I posit that the components of the environment play a role in the deployment of the narrative by shaping the characters and influencing the action.
Of Wilderness, Forest, and Garden: An Eco-Theory of Genre in Middle English Literature
December 5, 2015 By
For the Knyʒhtys tabylle and for the Kyngges tabylle: An Edition of the Fifteenth-Century Middle English Cookery Recipes in London, British Library’s MS Sloane 442
November 26, 2015 By
The present thesis offers an edition of some fifteenth century Middle English cookery recipes, more specifically those of the Sloane 442 manuscript (MS Sloane 442), located at the British Library, London. The cookery recipes of this collection were most likely meant for the tables of the upper classes
Teaching Tolkien’s Translations of Medieval Literature: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo and Pearl
September 12, 2015 By
J.R.R. Tolkien, the medievalist who became the father of modern fantasy literature, translated many poems out of Old English, Old Norse and Middle English into carefully versified modern English
How to Speak Middle English
July 2, 2015 By
This four-part series of videos created by Youtuber Thatoneguyinlitclass gives a quick guide to speaking in Middle English.
Horticultural Landscapes in Middle English Romance
December 25, 2014 By
Gardens played a significant role in the lives of European peoples living in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Monstrous Women in Middle English Romance
September 25, 2014 By
I analyze Middle English narratives including the early sixteenth‐century translation of the prose Melusine, the Constance tale as adapted by Chaucer and Gower, and appearances of Medea in the works of Chaucer, Gower, and Caxton’s translation of the History of Jason to discover the ways these narratives use female monstrosity—in literal and figurative form—to dramatize the anxieties arising in a patriarchal society that defines the female as a slightly aberrant category of human
Guilt and Creativity in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer
September 2, 2014 By
I argue that as Chaucer develops his own expansive, questioning poetics in The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales, he problematises the principle of allegory on which the legitimacy of literary discourse was primarily based in medieval culture and the final fragments of The Canterbury Tales see Chaucer struggling, increasingly, to reconcile the boldness and independence of his poetic vision with the demands of his faith.
Amending the Ascetic: Community and Character in the Old English Life of St. Mary of Egypt
August 12, 2014 By
Among the most eligible saints for such treatment, Mary of Egypt deserves particular consideration: her popularity is evidenced by over a hundred extant Greek manuscripts of her Life and her uniquely prominent position in the Lenten liturgical cycle in the Eastern Church.
Medieval Misogyny and Gawain’s Outburst against Women in “‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’
August 12, 2014 By
The view has been gaining ground of late that the Gawain of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a knight renowned as ‘Pat fyne fader of nurture’ (1. 919) and as ‘so cortays and coynt’ of his ‘hetes’ (1. I525), degenerates at the moment of leave-taking from the Green Knight, his erstwhile host, to the level of a churl capable of abusing the ladies of that knight’s household (11.2411 -28).
A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
August 5, 2014 By
The famous line from that modern romance- “A kiss is just a kiss”- is the message the Gawain-poet gave his listeners six centuries ago.
Sumer is Icumen In!
May 28, 2014 By
One of the most famous pieces of music that has survived is a Middle English song about summer
Theories of the Nonsense Word in Medieval England
April 8, 2014 By
The goos the cokkow and the doke also
So cryede kek kek kokkow quek quek hye
British Library purchases the Catholicon Anglicum
March 21, 2014 By
The British Library has paid £92,500 in order to keep a 500-year old dictionary from leaving the United Kingdom. They announced earlier this week that they had completed the purchase of the Catholicon Anglicum, a 15th-century English-Latin dictionary.
Writing conquest: traditions of Anglo-Saxon invasion and resistance in the twelfth century
March 2, 2014 By
Writing Conquest examines the ways in which Latin, Old English, and Middle English twelfth-century historical and pseudo-historical texts remembered and reconstructed three formative moments of Anglo-Saxon invasion and resistance…
When Urine is like Snot – Middle English Uroscopy Texts
February 20, 2014 By
People in late medieval England were concerned about their health, and like their modern-day counterparts they might turn to self-help guides. One of the most popular ways to do this in the Late Middle Ages would be to analyze your own urine.
Worldly Unease in Late Medieval European Travel Reports
January 11, 2014 By
Comparing the Book of John Mandeville with Jean de Jeanville’s Vie Saint Louis and William of Rubruck’s Journey, this chapter argues that cosmopolitan perspectives in these texts seem to emerge in spite of rather than because of their contacts with other cultures.
Towards A Poetics of Marvellous Spaces in Old and Middle English Narrative
January 1, 2014 By
I argue that the heart of this poetics of marvellous spaces is displacement. Their wonder and dread comes from boundaries that these places blur and cross, from the resistance of these places to being known or mapped, and from the deliberate distancing between these places and the home of their texts.
Chaucer’s reading list: Sir Thopas, Auchinleck, and Middle English romances in translation
December 29, 2013 By
One frustration of engaging in any branch of European medieval studies as an academic pursuit is that few claim expertise about the ancient or Roman worlds, but seemingly everyone on an internet discussion forum believes him or herself knowledgeable about the medieval period, usually based on patently false beliefs.
On Omissions and Substitutions in the Medieval English Translations of the Gospel
December 20, 2013 By
In view of this we carried out research on two English medieval translations of John’s Gospel, believing that their comparison would not only reveal differences in the perception and experience of biblical concepts (expressed through language), but also those in culture, society and cognition that occurred in the period between their occurrence.
A Word About Our Words
November 28, 2013 By
This may be a little hard to believe, considering the conspicuous lack of “thee” and “thou” in modern writing, but the forms of English that came before are even more foreign.
Gower’s “Confessio” and the “Nova statuta Angliae”: royal lessons in English law
November 13, 2013 By
In the following discussion, I will explore some hitherto unexamined links between the Confessio Amantis and one of these legal texts, the Nova Statuta Angliae or New Statutes of England, which circulated among professional and non-professional readers in the 1380s and 1390s and which Richard II received in a manuscript now in Cambridge: St. John’s College MS A.7.
Seasonal Setting and the Human Domain in Early English and Early Scandinavian Literature
November 10, 2013 By
Seasonal Setting and the Human Domain in Early English and Early Scandinavian Literature Paul Sander Langeslag University of Toronto: Doctor of Philosophy, Centre for Medieval Studies (2012) Abstract The contrast between the familiar social space and the world beyond has been widely recognised as an organising principle in medieval literature, in which the natural and the […]
Literature, Logic and Mathematics in the Fourteenth Century
September 27, 2013 By
This thesis assesses the extent to which fourteenth-century Middle English poets were interested in, and influenced by, traditions of thinking about logic and mathematics.
Impregnable friendship : locating desire in the middle English ‘Amis and Amiloun’
July 24, 2013 By
Scholarship on Amis and Amiloun has generally been divided into two critical schools. The majority of critics have read the work as an exemplar of perfect friendship, overlooking (or ignoring) any trace of homoeroticism, citing the possibility itself as anachronistic, or explaining away its presence by offering historical or theoretical justification for intimacy among medieval men.
Listening for the Vikings: Some Evidence from Etymology
May 18, 2013 By
The Vikings left behind several kinds of evidence during their stay in Anglo-Saxon England. Richard Dance notes that ‘one crucial aspect is the etymological.’
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