Angelic Demons: Witchcraft and Sorcery in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
In Chaucer’s tales regarding magic and sorcery, three stand out in particular: The Franklin’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale.
“A Swarm in July”: Beekeeping Perspectives on the Old English Wið Ymbe Charm
At the same time, however, their differing responses to the remedy attest both to the variation of beekeeping practices and the multivalence of Wið Ymbe itself. The fact that two beekeepers interviewed within two days and two hundred miles of each other can respond differently to the charm’s advice on swarms suggests that we reevaluate unilateral assertions regarding what the text might have meant across the hundreds of years that we now know as the Anglo-Saxon period.
The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature
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.
Sources of Medieval Demonology
Greek philosophy, Jewish apocryphal literature, Biblical doctrine, and pagan Germanic folklore all contribute elements to the demons which flourished in men’s minds at the close of the medieval period.
The Mandrake Plant and its Legend
This study focuses on the mandrake legend and its growth in Western Europe.
The Riddle of Gollum: Was Tolkien Inspired by Old Norse Gold, the Jewish Golem, and the Christian Gospel?
I would like to speculate on Tolkien’s sources for Gollum. As a start, it is likely that Tolkien’s conscious sources for Gollum were the same as his sources for ents.
Pagan traces in medieval and early modern European witch-beliefs
The aim of this research is to explore how pre-Christian beliefs, cults and popular traditions may have indirectly survived in early modern and medieval European witch-beliefs.
Vilification of Identity and the Exilic Narrative: The Illustrated Pied Piper Story
This paper situates The Pied Piper story as an exilic narrative, part of a larger repertoire of stories that follow the romantic quest-myth formula, a formula that conveys a totla metaphor for the “journey of life”.
The Folk-Stories of Iceland
The imaginative life of the folk-stories was shaped by an Icelandic rural culture which was homogeneous, simple and poor looked at from the outside, but at the same time enriched by knowledge and practice of poetry, familiarity with a literary tradition and unbroken links with the ancient culture of the country.
Imagining Samarkand: Fruitful Themes in 13th-16th Century Literature on a Silk Road City
… Samarkand was seen as the last great urban Islamic stop.4 Perhaps because of this, the period between the Arab invasion of Samarkand and the Mongol invasion in 1220 fomented many of the mythologies about the city which will feature prominently in this paper.
Creativity, the trickster, and the cunning harper king: A study of the minstrel disguise entrance trick in “King Horn” and “Sir Orfeo”
What does a hero do when he finds himself in an impossible situation where customary tactics are useless; magic is not in the cards, and divine intervention unlikely? He could give up. Or he could use cunning. In both King Horn and Sir Orfeo, the hero wiggles out of just such a squeeze by using a minstrel disguise entrance trick—a sort of musical Trojan horse for which the enemy’s closely guarded gates swing open in welcome.
Near-Death Folklore in Medieval China and Japan : A Comparative Analysis
Medieval Chinese and Japanese literature provides numerous examples of near-death experiences, episodes in which the narrator claims to have gained personal images of the after life.
Unearthing Medieval Vampire Stories In England: Fragments From De Nugis Curialium and Historia Rerum Anglicarum
I first came across Walter Map and William of Newburgh by way of a chance encounter with The Vampire Encyclopedia a few years ago.
Fact to fiction: how the Tuatha de Danaan of history became the fairies of contemporary fantasy
I will show an evolution of the Tuatha de Danaan from historical people into the fairies commonly associated with Irish myth, how the Tuatha de Danaan have changed and morphed into the contemporary fairies of the fantasy genre, and why this change has occurred and been allowed to take its place among fantasy.
Halloween Customs in the Celtic World
In Wales it is known as Hollantide, in Cornwall Allantide, and in Brittany Kala-Goanv. Samhain’s equivalent on the Christian calendar is All Saints’ Day, introduced by the Catholic church partly to supplant the pagan festival of the dead.
Magiferous Plants in Medieval English Herbalism
This study examines thirteen English vernacular medical texts, dating from approximately the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, for evidence of magiferous healing plants.
The Thread of Life in the Hand of the Virgin
The motif of the Virgin at the loom occurred with frequency in Western art only after the Feast of the Presentation of the Virgin (celebrated by the Byzantine Church on November 21 from the seventh or eighth century onward) was introduced into the West in 1372.
A Reassessment of the Feast of Fools: A Rough and Holy Liturgy
A younger contemporary of Richard of St.-Victor, Jean Beleth (fl. 1160), acknowledged the popular name of the feast: “The feast of the subdeacons, which we call ‘of fools’, by some is executed on the Circumcision, but by others on Epiphany or its octave.’
Folk narratives and legends as sources of widespread idioms: Toward a Lexicon of Common Figurative Units
On the one hand, stories (particularly fables) have been de- rived from already existing proverbs, from antiquity up to early modern times. On the other hand, a story in its summarised form can live on in a proverb or an idiom, even if the knowledge of this story has been forgotten for a long time.
The demise of the walking dead : the rise of purgatory and the end of revenancy
Imagine a time when people actually believed in the existence of revenants, that is, the walking dead; there are records of people having heard them, seen them and partaken in countermeasures against these monsters, or at least those who recorded the stories fully believed the people who said that they had.
The Lebor Gabála Érenn at a Glance: an Overview of the 11th Century Irish Book of Invasions
This document is intended as an orientation for students of the Lebor Gabála Érenn (LGE), a refresher for those who have read it in the
past, and a rapid reference in relation to the genealogy of persons mentioned in the LGE.
Early history of wound treatment
In the fourth century AD the cultural centre of the Mediterranean area shifted to Byzantium (Constantinople) and from there medical knowledge in the form of Galenic teaching spread to the Arabs by way of the exiled Nestorians…
Magic
No one knew the risks and rewards of magic better than Agrippa. His notorious handbook, De occulta philosophia, circulated in manuscript by 1510, though it was printed only in 1533, over the complaints of Dominican inquisitors.
Defining the indefinable: the cultural role of monsters in the Middle Ages
The Middle Ages were littered with monsters. These strange creatures poked their heads out from behind courtly literature; they crept into theological discussions of the Church; they stood alongside factual persons in histories of the period; and they lurked always in the background of the medieval mindset.