Download or read book Communal Creativity in the Making of the Beowulf Manuscript written by Simon C. Thomson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Communal Creativity in the Making of the ‘Beowulf’ Manuscript, Simon Thomson analyses details of scribal activity to tell a story about the project that preserved Beowulf as one of a collective, if error-strewn, endeavour and arguing for a date in Cnut’s reign. He presents evidence for the use of more than three exemplars and at least two artists as well as two scribes, making this an intentional and creative re-presentation uniting literature religious and heroic, in poetry and in prose. He goes on to set it in the broader context of manuscript production in late Anglo-Saxon England as one example among many of communities using old literature in new ways, and of scribes working together, making mistakes, and learning.
Download or read book Anglo Danish Empire written by Richard North and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anglo-Danish Empire is an interdisciplinary handbook for the Danish conquest of England in 1016 and the subsequent reign of King Cnut the Great. Bringing together scholars from the fields of history, literature, archaeology, and manuscript studies, the volume offers comprehensive analysis of England’s shift from Anglo-Saxon to Danish rule. It follows the history of this complicated transition, from the closing years of the reign of King Æthelred II and the Anglo-Danish wars, to Cnut’s accession to the throne of England and his consolidation of power at home and abroad. Ruling from 1016 to 1035, Cnut drew England into a Scandinavian empire that stretched from Ireland to the Baltic. His reign rewrote the place of Denmark and England within Europe, altering the political and cultural landscapes of both countries for decades to come.
Download or read book MS Junius 11 and Its Poetry written by Carl Kears and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2023-02-21 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh close reading of the texts of one of the four surviving major manuscripts of Old English poetry, reappraising Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 11 to discover some of the preoccupations of its compliers. Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Junius 11 is one of the four major manuscripts of Old English poetry to survive and the only one of these to have had a planned sequence of illuminations. Junius 11 is made up of different poems - Genesis A, Genesis B, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan - compiled to resemble a long narrative that represents salvation history from its violent origins to its Last Days. While the poems draw inspiration from biblical, apocryphal and commentary traditions, they combine in the manuscript to create powerful effects that can also be understood through an appreciation of the distinctive craft and complexity of early medieval vernacular verse. But can the language of the poetry within the manuscript tell us anything about the aims of the Junius 11 project, or the preoccupations of its compilers? This book approaches Junius 11 as an ambitious poetic endeavour that was designed to offer counsel through the medium of Old English verbal art. Tracing thematic language across and between the poems, and offering close readings of them in their manuscript context, MS Junius 11 and its Poetry argues that it is early medieval political ideas represented by the Old English words ræd (good counsel) and unræd (ill counsel) that emerge as the key components underlying the central conflicts of the history of humankind the makers of this manuscript sought to create. The poems themselves, by giving us many examples of rulers and leaders falling to ruin, have the potential to offer their own ræd to those who may have found themselves in relatable positions. But Junius 11 demands work for such gifts. Its poems generate impressions cumulatively and collectively, offering instruction to those who might build connections across pages, demanding audiences become attentive and active readers so that they might find solace and advice in a world that moves towards destruction.
Download or read book Humour in Old English Literature written by Jonathan Wilcox and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2023-10-02 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humour in Old English Literature deploys modern theories of humour to explore the style and content of surviving writing from early medieval England. The book analyses Old English riddles, wisdom literature, runic writing, the deployment of rhymes, and humour in heroic poetry, hagiography, and romance. Drawing on a fine-tuned understanding of literary technique, the book presents a revisionist view of Old English literature, partly by reclaiming often-neglected texts and partly by uncovering ironies and embarrassments within well-established works, including Beowulf. Most surprisingly, Jonathan Wilcox engages the large body of didactic literature, pinpointing humour in two anonymous homilies along with extensive use in saints’ lives. Each chapter ends by revealing a different audience that would have shared in the laughter. Wilcox suggests that the humour of Old English literature has been scantily covered in past scholarship because modern readers expect a dour and serious corpus. Humour in Old English Literature aims to break that cycle by highlighting works and moments that are as entertaining now as they were then.
