Romance was the most popular secular literature of the Middle Ages, and has been understood most productively as a genre that continually refashioned itself. The essays collected in this volume explore the subject of translation, both linguistic and cultural, in relation to the composition, reception, and dissemination of romance across the languages of late medieval Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. In taking this multilingual approach, this volume proposes a re-centring, and extension, of o...

This volume examines the erotic in the literature of medieval Britain, primarily in Middle English, but also in Latin, Welsh and Old French. Seeking to discover the nature of the erotic and how it differs from modern erotics, thecontributors address topics such as the Wife of Bath's opinions on marital eroticism, the role of clothing and nudity, the tension between eroticism and transgression, the interplay between religion and the erotic, and the hedonistic horrors of the cannibalistic Gi...

Malory's Morte Darthur is now a canonical and widely-taught text. Recent decades have seen a transformation and expansion of critical approaches in scholarship, as well as significant advances in understanding its milieux:textual, literary, cultural and historical. This volume adds to and updates the influential Companion of 1996, offering scholars, teachers and students alike a full guide to the text and the author. The essays it contains provide a synthetic overview of,...

It is often said that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, and perhaps no type of "doing" is more fascinating than sexual desires and behaviours. Our modern view of medieval sexuality is characterised bya polarising dichotomy between the swooning love-struck knights and ladies of romance on one hand, and the darkly imagined and misogyny of an unenlightened "medieval" sexuality on the other. British medieval sexual culture also exhibits such dualities through the ...

In Hamlet in Purgatory, renowned literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt delves into his longtime fascination with the ghost of Hamlet's father, and his daring and ultimately gratifying journey takes him through surprising intellectual territory. It yields an extraordinary account of the rise and fall of Purgatory as both a belief and a lucrative institution--as well as a capacious new reading of the power of Hamlet.In the mid-sixteenth century, English authorities ab...

Image and Imagination presents some of C.S. Lewis's finest literary criticism and religious exposition. This selection gathers together forty book reviews—never before reprinted—as well as four major essays which have been unavailable for many decades, and a fifth essay, “Image and Imagination,” published for the first time. The essays and reviews substantiate Lewis's reputation as an eloquent and authoritative critic across a wide range of literature, and as a keen judge of conte...

The medieval period was one of extraordinary literary achievement sustained over centuries of great change, anchored by the Norman invasion and its aftermath, the re-emergence of English as the nation's leading literary language in the fourteenth century and the advent of print in the fifteenth. This Companion spans four full centuries to survey this most formative and turbulent era in the history of literature in English. Exploring the period's key authors - Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-...

Why do authors use pseudonyms and pen-names, or ingeniously hide names in their work with acrostics and anagrams? How has the range of permissible given names changed and how is this reflected in literature? Why do some characters remain mysteriously nameless? In this rich and learned book, Alastair Fowler explores the use of names in literature of all periods - primarily English but also Latin, Greek, French, and Italian - casting an unusual and rewarding light on the work of literature i...

Piers Plowman has long been considered one of the greatest poems of medieval England. Current scholarship on this alliterative masterpiece looks very different from that available even a decade ago. New information about the manuscripts of the poem, new historical discoveries, and new investigations of its literary, cultural and theoretical scope have fundamentally altered the very meaning of Langland's art. This Companion thus critically surveys traditional scholarship, with the aim of re...

Christians in post-Reformation England inhabited a culture of conversion. Required to choose among rival forms of worship, many would cross - and often recross - the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism. This 2009 study considers the poetry written by such converts, from the reign of Elizabeth I to that of James II, concentrating on four figures: John Donne, William Alabaster, Richard Crashaw, and John Dryden. Murray offers a context for each poet's conversion within the era's po...

Shakespeare lived at a time when England was undergoing the revolution in ritual theory and practice we know as the English Reformation. With it came an unprecedented transformation in the language of religious life. Whereas priests had once acted as mediators between God and men through sacramental rites, Reformed theology declared the priesthood of all believers. What ensued was not the tidy replacement of one doctrine by another but a long and messy conversation about t...

This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to tre...