Middle English language & literature

Graphic devices such as tables and diagrams and other visual strategies of organising text and information are an essential part of communication. The use of these devices and strategies in books and documents developed throughout the medieval and early modern periods as knowledge was translated and circulated in European vernaculars. Yet the use of graphic practices and multimodal literacies associated with them have mostly been examined in the context of Latin Greek Arabic and Hebrew and early vernacular writing remains an under-researched area. This volume brings together contributors from English historical linguistics and book studies to highlight multimodal graphic practices and literacies in texts across a range of genres and text types from the late medieval period until the eighteenth century. Contributions in the volume investigate both handwritten and printed materials from books in the domains of medicine religion history and grammar to administrative records and letter writing.

Cambridge University Library MS Additional 2604 contains a unique collection of prose saints’ lives evenly divided into eleven universal and eleven native saints (predominantly culted at Ely). Clearly intended for the devotional life of nuns presumably in an East Anglian convent the volume comprises nineteen female figures all of whom are virgins martyrs or nuns and three male saints (two apostles and a hermit). These late Middle English lives are translated from a variety of Latin sources and analogues including material by Jacobus de Voragine John of Tynemouth and others. The collection demonstrates an interest in showcasing native saints alongside their universal sisters. Luminaries of the English Church such as Æthelthryth of Ely and her sister Seaxburh are found in the company of notable virgin martyrs like Agatha and Cecilia. Famous saints like John the Evangelist and Hild of Whitby feature alongside others such as Columba of Sens and Eorcengota. Fully analysed and contextualised in its companion volume Saints’ Lives for Medieval English Nuns I: A Study of the ‘Lyves and Dethes’ in Cambridge University Library MS Additional 2604 these texts are edited here for the first time. Alongside the edition of the twenty-two saints’ lives and full textual apparatus there are extensive overviews and commentaries providing details of the sources and analogues as well as explanatory historical and literary notes. The edition concludes with three appendices a detailed select glossary and a bibliography of works cited.

This is a novel interdisciplinary study of the Mongol military campaign in Eastern Europe (1241–1242) — the North as thirteenth-century Europeans saw the region — in the works of contemporary English chronicler Matthew Paris of St Albans Monastery. Tracing the journey of his sources the volume explores thirteenth-century information networks against the backdrop of the struggle between Emperor Frederick II and Pope Innocent IV.

Parallel to the history of information the subject of the study is the Chronica majora and its afterlife Matthew’s chronicle world where the sometimes fictitious (and often very real) episodes of the Mongol story unfold. Tracing major landmarks in the meta-history of the Chronica majora the author wishes to emancipate Matthew Paris as a historian — one in the series of a multitude of others who continue to write and rewrite the history of the Mongol invasion across centuries of historiography.

The volume is a handy companion both to scholars of English historiography and those who want to read critically the oft-cited primary sources of the history of the Mongol military operations in Europe.

Visible English recovers for the first time the experience of reading and writing the English language in the medieval period through the perspectives of littera pedagogy the basis of medieval learning and teaching of literate skills in Latin. Littera is at the heart of the set of theories and practices that constitute the ‘graphic culture’ of the book’s title. The book shows for the first time that littera pedagogy was an ‘us and them’ discourse that functioned as a vehicle for identity formation. Using littera pedagogy as a framework for understanding the medieval English-language corpus from the point of view of the readers and writers who produced it Visible English offers new insights on experiences of writing and reading English in communities ranging from those first in contact with Latin literacy to those where print was an alternative to manuscript. Discussing a broad range of materials from so-called ‘pen-trials’ and graffiti to key literary manuscripts Visible English provides new perspectives on the ways that the alphabet was understood on genres such as alphabet poems riddles and scribal signatures and on the different ways in which scribes copied Old and Middle English texts. It argues that the graphic culture underpinned and transmitted by littera pedagogy provided frameworks for the development and understanding of English-language literacy practices and new ways of experiencing social belonging and difference. To be literate in English it proposes was to inhabit identities marked by Anglophone literate practices.

