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In this creative and engaging reading, Richard Kuhns explores the ways in whichDecameron'ssexual themes lead into philosophical inquiry, moral argument, and aesthetic and literary criticism. As he reveals the stories' many philosophical insights and literary pleasures, Kuhns also examinesDecameronin the context of the nature of storytelling, its relationship to other classic works of literature, and the culture of trecento Italy.

Stories and storytelling are to be interpreted in terms of a wider cultural context that includes masks, metamorphosis, mythic themes, and character analysis, all of which Boccaccio explores with wit and subtlety. As a storyteller, Boccaccio represents himself as literary pimp, conceiving the relationship between storyteller and audience in sexual terms within a tradition that goes back as far as Socrates' conversations with the young Athenians.

As a whole, Boccaccio's great collection of stories creates a trenchant criticism of the ideas that dominated his social and cultural world. Addressed as it is to women who were denied opportunities for education, the author's stories create a university of wise and culturally observant texts. He teaches that comic, religious, sexual, and artistic themes can be seen to function as metaphors for hidden and often dangerous unorthodox thoughts.

Kuhns suggests thatDecameronis one of the first self-conscious creations of what we today call "a total work of art." Throughout the stories, Boccaccio creates a detailed picture of the Florentine trecento cultural world. Giotto, Buffalmacco, and other great painters of Boccaccio's time appear in the stories. Their works and the paintings that surround the characters as they prepare to leave the plague-ridden city, with their representations of Dante, Aquinas, and other thinkers, are essential to understanding the ways the stories work with other works of art and illuminate and enlarge interpretations of Boccaccio's book.

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A unique narrative of sin, sex and salvation, The Book of Margery Kempe comprises a text which has continued to perplex and fascinate contemporary audiences since its discovery in the library of an English country house in 1934. Simultaneously exasperating, endearing, vulnerable and eccentric, Margery Kempe, mother of fourteen children and wife to a bemused John Kempe, provides us with an autobiographical account of her own singular brand of affective piety - excessive weeping, lack of bodily control, compulsive travelling, visionary meditations - and the growth of what she regarded as an individual and privileged mystical relationship with Christ. This new excerpted, thematically organised translation of the challenging text focuses on passages which will contextualise for the reader its author's reliance upon the experiences of her own maternal and sexualised body in an attempt to gain spiritual and literary authority. With detailed introduction and challenging interpretive essay, this volume uncovers in particular the importance of motherhood, sexuality and female orality to the inception and expression of Margery Kempe's singular mystical experiences and adds to contemporary debate regarding the agency of holy women during the later middle ages. LIZ HERBERT McAVOY is Lecturer in Medieval Language and Literature, University of Leicester. ... Read more

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Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book

In Covert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas—confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse—Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the Parson's Tale," the "Miller's Tale," the Secretum Secretorum, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as well as a broad range of less familiar works, such as a gynecological treatise, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, and a little known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past—and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.

Customer Reviews (1)

Warning - This book has nothing to do with covert operations
This book should be titled "Perversity, Gossip, and Women's Issues in the Late Medieval Period."It has nothing to do to with covert operations.Perhaps it is the only way the author could sell the book.Imagine spending $50 and expecting a serious discourse on medieval espionage, sabotage, spies, and assassins and receiving instead some feminist diatribe about gossip, sodomy, and other perversions.Unbelievable waste. ... Read more

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Originally published by J.M. Dent and Sons Ltd., 1934.

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For the first time in a convenient English anthology, Peter Speed assembles seventy-nine representative tales of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, together with useful and well-informed introductions to genres and traditions.

Part I surveys the Spanish tradition. The "Oriental anthologies" include Calila and Dimna and Sendebar - Spanish versions of the frame stories of India, Persia, and the Arab world popularized in A Thousand and One Nights. The medieval exempla include The Book of Cats, The Book of Exempla A.B.C., the Mirror of the Laity, Juan Ruiz's Libro de Buen Amor, plus such later anthologies as The Seven Sages of Rome and the Life and Fables of Aesop.

Part II offers a representative selection of sixteen French fabliaux, ranging from the sexual warfare of such well-known stories as The Goodwife of Orleans to the wily folk wisdom of The Peasant Who Argued His Way into Paradise.

Part III presents English stories that set the stage for Elizabethan comedy, including a sampling of humorous ballads from the later Middle Ages, and a selection from A Hundred Mery Talys, a sixteenth-century joke book.

