Bøger i Manchester Medieval Literature serien

This book studies the ways in which three fields of creative activity inspired by the medieval - musical performance, literature, cinema and their reception - have worked together to produce and sustain the fantasy of a long-lost, long-mourned paradisal home.

From England and France to the Low Countries, Wales, Scotland, and Italy, the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) fundamentally shaped late-medieval literature. This volume adopts an expansive focus to reveal the transnational literary consequences of over a century of international conflict. While traditionally seen as an Anglo-French conflict, the Hundred Years War was a multilateral conflict with connections across the continent through alliances and proxy battles. Writers, whether as witnesses, diplomats, or provocateurs, played key roles in shaping the conflict, and the conflict equally impacted the course of literary history. The volume shows how a wide variety of genres and works are deeply engaged with responses to the war, from women's visionary writing by figures like Catherine of Siena to anonymous lyric poetry, from Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Long takes advantage of the fifteenth century's intense interest in the Virgin Mary, the best-documented mother of the medieval period, to examine the constructions and performances of her maternity in devotional texts. This results in revisionist readings that consider maternity as a literate practice and devotional literacy as a maternal one.

This innovative volume harnesses the interdisciplinarity and flexibility of 'encounter' to provide dynamic readings The Book of Margery Kempe in the twenty-first century. Incorporating thirteen original chapters and a critical introduction, it offers myriad exciting approaches to this important and ever-surprising medieval text.

This book addresses the vexed status of literary value, focusing on everyday scholarly and pedagogical activities, using Chaucer studies as a case in point. It explores how we may reconcile literary value's inevitability with its uncertainties and complicities, seeking to forge a viable rationale for literary studies generally.