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. Chrétien 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; Laȝamon'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.
