickness in relation to the sin. By examining different readings of specific illnesses, this book shows how the social construction of epidemic diseases formed a kind of narrative wherein man attempts to take the control of the disease out of God's hands by connecting epidemic diseases to the sins of carnality.
This book explores the historical and imaginary representation of the Saracen, or Muslim, in French writings from 1100 to 1500.
This book explains how the authority Thomas Aquinas's theological teachings grew out of the doctrinal controversies surrounding it within the Dominican Order. The adoption and eventual promotion of the teachings of Aquinas by the Order of Preachers ran counter to every other current running through the late thirteenth-century Church; most scholastics, the Dominican Order included, were wary of the his unconventional teachings. Despite this, the Dominican Order was propelled along their solitary via Thomas by conflicts between two groups of magistri: Aquinas's early Dominican followers and their more conservative neo-Augustinian brethren. This debate reached its climax in a series of bitter polemical battles between Hervaeus Natalis, the most prominent of early defenders, and Durandus of St. Pourcain, the last major Dominican thinker to attack Aquinas's teachings openly. Elizabeth Lowe offers a vivid illustration of this major shift in the Dominican intellectual tradition.
First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This book focuses on the use of the past in two senses. First, it looks at the way in which medieval texts from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries discussed the past: how they presented history, what kinds of historical narratives they employed, and what anxieties gathered around the practice of historiography. Second, this study examines twentieth-century interactions with this textual past, and the problems that have arisen for critics trying to negotiate this radically different textual culture. Lauryn Mayer examines chronicle histories that have been largely ignored by scholars, bringing these neglected texts into dialogue with contemporaneous canonical works such as Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, the Morte Darthur, Beowulf, and The Battle of Maldon.
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
First published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.