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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 3 of 5

The Book of Memory
  • A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture
  • 2nd edition
  • Mary Carruthers
  • Published online:
    05 January 2014
    Print publication:
    29 April 2008
  • Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion).

Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature
  • Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular
  • Martin Eisner
  • Published online:
    05 October 2013
    Print publication:
    12 September 2013
  • Giovanni Boccaccio played a pivotal role in the extraordinary emergence of the Italian literary tradition in the fourteenth century, not only as author of the Decameron, but also as scribe of Dante, Petrarch and Cavalcanti. Using a single codex written entirely in Boccaccio's hand, Martin Eisner brings together material philology and literary history to reveal the multiple ways Boccaccio authorizes this vernacular literary tradition. Each chapter offers a novel interpretation of Boccaccio as a biographer, storyteller, editor and scribe, who constructs arguments, composes narratives, compiles texts and manipulates material forms to legitimize and advance a vernacular literary canon. Situating these philological activities in the context of Boccaccio's broader reflections on poetry in the Decameron and the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the book produces a new portrait of Boccaccio that integrates his vernacular and Latin works, while also providing a new context for understanding his fictions.

The Evolution of Arthurian Romance
  • The Verse Tradition from Chrétien to Froissart
  • Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann
  • Translated by Margaret Middleton, Roger Middleton
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    28 May 1998
  • This 1998 study serves as a contribution to both reception history, examining the medieval response to Chrétien's poetry, and genre history, suveying the evolution of Arthurian verse romance in French. It describes the evolutionary changes taking place between Chrétien's Eric et Enide and Froissart's Meliador, the first and last examples of the genre, and is unique in placing Chrétien's work, not as the unequalled masterpieces of the whole of Arthurian literature, but as the starting point for the history of the genre, which can subsequently be traced over a period of two centuries in the French-speaking world. Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's study was first published in German in 1985, but her radical argument that we need urgently to redraw the lines on the literary and linguistic map of medieval Britain and France is only now being made available in English.

From England to Bohemia
  • Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages
  • Michael Van Dussen
  • Published online:
    05 April 2012
    Print publication:
    01 March 2012
  • This is the first book-length study of the influential cultural and religious exchanges which took place between England and Bohemia following Richard II's marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. The ensuing growth in communication between the two kingdoms initially enabled new ideas of religion to flourish in both countries but eventually led the English authorities to suppress heresy. This exciting project has been made possible by the discovery of new manuscripts after the opening up of Czech archives over the past twenty years. It is the only study to analyze the Lollard-Hussite exchange with an eye to the new opportunities for international travel and correspondence to which the Great Schism gave rise, and examines how the use of propaganda and The Council of Constance brought an end to this communication by securing the condemnation of heretics such as John Wyclif.

The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes
  • Once and Future Fictions
  • Donald Maddox
  • Published online:
    07 October 2011
    Print publication:
    26 April 1991
  • Chrétien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary traditions to a highly sophisticated literary cultivation of the Old French verse romance. While examining individually each of Chretien's five Arthurian romances, Donald Maddox looks at their coherence as a group, suggesting that their intertextual relations lend a harmony of meaning and design to the ensemble as a whole. Central to his argument is the focus on customs, which provide unity within as well as among the works while conveying an acute sense of the vulnerability and dissolution of feudal institutions in an age of social crisis and transition.

Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland
  • Allegories of Authority
  • Antony J. Hasler
  • Published online:
    04 April 2011
    Print publication:
    10 March 2011
  • This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to treat English and Scottish material of its period together, and responds to European literary contexts, the dialogue between vernacular and Latin matter, and current critical theory. In so doing it claims that public and occasional writing evokes a counter-discourse in the secrecies and subversions of medieval love-fictions. The result is a poetry that queries and at times cancels the very authority to speak that it so proudly promotes.

The Theatre of Medieval Europe
  • New Research in Early Drama
  • Edited by Eckehard Simon
  • Published online:
    29 March 2011
    Print publication:
    25 January 1991
  • The Theatre of Medieval Europe brings together the work of thirteen internationally recognized scholars of early drama to give a comprehensive account of recent findings in the field. Whilst reflecting the large body of research on English drama, the book widens the focus of its survey to represent the continental theatre of the period, with a succession of essays covering England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, central Europe and the Low Countries. In addition, it deals with Latin musical and liturgical drama, and addresses both the archival and stage-orientated aspects of theatre research. In reviewing the field in this way, this collection not only offers an account of recent discoveries across a range of countries and types of drama, but also suggests the comparative and interdisciplinary ground on which these fields of research may increasingly come to meet and cross-fertilise one another in the future. A major feature of the book is its authoritative, chronological and fully-indexed bibliography, which should serve as an invaluable guide to the most significant contributions in the field.

