Medieval Literature

John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences.

This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton, A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite

From The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. Ed. Sian Echard and Robert Rouse (Wiley & Sons, 2017).
Wiley Online Library: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781118396957

For medieval Roman Catholics in Britain, the Virgin Mary was queen of heaven, empress of the world, and our lady of literature. As the author of the Magnificat and Mother of the Word, Mary became a vehicle for the truth and power of the verbal arts. Repeatedly, medieval British authors inscribed the story of Mary's life, gleaned from legend and apocrypha, as a way to gain access to that truth and power and to achieve a better understanding of the divine light she incorporated. This encyclopedia entry surveys Marian literature in Britain from "The Dream of the Rood" to the Regiment of Princes.

That by his death Grettir is treated by the saga's composer as a monster, similar to those he killed, and that this is done ironically, with echoic passages studying monstrosity throughout this latest extant version of the narrative. The composer does this for complex reasons, to which I intend to return at some point in the next year or two.

Boccaccio inizia il Proemio del Decameron con le parole « Umana cosa è aver compassione degli afflitti », e spiega che essendo stato egli stesso nel passato distolto dai dolori dell'amore dai « piacevoli ragionamenti d'alcuno amico », senza i quali sarebbe morto, scrive ora in consolazione di quelli similmente afflitti. L'autore dichiara di voler portare sollievo, in particolare, alle giovani donne che soffrono il mal d'amore, alle quali non sono concessi gli stessi diversivi per superarlo che gli uomini hanno a loro disposizione. Lo scopo del Decameron è perciò di offrire loro una distrazione o un divertimento, un'occupazione temporanea in modo che non pensino ai loro problemi, i quali poi, nel tempo, si risolveranno. Tuttavia, la frase iniziale del libro solleva anche un'altra questione molto dibattuta dalla critica : leggere la narrativa, le novelle, i romanzi, può davvero insegnare la compassione ? È questo ciò che Boccaccio intende ? Alcuni stu-diosi contemporanei, come la filosofa americana Martha Nussbaum e il critico letterario Wayne Booth, giustificano l'insegnamento della letteratura, soprattutto del romanzo borghese, coll'argomento che esso migliora il lettore, sviluppando le sue capacità di capire norme morali astratte in modo più concreto o reale e di fare scelte etiche, facendolo agire alla fine in maniera più generosa e compassionevole.

Il testo del Devisement dou monde (o Milione, secondo la tradizione italiana) trasmesso dal codice parigino fr. 1116 rappresenta la forma linguisticamente più vicina alla superficie discorsiva originale dell’opera poliana. Dopo l’edizione del 2010 Mario Eusebi ne ha rivisto la lezione: il frutto di tale revisione (già disponibile al lettore nell’edizione digitale di Dei viaggi di Messer Marco Polo di Giovanni Battista Ramusio, in questa collana, vol. 5) torna alla tradizionale forma-libro, accompagnato dal glossario integrale e dagli indici dei nomi e dei toponimi, curati da Eugenio Burgio.

After the 2010 edition (Il manoscritto della Bibliothèque Nationale de France fr. 1116, Rome-Padua: Editrice Antenore), Mario Eusebi reviewed the text of the Franco-Venetian redaction (F) of the Devisement dou monde (in collaboration with Eugenio Burgio and Samuela Simion). The result of this revision has long been available to the reader in the digital edition of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Dei viaggi di Messer Marco Polo (Simion, Burgio 2015): here the text goes back to the traditional book-form; the second volume, already promised in the subtitle of the 2010 edition, is dedicated to the full glossary and indexes (names and toponyms), edited by Eugenio Burgio (with a linguistic note by Mario Eusebi).

