First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Contents:
1. Philosophy: Victor Cousin (1792-1867) John Marenbon. Pierre Duhem (1861-1947) John E. Murdoch. Martin Grabmann (1875-1949), Philipp W. Rosemann. Etienne Gilson (1884-1947) Edward A. Synan. Harry Austryn Wolfson (1887-1974) Arthur Hymans. Philotheus Boehner, O.F.M. (1901-1955) Fr. Gedeon Gal, O.F.M.
2. Musicology: Introduction. Henry Julius Wetenhall Tillyard (1881-1960) Diane Touliatos. Egon Wellesz (1885-1974) Milos Velimirovic. Bruon Stablein (1895-1978) Charles Atkinson. Gustav Reese (1899-1977) Theodore Karp.
3: Art History: Introduction. Alois Riegel (1858-1905) Margaret Olin. Henri Focillon (1881-1943) Walter Cahn. Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933) Linda Seidel.

This is the second of a three-volume set on medieval scholarship that presents original biographical essays on the scholars whose work has shaped medieval studies for the past 400 years.

This volume covers the lives of 34 eminent individuals -- from Laurence Nowell (1530-1570) to Rosemary Woolf (1925-1978) -- whose subjects were the languages and literatures of Europe between 500 and 1500. Each of these scholars pioneered or revolutionized traditional views in fields such as manuscript and archival studies; folklore and prognostics; metrics; dialectology, phonology, and grammar; textual criticism and editing; folk and religious drama; literary and cultural history; Germanic and Romance philology. The selections discuss such topics as the chansons de geste, Chaucer, Dante, Chretien de Troyes, troubadour lyrics, topology, heroic epic, Arthurian Romance, and Celtic, Germanic, and medieval Scandinavian literature. Some of the scholars pioneered comparative and multidisciplinary studies; others championed national literatures; all published work that is still essential to our understanding of our cultural and aesthetic heritage.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In "Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England," Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of "Beowulf's" 3,182 lines in the context of the turbulent years that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining the the reigns of Cnut and his sons recorded in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," the "Encomium Emmae Reginae," and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem's quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings. Given the poet's compositional skill-widely relational and eclectic at its core-and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned, darkly satirized, or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet's compositional process. Damico illustrates the poet's use of the tools of his trade-compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character-to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical "facts" of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled, are simultaneously operative. "Beowulf and the Grendel-kin" lays out the story of the poem, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.

The publication of this volume of essays is a milestone in Old English studies. It is the first collection to examine this literature from a feminist perspective. Although the contributors represent a plurality of approaches and positions, they share a common objective: to reassess women as women, as they actually appear in the laws, in works written by women, and in canonical literature. The essays address, correct, and round out the nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon critical tradition and begin fresh exploration of the women in Old English literature.

The subjects discussed fall into the following broad categories: the historical record; sexuality and folklore; language and difference in characterization and the "deconstructed" stereotype. Contributors include Marijane Osborn; Christine E. Fell; F.T. Wainwright; Pauline Stafford; Frank M. Stenton; Mary P. Richard s and B. Jane Stanfield; Carol J. Clover; Edith Whitehurst Williams; Paul E. Szarmach; Audrey L. Meaney; Helen Damico; Patricia A. Belanoff; L. John Sklute; Paul Beekman Taylor; Alexandra Hennessey Olsen; Joyce Hill; Jane Chance; Alain Renoir; Dolores Warwick Frese; and Anita R. Riedinger.