Annual volume on medieval textual cultures, engaging with intellectual
and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, 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: law and
literature; manuscript production, patronage, and aesthetics; real and
imagined geographies; gender and its connections to narrative theory and
to psychoanalysis. Investigations range from the eleventh to the
fifteenth centuries, from England to the eastern Mediterranean. New
arguments are put forward about the dating, context, and occasion of
Geoffrey Chaucer's Boece, while the narrative dynamics of Chaucer's
"Franklin's Tale" and "Tale of Melibee" are examined from new
perspectives. The topography of the Holy Lands appears both as a set of
emotional sites, depicted in the Prick of Conscience in its account of
the end of the world, and as co-ordinates in the cultural imaginary of
medieval the wine-trade. Grendel's mother emerges as the invisible and
unavowable centre of male heroic culture in Beowulf, and the
fourteenth-century St Erkenwald is brought into contact with the
community-building project of the medieval death investigation. Finally,
the late medieval Speculum Christiani is revealed to be a work with deep
aesthetic investments when read through the framework of how its
medieval scribes encountered and shaped that work.
