Owain Miles And Other Inedited Fragments Of Ancient English Poetry

This bibliography covers visions of Heaven and Hell - or, more usually, Purgatory and Earthly Paradise - in 19 medieval texts relating seven visions: the vision of St Paul, or the Eleven Pains of Hell; St Patrick's purgatory; the vision of Tundale; a revelation of purgatory; the revelation of the Monk of Eynsham; the vision of Fursey; and the vision of Edmund Leversedge.

Three quarters of what is now considered the corpus of Middle English romances were recovered and edited between the 1760s and the 1860s by a handful of dilettante scholars (from Thomas Percy to Frederick J. Furnivall) whose progress in the understanding of the texts and of the time in which they were written follows paths very different from those of modern textual and philological analysis. The present volume describes and discusses more than one hundred primary sources (collections, editions, dissertations, and marginal writings such as glosses and introductions) in order to provide a picture of the infancy of the study of medieval romance in Britain. The volume is arranged as a chronological review of the amateur scholars and their editorial and critical practices and it was conceived as a reference book, providing a complete list of the romances edited in the period considered and information about single texts and their manuscript and printed versions. The author offers a picture of the first steps towards the gradual rehabilitation of a genre that had been despised for more than two centuries and its inclusion in the literary canon. Her discussion illuminates several aspects of the transmission and reshaping of the medieval culture in the nineteenth century and constitutes a contribution to the desideratum of a history of medieval studies.

First published in 1907, the publication of these Middle-English texts aimed to make the dramatic Harrowing of Hell and Gospel of Nicodemus easily accessible to students of English literature. Edited together using all known manuscripts, the volume includes the texts of the Harrowing of Hell and the Gospel of Nicodemus along with an extensive scholarly introduction on both texts. The Digby, Harley and Auchinleck manuscripts of the Harrowing are printed in three parallel columns to allow for fuller, comparative understanding, at once succinct and comprehensive. The Gospel is reproduced similarly with its Galba, Harley and Sion manuscripts along with an additional manuscript. Explanatory notes and glosses have been omitted owing to inclusion in a separate publication.