Essays studying the relationship between literariness and form in medieval texts. The twenty-first century has witnessed the re-emergence of various kinds of literary formalism, and one project that characterizes most of these diverse formalisms is the effort to distinguish what is precisely literary about their objects of study. The presumed relation between form and the literary that this project presupposes, however, raises questions that still need to be addressed. What is it about form that produces the category of the literary? What precisely is literary about literary form? Can the literary be defined beyond form? This volume explores these questions in the historical and geographical frame of late medieval Britain, across vaunted literary works such as the Franklin's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Towneley Shepherds' Plays, and presumed "non-literary" texts, such as books of hours. By studying texts from a period long priorto literary formalism - indeed, before any fully articulated theory of the literary - the essays gathered here aim to rethink the relationship between form and the literary. Robert J. Meyer-Lee is Margaret W. PepperdeneDistinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Agnes Scott College; Catherine Sanok is an Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Contributors: Anke Bernau, Jessica Brantley, Seeta Chaganti, Shannon Gayk, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Andrew Klein, Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Ingrid Nelson, Maura Nolan, Sarah Elliott Novacich, Catherine Sanok, Emily Steiner, Claire M. Waters.

Essays on a variety of topics in late medieval literature, linked by an engagement with form. The insight that "the implications of textuality as such" can and must underlie our interpretations of literary works remains one of A.C. Spearing's greatest contributions to medieval studies. It is a tribute to the breadth and significance of his scholarship that the twelve essays gathered in his honour move beyond his own methods and interests to engage variously with "textuality as such," presenting a substantial and expansive view of current thinking on form in late medieval literary studies. Covering a range of topics, including the meaning of words, "experientiality", poetic form and its cultural contexts, revisions, rereadings, subjectivity, formalism and historicism, failures of form, the dit, problems of editing lyrics, and collective subjectivity in lyric, they offer a spectrum of the best sort of work blossoming forth from close reading of the kind Spearing was such an early advocate for,continues to press, and which is now so central to medieval studies. Authors and works addressed include Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, "Adam Scriveyn", "To Rosemounde", "TheComplaint Unto Pity"), Langland (Piers Plowman), the Gawain-poet (Cleanness), Charles d'Orleans, Gower (Confessio Amantis), and anonymous lyrics. Cristina Maria Cervone teaches English literature and medieval studies at the University of Memphis; D. Vance Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University. Contributors: Derek Pearsall, Elizabeth Fowler, Claire M. Waters, Kevin Gustafson, Michael Calabrese, David Aers, Nicolette Zeeman, Jill Mann, D. Vance Smith, J.A. Burrow, Ardis Butterfield, Cristina Maria Cervone, Peter Baker.

Composed in French in twelfth-century England, these twelve brief verse narratives center on the joys, sorrows, and complications of love affairs in a context that blends the courtly culture of tournaments and hunting and otherworldly elements such as self-steering boats, shape-shifting lovers, and talking animals. Popular with readers across countries and languages since their composition, the Lais have made their author, Marie, one of the most famous women writers of the Middle Ages, renowned for her brilliant use of language and cultural allusion as well as her keen eye for human behavior. This new edition provides a complete facing-page edition with the original text alongside a new modern English translation.

The Saints' Life was one of the most popular forms of literature in medieval England. This volume offers crucial information for an understanding of the genre. The saints were the superheroes and the celebrities of medieval England, bridging the gap between heaven and earth, the living and the dead. A vast body of literature evolved during the middle ages to ensure that everyone, from kings to peasants, knew the stories of the lives, deaths and afterlives of the saints. However, despite its popularity and ubiquity, the genre of the Saint's Life has until recently been little studied. This collection introduces the canon of Middle English hagiography; places it in the context of the cults of saints; analyses key themes within hagiographic narrative, including gender, power, violence and history; and, finally, shows how hagiographic themessurvived the Reformation. Overall it offers both information for those coming to the genre for the first time, and points forward to new trends in research. Dr SARAH SALIH is Senior Lecturer in English, King's College London. Contributors: SAMANTHA RICHES, MARY BETH LONG, CLAIRE M. WATERS, ROBERT MILLS, ANKE BERNAU, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, MATTHEW WOODCOCK

Angels and Earthly Creatures Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages Claire M. Waters "Waters's book is remarkable in the range of sources employed and the attention paid to each genre and work in its cultural context. . . . Her book makes a significant new contribution to the growing field of sermon studies and should also be taken seriously by students of intellectual history who seek to understand the complex roles preachers and preaching played in the later Middle Ages."--"Journal of Religion" Texts by, for, and about preachers from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries reveal an intense interest in the preacher's human nature and its intersection with his "angelic" role. Far from simply denigrating embodiment or excluding it from consideration, these works recognize its centrality to the office of preacher and the ways in which preachers, like Christ, needed humanness to make their performance of doctrine effective for their audiences. At the same time, the texts warned of the preacher's susceptibility to the fleshly failings of lust, vainglory, deception, and greed. Preaching's problematic juxtaposition of the earthly and the spiritual made images of women preachers, real and fictional, key to understanding and exploiting the power, as well as the dangers, of the feminized flesh. Addressing the underexamined bodies of the clergy in light of both medieval and modern discussions of female authority and the body of Christ in medieval culture, "Angels and Earthly Creatures" reinserts women into the history of preaching and brings together discourses that would have been intertwined in the Middle Ages but are often treated separately by scholars. The examination of handbooks for preachers as literary texts also demonstrates their extensive interaction with secular literary traditions, explored here with particular reference to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Through a close and insightful reading of a wide variety of texts and figures, including Hildegard of Bingen, Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, Waters offers an original examination of the preacher's unique role as an intermediary--standing between heaven and earth, between God and people, participating in and responsible to both sides of that divide. Claire M. Waters teaches English at the University of California, Davis. The Middle Ages Series 2003 296 pages 6 x 9 ISBN 978-0-8122-3753-5 Cloth $69.95s 45.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0403-2 Ebook $69.95s 45.50 World Rights Literature, Religion, Women's/Gender Studies Short copy: Claire M. Waters offers an original examination of the preacher's unique role as an intermediary--standing between heaven and earth, between God and people, participating in and responsible to both sides of that divide.

In Translating "Clergie", Claire Waters explores texts in French verse and prose from England and the Continent that respond to the educational imperative implicit in the Fourth Lateran Council's mandate that individuals be responsible for their own salvation. These texts return repeatedly to the moment of death and individual judgment to emphasize the importance of the process of teaching and to remind teacher and learner of their common fate. The texts' focus on death was not solely a means of terrifying an audience but enabled lay learners to envision confrontations or conversations with dead friends, saints, or even God. Such dialogues at the point of death reinforced the importance of the dialogue between teacher and learner in life and are represented in such varied works as doctrinal handbooks, miracles of the Virgin Mary, retellings of the Harrowing of Hell, and even fabliaux-tales of wit and reversal-in which it is possible to argue one's way into Heaven. Lively stories that featured minstrels dicing with saints, friends returning from the dead, and thieves teaching the prophets offered a model for laypeople considering how to put their Christian learning into practice and perhaps to teach others. Rather than being seen as a challenge to ecclesiastical authority, lay learning in these texts is depicted as hopeful, comic, and affectionate. By examining informal works of Christian instruction used outside institutional teaching contexts to convey the learning of the schools to the parishes, Waters shows how lay learners could assume the role of disciple or student in a way previously available only to monks or university scholars.