This treasury of more than 350 poems, prayers, hymns, blessings, and dramatic readings provides beautiful, powerful pieces that you can use to mark holidays, milestones, and the passing of the seasons. Discover prayers to Janus from Horace and Ovid, a traditional Scottish blessing for Imbolc, an invocation to Pan by poet Helen Bantock, a salutation to the sun by Aleister Crowley, a pharoah's hymn to Isis, a song for Lammas by Gwydion Pendderwen, and many, many more. In addition to readings and blessings for Pagan holidays and other special days throughout the year, you will also discover prayers for weddings and funerals and to coincide with phases of the moon. Author Barbara Nolan includes brief historical or biographical details to contextualize each piece as well as descriptions of various holidays and festivals to help you integrate these readings into your practice. A Year of Pagan Prayer demonstrates that the literary worship of Pagan deities was never fully lost in the West. This bounteous collection draws from the creative and spiritual legacy of Italian Renaissance poets, ancient Sumerian priestesses, twentieth-century Pagans, French Romantics, Greek playwrights, nineteenth-century British occultists, and Egyptian hymnists, making it a must-have sourcebook for anyone who yearns to embody the eloquent expressions of our Pagan past.

Essays exploring Chaucer's identity as a London poet and the urban context for his writings. Literature of the city and the city in literature are topics of major contemporary interest. This volume enhances our understanding of Chaucer's iconic role as a London poet, defining the modern sense of London as a city in history, steeped in its medieval past. Building on recent work by historians on medieval London, as well as modern urban theory, the essays address the centrality of the city in Chaucer's work, and of Chaucer to a literature and a language of the city. Contributors explore the spatial extent of the city, imaginatively and geographically; the diverse and sometimes violent relationships between communities, and the use of language to identify and speak for communities; the worlds of commerce, the aristocracy, law, and public order. A final section considers the longer history and memory of the medieval city beyond the devastations of the Great Fire and into the Victorian period. Dr ARDIS BUTTERFIELD is Reader in English at University College London. Contributors: ARDIS BUTTERFIELD, MARION TURNER, RUTH EVANS, BARBARA NOLAN, CHRISTOPHER CANNON, DEREK PEARSALL, HELEN COOPER, C. DAVID BENSON, ELLIOTKENDALL, JOHN SCATTERGOOD, PAUL DAVIS, HELEN PHILLIPS

Barbara Nolan contends that attitudes toward the meaning of history, prophecy, and vision developed by religious writers of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries fundamentally affected the shape of literary narrative and religious art for two centuries. In these essays, she explores some of the most important moments in this Gothic visionary perspective. The author first follows the history of Apocalypse commentaries from Bede to Alexander of Bremen, focusing particularly on twelfth-century interpretation of Revelation as a spiritual guidebook for the contemporary Christian. She shows that innovative interpretations in these texts have parallels in the cathedral art of St.-Denis and Chartres, the illuminations for later medieval illustrated Apocalypses, and the invention of new "anagogical" literary modes. Professor Nolan's close study of the Vita Nuova indicates that in his earliest work Dante used a prophetic voice and a graded series of visions to shape his conventional love story into a book of revelation. Examination of the thirteenth-century spiritual quest reveals that French writers, transforming older monastic forms, gave new importance to the process of conversion by way of vision. Pearl and Piers Plowman participate in the tradition of the spiritual quest even as Piers marks a final moment in its history. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The theme of the `body and soul' relationship in medieval texts and modern reworkings. The theme of the body-and-soul relationship in medieval texts and in modern reworkings of medieval matter is explored in the articles here, specifically the representation of the body in romance; the relevance of bawdy tales to the cultural experience of authors and readers in the middle ages; the function of despair, or melancholy, in medieval and Renaissance literature; and the political significance of late medieval representations of `bodies' in the chroniclers' accounts of the Rising and in Gower's poems. Two articles are devoted to modern retellings of medieval themes: John Foxe's Acts and Monuments, seen in relation to the traditional acta martyrum, and the medieval revival in Tory Britain exemplified in Douglas Oliver's The Infant and the Pearl. Contributors: PAMELA JOSEPH BENSON, NIGEL S. THOMPSON, JON WHITMAN, JEROME MANDEL, BARBARA NOLAN, YASUNARI TAKADA, YVETTE MARCHAND, ROBERT F. YEAGER, JOERG O. FICHTE, JOHN KERRIGAN

Malory's Morte Darthur - text, history and reception - expertly appraised by international scholars. This collection of original essays by an international group of distinguished medievalists provides a comprehensive introduction to the great work of Sir Thomas Malory, which will be indispensable for both students and scholars. It is divided into three main sections, on Malory in context, the art of the Morte Darthur, and its reception in later years. As well as essays on the eight tales which make up the Morte Darthur, there are studies ofthe relationship between the Winchestermanuscript and Caxton's and later editions; the political and social context in which Malory wrote; his style and sources; and his treatment of two key concepts in Arthurian literature, chivalry and the representation of women. The volume also includes a brief biography of Malory with a list of the historical records relating to him and his family. It ends with a discussion of the reception of the Morte Darthurfrom the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and a select bibliography. Contributors: P.J.C. FIELD, FELICITY RIDDY, RICHARD BARBER, ELIZABETH EDWARDS, TERENCE MCCARTHY, CAROL MEALE, JEREMY SMITH, ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD,BARBARA NOLAN, HELEN COOPER, JILL MANN, DAVID BENSON, A.S.G. EDWARDS

Barbara Nolan contends that attitudes toward the meaning of history, prophecy, and vision developed by religious writers of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries fundamentally affected the shape of literary narrative and religious art for two centuries. In these essays, she explores some of the most important moments in this Gothic visionary perspective. The author first follows the history of Apocalypse commentaries from Bede to Alexander of Bremen, focusing particularly on twelfth-century interpretation of Revelation as a spiritual guidebook for the contemporary Christian. She shows that innovative interpretations in these texts have parallels in the cathedral art of St.-Denis and Chartres, the illuminations for later medieval illustrated Apocalypses, and the invention of new "anagogical" literary modes. Professor Nolan's close study of the Vita Nuova indicates that in his earliest work Dante used a prophetic voice and a graded series of visions to shape his conventional love story into a book of revelation. Examination of the thirteenth-century spiritual quest reveals that French writers, transforming older monastic forms, gave new importance to the process of conversion by way of vision. Pearl and Piers Plowman participate in the tradition of the spiritual quest even as Piers marks a final moment in its history. Originally published in 1977. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This is a detailed investigation of Chaucer's poetics in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight's Tale in relation to an important continental narrative tradition. It is the first such wide-ranging study since Charles Muscatine's seminal Chaucer and the French Tradition and the first book to argue in detail that Chaucer's poems, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida and the twelfth-century French romans antiques participate in a distinct formal tradition within the protean field of medieval romance. By close examination of the formal and ethical designs of each poem, Barbara Nolan explores both the compositional practices shared by all of the poets she discusses, and their calculated differences from each other. Her analysis culminates in a full examination of Chaucer's richly original response to the continental verse narratives from which he borrowed. No other study offers so full and careful a delineation of the compositional features that distinguish the roman antique from other forms of romance in the Middle Ages.

Including selections in verse from the talks and writings of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, this daily contemplation book directs the reader toward a deeper appreciation of spiritual life.