Download or read book Performance in Beowulf and Other Old English Poems written by Steven J. A. Breeze and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-10-25 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acts of performance, such as music, storytelling, and poetry recital, have made significant contributions to the rediscovery and widening popularity of Old English poetry. However, while these performances capture the imagination, they also influence an audience's view of the world of the original poems, even to propagating certain assumptions, particularly those to do with performance practices. By stripping away these assumptions, this book aims to uncover the ways in which representations of performance in Old English poetry are intimately associated with poetic production and fundamental cultural concerns. Through an examination of Beowulf, diverse wisdom poems, and the "artist" poems Deor and Widsith, it proposes that poets constructed an imaginary domain of "poetic performance", which negotiated tensions between early medieval creativity and core social beliefs. It also shows how the poems' relationship with oral methods of composition and circulation weakened in later medieval poetry as both language and poetic form altered. Overall, the book explores what depictions of performance within these texts can tell us about early medieval conceptualisations, processes, and practices, in the poetic imagination and in wider culture. Through an analysis of Eddic poetry and Laȝamon's Brut, it also highlights a tradition of "poetic performance" in English poetics.
Download or read book Trans Historical written by Greta LaFleur and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives—literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.
Download or read book Medievalia et Humanistica No 44 written by Reinhold F. Glei and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-03 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardcover volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, art, literature, music, science, law, economics, and philosophy. Volume 44 showcases the interdisciplinary nature of the series with articles on the role of women in Old English martyrology, the blending of sacred and mundane subjects in medieval biblical plays (Spiele), the relationship between reality and literary topoi in the humanist praise of cities (Städtelob), and reflections on the absence of the bull in early modern European discourse. Volume 44 also includes five review notices that illustrate the journal’s interdisciplinary scope.
Download or read book Balaam s Ass Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation written by Nicholas Watson and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For over seven hundred years, bodies of writing in vernacular languages served an indispensable role in the religious and intellectual culture of medieval Christian England, yet the character and extent of their importance have been insufficiently recognized. A longstanding identification of medieval western European Christianity with the Latin language and a lack of awareness about the sheer variety and quantity of vernacular religious writing from the English Middle Ages have hampered our understanding of the period, exercising a tenacious hold on much scholarship. Bringing together work across a range of disciplines, including literary study, Christian theology, social history, and the history of institutions, Balaam's Ass attempts the first comprehensive overview of religious writing in early England's three most important vernacular languages, Old English, Insular French, and Middle English, between the ninth and sixteenth centuries. Nicholas Watson argues not only that these texts comprise the oldest continuous tradition of European vernacular writing, but that they are essential to our understanding of how Christianity shaped and informed the lives of individuals, communities, and polities in the Middle Ages. This first of three volumes lays out the long post-Reformation history of the false claim that the medieval Catholic Church was hostile to the vernacular. It analyzes the complicated idea of the vernacular, a medieval innovation instantiated in a huge body of surviving vernacular religious texts. Finally, it focuses on the first, long generation of these writings, in Old English and early Middle English.
Download or read book Communal Creativity in the Making of the Beowulf Manuscript written by Simon C. Thomson and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Re)introducing the texts of the Nowell Codex -- The passion of Saint Christopher -- The wonders of the East -- The letter of Alexander to Aristotle -- Beowulf -- Judith -- Reading the Nowell Codex in the Eleventh Century -- Reconstructing the Nowell Codex -- Dating and placing the scribes of the Nowell Codex -- Extant gatherings -- Judith, St Christopher and the missing gatherings -- Sequence of production -- The images in the wonders of the East -- A's collection of absurdities? -- The two artists of the Nowell Wonders -- Frames -- Colours -- The planning and control of the images -- Variant styles; multiple exemplars -- Scribe A's performance -- The value of the Nowell Codex's prose texts -- Corrections -- Scribe A's density of copying in Beowulf
Download or read book The Texture of Images written by Livia Cárdenas and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-11-16 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Textures of Images presents for the first time a fundamental analysis and synopsis of the printed relic-book genre. The author brings into focus the specific mediality and aesthetics of this kind of printed books between the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period.
Download or read book Literature Videogames and Learning written by Andrew Burn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative book explores links between literature and videogames, and how designing and playing games can transform our understanding of literature. It shows how studying literature through the lens of videogames can provide new insights into narrative and creative engagement with the text. The book sets out theories of narrative aesthetics and multimodality in literature and videogames, alongside models of literacy needed for such cultural and creative engagement. It goes on to examine game adaptations of children’s literature; and a series of videogames made by students based on Beowulf and Macbeth. In each case, the book considers ways in which the original text has been transformed by the process of game design, and what fresh light this casts on the literary narrative. It also considers what kind of learning, creative production, and cultural engagement is apparent in the game designs and emphasises the importance of treating games as a narrative medium in their own right. With a unique approach to the aesthetics of narrative in literature and videogames, the book will be of great interest to researchers, academics, and post-graduate students in the fields of literature, pedagogy, and game studies.
