This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring. -- .

This invigorating study places medieval romance narrative in dialogue with theories and practices of gift and exchange, opening new approaches to questions of storytelling, agency, gender and materiality in some of the most engaging literature from the Middle Ages. It argues that the dynamics of the gift are powerfully at work in romances: through exchanges of objects and people; repeated patterns of love, loyalty and revenge; promises made or broken; and the complex effects that time works on such objects, exchanges and promises. Ranging from the twelfth century to the fifteenth, and including close discussions of poetry by Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet and romances in the Auchinleck Manuscript, this book will prompt new ideas and debate amongst students and scholars of medieval literature, as well as anyone curious about the pleasures that romance narratives bring. -- .

From chivalrous knights to damsels in distress, fire-breathing dragons, and high-walled towers, the characteristics and expectations we ascribe to stories of love and romance have their origins in some of the most beautiful and intriguing books of the Middle Ages. Encompassing Arthurian legends, Alexander the Great's global conquests, sudden reversals of fortune, revenge, or enchantment, images and tales of medieval romance still resonate today. This beautifully illustrated history of romance legends explores the conjunctions of chivalric violence, love, sex, and piety that marked these striking and resonant stories. Through a discussion of surviving manuscripts, printed books, and visual art, "The Romance of the Middle Ages "examines the development of romance as a literary genre, its place in medieval culture, and the scribes and readers who copied, owned, and commented on romance books--from magnificent illuminated manuscripts to personal notebooks. It describes the dangerous pull of desire in works by Dante, Chaucer, Malory, and many others, and traces the influence of these stories through their rewriting in Shakespeare, Spenser, Walter Scott, and Mark Twain, along with the medievalist visions of Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones. "The Romance of the Middle Ages" then brings the story up to date by showing how later writers and artists have responded to medieval romance, including Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling, and the very different knightly casts of Monty Python and "Star Wars." "The Romance of the Middle Ages "is an engaging analysis of stories that still have the power to capture our imaginations long after 'happily ever after'.

The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. An excellent collection... breaks new ground in many areas. Should make a substantial impact on the discussion of the contemporary influence of Anglo-Saxon Culture. Conor McCarthy, author of Seamus Heaney and the Medieval Imagination Britain's pre-Conquest past and its culture continues to fascinate modern writers and artists. From Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader to Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, and from high modernism to themusclebound heroes of comic book and Hollywood, Anglo-Saxon England has been a powerful and often unexpected source of inspiration, antagonism, and reflection. The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. They offer fresh insights on established figures, such as W.H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien, and David Jones, and on contemporary writers such asGeoffrey Hill, Peter Reading, P.D. James, and Heaney. They explore the interaction between text, image and landscape in medieval and modern books, the recasting of mythic figures such as Wayland Smith, and the metamorphosis of Beowulf into Grendel - as a novel and as grand opera. The early medieval emerges not simply as a site of nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions, but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and artistic experiment. Contributors: Bernard O'Donoghue, Chris Jones, Mark Atherton, Maria Artamonova, Anna Johnson, Clare A. Lees, Sian Echard, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Maria Sachiko Cecire, Allen J. Frantzen, John Halbrooks, Hannah J. Crawforth, Joshua Davies, Rebecca Anne Barr

We all know about giving and receiving gifts: they can be touching or puzzling, either strengthening bonds of friendship or becoming a burden. Gifts are an integral part of human societies and this volume explores how, over the centuries, books and writing describe gifts in all their complexity, but also become precious gifts themselves. In a series of thought-provoking essays, richly illustrated from the Bodleian Library’s collections and beyond, the contributors illuminate some of the striking ways in which writing interacts with those fundamental impulses to give, receive and reciprocate. Each chapter draws on a particular perspective, including archaeology and religion, history, literature and anthropology. From an ancient Sumerian tablet recording the founding of a temple to contemporary children’s literature that highlights the pleasures and troubling histories of exchange and inheritance, the dynamics of the gift are at work across space and time. This book features gorgeous medieval manuscripts, gifts made by and for Queen Elizabeth I, Victorian Christmas tales and a mysterious Scottish book sculpture. Stories of sacrifice, love, loyalty and friendship are woven into these books and objects, showing the ongoing power of the gift to shape the stories we tell about ourselves.