Sul profilo biografico di Cecco d'Ascoli, al secolo Francesco Stabili, gravano secoli di leggenda che si è frammista alla storia. Le scarse notizie sulla sua formazione, la rapida e fortunata carriera universitaria, i processi inquisitoriali e la tragica fine sul rogo a Firenze  hanno alimentato una pluralità di notizie a suo carico che devono fare i conti con le fonti storiche. Il presente lavoro tenta innanzi tutto di chiarire quali siano queste fonti e, quindi, di tracciare un profilo biografico attendibile.
Nel secondo capitolo, invece, viene analizzata quella che per diverse ragioni può essere ritenuta come l'opera più rappresentativa dell'autore: il Commento alla Sfera del Sacrobosco. La lettura del manuale di astronomia più diffuso del medioevo, diviene nel corso stabiliano occasione per intrecciare astrologia, negromanzia e magia.
L'ultima parte dell'elaborato, infine, è più ricca di domande che di risposte. Dopo aver analizzato in chiave diacronica e sincronica il contesto dello studium bolognese, vengono espresse alcune suggestioni in merito alle problematiche poetico-letterarie e alcuni indirizzi di ricerca futuri sulle questioni stabiliane.

Il Libro della natura degli animali (noto anche come Bestiario toscano) è il primo bestiario moralizzato in prosa della letteratura italiana. Composto nell’ultimo quarto del XIII impiegando fonti latine e francesi, questo testo fu copiato fino alla fine del XV secolo ed ebbe una notevole diffusione nell’area toscana, nell’Italia settentrionale e in Catalogna, dove fu tradotto in catalano nella prima metà del XIV secolo. Il presente volume ne offre un’edizione critica, per la prima volta fondata su un’analisi completa della tradizione diretta e indiretta.

One of the most important developments in European history took place in communication. A transition is clearly visible from illiterate societies to societies in which most members are active users of the written word. This complex process, which started in Antiquity, and is still not complete, gained momentum during the Middle Ages. This series is intended to provide a forum for publications on the history of non-verbal, oral and written communication in the Middle Ages. Interest in the subject is now widespread within the worldwide community of medieval studies; and ever more scholars are becoming convinced of the potential of studying the tensions between oral and literate modes of thought.

In un’epoca che non riconosce più la centralità della storia della letteratura, dilaniata dal dibattito tra estetica e storicismo e polverizzata in una miriade di generi, sistemi e correnti, il volume fa luce in modo approfondito su un patrimonio letterario poco noto, discontinuo ed eterogeneo, risalente alle culture germaniche dell’Alto Medioevo.
Al netto degli stereotipi barbarici, queste rappresentavano il risultato di un lungo processo di integrazione tra la miriade di società segmentarie del Ferro, dalle Alpi alla Scandinavia, e le varie forme in cui si declinò l’esperienza culturale romana, diffusa ben oltre i limiti cronologici dell’Impero.
Lungamente dominate dall’oralità o da fenomeni scritturali epigrafici – o spesso di natura pragmatica e talora troppo intermittenti per essere definiti “letteratura” –, queste culture seppero dar vita, con il contributo essenziale del Cristianesimo e delle sue prerogative di trasmissione scritta, a una densa tradizione letteraria dalle caratteristiche disomogenee.

The present study scrutinizes the outlawry and outlaws that appear in the Icelandic Family Sagas. It provides a thorough description about outlawry on the basis of extant law and saga texts as well as an analysis of referential connotations attached to it. The concept of outlawry was fundamental for the medieval Icelanders conceptions of their past. Indeed, understanding outlawry is essential for understanding many of the Family Sagas. Outlaws appear in saga texts in significant roles.

The Icelandic Family Sagas comprise a group of prose narratives that were written down in the 13th and 14th century Iceland. They are based on events and personae that belong to the 10th century Iceland. These narratives introduce many outlaws, out of which some 75 are named.

The Family Sagas are studied here as one corpus and special emphasis is given to those narrative features that repetitively appear in connection with outlawry and the outlaw characters. Therefore, the eventual objects of this study are the medieval Icelanders general conceptions of the historical outlawry as well as the variations of these conceptions throughout the period of saga writing. The medieval Icelanders general conceptions about the 10th 11th century, which are reflected in the Family Sagas, are here referred to as the Saga World. The Saga World is the historically based taleworld to which all of the Family Sagas refer.

The medieval law texts, which were derived from centuries old legislative traditions, reveal that outlawry meant banishing from the society and being denied all help, and that the outlawed person lost the protection of the law. In practice, outlawry was a death sentence.

