Essays illuminating how medieval cultures and identities have influenced later authors, texts, and communities .
How did medieval literary cultures shape, and how were they shaped by, their received textual traditions? And how have cultures continued to respond to the inherited medieval tradition in later eras? This volume explores these important questions, considering how language and literature mediate the narration of history or culture – especially the culture and identity of Britain.
In addressing the overarching concern of the conception of the past in the literatures of medieval Britain, and the later reception of medieval texts, the contributors’ essays respond to the diverse areas of medieval studies upon which Professor Echard’s work has had significant influence. They address, amongst other subjects, Arthuriana and ‘Matter of Britain’ texts, the literary interrelationships between medieval Wales and England, medieval adaptations and interpretations of texts from classical antiquity, the poet John Gower, and medievalism in later centuries. As Professor Echard has consistently demonstrated in these fields, and as these essays overwhelmingly confirm, the past is rarely, if ever, represented at face value in the cultural products that lay claim to it.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction –
William Green, Daniel Helbert, and Noëlle Phillips
Part I
Navigating Multilingualism: Medieval British Languages in Contact
1.
Gormes and
Ysgymun in the Dingestow
Brut – Joshua Byron Smith
2.
Melioratum et Emendatum: Rewriting, Polishing, and Textual Fluidity among Twelfth- and Thirteenth-century Latin and Welsh Writers in Britain –
Paul Russell
3. Precarious Reimaginings of the British History in the English Brut Tradition –
John J. Thompson
4. The Weight that English Carries: Vernacularity from
Hali Meiðhad to Chaucer’s
House of Fame – Andrew Galloway
Part II
Gower’s Books and Books of Gower
5. Gower’s Ovidian Aesthetic and its Discontents –
R. F. Yeager
6. Gower’s Allusive Forms: Anaphora and Political Desire in the Visio Anglie –
Stephanie Batkie
7. Gower and the Heavens: The ‘Dull’ and the Divine in
Confessio Amantis – William Green
8. A Knight at the Roxburghe (Club): George Granville Sutherland-Leveson-Gower and the Textual Transmission of
Balades and Other Poems by John Gower – David Watt
Part III
Heroes and their Afterlives
9. The Idea of
Beowulf and the ‘Book Beautiful’ –
Elaine Treharne
10. Trojan Ghosts in Arthurian Romance –
Elizabeth Archibald
11. In Defence of British History: Sir John Prise, King Arthur, and the Tudors –
Helen Fulton
12. Boys Gone Wild: Britain’s Mythic Tradition in America’s Boys’ Clubs –
Martin B. Shichtman and Laurie A. Finke
Annotated Bibliography of Siân Echard’s Publications –
Mairi Hill and Kelsey Moskal
Index
Tabula Gratulatoria
About the author
Helen Fulton is Chair of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol.
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