Published in 1981, Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Central Asia 1810-1895 is a valuable contribution to the field of Middle Eastern Studies.

Published in 1981, Anglo-Russian Rivalry in Central Asia 1810-1895 is a valuable contribution to the field of Middle Eastern Studies.

An introduction to the castles of Wales, this is also a detailed guide to 70 of them for the historical tourist. The main guide is made up of entries on medieval castles that include notes on access, OS-grid references, history and building details.

A survey of critical attention devoted to Arthurian matters. This book offers the first comprehensive and analytical account of the development of Arthurian scholarship from the eighteenth century, or earlier, to the present day. The chapters, each written by an expert in the area under discussion, present scholarly trends and evaluate major contributions to the study of the numerous different strands which make up the Arthurian material: origins, Grail studies, editing and translation of Arthurian texts, medieval and modern literatures (in English and European languages), art and film. The result is an indispensable resource for students and a valuable guide for anyone with a serious interest in the Arthurian legend. Contributors:NORRIS LACY, TONY HUNT, KEITH BUSBY, JANE TAYLOR, CHRISTOPHER SNYDER, RICHARD BARBER, SIAN ECHARD, GERALD MORGAN, ALBRECHT CLASSEN, ROGER DALRYMPLE, BART BESAMUSCA, MARIANNE E. KALINKE, BARBARA MILLER, CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ, MURIEL WHITAKER, JEANNE FOX-FRIEDMAN, DANIEL NASTALI, KEVIN J. HARTY NORRIS J. LACY is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of French and Medieval Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

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This fourth volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry consolidates the work of the previous three volumes on the great subjects of English literature in the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The Norman Conquest of England built upon the rich foundation of Anglo-Saxon England but did not destroy it; thus the present volume begins with the commemoration of English heroism in The Battle of Maldon. In the late twelfth century we encounter in Chretien de Troyes's seminal romance Le Chevalier de la Charrete a new kind of hero in Lancelot, abject and obedient before his mistress, although Chretien himself is not an uncritical admirer of the sanctity of adulterous love. Hence the importance of Dante's exposition of love in Purgatorio, XVIII, which forms a background to the essays here on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Parliament of Fowls. The volume concludes with essays on Chaucer's Knight's, Monk's and Nun's Priest's Tales, which form part of a long-term project to interpret the Canterbury Tales as a unified whole and not merely a series of fragments awaiting revision on Chaucer's death.

This third volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry includes, as in the previous volumes, essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Langland, Chaucer and Spenser; it also includes essays on Beowulf and Dante. It was never the author's intention to exclude Old English poetry from the historical continuum of English poetry, and practical rather than ideological considerations explain the absence of Beowulf from the two previous volumes. The language of Beowulf is in all essentials the language of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman, in one and the same native alliterative tradition, and also the language of Chaucer, in the European tradition inherited from the great French and Italian poets. The transition from Beowulf to Dante may seem abrupt, but the poetry of Chaucer, whose assimilation of Italian influences is both formidable and remarkable, requires us to make it. Indeed, the exploration in this volume of Dante's exposition of love in the Purgatorio takes us to the heart of the poetry that we associate with the period of Chaucer's greatness in the 1380s and 1390s. Here we see not an anachronistic system of courtly love, imposed on medieval poems by modern critics, but distinctions of natural, sensitive and rational love that make sense (among other things) of the ending of Troilus and Criseyde as the poem's logical and persuasive conclusion.

This second volume of essays under the title The Shaping of English Poetry continues the project set out in the Preface to the first volume, discussing the three golden poets of the Golden Age of English poetry in the second half of the fourteenth century. The first two essays address the great alliterative poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman and the remaining six essays are on Chaucer, five of them on The Canterbury Tales. There is no doubt about the sustained excellence (and often the sublimity) of these works, and it remains a hard task for readers and scholars to measure up to them. The essays on Chaucer are predominantly concerned with the influence of Italian poetry and Aristotelian moral philosophy. These influences have long been recognised, but their depth and weight have not so readily been acknowledged. In particular, the influence of Aristotle - not merely on Chaucer's poetry but on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century English and European culture as a whole - presents an intellectual challenge that scholars of medieval English literature have often been reluctant to confront. These essays seek to demonstrate that in engaging with Chaucer's response to Aristotelian moral philosophy our perspective will not only be enriched but dramatically altered.