Listeners Guide To Medieval English

From the middle of the twentieth century, dozens of medievalists and other performers have recorded early English. Many educational institutions already own sound recordings of English before 1500, or may wish to purchase the most useful ones available. This discography aims to assist teachers, administrators and librarians to make the best use of their resources.

From the middle of the twentieth century, dozens of medievalists and other performers have recorded early English. Many educational institutions already own sound recordings of English before 1500, or may wish to purchase the most useful ones available. This discography aims to assist teachers, administrators and librarians to make the best use of their resources.

For the first time available in paperback, this classic anthology provides readers with important literary works composed during the Middle English period (1100-1500) in England, Scotland, and Ireland. The editors provide glosses for all unfamiliar words and obscure phrases and every selection refers to at least one definitive edition where details of recent scholarship can be found. Modern punctuation and capitalization are used throughout and variant spellings are kept to a minimum to avoid unnecessary confusion. The introduction discusses important literary and linguistic questions; the headnotes and bibliography offer extensive guidance to secondary sources; and the appendixes clarify pronunciation, verb use, and dialect variations.

A Listener's Guide to Cellista's Transfigurations is the accompaniment to Cellista's album of experimental classical music Transfigurations. Cellista provides a critical companion text to her music that gives her listeners an opportunity to understand the compositional process behind her album. She offers a set of tools and "transfigurative" essays that guide curious ears through a musicological and at times, confessional journey. Readers will also find essays that plumb the subject of transfiguration through autobiographical reflection by the philosopher Dr. Frank Seeburger.

This set reissues 29 books on the English language, originally published between 1932 and 2003. Together, the volumes cover key topics within the larger subject of the English Language, including grammar, dialect and the history of English. Written and edited by an international set of scholars, particular volumes employ comparisons with other languages such as French and German, whilst other volumes are devoted to specific English dialects such as Cockney and Canadian English, or English in general. This collection provides insight and perspective on various elements of the English language over a period of 70 years and demonstrates its enduring importance as a field of research.

These fifteen essays, four of them commissioned for this volume, along with a discursive introduction which sets each essay into place and comments on its distinctive features, represent a gathering never before attempted: a symposium on Chaucer's craft that concentrates on his poetic forms, his rhythms, his riming, his versification, his prosody. In his seminal essay, Scanning the Prosodists, Alan Gaylord (the editor of this volume) had asked: To show how Chaucer moves, and in moving, moves us: is that not what the study of his prosody should do? Should it not identify a pattern of sounds in motion, a regular and expressive succession which is part of the order of verse and a major component of its effectiveness? In the two decades that followed that essay, a number of distinguished scholars provided a variety of answers for such questions, arising from the authors' work as metrical theorists, or editors of medieval verse, or literary historians, or critics -- but in every case, such work connected to the initiatives and discoveries of the classroom. The best written and most useful of those essays, by recognized authorities in their fields, have been included in this volume. The volume will be of use to the advanced student of Chaucer and medieval poetry, and to the teacher interested in identifying, explaining, and bringing to life the patterns of sound and sense in Chaucer's verse. The extensive master Bibliography for the whole volume comprises a library of references which will have been reviewed and discussed in the essays.

This collection of 32 modernised versions of The Canterbury Tales which appeared in the 18th century offers basic material for studying the history of attitudes to Chaucer, and Chaucer scholarship, duringthe period. Reception data so precise and extensive is available only for Chaucer among English authors. At least seventeen known and anonymous writers produced thirty-two modernised Canterbury tales during the century, plus tale links and adaptations of each other's work. The present collection contains only modernisations that have not seen print since 1796, thus excluding those by Pope and Dryden. Although most works in this collection may be examined further in several British and American libraries, others cannot. Apparently only one copy has survived of an anonymous Miller's Tale (1791) with a thoughtful preface justifying the tale's overt sexuality published just as William Lipscomb was completing his 1795 edition that, in its preface, justifies exclusion from the pilgrimage of the notorious tales of Miller and Reeve. Such contrasting attitudes illustrate the dangers of generalisation about the usual reception or interpretation of Chaucer during this or any other socio-historic period; instead, the collection provides an untapped reservoir of material with which to investigate anew the rich complexity of his poetry and its enduring appeal. BETSY BOWDEN is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Jersey.