Books in the Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature series

Focusing on the Clerk, Merchant, Franklin and Squire sequence in The Canterbury Tales, this book explores Chaucer's meditation on the fraught relation between the value of literature and the values underlying various non-literary ways of earning a living. It will appeal to scholars and students of medieval studies.

This study introduces a new set of texts into the Arthurian canon and suggests a way to understand their place in that tradition. Unfamiliar works are summarized for the reader, and there are extensive quotations, with translations, throughout.

A study of the Divine Comedy, this book offers an interesting perspective on Dante's representation of the afterlife. Alison Morgan departs from the conventional critical emphasis on Dante's place in relation to learned traditions by undertaking a thorough examination of the poem in the context of popular beliefs.

Chretien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary traditions to a highly sophisticated literary cultivation of the Old French verse romance.

Little attention has been paid to the political and ideological significance of the medieval exemplum, a brief narrative form used to illustrate a moral. Through a study of four major works in the Chaucerian tradition, Professor Scanlon redefines the exemplum as a 'narrative enactment of cultural authority'.

The Craft of Thought, first published in 1998, examines medieval monastic meditation as a discipline for making thoughts, and discusses its influence on literature, art, and architecture, deriving examples from a variety of late antique and medieval sources, with excursions into modern architectural memorials.

In this book, eleven essays by leading scholars of music, liturgy, literature, manuscript production and architecture analyse how the medieval arts invited collaborative performances designed to persuade. Using concepts derived from rhetoric to analyse specific examples, the essays show the immense power of those forms of rhetoric which are 'beyond words'.

This 1998 collection examines the ways in which writing was used in the Celtic countries between c. 400 and c. 1500. It is concerned with the amount and types of material committed to writing as well as with the social groups which promoted the use of literacy and had access to its products.

This is a comprehensive account of the Legend of Good Women's interpretative puzzles, which does not ignore the element of political writing, and adds to a close and nuanced reading of the text an examination of literary, historical, and social contexts.

Reinterpretation of the significance of the figure of St Bernard in Dante's Commedia.

Taking as its model Virgil's Aeneid, this study examines the impact on medieval culture of an ancient text, through both its manuscript annotations and its reincarnation in vernacular versions such as the Roman d'Eneas and Chaucer's House of Fame.

Christine de Pizan's Livre de la Cite des Dames (1405) is justly renowned for its full-scale assault on the misogynist stereotypes which dominated the culture of the Middle Ages. This study shows the text's underlying unity and its insistence on the moral, if not the social, equality of the sexes.

'Tragedy' has been understood in a great variety of conflicting ways over the centuries, and the term has been applied to a wide range of literary works. In this book, H. A. Kelly explores the various meanings given to tragedy, from Aristotle, via Roman ideas and practices, to the middle ages.

In this first full study of the early history of greed Richard Newhauser shows that avaritia, the sin of greed for possessions, was increasingly dominant in a wide range of theological and literary texts from the first century CE to the end of the tenth century.

This book is an extended investigation of the anticlericalism of the medieval English poem Piers Plowman.

This book challenges the hitherto generally accepted belief that late-medieval writers wrote for an audience of individual, private readers. Coleman argues that both in Britain and France, from the mid-fourteenth to the late-fifteenth century, literate, elite audiences continued to prefer public reading aloud to private reading.

This book, first published in 2003, examines the relationship between poetry and music in medieval France. Butterfield describes the wide range of contexts in which secular songs were quoted and copied, including narrative romances, satires and love poems. The volume is well illustrated to demonstrate the rich visual culture of medieval French writing.

This book investigates how people learnt to read in the Middle Ages. It uses medieval teachers' glosses on Latin texts to show how complex works were used in a very basic way in the classroom, and argues that this has profound implications for our understanding of medieval literacy and hermeneutics.

Through seven narratives of individual medieval women, prefaced by an overview of nuns' reading and of women who owned printed books, Mary Erler traces networks of female book ownership and exchange which have so far been obscure, and shows how women were responsible for both owning and circulating devotional books.

This is the first collection of essays to focus on women and literature in Britain during the late medieval period. It investigates the levels of literacy open to women, their roles as producers, patrons and readers of literature, and their representation within literary texts.

This book is about the place of pedagogy and the role of intellectuals in medieval dissent. Focusing on the medieval English heresy known as Lollardy, Rita Copeland shows how how radical teachers transformed inherited ideas about classrooms and pedagogy as they brought their teaching to adult learners.

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of Old Icelandic literature within its social context. Leading experts examine the ways in which Iceland's unique social experiment, a kingless society without an established authority structure, inspired a wealth of writing including a new literary genre - the saga.

This is a major study of the cultural and social effects of grammatica, the main medieval discipline concerned with literacy, language and literature. Drawing on a variety of sources, Irvine reveals the implications of grammatica for literary theory and the making of textual culture in the medieval West.

Troubadours and Irony re-examines the work of five early troubadours, namely Marcabru, Bernart Marti, Peire d'Alvernha, Raimbaut d'Aurenga and Giraut de Borneil, to argue that the courtly poetry of southern France in the twelfth century was permeated with irony and that many troubadour songs were playful, laced with humorous sexual innuendo and far from serious.

Simon Gilson examines Dante's reception in Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly his influence on Boccaccio and Petrarch, and on humanism. Ranging across literature, philosophy and art, Gilson's study fully illuminates for the first time Dante's central place in Italian Renaissance culture and thought.

The fifty-plus manuscripts of Piers Plowman have always posed a puzzle to scholars. This 1996 book is an account of the editions of the poem which have appeared since 1550, examining the circumstances in which the editions were produced, the lives and intellectual motivations of the editors, and the relationship between one edition and the next.

This 1991 book is a literary study of Richard Rolle, one of the most widely read English writers of the late Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson proposes a chronology of Rolle's Latin and English writings and offers a literary analyses of a number of his works, showing how they focus principally on the establishment of his own spiritual authority.

In this study, Joseph Duggan interprets the Cantar de mio Cid as a work that transmutes moral values first into the economic values of a gift economy, then into genealogical values. He maintains that the Cantar de mio Cid was composed around the year 1200 in substantially the form in which we have it now, in the course of a singer's performance.