The legend of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne is widespread through the literature of the European Middle Ages. This book offers a detailed and critical analysis of how this myth emerged and developed in medieval German and Dutch literatures, bringing to light the vast array of narratives either idealizing, if not glorifying, Charlemagne as a political and religious leader, or, at times, criticizing or even ridiculing him as a pompous and ineffectual ruler. The motif is traced from its earliest origins in chronicles, in the Kaiserchronik, through the Rolandslied and Der Stricker's Karl der Große, to his recasting as a saint in the Zürcher Buch vom Heiligen Karl.

Situates Celtic languages and literatures in relation to European movements, in the tradition of Helen Fulton's groundbreaking research. Professor Helen Fulton's influential scholarship has pioneered our understanding of the links between Welsh and European medieval literature. The essays collected here pay tribute to and reflect that scholarship, by positioning Celtic languages and literatures in relation to broader European movements and conventions. They include studies of texts from medieval Wales, Ireland, and the Welsh March, alongside discussions of continental multicultural literary engagements, understood as a closely related and analogous field of enquiry. Contributors present new investigations of Welsh poetry, from the pre-Conquest poetry of the princes to late-medieval and early Tudor urban subject matters; Welsh Arthuriana and Irish epic; the literature of the Welsh March - including the writings of the Gawain-poet; and the multilingual contexts of medieval and post-medieval Europe, from the Dutch speakers of polyglot medieval Calais to the Romantic poet Shelley's probable ownership of a Welsh Bible.

This collection studies the representations of the character of the monarch in literature and cinema. Being a person, an institution, a character archetype and a narrative role, the characters of the monarch and other royal or regal characters oscillate between humanity and the non-human. As such, they are hybrid forms of existence and subjectivity. The authors of this collection explore this hybridity across large spectra of genres, historical periods and cultural contexts. Some of the most prolific and widely read scholars analyze the archetype of the monarch on the page, the stage and the screen. They cover large swathes of intersecting creative and interpretive territories including ancient epic and religious poetry, Arthurian legends, British Renaissance and modern drama, British horror films and Hollywood crime and sports films. This collection also features interviews with six prominent comic book writers and artists, who discuss the influence of classical royal archetypes on their works.

Captured here for the first time is the richness of the Charlemagne tradition in medieval Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Wales and Ireland and its coherence as a series of adaptations of Old French chansons de geste

Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature aims to examine and unearth the critical investigations of toleration and tolerance presented in literary texts of the Middle Ages. In contrast to previous approaches, this volume identifies new methods of interpreting conventional classifications of toleration and tolerance through the emergence of multi-level voices in literary, religious, and philosophical discourses of authorities in medieval literature. Accordingly, this volume identifies two separate definitions of toleration and tolerance, the former as a representative of a majority group accepts a member of the minority group but still holds firmly to the believe that s/he is right and the other entirely wrong, and tolerance meaning that all faiths, convictions, and ideologies are treated equally, and the majority speaker is ready to accept that potentially his/her position is wrong. Applying these distinct differences in the critical investigation of interaction and representation in context, this book offers new insight into the tolerant attitudes portrayed in medieval literature of which regularly appealed, influenced and shaped popular opinions of the period.

Every human being knows that we are walking through life following trails, whether we are aware of them or not. Medieval poets, from the anonymous composer of Beowulf to Marie de France, Hartmann von Aue, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Guillaume de Lorris to Petrarch and Heinrich Kaufringer, predicated their works on the notion of the trail and elaborated on its epistemological function. We can grasp here an essential concept that determines much of medieval and early modern European literature and philosophy, addressing the direction which all protagonists pursue, as powerfully illustrated also by the anonymous poets of Herzog Ernst and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Dante’s Divina Commedia, in fact, proves to be one of the most explicit poetic manifestations of the fundamental idea of the trail, but we find strong parallels also in powerful contemporary works such as Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine and in many mystical tracts.

The Secret in Medieval Literature explores the many secret agents, actions, creatures, and other beings influencing human existence. Medieval poets had a clear sense of the alternative dimension (the secret) and allowed it to enter quite frequently into their texts.

Examining literary narratives from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries, this book explores how writers used their craft to voice harsh criticism of the ruling class and unearths a deep distrust of kings and other authority figures during the Middle Ages.

Die neue englischsprachige Reihe zur Mediävistik strebt eine methodisch reflektierte, anspruchsvolle Verbindung von Text- und Kulturwissenschaft an. Sie widmet sich den kulturellen Grundthemen der mittelalterlichen Welt aus der Perspektive der Literatur- und Geschichtswissenschaft. ‚Grundthemen' sind die kulturprägenden Denkbilder, Weltanschauungen, Sozialstrukturen und Alltagsbedingungen des mittelalterlichen Lebens, also z. B. Kindheit und Alter, Sexualität, Religion, Medizin, Rituale, Arbeit, Armut und Reichtum, Aberglauben, Erde und Kosmos, Stadt und Land, Krieg, Emotionen, Kommunikation, Reisen usw. Die Reihe greift wichtige aktuelle Fachdiskussionen auf und stellt ein Forum der interdisziplinären Mittelalter-Forschung dar. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture steht Sammelbänden ebenso offen wie Monographien. Intention ist immer, kompendienhafte Werke zu zentralen Fragen der mittelalterlichen Kulturgeschichte vorzulegen, die einen soliden Überblick über einen geschlossenen Themenkreis aus der Perspektive verschiedener Fachdisziplinen vermitteln. Im Ganzen bietet die Reihe so eine Enzyklopädie der mittelalterlichen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte und ihrer Hauptthemen. Es werden ca. zwei Bände pro Jahr erscheinen.

The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.