However, outlaws occupy many differing roles in the saga narratives even in connection with recurrent narrative motifs. These roles reflect the social and spatial structures of the Saga World. The inspection of outlawry within these structures reveals that the definition of outlawry as it appears in the law texts is insufficient for understanding outlawry in the saga texts.

The social and spatial structures also provide a basis for the connotations of outlawry. In this study, these connotations are inspected primarily from the referential connections between outlawry in the Family Sagas and corresponding phenomena in other concurrent literature. This is done by studying the implementations of the basic elements of outlawry in the Family Sagas marginalization, banishing, rejection and solitariness within other literary genres and the taleworlds to which they refer. It is argued that these taleworlds reflect the same ideas that were associated with outlawry in the Family Sagas albeit in different forms and that these different forms reciprocally contributed to the conceptions of outlawry.

The variety of denotations and connotations of outlawry that is visible in the medieval Icelandic texts reflects the ambiguity of outlawry in the Family Sagas. This ambiguity may shed light to questions such as why an outlaw could be perceived as a hero in a literary genre that predominantly promoted law and order and why the same outlaw could be perceived as a villain on another occasion.

Using the critical lens of Claire Sponsler’s scholarship on subversive performance, this essay considers the warrior Cú Chulainn’s lament for his foster-brother in the medieval Irish Táin. This ritualized spectacle washes clean and revivifies the slain hero’s body: poetry’s incantatory alliterations and rhymes re-fuse the dismembered body and animate it with story. By considering the lament in terms of caoineadh (“keening”), a genre typically associated with women, we gain insights into the subversive potential of Cú Chulainn’s performance. A man’s transgressive performance of caoineadh provides a critique of gender and disempowerment: the surrounding narrative provides multiple examples of young warriors, noble daughters, and other figures whose bodies and lives are pawned to execute the wishes of morally bankrupt kings and queens. This lament thus participates in the caoineadh’s mode of protest, as a cry against the slaughter of youth in the wargames of the powerful.

This article presents a manuscript that significantly enriches the textual corpus of ›Helfta Mysticism‹ with a series of hitherto unknown writings. Aside from this, it contains what is by some distance the oldest copy of the ›Legatus divinae pietatis‹, in the form of a ›special edition‹ that consists of excerpts from the known text as well as new material. This is preceded by a prologue and a florilegium which is marked in an epilogue as Gertrude’s own work. We argue that the epilogue of the florilegium, the prologue and the ›special edition‹ itself were probably composed by ›Sister N‹ of Helfta herself. The article provides a full description of the manuscript (Ms 827), a breakdown of the new ›special edition‹ of the ›Legatus‹-text, and an edition, translation, and close reading of the prologue.

Im Folgenden soll eine Handschrift vorgestellt werden, die die Textbasis der Helftaer Mystik mit einer Reihe von bislang unbekannten Schriften bereichert. Außerdem enthält sie die mit Abstand älteste Abschrift des ›Legatus divinae pietatis‹ in Form einer ›Sonderausgabe‹, die aus Exzerpten aus dem bekannten Textcorpus und aus weiterem bislang nicht bekanntem Material besteht. Dieser geht eine Vorrede und ein im Epilog als Gertruds Werk ausgewiesenes Florilegium voraus, Texte, die wie die ›Sonderausgabe‹ selbst von Schwester N von Helfta stammen dürften. Die vorliegende Studie bietet eine Beschreibung von Ms 827, die Aufschlüsselung der ›Sonderausgabe‹ des ›Legatus‹ sowie Abdruck, Übersetzung und inhaltliche Analyse der Vorrede.

This book studies an extraordinary Latin dialogue with a woman called Jezebel, who is flamboyantly vulgar and irreverent. Ziolkowski first explores medieval attitudes toward the biblical Jezebel. He then sets the poem in the cultural milieu of eleventh-century Normandy. The book contains an edition, a translation, and a copious commentary.