The popular genre of medieval romance explored in its physical, geographical, and literary contexts. The essays in this volume take a representative selection of English and Scottish romances from the medieval period and explore some of their medieval contexts, deepening our understanding not only of the romances concerned but also of the specific medieval contexts that produced or influenced them. The contexts explored here include traditional literary features such as genre and rhetorical technique and literary-cultural questions of authorship, transmission and readership; but they also extend to such broader intellectual and social contexts as medieval understandings of geography, the physiology of swooning, or the efficacy of baptism. A framing context for the volume is provided by Derek Pearsall's prefatory essay, in which he revisits his seminal 1965 article on the development of Middle English romance. Rhiannon Purdie is Senior Lecturer in English, University of St Andrews; Michael Cichon is Associate Professor of English at St Thomas More College in the University of Saskatchewan. Contributors: Derek Pearsall, Nancy Mason Bradbury, Michael Cichon, Nicholas Perkins, Marianne Ailes, John A. Geck, Phillipa Hardman, Siobhain Bly Calkin, Judith Weiss, Robert Rouse, Yin Liu, Emily Wingfield, Rosalind Field

Studies of how the physical manifests itself in medieval romance - and medieval romances as objects themselves. Medieval romance narratives glitter with the material objects that were valued and exchanged in late-medieval society: lovers' rings and warriors' swords, holy relics and desirable or corrupted bodies. Romance, however, is also agenre in which such objects make meaning on numerous levels, and not always in predictable ways. These new essays examine from diverse perspectives how romances respond to material culture, but also show how romance as a genre helps to constitute and transmit that culture. Focusing on romances circulating in Britain and Ireland between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, individual chapters address such questions as the relationship between objects and protagonists in romance narrative; the materiality of male and female bodies; the interaction between visual and verbal representations of romance; poetic form and manuscript textuality; and how a nineteenth-century edition of medieval romances provoked artists to homage and satire. NICHOLAS PERKINS is Associate Professor and Tutor in English at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford. Contributors: Siobhain Bly Calkin, Nancy Mason Bradbury, Aisling Byrne, Anna Caughey, Neil Cartlidge, Mark Cruse, Morgan Dickson, Rosalind Field, Elliot Kendall, Megan G. Leitch, Henrike Manuwald, Nicholas Perkins, Ad Putter, Raluca L. Radulescu, Robert Allen Rouse,

Hoccleve, often considerd conventional and naive, is shown to be deeply engaged in the political and literary currents of his time. The 'new' new historicist shift from a Foucauldian modelling of the infinitely malleable instrumentation of power, in which writers like Hoccleve are inevitably complicit, to a more flexible model in which authority is typically anxious and unstable, open to compromise and negotiation, and where writers can mak significant interventions, is welcome. Perkins's book is a triumph of this new approach. MEDIUM AEVUM [Derek Pearsall] This is the first book-length study of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes. It is an excellent one; critically alert and sensitive to the potential of a variety of fruitful approaches to Hoccleve'smajor poem.... helpfully contextualises Hoccleve's poem in a far more comprehensive way than previously... combines critical and scholarly acumen to give us a book that will be the necessary departure for any future study of The Regiment of Princes. A.S.G. EDWARDS, NOTES AND QUERIES Thomas Hoccleve's politics and poetics have often been viewed as conventional, servile and naive. In the first book-length study of Hoccleve's major poem,Nicholas Perkins argues that The Regiment of Princes is in fact deeply engaged in the political and literary currents of the early fifteenth century, combining the elaborate deference of a petition, the resistance of a complaint and the monitory authority of a speculum principis in its address to the future Henry V. Perkins sets the Regiment's production within a late-medieval economy of advisory speech, reassesses the poem's relationship to the Latin treatises on which it draws, and examines its hermeneutics of royal counsel, which challenges the prince to interpret and act on the advice he receives. Using evidence from the Regiment's many manuscripts,he then reveals how Hoccleve's poem was refashioned for new audiences beyond the Lancastrian court in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. NICHOLAS PERKINS teaches at St Hugh's College, Oxford.