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.
Browse by Subject: Medieval/Renaissance
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With this volume, Jane Chance concludes her monumental study of the history of mythography in medieval literature. Her focus here is the advent of hybrid mythography, the transformation of mythological commentary by blending the scholarly with the courtly and the personal.
Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe’s Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race.
Old French epic poems, or chansons de geste, are one of the most important traditions of the French Middle Ages. Consisting of approximately 120 poems including the famous Song of Roland, these tremendously popular songs were based on French history but often embellished in fantastical ways and written to be performed by minstrels.
This new and provocative interpretation examines the formal similarities between the Decameron’s tales of wit, wisdom, and practical jokes and the popular thirteenth-century fabliaux.