Books in the Muensteraner Monographien zur englischen Literatur / Muenster Monographs on English Literature series

This study focuses on testaments and donation records from England before 1450 to investigate the values of medieval books. Semantic fields as indicators of value help discover the values associated with books in the manuscript period. This systematic analysis of the records shows the varied aspects of medieval books before the arrival of print.

Jonathan Swift was not alone when he published the "Drapier's Letters" in protest against a coinage patent granted to the English manufacturer William Wood. This annotated edition contains more than 100 pamphlets, public declarations, poems, and songs, which denounced the project as a threat to Ireland's financial security and economic well-being.

This study argues that the critical response to textual authority in Chaucer's fables helped to negotiate scholastic poetics in fifteenth-century England. Drawing on a selection of late medieval sources, the book traces the re-assessment of textual authority in the face of the growing importance of an empowered vernacular readership.

Employing historical discourse analysis, this study analyses concepts of language in Elizabethan normative sources and the Marprelate controversy. It shows under which circumstances Elizabethans understood language as violence. It also shows that in theological controversy language concepts were used in legitimation and de-legitimation strategies.