Living Death in Medieval French and English Literature
  • Jane Gilbert
  • Published online:
    01 March 2011
    Print publication:
    17 February 2011
  • Medieval literature contains many figures caught at the interface between life and death - the dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize or desire their own deaths. Jane Gilbert's original study examines the ways in which certain medieval literary texts, both English and French, use these 'living dead' to think about existential, ethical and political issues. In doing so, she shows powerful connections between works otherwise seen as quite disparate, including Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women, the Chanson de Roland and the poems of Francois Villon. Written for researchers and advanced students of medieval French and English literature, this book provides original, provocative interpretations of canonical medieval texts in the light of influential modern theories, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, presented in an accessible and lively way.

Vernacular Translation in Dante's Italy
  • Illiterate Literature
  • Alison Cornish
  • Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    23 December 2010
  • Translation and commentary are often associated with institutions and patronage; but in Italy around the time of Dante, widespread vernacular translation was mostly on the spontaneous initiative of individuals. While Dante is usually the starting point for histories of vernacular translation in Europe, this book demonstrates that The Divine Comedy places itself in opposition to a vast vernacular literature already in circulation among its readers. Alison Cornish explores the anxiety of vernacularization as expressed by translators and contemporary authors, the prevalence of translation in religious experience, the role of scribal mediation, the influence of the Italian reception of French literature on that literature, and how translating into the vernacular became a project of nation-building only after its virtual demise during the Humanist period. Vernacular translation was a phenomenon with which all authors in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe - from Brunetto Latini to Giovanni Boccaccio - had to contend.

Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry
  • Love after Aristotle
  • Jessica Rosenfeld
  • Published online:
    04 February 2011
    Print publication:
    02 December 2010
  • Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.

Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England
  • Shannon Gayk
  • Published online:
    17 November 2010
    Print publication:
    30 September 2010
  • Focusing on the period between the Wycliffite critique of images and Reformation iconoclasm, Shannon Gayk investigates the sometimes complementary and sometimes fraught relationship between vernacular devotional writing and the religious image. She examines how a set of fifteenth-century writers, including Lollard authors, John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, John Capgrave, and Reginald Pecock, translated complex clerical debates about the pedagogical and spiritual efficacy of images and texts into vernacular settings and literary forms. These authors found vernacular discourse to be a powerful medium for explaining and reforming contemporary understandings of visual experience. In its survey of the function of literary images and imagination, the epistemology of vision, the semiotics of idols, and the authority of written texts, this study reveals a fifteenth century that was as much an age of religious and literary exploration, experimentation, and reform as it was an age of regulation.

Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition
  • Siân Echard
  • Published online:
    10 November 2010
    Print publication:
    10 September 1998
  • Arthurian literature is a popular field, but most of the published work focuses on the vernacular tradition. This book, uniquely, looks at Latin Arthurian works. Geoffrey of Monmouth is treated at length and this is the first book to put him in a context which includes other Latin histories, monastic chronicles, saints' lives and other Latin prose Arthurian narratives. Like Geoffrey's works, most can be associated with the Angevin court of Henry II and by placing these works against the court background, this book both introduces a new set of texts into the Arthurian canon and suggests a way to understand their place in that tradition. The unfamiliar works are summarized for the reader, and there are extensive quotations, with translations, throughout. The result is a thorough exploration of Latin Arthurian narrative in the foundational period for the Arthurian tradition.

Writing to the King
  • Nation, Kingship and Literature in England, 1250–1350
  • David Matthews
  • Published online:
    07 May 2010
    Print publication:
    01 April 2010
  • In the century before Chaucer a new language of political critique emerged. In political verse of the period, composed in Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English, poets write as if addressing the king himself, drawing on their sense of the rights granted by Magna Carta. These apparent appeals to the sovereign increase with the development of parliament in the late thirteenth century and the emergence of the common petition, and become prominent, in an increasingly sophisticated literature, during the political crises of the early fourteenth century. However, very little of this writing was truly directed to the king. As David Matthews shows in this book, the form of address was a rhetorical stance revealing much about the position from which writers were composing, the audiences they wished to reach, and their construction of political and national subjects.

Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing
  • Edwin D. Craun
  • Published online:
    15 April 2010
    Print publication:
    18 February 2010
  • The late medieval Church obliged all Christians to rebuke the sins of others, especially those who had power to discipline in Church and State: priests, confessors, bishops, judges, the Pope. This practice, in which the injured party had to confront the wrong-doer directly and privately, was known as fraternal correction. Edwin Craun examines how pastoral writing instructed Christians to make this corrective process effective by avoiding slander, insult, and hypocrisy. He explores how John Wyclif and his followers expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against mendicants and clerical wealth. Finally, he traces how major English reformist writing - Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Book of Margery Kempe - expanded the practice to justify their protests, to protect themselves from repressive elements in the late Ricardian and Lancastrian Church and State, and to urge their readers to mount effective protests against religious, social, and political abuses.

