From Phoenix To Chauntecleer

First English translation and detailed commentary of a fourteenth-century Low-German work about the Near and Middle East. That extensive travel took place during the Middle Ages has long been established, via such accounts as, for example, Marco Polo's Devisement du Monde; but there remains a relative paucity of documents or narratives confirming and dealing with this phenomenon. Der Niederrheinische Orientbericht ("An Account of the Middle East"), composed around 1350/55 by an anonymous author in Low German, is powerful evidence of international relations between east and west during this period; it provides extensive information, dealing with such matters as the local culture, fauna and flora, and offers spectacular insights into the co-existence of many different religions and peoples. It is therefore an important source for our knowledge; but it has hitherto been neglected by scholars, not least because of the difficulty of its language. This volume offers the first translation into English, thereby making the work available to a wider audience; it is accompanied by a detailed commentary on its historical, religious, military, architectural and political elements, elucidating the narrative fully. The volume also contains a contextual introduction, considering what can be known of the author, and the manuscript tradition.

Old and Middle English literature can be obscure and challenging. So, too, can the vast body of criticism it has elicited. Yet the masters of medieval literature often drew on similar texts, since imitation was admired. For this reason, recent scholarship has often focused on the importance of genre. The genre in which a work was written can illuminate the author's intentions and the text's meaning. Read in light of a genre's parameters, a given work can be considered in relation to other works within the same category. This reference is a comprehensive overview of Old and Middle English literature. Chapters focus on particular genres, such as Allegorical Verse, Balladry, Beast Fable, Chronicle, Debate Poetry, Epic and Heroic, Lyric, Middle English Parody/Burlesque, Religious and Allegorical Verse, and Romance. Expert contributors define the primary characteristics of each genre and discuss relevant literary works. Chapters provide extensive reviews of scholarship and close with detailed bibliographies. A more thorough bibliography of major scholarly studies closes the book.

An edition of the early Middle English verse sequence contained in the thirteenth-century Oxford Jesus College MS 29 (II) with accompanying translations in Modern English and scholarly introduction and apparatus. The sequence is varied in subject, with poems of religious exhortation set beside others of secular pragmatism. Included are: The Owl and the Nightingale, Poema Morale, The Proverbs of Alfred, Thomas of Hales's Love Rune, The Eleven Pains of Hell, the prose Shires and Hundreds of England, the lengthy Passion of Jesus Christ in English, and twenty-one additional lyrics, most of them uniquely preserved in this manuscript. Made in the West Midlands, the Jesus 29 manuscript is the lengthiest all-English verse collection known to exist in the period between the Exeter Book and the Harley Lyrics.

In Brian Friel's writing, the distinction between public and private is closely linked to the concepts of home, family, identity and truth. This study examines the characters' excessive introspection and their deep-seated need to disclose their most intimate knowledge and private truths to define who they are and, thus, to oppose dominant discourse or avoid heteronomy. This study begins by investigating how a number of Anglo-Irish writers publicised their characters' private versions of truth thereby illustrating what they perceived to be the space of 'Irishness'. The book then focuses on Friel's techniques of sharing his character's private views to demonstrate how he adopted and adapted these practices in his own oeuvre. As the characters' superficial inarticulateness and their vivid inner selves are repeatedly juxtaposed in Friel's texts, his oeuvre, quintessentially, displays a great unease with the concepts of communication and absolute truth.

Disputation literature is a type of text in which usually two non-human entities (such as trees, animals, drinks, or seasons) try to establish their superiority over each other by means of a series of speeches written in an elaborate, flowery register. As opposed to other dialogue literature, in disputation texts there is no serious matter at stake only the preeminence of one of the litigants over its rival. These light-hearted texts are known in virtually every culture that flourished in the Middle East from Antiquity to the present day, and they constitute one of the most enduring genres in world literature. The present volume collects over twenty contributions on disputation literature by a diverse group of world-renowned scholars. From ancient Sumer to modern-day Bahrain, from Egyptian to Neo-Aramaic, including Latin, French, Middle English, Armenian, Chinese and Japanese, the chapters of this book study the multiple avatars of this venerable text type.

Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal. The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.