The twelfth century was a period of significant development and change in the religious and secular world of Western Europe. One area of transition occurred in depictions of Christ’s crucifixion. In both writing and art, the triumphant living Christ of the early Middle ages, was transformed into the dying, suffering, and yet majestic savior of the twelfth century.  This essay examines images and written sources from the fourth to the twelfth centuries, and seeks to determine how the twelfth century renaissance and reformation—based on the discovery of the individual— influenced this evolution.

A cura di Davide Checchi 🔗 https://bit.ly/2VxVjR0 Il Libro della natura degli animali (noto anche come Bestiario toscano) è il primo bestiario moralizzato in prosa della letteratura italiana. Composto nell’ultimo quarto del XIII impiegando fonti latine e francesi, questo testo fu copiato fino alla fine del XV secolo ed ebbe una notevole diffusione nell’area toscana, nell’Italia settentrionale e in Catalogna, dove fu tradotto in catalano nella prima metà del XLV secolo. Il presente volume ne offre un’edizione critica, per la prima volta fondata su un’analisi completa della tradizione diretta e indiretta.

The three Íslendingasögur about major outlaws have long fascinated scholars and readers alike, and the question why medieval Icelanders told tales in which social outsiders play the part of the hero has been the concern of scholarship for a number of years. At the heart of this scholarship has been a preoccupation with the characters and their families, for these families play a prominent role in the texts: Gísli is outlawed for killing one brother-in-law to avenge another; Hörðr does not trust any of his male relatives, and this eventually leads to his downfall; and Grettir's difficult relationship with his father seems to lead to his reckless and arrogant behaviour later in life. But why are these stories about outlaw heroes so focussed on the relationships between the individual and his kin group? And why were Icelanders – medieval and modern – so fascinated by these marginal, destructive figures?
In this article these questions are addressed by approaching the outlaw from the perspective of monster theory. The monster, as a creature that points towards or even embodies meaning beyond itself, lends itself well to such an investigation into social and cultural concerns whose reflection we might see in the literary products of said culture. So far, outlaws have not been included into the corpus of Íslendingasögur monsters, and therefore, the article consists of four parts. First, the concept of social monstrosity is established, based on Cohen’s monster theory but more suited to the unique situation in the Íslendingasögur. This concept is then applied to the three major outlaws before turning to the discussion of outlaws within their matrix of family ties. In the final step, the monstrous outlaw in his disrupted, disruptive family will be read as symptomatic of medieval Icelandic socio-cultural concerns about the fragmentation of family structures.

This article aims at providing a new interpretation of the earliest «Mirabilia urbis Romae». Although many scholars considered them as guides for pilgrims who went to visit the city, the Mirabilia actually show a different raison d’être:
when observed through a consistent viewpoint, taking into account both the manuscript tradition and the specific political, legal and cultural context, they appear to be official censuses, promoted by public institutions of Rome (first the papacy, then the commune), of the monumental unity intimately linked to the expression of political power, known in Late Antiquity as «ornatus» (ornament) and in the Middle Ages as «decus» (decorum).

Chapter 4 of Eiríks saga rauða has long drawn the attention of scholars due to its detailed description of a seiðr, a rare occurrence in Íslendinga sǫgur as well as in sagas of other genres. The protagonist of the scene, a Greenlandic seiðkona named Þorbjǫrg, is depicted as a social functionary who creates a relationship with the supernatural world and acquires a deeper knowledge and foreknowledge concerning the surrounding area, for the benefit of the local community. The performance takes place during a great famine at the beginning of the eleventh century, and the semi-public ritual had the purpose of predicting when the dearth would come to an end. It consisted – among other things-of a ritual meal: a porridge of kid's milk and of the cooked hearts of all the living creatures that inhabited the area. The present paper aims at casting light on this specific aspect of Þorbjǫrg's seiðr, and at contextualizing it within a wider literary and historical landscape. The intention is to integrate traditional interpretations with observations on the importance of sympathetic magic in ancient and medieval Europe, and particularly in medieval Scandinavia.