Troubadours and Irony
  • Simon Gaunt
  • Published online:
    23 February 2010
    Print publication:
    18 May 1989
  • From Petrarch and Dante to Pound and Eliot, the influence of the troubadours on European poetry has been profound. They have rightly stimulated a vast amount of critical writing, but the majority of modern critics see the troubadour tradition as a corpus of earnestly serious and confessional love poetry, with little or no humour. Troubadours and Irony re-examines the work of five early troubadours, namely Marcabru, Bernart Marti, Peire d'Alvernha, Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Giraut de Borneil, to argue that the courtly poetry of southern France in the twelfth century was permeated with irony and that many troubadour songs were playful, laced with humorous sexual innuendo and far from serious; attention is also drawn to the large corpus of texts that are not love poems, but comic or satirical songs.

Piers Plowman and the New Anticlericalism
  • Wendy Scase
  • Published online:
    09 February 2010
    Print publication:
    15 June 1989
  • The medieval English poem Piers Plowman is noted for its attacks on the clergy. The later fourteenth century, when the poem was written, is often thought of as an anticlerical age. This book is an extended investigation of the anticlericalism of the poem. Dr Scase challenges the usual assumption that long-established anticlerical traditions continued unchanged in the conflicts of this period. She describes and analyses important but little-known medieval polemics and satires (many of them only available in manuscript), tracing the emergence of a distinctive 'new anticlericalism' which entailed nothing less than the making of a new anticlerical literature. With the writing of Piers Plowman, she argues, this literary challenge was accepted. Always referring closely to the contemporary controversies, and with constant attention to the detail of the text, she reveals the significance of the poem's anticlericalism. Informative and rigorously argued, this book is intended to convince literary critics and historians alike.

Dante and the Mystical Tradition
  • Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia
  • Steven Botterill
  • Published online:
    15 January 2010
    Print publication:
    05 May 1994
  • In this study, Steven Botterill explores the intellectual relationship between the greatest poet of the fourteenth century, Dante, and the greatest spiritual writer of the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux. Botterill analyses the narrative episode involving Bernard as a character in the closing cantos of the Paradiso, against the background of his medieval reputation as a contemplative mystic, devotee of Mary, and, above all, a preacher of outstanding eloquence. Botterill draws on a wide range of materials to establish and illustrate the connections between Bernard's reputation and his portrayal in Dante's poem. Botterill's fresh approach to the analysis of the whole episode will provoke the reader to re-evaluate the significance and implications of Bernard's presence in the Commedia.

Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun
  • John M. Fyler
  • Published online:
    13 January 2010
    Print publication:
    16 July 2007
  • Medieval commentaries on the origin and history of language used biblical history, from Creation to the Tower of Babel, as their starting-point, and described the progressive impairment of an originally perfect language. Biblical and classical sources raised questions for both medieval poets and commentators about the nature of language, its participation in the Fall, and its possible redemption. John M. Fyler focuses on how three major poets - Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun - participated in these debates about language. He offers fresh analyses of how the history of language is described and debated in the Divine Comedy, the Canterbury Tales and the Roman de la Rose. While Dante follows the Augustinian idea of the Fall and subsequent redemption of language, Jean de Meun and Chaucer are skeptical about the possibilities for linguistic redemption and resign themselves, at least half-comically, to the linguistic implications of the Fall and the declining world.

Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century
  • Sarah Spence
  • Published online:
    08 January 2010
    Print publication:
    12 December 1996
  • Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century analyses key twelfth-century Latin and vernacular texts which articulate a subjective, often autobiographical, stance. The contention is that the self forged in medieval literature could not have come into existence without both the gap between Latinity and the vernacular and a shift in perspective towards a visual and spatial orientation. This results in a self which is not an agent that will act on the outside world like the Renaissance self, but, rather, one which inhabits a potential, middle ground, or 'space of agency', explained here partly in terms of object-relations theory.

'Floire and Blancheflor' and the European Romance
  • Patricia E. Grieve
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    10 April 1997
  • This comparative 1997 study examines a medieval love story, Floire and Blancheflor, and shows how writers from Spain, France, Italy, England and Scandinavia reworked the story from the twelfth to the sixteenth century to develop and emphasize social, political, religious and artistic goals, while maintaining its entertaining qualities. It shows the importance of a little-known medieval Spanish version to the development of the story throughout Europe, and especially as a precursor to Boccaccio's Il Filocolo, and examines important issues of the development of prose fiction in medieval and Renaissance Europe. This study is unique for its breadth of coverage of one story and for its inclusion of Spain as a significant participant in the development of medieval narrative.

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