Annual volume showcasing the best new work in this field. 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 the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with widely varied themes, from confession in the domestic household to international politics and statecraft; experimental scientific knowledge, and the supernatural world of demons; canonical Arthurian romance, and scholastic theology in the vernacular; monastic historiographical visions, and geographies of pilgrimage. Investigations range from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, and from England to the Holy Land. Chretien de Troyes's Le chevalier de la charrette and Geoffrey Chaucer's Friar's Tale are examined in new ways, and with new conclusions for their engagements with technologies of embodiment and the hermeneutics of bodily contact; Lazamon's Brut is shown to bring the expectations of monastic historiography into the vernacular, while Reginald Pecock's radical and sophisticated vernacular theology is explicated in all its dangerous heterodoxy. Multiple narratives converge and are occluded at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron; Albert the Great experiments with animals and reorients humans in the natural world; Alain Chartier strives to build a united French state. Finally, domestic, familial, and civic bonds of obligation emerge in the shared textual communities of anonymous, late-medieval confessional forms. CONTRIBUTORS: ROBYN A. BARTLETT, KANTIK GHOSH, AYLIN MALCOLM, ALASTAIR MINNIS, LUKE SUNDERLAND, JAMIE K. TAYLOR, HANNAH WEAVER, LUCAS WOOD.

Detailed readings of four major medieval cycles. This is a study of four colossal medieval works - the Cycle de Guillaume d'Orange, the Vulgate Cycle, the Prose Tristan and the Roman de Renart - which are normally considered separately. By placing them side-by-side for analysis, Luke Sunderland is able to argue for an aesthetic of cyclicity that cuts across genre. He combines detailed readings of the narrative infrastructure of each cycle with attention to the shifts and transformations that come with successive acts of rewriting. Old French Narrative Cycles focuses in particular on revisions and controversies around heroic figures, arguing that competition between alternative heroes within these texts makes them a discourse on heroism. Using a theoretical framework deriving from Lacanian psychoanalysis, the study reveals anxieties surrounding the hero's relationship to the "good": the hero oscillates between support for moral ideals and subversive assertions of freedom that can lead to evil and death. Ultimately, it is contended that the instability of the hero as conduit for morality produces textual confusion and generates the myriad differing versions of these vast and perplexing works. LUKE SUNDERLAND is Lecturer in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Durham.

Essays examining both the theory and practice of medieval translation. Engaging and informative to read, challenging in its assertions, and provocative in the best way, inviting the reader to sift, correlate and reflect on the broader applicability of points made in reference to a specific text orexchange. Professor Carolyne P. Collette, Mount Holyoke College. Medieval notions of translatio raise issues that have since been debated in contemporary translation studies concerning the translator's role asinterpreter or author; the ability of translation to reinforce or unsettle linguistic or political dominance; and translation's capacity for establishing cultural contact, or participating in cultural appropriation or effacement.This collection puts these ethical and political issues centre stage, asking whether questions currently being posed by theorists of translation need rethinking or revising when brought into dialogue with medieval examples. Contributors explore translation - as a practice, a necessity, an impossibility and a multi-media form - through multiple perspectives on language, theory, dissemination and cultural transmission. Exploring texts, authors, languages and genres not often brought together in a single volume, individual essays focus on topics such as the politics of multilingualism, the role of translation in conflict situations, the translator's invisibility, hospitality, untranslatability and the limits of translation as a category. EMMA CAMPBELL is Associate Professor in French at the University of Warwick; ROBERT MILLS is Lecturer in History of Art at University College London. Contributors: William Burgwinkle, Ardis Butterfield, Emma Campbell, Marilynn Desmond, Simon Gaunt, Jane Gilbert, Miranda Griffin, Noah D. Guynn, Catherine Leglu, Robert Mills, Zrinka Stahuljak, Luke Sunderland

An examination of the ideas of space and place as manifested in medieval texts, art, and architecture. This interdisciplinary collection of sixteen essays explores the significance of space and place in Late Antique and medieval culture, as well as modern reimaginings of medieval topographies. Its case studies draw on a wide variety of critical approaches and cover architecture, the visual arts (painting and manuscript illumination), epic, romance, historiography, hagiography, cartography, travel writing, as well as modern English poetry. Challenging simplistic binaries of East and West, self and other, Muslim and Christian, the volume addresses the often unexpected roles played by space and place in the construction of individual and collective identities in religious and secular domains. The essays move through world spaces (mappaemundi, the exotic and the mundane East, the Mediterranean); empires, nations, and frontier zones; cities (Avignon, Jerusalem, and Reval); and courts, castles and the architectureof subjectivity, closing with modern visions of the medieval world. They explore human movement in space and the construction of time and place in memory. Taking up pressing contemporary issues such as nationalism, multilingualism, multiculturalism and confessional relations, they find that medieval material provides narratives that we can use today in our negotiations with the past. Julian Weiss is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Studies, Sarah Salih Senior Lecturer in English, at King's College London. Contributors: Richard Talbert, Paul Freedman, Sharon Kinoshita, Luke Sunderland, Julian Weiss, Sarah Salih, Konstantin Klein, Katie Clark, Elizabeth Monti, Elina Gertsman, Elina Rasanen, Geoff Rector, Nicolay Ostrau, Andrew Cowell, Joshua Davies, Chris Jones, Matthew Francis

Ambivalence towards kings, and other sovereign powers, is deep-seated in medieval culture: sovereigns might provide justice, but were always potential tyrants, who usurped power and 'stole' through taxation. Rebel Barons writes the history of this ambivalence, which was especially acute in England, France, and Italy in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when the modern ideology of sovereignty, arguing for monopolies on justice and the legitimate use of violence, was developed. Sovereign powers asserted themselves militarily and economically provoking complex phenomena of resistance by aristocrats. This volume argues that the chansons de geste, the key genre for disseminating models of violent noble opposition to sovereigns, offer a powerful way of understanding acts of resistance. Traditionally seen as France's epic literary monuments - the Chanson de Roland is often presented as foundational of French literature - chansons de geste in fact come from areas antagonistic to France, such as Burgundy, England, Flanders, Occitania, and Italy, where they were reworked repeatedly from the twelfth century to the fifteenth and recast into prose and chronicle forms. Rebel baron narratives were the principal vehicle for aristocratic concerns about tyranny, for models of violent opposition to sovereigns and for fantasies of escape from the Carolingian world via crusade and Oriental adventures. Rebel Barons reads this corpus across its full range of historical and geographical relevance, and through changes in form, as well as placing it in dialogue with medieval political theory, to bring out the contributions of literary texts to political debates. Revealing the widespread and long-lived importance of these anti-royalist works supporting regional aristocratic rights to feud and revolt, Rebel Barons reshapes our knowledge of reactions to changing political realities at a crux period in European history.