Excerpts from texts (with translation) from the French of medieval England offer a guide to medieval literary theory. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, French was one of England's main languages of literature, record, diplomacy and commerce and also its only supra-national vernacular. As is now recognised, the large corpus of England'sFrench texts and records is indispensable to understanding England's literary and cultural history, the multilingualism of early England, and European medieval French-language culture in general. This volume presents a full, representative collection of texts and facing translations from England's medieval French. Through its selection of prologues and other excerpts from works composed or circulating in England, the volume presents a body of vernacular literary theory, in which some fifty-five highly various texts, from a range of genres, discuss their own origins, circumstances, strategies, source materials, purposes and audiences. Each entry, newly edited from a single manuscript, is accompanied by a headnote, annotation, and narrative bibliography, while a general introduction and section introductions provide further context and information. Also included are essays on French in England and onthe prosody and prose of insular French; Middle English versions of some of the edited French texts; and a glossary of literary terms. By giving access to a literate culture hitherto available primarily only to Anglo-Norman specialists, this book opens up new possibilities for taking English francophony into account in research and teaching. JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE is Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature, English Department, Fordham University, New York, and formerly Professor of Medieval Literature, University of York; THELMA FENSTER is Professor Emerita of French and Medieval Studies, Fordham University; DELBERT RUSSELL is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French, University of Waterloo.

Collection of letters and texts offering guidance for nuns, and including selections from Abelard's letters to Heloise. These translated letters and texts composed for younger and older women in twelfth-century convents illuminate the powerful medieval ideals of virginity and chastity. Abelard's history of women's roles in the church and his letteron women's education, both written for Heloise in her work as abbess, are seen here alongside previously untranslated letters and texts for abbesses and nuns in England and France. An interpretive essay explores the practical and spiritual engagement of women's convents with medieval commemorative and memorial practices, showing that the professional concern of women religious with death goes far beyond the stereotype of nuns as dead to the world, or enclosed in living death. VERA MORTON gained an MA in Medieval Studies at the University of Liverpool in 1994. JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE is Professor of English at Fordham University, NY.

Groundbreaking surveys of the complex interrelationship between the languages of English and French in medieval Britain. With co-editors: CAROLYN COLLETTE, MARYANNE KOWALESKI, LINNE MOONEY, AD PUTTER, and DAVID TROTTER England was more widely and enduringly francophone in the Middle Ages than our now standard accounts of its history, culture and language allow. The French of England (also known as Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French) is the language of nearly a thousand literary texts, of much administration, and of many professions and occupations. English literary, linguistic and documentary history is deeply interwoven both with a continually evolving spectrum of Frenches used within and outside the realm, and cannot be fully grasped in isolation. The essays in this volume open up andbegin writing a new cultural history focussed on, but not confined to, the presence and interactions of francophone speakers, writers, readers, texts and documents in England from the eleventh to the later fifteenth centuries. They return us to a newly-alive, multi-vocal, complexly multi-cultural medieval England, in which the use of French and its interrelations with English and other languages involve many diverse groups of people. The volume's size testifies to the significance of England's francophone culture, while its chronological range shows the need for revision across the whole span of our existing narratives about medieval English linguistic and cultural history.. Contributors: HENRY BAINTON, MICHAEL BENNETT, JULIA BOFFEY, RICHARD BRITNELL, CAROLYN COLLETTE, GODFRIED CROENEN, HELEN DEEMING, STEPHANIE DOWNES, MARTHA DRIVER, MONICA H. GREEN, RICHARD INGHAM, REBECCA JUNE, MARYANNE KOWALESKI, PIERRE KUNSTMANN, FRANCOISE H. M. LE SAUX, SERGE LUSIGNAN, TIM WILLIAM MACHAN, JULIA MARVIN, BRIAN MERRILEES, RUTH NISSE, MARILYN OLIVA, W. MARK ORMROD, HEATHER PAGAN, LAURIE POSTLEWATE, JEAN-PASCAL POUZET, AD PUTTER, GEOFFRECTOR, DELBERT RUSSELL, THEA SUMMERFIELD, ANDREW TAYLOR, DAVID TROTTER, ELIZABETH M. TYLER, NICHOLAS WATSON, JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE, ROBERT F. YEAGER

The South English Legendary is the major collection of saints' lives in medieval English. A medieval 'bestseller', with 50 or so manuscripts and manuscript fragments and nearly 300 separate items in circulation in various combinations and books from the late thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, the Legendary has become increasingly well known in recent years through modern editions of individual texts and study of particular manuscripts. Meanwhile greatly increased interest in saints' lives, in literary and historical scholarship and the cultural and post-disciplinary turn in literary studies provide a wealth of new approaches through which to view the South English Legendary. The present volume creates a fresh platform for thinking about this richly dynamic work: it draws on the new hagiographic scholarship, attends to textual, socio-cultural, political and other issues, reprints a handful of earlier key articles now difficult to obtain, and includes a special section on performance. It will be of interest to all scholars of medieval literature: academics, teachers, graduate students, undergraduates. -- .