Speed Edits these tales with all the rough edges, ribald humor, and unapologetic earthiness of their time and place. Here the reader will discover stories that recall Aesop, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Molière, as vixen and wolf, monk and priest, merchant and shopkeeper, lord of the manor and courtly lady, all wage sexual and social, moral, religious and economic battles of wit, chicanery, and - sometimes - loyalty and faith. ... Read more

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This collection of essays explores the place, function, and meaning of women as characters, authors, constructs, and cultural symbols in a variety of epics from the Middle Ages, including those of Persia, Spain, France, England, Germany, and Scandinavia. Medieval epics are traditionally believed to narrate the deeds of men at war, but this volume draws our attention not only to the key roles women often play in these narratives, but also to the larger implications they might have for the history of gender. Rather than invite cross-cultural generalizations about epic women, however, this book bears witness to the complex gender configurations molded by the rich epic literature of the medieval period.
... Read more

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This work offers an examination of religious texts written by twelve women over three centuries in two languages and three genres, showing the variety and complexity of gendered images available to medieval women. Moving beyond the categories of virgin, wife and widow, these religious texts created a spectrum of exemplary feminine life-paths based not on marital status, age, social rank, or profession, but instead founded on biblical figures, monastic divisions of labour, expected saintly behaviours, and even individual personality characteristics. This study contributes to discussions of genre and its influences on gender representation, as well as to scholarship on the complexities of gender relationships within literary works and historical contexts. This work will also serve to introduce a wider audience to a cycle of texts and an interrelated group of women authors previously available only to specialists in German and manuscript studies. ... Read more

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(B-text, as found in Bodleian MS. Laud 581) Edited with notes and glossary by J. A. W. Bennett. ... Read more

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Ovid's Heroides, a catalogue of letters by women who have been deserted, has too frequently been examined as merely a lament. In a new departure, this book portrays the women of the Heroides as a community of authors. Combining close readings of the texts and their mythological backgrounds with critical methods, the book argues that the points of similarity between the different letters of the Heroides, so often derided by modern critics, represent a brilliant exploitation of intratextuality, in which the Ovidian heroine self-consciously fashions herself as an alluding author influenced by what she has read within the Heroides. Far from being naive and impotent victims, therefore, the heroines are remarkably astute, if not always successful, at adapting textual strategies that they perceive as useful for attaining their own ends. With this new approach Professor Fulkerson shows that the Heroides articulate a fictional poetic, mirroring contemporary practices of poetic composition. ... Read more

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This remarkable anthology of sixteen narratives from ancient and medieval Hebrew texts opens a new window on the Jewish imagination. Sometimes pious, sometimes playful, in some cases almost scandalous, the selections present a captivating world of rabbinic storytelling and reveal a surprisingly deep connection between the values of classical Judaism and the art of imaginative narrative writing. Nearly all the narratives are here published in English for the first time. ... Read more

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Fun and Clever
This book belongs in any library of Jewish folklore.The stories are well-written and delightful; and often provide a new spin on a familiar tale.Excerpted (and cited, of course) they make excellent anecdotes. Woven together, they provide a sense of the rich and vivid tapestry thatcomprises Jewish folktales.Sometimes irreverent, sometimes poignant, andalways real; there is something for everyone here. ... Read more

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The rich tapestry of medieval belief, morality, and manners, shines through this comprehensive anthology of the twenty-four major plays that bridge the dramatic worlds of medieval and Tudor England. Here are the plays that paved the way to the Renaissance and Shakespeare. In John GassnerÕs extensively annotated collection, the plays regain their timeless appeal and display their truly international character and influence.

Medieval and Tudor Drama remains the indispensable chronicle of a dramatic heritage - the classical plays of Hrotsvitha, folk and ritual drama, the passion play, the great mortality play Everyman, the Interlude, Tudor comedies Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer GurtonÕs Needle, and the most famous of Tudor tragedies, Gorboduc. Mr. GassnerÕs introductions and notes tell a tale of excellence and evolution too easily forgotten. The texts have been modernized for todayÕs readers and those composed in Latin have been translated into English. ... Read more

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Medieval and Tudor Drama:Twenty-Four Plays

Medieval and Tudor Drama: Twenty-Four Plays was in excellent condition, almost like new.

24 plays in one book! Great selection of medieval/tudor plays
This one paperback volume includes all of the following:

Classical Heritage:
1. Hrotsvitha: Dulcitius
2. Hrotsvitha: Paphnutius

Pagan Remains:
3. Christmas Mumming (Play of St. George)

Christian Ritual Beginnings:
4. Quem Quaritis Trope
5. Pantomime for Easter Day
6. Easter Resurrection Play
7. Orleans Sepulcher

English Passion Play
8. Creation and Fall of Lucifer
9. Man's Disobedience / Fall of Man
10. First Murder: Murder of Abel
11. Deluge: Noah and His Sons
12. Brome: Abraham and Isaac ]
13. The second shepherd's play
14. Pageant of the Shearmen / Tailors of Coventry
15. Death of Herod
16. Betrayal of Christ
17. Wakefield Crucifixion
18. Resurrection: Harrowing of Hell / Last Judgment