This essay examines the role of nursing experiences in the formation of popular heroes in Arabic literature of the medieval period, with a primary focus on the genres of siyar shaʿbiyya and qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ. I show that the miraculous nursing of heroes—many of whom are foundlings—in popular texts tends to follow a providential meeting either with an animal or with a woman who is capable of nursing. Though such tale patterns are attested across many cultures, they are also elaborated in specific, linked ways in traditional Muslim sources, as in narratives of Moses’s miraculous nursing and stories of Muḥammad’s wet nurse, Ḥalīma. Whereas prophetic literature often depicts nursing solely as a human-human relationship, the heroic literature incorporates significant human-animal encounters. Using an exemplary anecdote about a hero’s suckling found in manuscripts and early print editions of Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma, I sketch how one such instance can travel and shift across an epic tradition. I interpret the experience of the hero’s foster mother through the lens both of traditional Islamic institutions of milk kinship and of a reading practice that attends closely to women’s presences and agencies in the early lives of (mostly) male literary figures.

The narrative figures of the Yanuka (the Wunderkind) and the Sava (the Wise Old Man) are among the most enigmatic characters in zoharic narratives. As shown in this article, these figures represent also the narrative incarnation of God and his Son through the mythical figures of an Old Man and a Young Child. The article’s primary focus is on the close relationship between the Yanuka figure as Son of God and that of Jesus. This objective is accomplished through a survey of various textual clues (e.g. the Yanuka as son of the “Holy Mother”; the symbol of the fish; the Bread and Wine mysteries vs. the Eucharist), which, combined, create a mosaic of Christian elements that run through the the Yanuka and Sava characters.

This article attempts to advance a number of claims concerning the Zohar’s exegetical presentation of the biblical story of the blasphemer (Lev. 24: 10-23). The major thesis of the article is that the Zoharic interpretation contains a hidden anti-Christian polemic—one aimed directly at the figures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. To prove this, the article shows that the Zohar’s language concerning the blasphemer recalls tropes and structures from the popular medieval polemical work, Toledot Yeshu.
The article provides a significant understanding of the ambivalent Zoharic attitude towards Jesus as the Son of God – and of the Virgin Mary as linked to the Shekhinah.

This article was previously published in my Ph.D. dissertation in 2012 (Hebrew).

CU Boulder - FREN1200
Offered FA2014, FA2015, FA2016
Course Description: The popularity of George RR Martin's fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire and its Emmy-winning HBO adaptation Game of Thrones shows us that major themes from medieval stories still resonate with audiences a thousand years after their composition. This course will examine major epic and romance texts of the Middle Ages such as Beowulf, The Song of Roland, and The Death of King Arthur. We will aim to understand the rich literary tradition that has led to our modern interest in dragons, knights, heroes and magic. We will also look at how representations of medieval culture in contemporary series such as Game of Thrones influence our conceptions (and misconceptions) of the Middle Ages. Much like Sansa, we will find that the stories do not necessarily reflect the reality.

This paper examines the character of Bergetto from John Ford’s play, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and suggests that the foolish figure is an evolution of the humanum genus stock-character. As such, Bergetto encapsulates moral and ethical paradigms, most notably the parable of the prodigal son and Aristotle’s golden mean. In the morality tradition the representative of humanity is aided and hindered by opposing forces of Virtue and Vice, led into sin by the latter before being persuaded to repent by the former, and thus finding the path to salvation. Aristotle’s ethical vision of virtue as a moderate point between vices of excess and defect was frequently overlaid upon this psychomachian concept; fallen humanity becoming the vice of defect and the forces of evil that seek to corrupt him or her the vices of excess. In Ford’s debased Parma there are no virtuous figures (with the possible exception of Bergetto’s would-be wife Philotis) and Bergetto offers the sole representative of frail humanity. Surrounded in a city that has been overrun by vice and excess, he is ultimately murdered moments before his marriage, an event that often signified redemption in the Stuart period. Ford uses Bergetto to exploit and pervert traditional morality themes in order to portray a society so corrupt that innocence and virtue cannot survive. Bergetto therefore plays a vital and underestimated role in conveying the depth of this dark vision.

Real, Julian. 2017. ‘Bergetto - The Prodigal Son Abroad in “The Iron Age”.’ Early Modern Literary Studies 0 (0). https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/377.