Excerpts from texts (with translation) from the French of medieval England offer a guide to medieval literary theory. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, French was one of England's main languages of literature, record, diplomacy and commerce and also its only supra-national vernacular. As is now recognised, the large corpus of England'sFrench texts and records is indispensable to understanding England's literary and cultural history, the multilingualism of early England, and European medieval French-language culture in general. This volume presents a full, representative collection of texts and facing translations from England's medieval French. Through its selection of prologues and other excerpts from works composed or circulating in England, the volume presents a body of vernacular literary theory, in which some fifty-five highly various texts, from a range of genres, discuss their own origins, circumstances, strategies, source materials, purposes and audiences. Each entry, newly edited from a single manuscript, is accompanied by a headnote, annotation, and narrative bibliography, while a general introduction and section introductions provide further context and information. Also included are essays on French in England and onthe prosody and prose of insular French; Middle English versions of some of the edited French texts; and a glossary of literary terms. By giving access to a literate culture hitherto available primarily only to Anglo-Norman specialists, this book opens up new possibilities for taking English francophony into account in research and teaching. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne is Thomas F.X. and Theresa Mullarkey Chair in Literature, Fordham University, New York, and formerly Professor of Medieval Literature, University of York; Thelma Fenster is Professor Emerita of French and Medieval Studies, Fordham University; Delbert Russell is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French, University of Waterloo.

Much recent research has illuminated medieval secular life and lifestyles with renewed attention to the economic and social history of medieval households. New editions of household rolls and account books have appeared, together with further studies of kin groups and the demographics of household, and intensified awareness of the household as a site of cultural patronage. Current scholarship on medieval women has also produced numerous studies of the devotional reading of medieval women, of medieval female communities, and the history of medieval professed and laywomen's religious lives. However we know of no study uniting the household and medieval women's religious activities as a focus of enquiry. The present volume thus at once addresses a field of vigorous scholarship while offering a distinctive and powerful focus for the history of medieval women.

Essays on aspects of medieval French literature, celebrating the scholarship of Sarah Kay and her influence on the field. Sarah Kay is one of the most influential medievalists of the past fifty years, making vital, theoretically informed interventions on material from early medieval chansons de geste, through troubadour lyric, to late medieval philosophy and poetry, in French, Occitan, Latin, and Italian. This volume in her honour is organised around her six major monographs, published between 1990 and 2017. Its essays engage in critical, constructive dialogue with different aspects of Kay's work, and envisage how these might shape medieval French as a discipline in coming years or decades. The subject matters demonstrate the richness of the discipline: animal studies, musicology, temporality, the material turn, medieval textuality, feminism, queer theory, voice, medieval and modern intellectual formations, psychoanalysis, philology, visual arts, transversal criticism, the literary object, affect, rhetoric, body, the past, modern responses to medieval forms and tropes, non-Christian texts and thought-patterns, politics. Reiterating Kay's engagement with medieval literature's complex philosophical debates and analytical scrutiny of human knowledge and affect, they follow her in emphasising how the pleasure of reading medieval literature depends crucially on that literature's intellectual robustness. These essays shed new light on a range of canonical and less well-known medieval texts and artefacts, to present a fresh perspective on the field of medieval studies.

Studies on the cultural, social, political and economic history of the age. This collection presents new and original research on the long thirteenth century, from c.1180-c.1330, including England's relations with Wales and Ireland. The range of topics embraces royal authority and its assertion and limitation, the great royal inquests and judicial reform of the reign of Edward I, royal manipulation of noble families, weakening royal administration at the end of the century, sex and love in the upper levels of society, monastic/layrelations, and the administration of building projects. Contributors: RUTH BLAKELY, NICOLA COLDSTREAM, BETH HARTLAND, CHARLES INSLEY, ANDY KING, SAMANTHA LETTERS, JOHN MADDICOTT, MARC MORRIS, ANTHONY MUSSON, DAVIDA. POSTLES, MICHAEL PRESTWICH, SANDRA G. RABAN, BJORN WEILER, JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE, ROBERT WRIGHT. THE EDITORS are all in the Department of History, University of Durham.

Wide-ranging essays engaging with all aspects of medieval romance, from textual studies to historical sources. The essays in this volume reflect the range and diversity of approach and of critical stance which have characterised romance studies in recent years. Amongst the areas of interest addressed are those of generic definition; the role of romance in relation to emergent ideas of nationalism; the complex associations between gender and genre, and between historical events and their expression in literature. Other issues explored are the transmission and reception of texts; the nature of the audiences; and the implications of critical theory for the reading of medieval romance. Contributors: MALDWYN MILLS, J.A. BURROW, DONNA CRAWFORD, A.S.G. EDWARDS, ARLYN DIAMOND, JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE, JOHN J. THOMPSON, THORLAC TURVILLE-PETRE, DIANA SPEED, JOHN SCATTERGOOD, COLIN RICHMOND, CAROL M. MEALE.

