Where the Middle Ages Begin
The Lord of the Rings is set in the fictional but incredibly vast and detailed universe of Middle-Earth. Tolkien has put great effort in developing an impossibly gigantic realm peopled by many diverse races. Of the immeasurable number of characters and locations present in Tolkien’s work, many bear a name deeply rooted in Old English.
With such a model in mind, then, we have entered into a discussion of art, myth‐making, and the Primary World from a combined academic and artistic perspective.
I want to focus my attention here in another text, the Lay of el Cid, the only fully preserved Castilian epic poem.
Read our interview with Mary C. Flannery about her new book
If Haraldr’s contemporaries and the early writers did not know him as hardradi, what did they call him?
This is a summary of the The London Medieval Graduate Network Inaugural Conference by Rachel Scott. The conference was held on November 2nd at King’s College London.
It’s obvious that the Byzantine female hymnography was not flourished especially in Byzantium.
The narrative accomplished on this plane is critical to the foundation, or re-foundation, of royal order after a usurpation, yet it is more than a dynastic expedient;3 rather, it is a story that, even as it bridges the gaps in credibility and legitimacy attendant upon a new royal line, primally reinforces the governing fictions of kingship as an institution.
Tempting though it is to assume that these poems are simply peculiarly Scots, to do so denies them their place in British literature. A survey of English romances, moreover, reveals what appears to be an English equivalent: Richard Coer de Lion. It is also a hybrid poem about a recent king and military leader.
Though extremely fascinating and very appealing, the theory of the saxonization and northernization of the Gospel has ended up permeating every single level upon which an analysis of the poem can be carried out, becoming a sort of a priori starting point that may lead scholars to over-interpretation and, therefore, hinder them from developing a perhaps deeper insight into the poem.
The Medieval English dream vision evidence influences from a variety of earlier vision literature, notably the apocalyptic vision and narrative dream.
This study asks: how did jongleurs professionalize over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and incorporate themselves into society as legitimate, productive members?
Returning to Tolkien’s allegory, it is clear that he suggests that his fellow medievalists have taken a work of great imaginative and artistic power, and instead of using it to “see the sea”, they have mined it for words and phrases, and pulled it apart, looking for bits and pieces from other ancient works, and even reworked it after their own notions of how it “ought” to be built.
The Machzor Vitry work is, as mentioned above, not just a prayer book but includes much more, including many laws and a commentary. It consists of three portions; the halakhic legal portion, the liturgical formulae, and commentaries to the prayers taken from the aggadah.
From the first through the fourteenth centuries, a succession of solutions to the problem of these virtuous pagans evolved. For the Early Church, an attractive solution was that Christ descended into Hell to convert the souls he found there.
The most characteristic kind of verse that has been preserved from the Viking Age is praise poetry — praise either of the living or of the recently dead…
This is a defence of the characters of Criseyde and of Diomede based, inter alia, on a close textual analysis.
The nature of balsam and its qualities, especially the ability to act as an extraordinarily effective preservative, demands further inquiry. Is this Lydgate’s invention, or instead a reflection of late medieval ideas about a particular natural substance?
In this dissertation I examine key smithing motifs in the eddic poems Võluspá and Võlundarkviña in relation to the socio-cultural role of smithing techniques and sites in early medieval Scandinavia.
In courtly works, the resolution is generally in favour of the status quo as a courtly adulterous affair rarely works out, while in the fabliau the marriage is generally left intact, although a deceitful wife may be given carte blanche to philander.
In this article I will demonstrate that The Windhover has strong formal similarities with early English riddling. This genre, which has very little in common with modern riddles, has a range of distinctive formal conventions which, I argue, are also present in The Windhover, including an “entitled solution,” “kennings” and the use of formulae.
Lewis Morris (1700/1-1765) was regarded as the foremost Welsh antiquary and authority on Welsh literature of his day. A founding member of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion in 1751his expertise on Welsh literature and history was solicited by Welsh poets and antiquaries alike.
Madness has been long misrepresented in medieval studies. Assertions that conceptions of mental illness were unknown to medieval people, or that all madmen were assumed to be possessed by the devil, were at one time common in accounts of medieval society.
The way these operate can be seen in the section of La Male Regle from which I excerpted my paper’s title. It comes about three-quarters of the way through the poem when the narrator relates a first-hand account of how he and his Privy-Seal Office colleagues handle a night of drinking.
This paper’s argument is purposeless without the reader knowing the seventh century events of the so-called explosion of Islam, and the interpretation of which I find so contentious. Thus a brief description of the episode is necessary.
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