Books published by Medieval Institute Publications

Ava is the first woman whose name we know who wrote in German. She wrote her poem - or poems - on the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus Christ sometime early in the twelfth century, no later than 1127.

For all its spiritual cheerfulness and obvious importance as a tale to conclude tales, The Parson's Tale seems to have inspired sentence and solaas in remarkably few critics. . This rethinking of traditional scholarship on The Canterbury Tales will be of great interest to Chaucer scholars and students of medieval literature.

In this volume, John Metham's classic romance Amoryus and Cleopes is made available to a wider audience of students and teachers of Middle English with its contextualizing introduction, extensive notes, and helpful gloss. This fifteenth century romance, written by John Metham, creatively reworks Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe's tragic love from his Metamorphoses. Metham draws on a wide variety of popular romances and particularly Chaucer's Ovidian works to create an inventive romance of his own with a decidedly moral aim. This volume will be of interest to students of Middle English romance and all those interested in the literary legacy of Chaucer.

Illustrates how, in the devout medieval English sensibility, doctrine was vitally connected to affective receptivity. Narrative moods range from love-longing and passion to bitter grief and sorrowful lament, feelings from the intimately personal state of being God's created creature, individually answerable to divine law and love.

Surveys of the history of biblical exegesis and, in particular, the history of Apocalypse commentaries rarely fail to allude to Nicholas of Lyra O.F.M. (1270-1349) as the greatest biblical exegete of the fourteenth century.

Primarily for students of medieval history, nothing from a specifically literary text has been included. Only material from record sources is provided as these are the only written materials that permit some measure of personalized contact with specific men and women from the past, so this gives them a special importance.

This book brings together and translates from the medieval Latin a series of commentaries on the biblical book of Ruth, with the intention of introducing readers to medieval exegesis or biblical interpretation. . . . Ruth is the shortest book of the Old Testament, being only four chapters long. It is partly for this reason that it lends itself so well to a short book introducing medieval exegesis; but it is also of interest in itself. Ruth poses a number of exegetical problems, including the basic one of why such an odd book, in which God never appears as an actor, and with a central character who was not an Israelite but a Moabite outsider, and a woman at that, should find a place in the canon of Scripture.

The only known English version of Chretien de Troyes's romance of Perceval. Accompanying this tale is Ywain and Gawain. An excellent introduction to Middle English Arthurian romance, as they include editing, glosses, introductions, and a very helpful glossary for beginning students.

Depositions (or testimony) in marriage cases brought before fifteenth-century English church courts reveal the attitudes and feelings of medieval people towards the marital bond.

This new edition makes available to students of English romance and of the Matter of Britain two significant Middle English Arthurian romances. With introductions, glosses, notes, and glossary, a very accessible edition for students.

Wasson here provides the basic tools necessary to transcribe documents, without regard for the historical development of alphabets, letter forms, and the like. This manual will be of great interest to scholars of the arts in need of a guide for their journeys into the archives.

Eighteen essays by some of the most prominent British and North American students of heroic poetry, plus two poems and a bibliography, are gathered here to honor Jess B. Bessinger Jr., whose innovative studies of heroic poetry have instructed a generation of scholars and whose performances of Anglo-Saxon poems are legendary.

On anticlerical poetry in late medieval England. These Middle English poems attack ecclesiastical corruption; most of the poems were written by disgruntled Lollards about clerics and friars in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Well glossed and include introductions and copious notes, for students of any level of experience.

An account of life in London during the reign of the first Tudor king.

New translations of texts on the Apocalypse written by Theodulf of Orleans and Smaragdus of Saint Mihiel, two early ninth-century theological advisers to Charlemagne.

Performative dance and dance history, social history and musicological issues are all explored, touching on topics from the later Renaissance back through the Carolingian Empire.

Clifford Davidson's newly revised and expanded edition of A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge makes available the longest and most significant text of dramatic criticism in Middle English.

Gower's imaginative French poetry is now available in a new edition with facing page translation, annotations, and introduction. Gower's Traitie employs the French poetic form of balade, typically used for courtly verses, to avow instead the virtues of loving marriage, characteristic of Gower's signature moralizing. His Cinkante Balades confront the tradition of the French Livre de Cent Balades, by describing the feelings of a young man towards his lady, but eventually offering a praise of love insofar as it is subject to reason and morality. Together the two works offer an excellent introduction to the Anglo-Norman works of Gower and are perfect for classroom use.

The paraphrase is a remarkable artifact of the Chaucerian period, one that can reveal a great deal about vernacular biblical literature in Middle English, about understandings of the Bible, about the environment in which the Lollards and other reformers worked, perceived roles of women in history and in society and composition of medieval drama.

This sourcebook presents editions and translations of seven 14th- and 15th-century texts that advance our understanding of gender, sexuality, and class in the late medieval German-speaking world. Three of the translated texts are fiction. Additionally, there is a religious treatise, a religious legend, an inventory of books, and a legal document.

Morality play deals allegorically with the life of man, his struggle against temptation and sin and hope of final redemption. The play begins before Mankind's birth and concludes with his salvation after death, and features the traditional enemies of Mankind (the World, the Flesh and the Devil) and his two advisors (the Good and the Bad Angel).

The idea for the Bloomfield Lectures was...[to] reflect to some extent Morton Bloomfield's wide and varied interests-in literature, in the history of philosophy, in language studies, in Judaic studies.

John Lydgate is known as the most distinguished poet of fifteenth-century England. This volume presents his brilliant and underappreciated dramatic texts written for both private and public entertainment, encompassing both religious and secular topics. This is the first time since 1934 that many of these poems have been reprinted or reedited. They are published here with an extensive gloss and notes, as well as a glossary and an introduction, making them accessible to a new generation of students of the Middle Ages. These works are indispensible to any study of medieval English drama.

A remarkable product of an important period in German literature and indeed in medieval European culture; it may be argued with considerable justification that Der Welsche Gast is the most significant didactic work of the German High Middle Ages.

A morality play warning Mankind how it may be led astray by temptation, while entertaining the audience with banter between the characters representing vice. With a gloss, notes, an introduction, and a glossary, this edition of the lively Middle English play is perfect for any level of instruction and invaluable to those who teach early drama.

This collection of essays addresses the concerns of Anglo-Saxon manuscript studies today, which have been given new energy by the publication of Helmut Gneuss's Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts. .