Download or read book Images Texts and Marginalia in a Vows of the Peacock Manuscript New York Pierpont Morgan Library MS G24 written by Domenic Leo and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-08-16 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Vows of the Peacock" - written in 1312 and dedicated to Thibaut de Bar, bishop of Liège - recounts how Alexander the Great comes to the aid of a family of aristocrats threatened by Indians. The poem remained popular throughout the fourteenth century and was soon followed by two sequels. Twenty-six illuminated manuscripts constitute part of a catalogue and concordance of all Peacock manuscripts. One of the most provocative, (PML, MS G24), has twenty-two miniatures which illustrate chivalry and courtly love, as epitomized in the text. An unusually high number of scurrilous marginalia, however, surround them. An interdisciplinary exploration of iconography, reception, image-text-marginalia dynamics, and context reveals their ultimate polysemy as scatological comedians and serious harbingers of sin.
Download or read book Slow Scholarship written by Catherine E. Karkov and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2019 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A powerful claim for the virtues of a more thoughtful and collegiate approach to the academy today.
Download or read book Pink written by Lynne Rickards and published by 'The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc'. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pink! is a heartwarming story about learning to be different. Patrick wakes up one morning to find he’s turned pink overnight. But boys can’t be pink! Rejected by his friends, poor Patrick runs away in search of new pink playmates. He crosses oceans where he finds some pink flamingos, but will he ever fit in with them? Patrick soon learns that friendship is never black and white, but that real friends will accept you just as you are.
Download or read book Dating Beowulf written by Daniel C. Remein and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-20 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Featuring essays from some of the most prominent voices in early medieval studies, Dating Beowulf playfully redeploys the word ‘dating’, which usually heralds some of the most divisive critical impasses in the field, to provocatively phrase a set of new relationships with an Old English poem. The volume argues for the relevance of the early Middle Ages to affect studies and vice-versa, offering a riposte to antifeminist discourse and opening avenues for future work by specialists in the history of emotions, literary theorists, students of Old English literature and medieval scholars alike. To this end, the essays embody a range of critical approaches from queer theory to animal studies and ecocriticism to actor-network theory.
Download or read book Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Devotional Interaction in Medieval England and its Afterlives examines the interaction between medieval English worshippers and the material objects of their devotion. The volume also addresses the afterlives of objects and buildings in their temporal journeys from the Middle Ages to the present day. Written by the participants of a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded seminar held in York, U.K., in 2014, the chapters incorporate site-specific research with the insights of scholars of visual art, literature, music, liturgy, ritual, and church history. Interdisciplinarity is a central feature of this volume, which celebrates interactivity as a working method between its authors as much as a subject of inquiry. Contributors are Lisa Colton, Elizabeth Dachowski, Angie Estes, Gregory Erickson, Jennifer M. Feltman, Elisa A. Foster Laura D. Gelfand, Louise Hampson, Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Heather S. Mitchell-Buck, Julia Perratore, Steven Rozenski, Carolyn Twomey, and Laura J. Whatley.
Download or read book The Mere Wife written by Maria Dahvana Headley and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers—a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran—fight to protect those they love in The Mere Wife. This modern fantasy tale transports you from the ancient mead halls of the Geats to the picket-fenced, meticulously planned community of American suburbia, known as Herot Hall. In the expert hands of Maria Dahvana Headley, this vibrant retelling underscores the timeless struggle between the protected and the outsiders. Enter the confines of Herot Hall, a gated community sequestered from the wild surroundings by sophisticated security systems. Here, life is a series of cocktail hours and playdates for Willa, the charming wife of Herot's heir, and her son Dylan. Meanwhile, deep in a nearby mountain cave lives Dana, a hardened soldier and mother of Gren, a child of mysterious origin. Their worlds collide in a shocking turn of events when Gren breaks into Herot Hall and escapes with Dylan. A brilliant literary novel that effortlessly melds modern literature with ancient mythology, The Mere Wife is a captivating testament to unintended consequences, the brutality of PTSD, and the enduring power of motherhood.
