The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English

Edited by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker

Oxford Handbooks

44 newly commissioned essays by world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices
A comprehensive and dynamic new guide to the range of medieval literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to the early sixteenth century
Contemporary approaches to literature, from postcolonial to ecocritical theories, applied throughout

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English

Edited by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker

Description

The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade.
The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from AElfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English

Edited by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker

Oxford Handbooks

Prologue
Speaking of the Medieval, Elaine Treharne
Literary Production
1. Books and Manuscripts, A.S.G. Edwards
2. Textual Copying and Transmission, Orietta Da Rold
3. Professionalisation of Writing, Simon Horobin
4. Writing, Authority and Bureaucracy, Nicholas Perkins
5. The Impact of Print, Elizabeth Evenden
Literary Consumption
1. Literature and the Cultural Elites, Ralph Hanna
2. The Verse of Heroes, Jayne Carroll
3. Insular Romance, Sian Echard
4. A York Primer and its Alphabet: Reading Women in a Lay Household, Nicola McDonald
5. Performing Communities: Civic Religious Drama, John McGavin
Literature, Clerical and Lay
1. Change and Continuity: The English Sermon before 1250, Bella Millett
2. Authorising Female Piety, Diane Watt
3. Visions and Visionaries, Andy Galloway
4. Writing, Heresy, and the Anticlerical Muse, Mishtooni Bose
5. Acquiring Wisdom: teaching texts and the lore of the people, Dan Anlezark
Literary Realities
1. The Yorkshire Partisans and the Literature of Popular Discontent, Andrew Prescott
2. Gothic Turn and the Twelfth-Century Chronicle, Tom Bredehoft
3. Antisocial Reform: Writing Rebellion, Stephen Kelly
4. Secular Drama, Elizabeth Dutton
5. Metaphorical and Real Flowers in Medieval Verse, Gillian Rudd
Complex Identities
1. Authority, Constraint and the Writing of the Medieval Self, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
2. Complex Identities: Selves & Others, Kathy Lavezzo
3. Spiritual Identities: The Chosen People, Samantha Zacher
4. Individuality, Alcuin Blamires
5. Emergent Englishness, Jacqueline Stodnick
Literary Place, Space and Time
1. Regions and Communities, Helen Fulton
2. The City and the Text: London Literature, Alison Wiggins
3. Provincial Reading Communities, Wendy Scase
4. Scottish Writing, Elizabeth Elliott
5. Places of the Imagination: The Gawain-Poet, Thorlac Turville-Petre
Literary Journeys
1. Pilgrimages, Travel Writing, and the Medieval Exotic, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
2. 'Britain': Originary Myths and the Stories of Peoples, Anke Bernau
3. Maps and Margins: Other Lands, Other Peoples, Alfred Hiatt
4. Monsters and the Medieval Exotic, Asa Simon Mittman
5. Spiritual Quest and Social Space: Texts of Hard Travel for God on Earth and in the Heart, Mary Baine Campbell
Epilogue
When did 'The Medieval End?' Retrospection, Foresight and The End(s) of the English Middle Ages, Greg Walker
Index of Manuscripts
General Index

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English

Edited by Elaine Treharne and Greg Walker

Oxford Handbooks

Author Information

Elaine Treharne, Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities Professor of English, and, by Courtesy, of German Studies, Stanford,Greg Walker, Masson Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, The University of Edinburgh

Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to that he was Professor of early-modern literature and culture at the University of Leicester. He has written extensively on the drama, poetry, and prose, and the political and religious history of the late medieval period and the sixteenth century in England and Scotland. He has edited the Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama and is co-editor with Thomas Betteridge of The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama.

Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities and Professor of English, and, by Courtesy, of German Studies at Stanford University. Elaine was previously Professor of Early English at Florida State University and Visiting Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published extensively on Old and Middle English literature and particularly religious prose, and she works on medieval manuscripts and their contents, focusing recently on the architextuality of early books.

Contributors:

Daniel Anlezark, University of Sydney
Anke Bernau, University of Manchester
Alcuin Blamires, Goldsmiths College, University of London
Mishtooni Bose, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford
Thomas Bredehoft, West Virginia University
Mary Baine Campbell, Brandeis University
Jayne Carroll, University of Nottingham
Orietta Da Rold, University of Leicester
Elisabeth Dutton, University of Oxford
Siân Echard, University of British Columbia
A.S.G. Edwards, De Montfort University
Elizabeth Elliott, University of Edinburgh
Helen Fulton, Swansea University
Andy Galloway, Cornell University
Ralph Hanna, Keble College, University of Oxford
Alfred Hiatt, University of Leeds
Simon Horobin, Magdalen College, University of Oxford
Stephen Kelly, Queen's University Belfast
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, University of Notre Dame
Susan M. Kim, Illinois State University
Kathy Lavezzo, University of Iowa
Nicola McDonald is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York
John McGavin, University of Southampton
Bella Millett, University of Southampton
Asa Simon Mitman, California State University, Chico
Nicholas Perkins, St Hugh's College, University of Oxford
Andrew Prescott, University of Wales, Lampeter
Gillian Rudd, University of Liverpool
Wendy Scase, University of Birmingham
Jacqueline Stodnick, University of Texas at Arlington
Elaine Treharne, Florida State University
Thorlac Turville-Petre, University of Nottingham
Greg Walker, University of Edinburgh
Diane Watt, Aberystwyth University
Alison Wiggins, University of Glasgow
Samantha Zacher, Cornell University