This book recovers the encounter with a 'multicultural' Britain by British travellers in the Tudor and Stuart periods. When William Camden, writing in the sixteenth century, set out to write the history of Britannia, he deliberately took to the roads to discover it first-hand, a…
Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) was one of the leading international composers of the post-war period as well as one of the most productive. This book provides a global view of his music, integrating a number of resonant themes in the composer's work while covering a representa…
Medical texts in Anglo-Saxon literary culture
Four complete medical collections survive from Anglo-Saxon England. These were first edited by Oswald Cockayne in the nineteenth century and came to be known by the names Bald's Leechbook, Leechbook III, the Lacnunga, and the Old English Pharmacopeia. Together these works repres…
The Third Crusade (1189-1192) was an attempt by Latin Christendom to reconquer the Holy Land, following the capture of Jerusalem by the Ayyubid sultan Saladin in 1187. Tens of thousands responded to a call for a crusade by Pope Gregory VIII and the efforts of his preachers at ma…
The reputation of the Normans is rooted in warfare, faith and mobility. They were simultaneously famed as warriors, noted for their religious devotion, and celebrated as fearless travellers. In the Middle Ages few activities offered a better conduit to combine warfare, religiosi…
Skin is the parchment upon which identity is written; class, race, ethnicity, and gender are all legible upon the human surface. Removing skin tears away identity, and leaves a blank slate upon which law, punishment, sanctity, or monstrosity can be inscribed; whether as an act o…
Women and the Land examines the pre-history of gendered property relations in England, focusing on the four-hundred-year period between roughly 1500 and 1900. More specifically, the book is about how gender shaped opportunities for and experiences of owning property, particularl…
What makes the compositions of Handel, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms stand out as great works of art? Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) set out to answer this question in a series of treatises, beginning with a strikingly original work with t…
The essays collected here focus on how Anglo-Saxon royal authority was expressed and disseminated, through laws, delegation, relationships between monarch and Church, and between monarchs at times of multiple kingships and changing power ratios. Specific topics include the impor…
The Book of the Duchess', Chaucer's first major poem, is foundational for our understanding of Chaucer's literary achievements in relation to late-medieval English textual production; yet in comparison with other works, its treatment has been somewhat peripheral in previous crit…
Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio
Although many of Chaucer's sources have been exhaustively studied, relatively little work has been done on the influence of his contemporary Boccaccio, a gap which this book aims to fill. It examines the relationship of the comic tales, the so-called fabl.
Chaucer and fame. Reputation and reception
by Davis, Isabel, Nall, Catherine
fromChaucer studies
Fama, or fame, is a central concern of late medieval literature: where fame came from, who deserved it, whether it was desirable and how it was acquired and kept. An interest in fame was not new but was renewed and rethought within the vernacular revolutions of the later Middle …
Chaucer and fame: reputation and reception
by Chaucer and celebrity, London
fromChaucer studies