Surviving in 59 complete manuscript versions, few English texts of the late medieval period seem to have achieved the popularity of Nicholas Love's fifteenth-century translation and adaptation of the Latin Meditationes Vitae Christi - The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. The Mirror has received surprisingly little scholarly attention and is often contextualized in terms of its role in the theological conflict between English ecclesiastical orthodoxy and the teachings of heresiar...

Perceforest is one of the largest and certainly the most extraordinary of the late Arthurian romances, and is almost completely unknown except to a handful of scholars. But it is a work of exceptional richness and importance, and has been justly described as "an encyclopaedia of 14th-century chivalry" and "a mine of folkloric motifs". Its contents are drawn not only from earlier Arthurian material, but also from romances about Alexander the Great, from Roman histories and from med...

Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.

Profound and intriguing, Grettir's Saga is the last of the great Icelandic sagas. It tells of the life and death of Grettir, a great rebel, individualist, and romantic hero viewed unromantically. Grettir spends his childhood violently defying authority: as a youth of sixteen he kills a man and is outlawed; all the rest of his life he devotes, with remarkable composure, to fighting more and more formidable enemies. He pits himself against bears, berserks, wraiths, trolls, and final...

At the center of Petrarch's vision, announcing a new way of seeing the world, was the individual, a sense of the self that would one day become the center of modernity as well. This self, however, seemed to be fragmented in Petrarch's work, divided among the worlds of philosophy, faith, and love of the classics, politics, art, and religion, of Italy, France, Greece, and Rome. In recent decades scholars have explored each of these worlds in depth. In this work, Giuseppe Mazzotta shows for t...

In the first full-length study of Judith of Flanders (c. 1032-1094), Mary Dockray-Miller provides a narrative of Judith’s life through analysis of the books and art objects she commissioned and collected. Organizing her book chronologically by Judith’s marriages and commissions, Dockray-Miller argues that Judith consciously and successfully deployed patronage to support her political and marital maneuverings in the eleventh-century European political theater. During her marriage to Tostig ...

The Arma Christi, the cluster of objects associated with Christ’s Passion, was one of the most familiar iconographic devices of European medieval and early modern culture. From the weapons used to torment and sacrifice the body of Christ sprang a reliquary tradition that produced active and contemplative devotional practices, complex literary narratives, intense lyric poems, striking visual images, and innovative architectural ornament. This collection displays the fascinating range of int...

The King’s Body investigates the role of royal bodies, funerals, and graves in English succession debates from the death of Alfred the Great in 899 through the Norman Conquest in 1066. Using contemporary texts and archaeological evidence, Nicole Marafioti reconstructs the political activity that accompanied kings’ burials, to demonstrate that royal bodies were potent political objects which could be used to provide legitimacy to the next generation.In most cases, new ruler...

In the Christian tradition, especially in the works of Paul, Augustine, and the exegetes of the Middle Ages, the body is a twofold entity consisting of inner and outer persons that promises to find its true materiality in a time to come. A potentially transformative vehicle, it is a dynamic mirror that can reflect the work of the divine within and substantially alter its own materiality if receptive to divine grace.The writings of Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine,...

Tolkien Studies: An Annual Scholarly Review presents the growing body of critical commentary and scholarship on both J. R. R. Tolkien's voluminous fiction and his academic work in literary and linguistic fields.

After establishing a feminist-historicist perspective on the tradition of biblical commentary, Tinkle develops in-depth case studies that situate scholars reading the bible in three distinct historical moments, and in so doing she exposes the cultural pressures that medieval scholars felt as they interpreted the bible.

In this book, Jennifer Garrison examines literary representations of the central symbol of later medieval religious culture: the Eucharist. In contrast to scholarship that depicts mainstream believers as enthusiastically and simplistically embracing the Eucharist, Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature identifies a pervasive Middle English literary tradition that rejects simplistic notions of eucharistic promise.Through new readings of texts such...