Studies of women's roles in the secular literary world, as patrons, authors, readers, and characters in secular literature. This second volume of proceedings from the `Women and the Book' conference, held at St Hilda's College, Oxford in 1993, brings together fifteen papers dealing with women's experience in the secular literary world. It covers the whole variety of roles women might take, as patrons, authors, readers, and characters in secular literature; encompassed in its range are well-known characters, real and fictional, such as Christine de Pisan and the Wife of Bath, and the more obscure but no less fascinating topic of women in Chinese medieval court poetry. Like its predecessor Women, the Book, and the Godly(Brewer, 1995), this volume illuminates the world of medieval women with carefulscholarship and attention to sources, producing new readings and new materials which shed fresh light on an increasingly important field of study. Contributors: PATRICIA SKINNER, PHILIP E. BENNETT, JENNIFER GOODMAN, CHARITY CANNON-WILLARD, BENJAMIN SEMPLE, ANNE BIRRELL, JEANETTE BEER, MARK BALFOUR, CAROL HARVEY, HEATHER ARDEN, KAREN JAMBECK, JULIA BOFFEY, JENNIFER SUMMIT, MARGARITA STOCKER

A wide overview of court culture in the middle ages. The court exercised an enormous amount of influence on the culture of the middle ages, as the essays collected here demonstrate. They examine a wide variety of different areas of medieval courtly culture, from the history of the book through courtly music to the theory of courtesy and courtly love. While some authors deal with the central texts of courtly literature, such as Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, Marie de France's Lais, the romances of Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg, and the corpus of courtly lyric in various languages, others consider less-studied works like Galeran de Bretagne, or the French version of the Disciplina Clericalis. Several contributions take a comparative approach to courtly texts outside the Western tradition, while others point to the courtly nature of chronicle literature and to courtly influences on religious-didactic works. The volume as a whole thus presents an overview of medieval court culture. Contributors: GLORIA ALLAIRE, LAURA D. BAREFIELD, ANNE BERTHELOT, BERT BEYNEN, JEAN BLACKER, WALTER BLUE, MAUREEN BOULTON, FRANKBRANDSMA, EMMA CAYLEY, MARCO CEROCCHI, CHRISTOPHER R. CLASON, ALAIN CORBELLARI, IVY A. CORFIS, PAUL CREAMER, EVELYN DATTA, JUDITH M. DAVIS, FIDEL FAJARDO-ACOSTA, YASMINA FOEHR-JANSSENS, STACY L. HAHN, CAROL HARVEY, C. STEPHEN JAEGER, KATHY M. KRAUSE, JUNE HALL MCCASH, MATTHIAS MEYER, EDWARD J. MILOWICKI, JEANNE A. NIGHTINGALE, CHRISTOPHER PAGE, ANA PAIRET, WENDY PFEFFER, RUPERT T. PICKENS, MARIA PREDELLI, SILVIA RANAWAKE, PAUL ROCKWELL, SAMUEL, N. ROSENBERG, JUDITH RICE ROTHSCHILD, MARY ROUSE, RICHARD ROUSE, MARIANNE SANDELS, SUSAN STAKEL, ALEXANDRA STERLING-HELLENBRAND, JOSEPH M. SULLIVAN, YUKO TAGAYA, RICHARD TRACHSLER, ADRIAN TUDOR, MARION UHLIG, LORI J. WALTERS, LOGAN E. WHALEN, VALERIE M. WILHITE, MONICA L. WRIGHT.

The expression of cultural differences in medieval courtly literature explored. Cultural differences in medieval European literary practice are reflected in many different ways, as this volume illustrates. The essays cover a whole range of courtly topics, in particular questions of context, genre and poetic voice. The five sections explore contexts for courtliness, especially the position of the vernacular poet at or near the court; the ways in which courtly values and political aspirations are reflected in the work of medieval chronicle and romance writers; questions of register, convention, gender, and narrative technique; problems of literary production and reception, particularly the transmission of courtly and quasi-courtly texts among widely differing medieval audiences; and broader issues such as the clues to the courtly mentality provided by peripheral narrative details, the blurring of conventional courtly boundaries, and the perennial fascination of tales with strong folklore or fabliau elements. Dr EVELYN MULLALLY and Dr JOHN THOMPSON are Senior Lecturers at the Queen's University of Belfast. Contributors: GEAROID MAC EOIN, NOLLAIG O MURA-LE, RUPERT T. PICKENS, FRANCOISE LE SAUX, CATHERINE LEGLU, BARBARA N. SARGENT-BAUR, AD PUTTER, MICHEL ZINK, DONALD MADDOX, JEANBLACKER, SARA STURM-MADDOX, MICHELLE SZKIILNIK, THEA SUMMERFIELD, HELEN COOPER JOHN SCATTERGOOD, JUNE HALL MCCASH, JOAN BRUMLIK, LESLIE C. BROOKMAUREEN BOULTON, JESSICA COOKE, DIANE M. WRIGHT, G. KOOLEMANS BEYNEN, LORI J. WALTERS, SYLVIA WRIGHT, FRANK BRANDSMA, CARTER REVARD, A S G EDWARDS, HEATHER COLLIER, TERENCE SCULLY, CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ, SARA I. JAMES, WILLIAM MACBAIN, SARA I. JAMES, MARY B. SPEER, YASMINA FOEHR-JANSSENS, CAROL J. HARVEY, BART BESAMUSCA, KEITH BUSBY