Browse by Subject: Medieval/Renaissance

Please note that while you may order forthcoming books at any time, they will not be available for shipment until shortly before publication date

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An Introduction to Jean Bodel

In this book, Lynn Ramey explores the life and works of Jean Bodel, a twelfth-century French poet, playwright, and epic writer, providing translations and summaries of works never published before in English while delving into Bodel’s historical and cultural context.

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An Introduction to Literary Debate in Late Medieval France: From Le Roman de la Rose to La Belle Dame sans Mercy

This volume immerses readers in a debate tradition that flourished in France during the late Middle Ages, focusing on two works that were both popular and controversial in their time and the discussions they sparked surrounding questions of women’s agency, love, marriage, and honor.

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Allegory and the Poetic Self: First-Person Narration in Late Medieval Literature

This book examines the rise of an influential new family of poetry in the late Middle Ages, analyzing why the allegorical first-person romance embedded itself in the vernacular literature of Western Europe and remained popular for more than two centuries.

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Gender and Voice in Medieval French Literature and Song

This volume brings together literary and musical compositions of medieval France, identifying the use of voice in these works as a way of articulating gendered identities.

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An Introduction to the Sagas of Icelanders

Combining an accessible approach with innovative scholarship, Carl Phelpstead draws on historical context, contemporary theory, and close reading to deepen our understanding of Icelandic saga narratives about the island’s early history.

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An Old French Trilogy: Texts from the William of Orange Cycle

This volume offers a broad and rich view of the tradition of Old French epic poetry, or chansons de geste, by providing an updated English translation of three central poems from the twelfth-century Guillaume d’Orange cycle.

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Shaping Identity in Medieval French Literature: The Other Within

Contributors to this collection consider the multiplicity and instability of medieval French literary identity, arguing that it is fluid and represented in many different ways. Inherently unstable, identity is created, re-created, adopted, refused, imposed, and self-imposed. Additionally, taken together the essays posit that an individual may identify with a group, existing within it, and yet remain foreign to it.  

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Machaut's Legacy: The Judgment Poetry Tradition in the Later Middle Ages and Beyond

In a daring rewrite of literary history, this volume argues that the medieval poet and musician Guillaume de Machaut was the major influence in narrative craft during the late Middle Ages and long after.   

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Signs That Sing: Hybrid Poetics in Old English Verse

In Signs That Sing, Heather Maring argues that oral tradition, ritual, and literate Latin- based  practices are dynamically interconnected in Old English poetry. Resisting the tendency to study these different forms of expression separately, Maring contends that poets  combined them in hybrid techniques that were important to the development of early English  literature.

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An Introduction to Piers Plowman

Useful for individuals reading any version of Piers Plowman, this engaging guide offers a much-needed navigational summary, a chronology of historic events relevant to the poem, biographical information about Langland and his work in context with his contemporaries, and keys to characters and to proper pronunciation.