Cornish Passion Play:
19. Cornwell Death of Pilot

Morality Play
20. Everyman

Interlude:
21. John Haywood: Play called the Four PP

Tudor Comedy:
22. Nicholas Udall: Ralph Roister Doister
23. Mr. S: Gammer Gurton's Needle

Tudor Tragedy:
24. Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville: Gorboduc

Bibliography

Watch out!
Page 359 of my copy of this book is blank. ... Read more

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This set collects eighty-four of the most important articles published on Virgil in the last hundred years, many of which remain the starting-points for modern scholarship and criticism. ... Read more

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This is an OCR edition without illustrations or index. It may have numerous typos or missing text. However, purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original rare book from GeneralBooksClub.com. You can also preview excerpts from the book there. Purchasers are also entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Journalism; Language Arts & Disciplines / Publishing; Literary Collections / Ancient, Classical & Medieval; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; Reference / Bibliographies & Indexes; ... Read more

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James O'Donnell tells the story from the vantage point of Hippo, the city in what is now Algeria, where Augustine spent almost 40 years as priest and bishop. By telling the story that way, he is able to escape from the Confessions: the post-Confessions years are the ones in which Augustine (354-430) really made his name. The story is extraordinarily rich in vivid primary material about the crises and doings of his time, the late Roman Empire. Rich men converting to Christianity to get ahead, priests covering up their sexual and financial peccadilloes, gangs of desperadoes invading churches or lying in ambush on country roads, generals playing coldly calculated games of geopolitics - these are the figures who stand out in Augustine's world against a background of a battle to the death over the future of Christianity. This is one of the most remarkable biographies to be written about any figure from the ancient world. ... Read more

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The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Short stories, American; ... Read more

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The poems of Hafiz of Shiraz celebrate love, wine, and fellowship of all creatures. An almost exact contemporary of Chaucer, his standing in Persian literature ranks him with Shakespeare and Goethe. Witty and wise, the poetry of Hafiz is at once deeply spiritual and of profound literary quality.

This volume, first published in 1952, includes an authoritative Introduction, a Glossary of Names, and copious Endnotes that provide the reader with the cultural and historical context for translations that are the most beautiful and faithful English renderings of this greatest of Persian writers. The poems of Hafiz of Shiraz celebrate wine, and the love and fellowship of all creatures. An almost exact contemporary of Chaucer, his standing in Persian literature ranks him with Shakespeare and Goethe. Witty and wise, the poetry of Hafiz is at once deeply spiritual and of profound literary quality. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The ideal translation of Hafiz
Hafiz's popularity today arises from the vogue for a quasi-Sufi mysticism of a 'New Age' variety. But Hafiz was not a religious teacher, but a professional poet, who used the same range of images to express love for an adolescent, mystical yearning, and the praise of some grizzled prince or vizier. The ambiguities in reference and meaning, and the variation between different stylistic registers, make him singularly difficult to translate. Very few of the available English versions are anything like adequate in conveying either the subtleties of meaning or the literary form of the originals. Of all the ones I have come across, this seems to me easily the best. Avery's participation ensures accuracy and authenticity, while Heath-Stubbs (a much respected writer of learned and often witty poetry) produces phrasing of exceptional vividness and vitality. The introduction is brief but very helpful. This book has been one of my favourite volumes of poetry in translation for forty years; its reappearance is a cause of celebration.
For those who can read French the perfect companion to this short English selection is the recent translation by Charles-Henri Fouchecour (you'll find it on amazon.fr under 'Hafez'), which offers a meticulously faithful but still readable translation of the whole Divan (486 poems) with full annotation, adding enormously to the accessibility of the work for a modern western reader. ... Read more

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"These excellent essays discuss a wide range of literary and art historical topics covering the full chronological span of the medieval period." —Louis Jordan, University of Notre Dame

The Text in the Community brings together essays by a diverse group of medievalists to consider the multiple ways in which readers approach texts and manuscripts as part of "communities" of readers, authors, scribes, and scholars. The central premise of this volume is that texts do not exist in isolation. Each written work is embedded in contexts—literary, historical, geographical, social, political, and religious—and derives its meaning in part from the intersection of those contexts in the reader's experience of the text.

This collection is distinguished by a range of approaches to the study of medieval texts and manuscripts and by the capacious time frame in which they are located, extending from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fifteenth century. Contributors demonstrate ways in which the insights gained from careful attention to the material as well as verbal dimensions of medieval texts can extend and complicate our notions of the literary tradition, medieval reading practices and audiences, and modes of composition. ... Read more