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Several scholarly fields investigate the reuse of source texts, most relevantly adaptation studies and fanfiction studies. The limitation of these two fields is that adaptation studies focuses narrowly on retelling, usually in the form of film adaptations, but is not as well equipped to treat other uses of source material like prequels, sequels, and spinoffs. On the other hand, fanfiction studies has the broad reach adaptation studies lacks but is generally interested in "underground" production rather than material that goes through the official publication process and thus enters the literary canon. This book sits in the gap between these fields, discussing published novels and their contribution to the scholarly engagement with their pre- and early modern source material as well as applying that creative framework to the teaching of literature in the college classroom.

This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women's sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She analyzes how playwrights employed visual and verbal clues to identify the sexual status of female characters to engage their audiences with popular concepts of women's health; and how they satirized the notion of the womb's insatiable appetite, suggesting that men who fear it have been duped. But the study also recognizes that, as these dramatists were fully aware, merely by bringing such material to the stage so frequently, they were complicit in perpetuating such theories.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.

Every known society wears some form of clothing. It is central to how we experience our bodies and how we understand the sociocultural dimensions of our embodiment. It is also central to how we understand works of literature. In this innovative study, Brazil demonstrates how medieval writers use clothing to direct readers¿ and spectators¿ awareness to forms of embodiment. Offering insights into how poetic works, plays, and devotional treatises target readers¿ kinesic intelligence¿their ability to understand movements and gestures¿Brazil demonstrates the theological implications of clothing, often evinced by how garments limit or facilitate the movements and postures of bodies in narratives. By bringing recent studies in the field of embodied cognition to bear on narrated and dramatized interactions between dress and body, this book offers new methodological tools to the study of clothing.

This volume is intended as a belated but heartfelt thank-you and Gedenkschrift to the late Larry Syndergaard (1936-2015), long-time professor of English at Western Michigan University and Fellow of the Kommission für Volksdichtung (International Ballad Commission). Larry's contributions down the decades to ballad studies--particularly Scandinavian and Anglophone--included dozens of papers and articles, as well as his supremely useful book, English Translations of the Scandinavian Medieval Ballads. As David Atkinson and Thomas A. McKean of the Kommission have written (May 2015): "Larry... was a sound scholar with a penetrating mind which he used to support, encourage and befriend others, rather than show off his own knowledge. He will be remembered for his contributions to international balladry, especially for providing a bridge between the English- and Scandinavian-language ballads." Larry's particular fascination with the vernacular ballads of the northern medieval world are reflected in this collection; topics here range from plot elements such as demonic whales, otherworldly antagonists, and mer-people to thematic issues of genre, religion and sexual mores. As a tribute to the global influence of Larry's scholarship and the broad academic interest in medieval ballads, the essays in this volume were contributed by twelve international scholars of narrative song based in Europe, North America and Australia.

Unique among the Icelandic sagas, part-history, part-fiction, the Saga of the Jomsvikings tells of a legendary band of vikings, originally Danish, who established an island fortress of the Baltic coast, launched and ultimately lost their heroic attack on the pagan ruler of Norway in the late tenth century. The saga's account of their stringent warrior code, fatalistic adherence to their own reckless vows and declarations of extreme courage as they face execution articulates a remarkable account of what it meant to be a viking. This translation presents the longest and earliest text of the saga, never before published in English, with a full literary and historical introduction to this remarkable work.

Wyclif sought the restoration of an idealized past even if that meant taking revolutionary steps in the present to recover what had been lost. His 1377-78 On the Truth of Holy Scripture represents such an effort in reform: the recognition of the inherent perfection and veracity of the Sacred Page which serves as the model for daily conduct, discourse, and worship, thereby forming the foundation upon which Christendom itself is to be ordered.

This book brings together and translates from the medieval Latin a series of commentaries on the biblical book of Ruth, with the intention of introducing readers to medieval exegesis or biblical interpretation. . . . Ruth is the shortest book of the Old Testament, being only four chapters long. It is partly for this reason that it lends itself so well to a short book introducing medieval exegesis; but it is also of interest in itself. Ruth poses a number of exegetical problems, including the basic one of why such an odd book, in which God never appears as an actor, and with a central character who was not an Israelite but a Moabite outsider, and a woman at that, should find a place in the canon of Scripture.

A new edition and translation of a comic medieval romance from the south of France.

This volume makes available for the first time in English an edition of the medieval romance Blandin de Cornoalha, including the original Occitan text, a translation and an introduction to the work.

Thomas Hoccleve was born in 1367 and entered government service as clerk in the office of the Privy Seal in 1387, an office that he held until his death in 1426. His earliest datable poem (the Epistle of Cupid, a free translation of Christine de Pisan's Epistre au Dieu d'Amour) was completed about 1402. The Regiment of Princes, written about 1410-11, was composed at a time when England was still feeling the consequences of the deposition of Richard II. Essentially it is addressed to a prince on the subject of his governance, but it exhibits considerable generic instability and thus raises fundamental questions about how we should understand the tone of considerable portions of the poem. For all the problems it presents, The Regiment shows that Hoccleve has strengths as a poet. At times he could be a very talented prosodist. In autobiographical sections of the poem he creates a most interesting early-modern subjectivity. He has distinctive observations to make about his time, and, in his self-critical awareness, probes the limits of what is means to be a poet writing in the wake of Chaucer.

