Bøger i Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature serien

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.

The contributors to this volume offer a ground-breaking investigation into the birth of new literatures in the vernacular languages of medieval Europe. Essential for scholars of medieval literature, the book opens new perspectives for specialists in specific languages and national literatures through a comparative, transnational approach.

"This is the first monograph to provide a comprehensive interpretation of the Decameron's response to classical and medieval didactic traditions. Olivia Holmes unearths the rich variety of Boccaccio's sources, ranging across Aesopic fables, narrative collections of Islamicate origin, sermon-stories and saints' lives, and compilations of historical anecdotes. Examining the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents in relation to medieval notions of narrative exemplarity, the study also considers how they intersect with current critical assertions of fiction's power to develop empathy and emotional intelligence. Holmes argues that Boccaccio provides readers with the opportunity to exercise both what the ancients called "Ethics," and our contemporaries call "Theory of Mind." This account of a vast tradition of tale collections and its provocative analysis of their workings will appeal to scholars of Italian literature and medieval studies, as well as to readers interested in evolutionary understandings of storytelling"--

This is the first book-length study of English writing in the period between Old and Middle English. For lecturers and students alike, it reveals exactly what happened to English in a period necessarily covered on introductory literary history courses and on courses in the history of the English language.

Focusing on one of the most influential poems in the European literary tradition, this collection brings together specialised chapters on medieval intellectual history, legal history, psychology, ethics, and logic. Re-evaluates the significance of the Roman de la Rose: indispensable reading for literary specialists and intellectual historians.

"This revisionist literary history of late-medieval and Renaissance poetry offers in-depth analyses of six major poets - Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve, Lydgate, Skelton, and Wyatt - and reconstructs their ideas about the proper way to write. It sheds new light on the question of what these poets thought literature itself was made from"--

Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages offers a literary history of the North-South divide, examining the complexities of the relationship - imaginative, material, and political - between North and South in a wide range of texts. Through sustained analysis of the North-South divide as it emerges in the literature of medieval England, this study illustrates the convoluted dynamic of desire and derision of the North by the rest of country. Joseph Taylor dissects England's problematic sense of nationhood as one which must be negotiated and renegotiated from within, rather than beyond, national borders. Providing fresh readings of texts such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads and the Towneley plays, this book argues for the North's vital contribution to processes of imagining nation in the Middle Ages and shows that that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism.

"Beyond merely examining debt in Middle English texts, Anne Schuurman shows how medieval literature, particularly Chaucer and Langland, engenders capitalism, a system rooted in penitential theology. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details"--