This essay picks up a cold trail in the search for the author of Piers Plowman: the name ‘William called Long Will’ without surname that Michael Bennett discovered among the names of elite associates of Sir John Holland half-brother to Richard II indicted for aiding (or not preventing) Holland’s killing of Sir Ralph Stafford in 1385 can be further traced in plea rolls of the case before the King’s Bench. Bennett argued that this eccentric name not only parallels the poet’s only explicit self-identification but identifies the poet at a late point of his life. The newly discovered and edited records serve as occasion for refuting recent objections to Bennett’s claim and for investigating further the figures involved revealing new reasons to think the poet had a relationship to Holland and others in this group by 1385. Holland for example was a major landlord in London’s Cornhill area where the narrator situates himself in the C text; those properties were managed by another of the figures indicted. Moreover some novel legal stratagems for land transfers used earlier by the Essex and Suffolk priest William Rokele currently the most promising candidate for authorship but whose traces vanish after 1369 were adopted by Holland and his agent soon after the events of 1385. Both the legal and poetic evidence is consistent with the theory that the poet went by varying surnames in earlier periods and for different purposes. This essay thus extends the known documentation of the events of 1385 while adding prosopographical information comparative examples and discussion of the poem’s focus on adopting or relinquishing surnames to confirm the possibility that this William called Long Will could have been the poet of Piers Plowman and to articulate some of the implications for his career and the poem.

This essay considers Langland’s representation of the figure of the fool and what it can teach us about both medieval and current understandings of wisdom and folly. It argues that in contrast to the deficit-based models of mental and cognitive limitation that are prevalent today the poem cultivates an understanding of the wisdom of the fool an understanding that emerges through Langland’s opposition of sinful and holy fools willed and unwilled forms of folly. Such attention to the poem’s representation of folly - and the biblical literary and theological sources from which those representations draw - provide a clearer view of Langland’s understanding of the role played by failure error and difficulty in the education of the will as Will’s often painful encounters with foolishness (his own and that of others) provide important lessons in humility. In contrast to current models of cognitive deficit and the ideologies of worldly achievement from which they arise the poem thus provides us with a worldview in which foolishness is central to the human experience and the intellectual limitation marginalization and suffering associated with it but that also presents generative opportunities for renewal.

An allegorical tree is presented before Will in B.16 to show him what ‘charite is to mene’ yet despite the ‘Tree of Charity’ moniker which follows this passage in critical literature in the B-text Langland never actually calls the tree itself ‘charity’ but rather ‘patience’. This essay seeks to better understand the interrelation of caritas and patientia by considering the place of patience in medieval pastoral theology. It draws attention to the use of patientia to describe cooperation with grace in pastoral manuals and moreover patientia is considered essential to retaining caritas after penitence. It also proposes that Langland prepares us for the tree allegory by highlighting this role of patience as a preparatory virtue through his personification Patience who takes on a sacramental role in B.14. Langland’s C-text revisions continue to think about cooperating grace by developing the role of Liberum Arbitrium in C.18.

The scene is Rome in the fi fteenth century Golden Rome a magnet drawing pilgrims by its architectural attractions and the magnitude of its religious importance as the mother of faith. The Austin friar John Capgrave attended Rome for the Jubilee in 1450 including the Lenten stations and his Solace of Pilgrimes intended as a guide for subsequent pilgrims was written up following the author’s own pilgrimage. In three parts it covers the ancient monuments the seven principal churches and the Lenten stations and other churches of note especially those dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The work has been described as the most ambitious description of Rome in Middle English. The present edition offers a new Text based on a transcription of the author’s holograph manuscript. Parallel with the Text there is a modern English Translation. The illustrations mostly from a period slightly later than the 1450 Jubilee aim to give some visual clue as to what Capgrave saw. There is a full account of the multiple sources that he used most of which is the product of new research. Following the Text there is a Commentary that aims to provide some background information about the buildings and monuments that Capgrave focuses on and to explain and illuminate any diffi culties or points of interest in the Text. Capgrave is an omni-present guide leading us towards what he considered an appropriate interpretation of the classical past as a foundation for the Christian present which built on it and surpassed it.

This sophisticated volume sheds new light on the transmission of texts in the medieval period by drawing into dialogue a study of medieval translation between English and French with questions concerning the Chaucerian canon and its reception. The author takes as a focus point three Middle English translations of French-language works - The Romaunt of the Rose the Belle Dame Sans Mercy and An ABC to the Virgin - and assesses the way in which these works respond to and reconfigure their source material while at the same time questioning how the connection of these translations with Chaucer has influenced our critical understanding of them. In this book these three translations are therefore removed from their habitual place on the fringes of the English Chaucer canon and are instead analysed in the context of late-medieval literary and cultural hybridity. The result is a fascinating reconceptualization of these works as creative cross-channel participations in late- medieval debates and simultaneously a call for the reappraisal of ‘the Chaucerian’ as a critical category.