Bøker av Gerald Morgan

Before 1990 no-one knew that over a thousand Welsh legal documents were filed at the Welsh National Library. These probate documents comprise wills, estate lists, letters and other documents which reveal effective and diverse use of the Welsh language. In this book we can listen to the last words and wishes of Welsh men and women from 1560...

This fourth volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry consolidates the work of the previous three volumes. Ranging from The Battle of Maldon to The Canterbury Tales, it provides a range of fascinating insights into the great subjects of English literature in the medieval period.

A comprehensive volume about St David, the patron saint of Wales. It contains information about the life of David, his religion, the myths associated with him, the history of St David''s Day and lists the churches named after him.

A collection of essays that is conceived not as a summary of past endeavours but as the beginning of an attempt to present a sense of the wholeness of a distinctively English literature from Beowulf to Spenser.

This third volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry includes, as in the previous volumes, essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer and Spenser; it also includes essays on Beowulf and Dante. It was never the author's intention to exclude Old English poetry from the historical continuum of English poetry, and practical rather than ideological considerations explain the absence of Beowulf from the two previous volumes. The language of Beowulf is in all essentials the language of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman, in one and the same native alliterative tradition, and also the language of Chaucer, in the European tradition inherited from the great French and Italian poets. The transition from Beowulf to Dante may seem abrupt, but the poetry of Chaucer, whose assimilation of Italian influences is both formidable and remarkable, requires us to make it. Indeed, the exploration in this volume of Dante's exposition of love in the Purgatorio takes us to the heart of the poetry that we associate with the period of Chaucer's greatness in the 1380s and 1390s. Here we see not an anachronistic system of courtly love, imposed on medieval poems by modern critics, but distinctions of natural, sensitive and rational love that make sense (among other things) of the ending of Troilus and Criseyde as the poem's logical and persuasive conclusion.

This second volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry continues the project set out in the Preface to the first volume, discussing the three golden poets of the Golden Age of English poetry in the second half of the fourteenth century. The first two essays address the great alliterative poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman and the remaining six essays are on Chaucer, five of them on The Canterbury Tales. There is no doubt about the sustained excellence (and often the sublimity) of these works, and it remains a hard task for readers and scholars to measure up to them. The essays on Chaucer are predominantly concerned with the influence of Italian poetry and Aristotelian moral philosophy. These influences have long been recognised, but their depth and weight have not so readily been acknowledged. In particular, the influence of Aristotle - not merely on Chaucer's poetry but on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English and European culture as a whole - presents an intellectual challenge that scholars of medieval English literature have often been reluctant to confront. These essays seek to demonstrate that in engaging with Chaucer's response to Aristotelian moral philosophy our perspective will not only be enriched but dramatically altered.

A comprehensive introduction to the castles of Wales, with a detailed guide to 80 of them, photographs and OS grid-references, for the historical tourist. The introduction covers the contemporary historical significance of castles; the military and political background; building stone castles, and mottes and ringworks; builders; castles of the...