Groundbreaking surveys of the complex interrelationship between the languages of English and French in medieval Britain. With co-editors: CAROLYN COLLETTE, MARYANNE KOWALESKI, LINNE MOONEY, AD PUTTER, and DAVID TROTTER England was more widely and enduringly francophone in the middle ages than many standard accounts of its history, culture and language allow. The development of French in England, whether known as "Anglo-Norman" or "Anglo-French", is deeply interwoven both with medieval English and with the spectrum of Frenches, insular and continental, used withinand outside the realm. As the language of nearly a thousand literary texts, of much administration, and of many professions and occupations, the French of England needs more attention than it has so far received. The essaysin this volume form a new cultural history focussed round, but not confined to, the presence and interactions of French speakers, writers, readers, texts and documents in England from the eleventh to the later fifteenth century.Taking the French of England into account does not simply add new material to our existing narratives of medieval English culture, but changes them, restoring a multi-vocal, multi-cultural medieval England in all its complexity, and opening up fresh agendas for study and exploration. Contributors: HENRY BAINTON, MICHAEL BENNETT, JULIA BOFFEY, RICHARD BRITNELL, CAROLYN COLLETTE, GODFRIED CROENEN, HELEN DEEMING, STEPHANIE DOWNES, MARTHA DRIVER, MONICA H. GREEN, RICHARD INGHAM, REBECCA JUNE, MARYANNE KOWALESKI, PIERRE KUNSTMANN, FRANCOISE H. M. LE SAUX, SERGE LUSIGNAN, TIM WILLIAM MACHAN, JULIA MARVIN, BRIAN MERRILEES, RUTH NISSE, MARILYN OLIVA, W. MARK ORMROD, HEATHER PAGAN, LAURIE POSTLEWATE, JEAN-PASCAL POUZET, AD PUTTER, GEOFF RECTOR, DELBERT RUSSELL, THEA SUMMERFIELD, ANDREW TAYLOR, DAVID TROTTER, ELIZABETH M. TYLER, NICHOLAS WATSON, JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE, ROBERT F. YEAGER

Christine de Pizan was born in Italy and moved to the French court of Charles V when she was four years old. She led a life of learning, stimulated by her reading and by her drive to engage with the cultural and political issues of her day. As a young widow she sought to support her family through writing, and she broke new ground by pursuing a life as an author and self-publisher, producing an astonishingly large and varied body of work. Her books, owned and read by some of the most important figures of her day, addressed politics, philosophy, government, ethics, the conduct of war, autobiography and biography, and religious subjects. The God of Love's Letter (1399), Christine de Pizan's first defense of women, is arguably her most succinct statement about gender. It also rebukes the thirteenth-century Romance of the Rose and anticipates Christine's City of Ladies. The Tale of the Rose (1402) responds to the growth in chivalric orders for the defense of women by arguing that women, not men, should choose members of the "Order of the Rose." Both poems are freshly edited here from their earliest manuscripts and each is newly translated into English.

Important tool for study of prose style, lexis, and the history of the English language - and for interpretation of Ancrene Wisse. The Concordance to `Ancrene Wisse' is a computer-based concordance to the early Middle English prose rule for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse. The base text used in this concordance is J.R.R. Tolkien's edition of the Corpus Christi College,Cambridge manuscript 402 (Early English Text Society, 1962). Scholarly discussion of Ancrene Wisse usually refers to Tolkien's diplomatic edition of this manuscript and a definitive critical edition based on all manuscripts has yet to appear. Folio and line references in the Concordance are to the Tolkien edition and follow the manuscript line for line. The Concordance is an important tool for the study of prose style, lexis, the history of the English language, and, of course, indispensable for all literary and linguistic study of Ancrene Wisse itself. JENNY POTTS is a former research student at Liverpool University and a freelance copy editor; LORNA STEVENSON; completed her doctoral thesis at Liverpool University; JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWN is Professor of English at Fordham University, New York

The Ancrene Wisse, a guide for female recluses written in the West Midlands in the early thirteenth century, and the closely related religious works of the `Katherine Group', offer a vivid insight into the religious life of the time, and their rich and varied prose style blends Latin and native English stylistic traditions with remarkable skill and assurance. The difficulty of their language, however, has made them largely inaccessible except to experts in Middle English, and this edition is designed to introduce them to a wider audience, including undergraduates with limited experience of Middle English and specialists in other disciplines, particularly history, theology, and women's studies. It provides a representative selection (the last two parts of Ancrene Wisse, and three complete works from the Katherine Group, Hali Meithhad, Sawles Warde, and Seinte Margarete) in new and readable critical texts, with a general introduction, notes, a select glossary, and interleaved translations.