An invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires, Review of English Studies New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces both the British Isles and Europe. Essays in this volume engage with the relations between humans and nonhumans; the power of inanimate objects to animate humans and texts; literary deployments of medical, aesthetic, and economic discourses; the language of friendship; and the surprising value of early readers' casual annotations. Texts discussed include Beowulf, works by Rolle, Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Lydgate; lyrics of the Occitan troubadour Marcabru and the French poet Richard de Fournival; and the Anglo-Saxon versions of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae and Augustine's Soliloquia. Wendy Scase is Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham; David Lawton is Professor of English at Washington University, StLouis; Laura Ashe is Associate Professor of English at Worcester College, Oxford.

Stolen Song documents the act of cultural appropriation that created a founding moment for French literary history: the rescripting and domestication of troubadour song, a prestige corpus in the European sphere, as French. This book also documents the simultaneous creation of an alternative point of origin for French literary history—a body of faux-archaic Occitanizing songs. Most scholars would find the claim that troubadour poetry is the origin of French literature uncomplicated and uncontroversial. However, Stolen Song shows that the "Frenchness" of this tradition was invented, constructed, and confected by francophone medieval poets and compilers keen to devise their own literary history. Stolen Song makes a major contribution to medieval studies both by exposing this act of cultural appropriation as the origin of the French canon and by elaborating a new approach to questions of political and cultural identity. Eliza Zingesser shows that these questions, usually addressed on the level of narrative and theme, can also be fruitfully approached through formal, linguistic, and manuscript-oriented tools.