The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components-with translations-of this bilingual text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes. Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the overall structure of Gower's poem.

Audelay's idiosyncratic devotional tastes, interesting personal life history, and declared political affiliations-loyalty to king, upholder of estates, anxiety over heresy-make him worthy of careful study beside his better-known contemporaries. Of particular note: MS Douce 302 preserves Audelay's own alliterative Marcolf and Solomon, a poem thought to be descended from Langland's Piers Plowman. The Audelay Manuscript also contains unique copies of other alliterative poems of the ornate style seen in Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pistel of Swete Susan. These pieces are Paternoster and Three Dead Kings, both set at the end of the book. Whether or not they are Audelay's own compositions, they seem certain to be his own selections. Audelay also displays a persistent habit of sequencing materials in generic and devotionally affective ways. His is a pious sensibility delicately honed by reverence for the liturgy and by an awe of God. That Audelay's poetry can awaken us to new poetic sensitivities in medieval devotional verse is reason enough to bring him into the ambit of canonical fifteenth-century English poets.

This study examines the various means of becoming empathetic and using this knowledge to explain the epistemic import of the characters¿ interaction in the works written by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and their contemporaries. By attuning oneself to another¿s expressive phenomena, the empathizer acquires an inter- and intrapersonal knowledge that exposes the limitations of hyperbole, custom, or unbridled passion to explain the profundity of their bond. Understanding the substantive meaning of the characters¿ discourse and narrative context discloses their motivations and how they view themselves. The aim is to explore the place of empathy in select late medieval and early modern portrayals of the body and mind and explicate the role they play in forging an intimate rapport.

This volume addresses the widespread medieval phenomenon of transgression as both a result of and the cause for the exclusion and persecution of those who were considered different. It is widely accepted that the essence of a manuscript cannot be fully grasped without studying its marginalia. Glosses sit on the margins of the text and clarify it, adding a whole new dimension to it and becoming an inextricable part of its content. Similarly, no society can be fully understood without knowledge of what lies on its margins, for the outliers of any given culture provide us with just as much information as its alleged foundational principles. In a time when the Western world ponders building walls up against perceived threats and frightening differences, this multidisciplinary collection of essays based on original and innovative pieces of research shows that it was mostly through tearing down walls that we learned our way forward.

This anthology brings together articles by scholars engaged in the study of the many manifestations of the paranormal in the Middle Ages. The guiding principles of the collection are a clear focus on the paranormal experiences themselves, and, essentially, how they are defined by the sources. The authors work with a variety of medieval Icelandic sources, including family sagas, legendary sagas, romances, poetry, hagiography and miracles.

The Eddic poem Vafþrúðnismál serves as a representation of early pagan beliefs or myths and as a myth itself; the poem performs both of these functions, acting as a poetic framework and functioning as sacred myth. In this study, the author looks closely at the journey of the Norse god Óðinn to the hall of the ancient and wise giant Vafþrúðnir, where Óðinn craftily engages his adversary in a life-or-death contest in knowledge.

"Oxford Jesus college MS 29 (II), a thirteenth-century manuscript, contains the longest surviving English verse sequence from period between the Exeter Book and the Harley Lyrics. The sequence is varied in subject, with poems of religious exhortation set beside others of secular pragmatism. Included are: "The Owl and the Nightingale," "Poema Morale," "The Proverbs of Alfred," Thomas of Hales's "Love Rune," "The Eleven Pains of Hell," the prose "Shires and Hundreds of England," the lengthy "Passion of Jesus Christ in English," and twenty-one additional lyrics, most of them uniquely preserved in this manuscript and presented here with accompanying translations in Modern English and scholarly introduction and apparatus"--

This collection of essays examines medieval and early modern perceptions of the marvelous and the monstrous. The essays investigate the nature of those phenomena and how people of these periods experienced them and how they recreated that experience for others. Essential reading for any analysis of the marvellous.

Each essay covers a unique topic in the study of the Playbook, utilizing a diverse set of methodological tools and interdisciplinary approaches for subjects which have not heretofore received adequate scholarly attention. The topics at hand are each of significant interest to the field at large.

Composed in rhyming English verse, the earliest and most complete work of its kind (Gospel paraphrases with homilies on the theme of the Gospel texts), its widespread and enduring popularity witnessed by three distinct recensions and twenty surviving manuscripts ranging from the early fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries.

Malory's use of myth and magic to explore his themes has received extensive scholarly attention, but his views on and thematic use of Christianity have long needed a closer look.

Essays in this volume offer non-Italian scholars a representative sample of current European research and a summary of recent debates regarding the historical evolution of those republics that posed the most formidable obstacles to the extension of Florentine hegemony.

This sourcebook is designed to introduce students to the everyday lives of the Jews who lived in the German Empire, northern France and England from the 11th to the mid-14th centuries. The volume consists of translations of primary sources written by or about medieval Jews.