The book series Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, founded by Gustav Gröber in 1905, is among the most renowned publications in Romance Studies. It covers the entire field of Romance linguistics, including the national languages as well as the lesser studied Romance languages. The editors welcome submissions of high-quality monographs and collected volumes on all areas of linguistic research, on medieval literature and on textual criticism. The publication languages of the series are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian as well as German and English. Each collected volume should be as uniform as possible in its contents and in the choice of languages.

These essays are a tribute to one of North America’s most distinguished scholars of Old French literature, Norris J. Lacy. Dealing with a wide range of medieval works, they reflect the honorand’s own scholarly interests in medieval narrative and its reception in later periods. Together, the contributions are witness not only to the esteem in which Norris Lacy is held by the profession but also to the collegial spirit of the international community of medievalists.

In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism. She argues that personifications are instead powerful tools for thought that help us to remember and manipulate complex ideas, testing them against existing moral and political paradigms. Specifically, different types of medieval personification should be seen as corresponding to positions in the rich and nuanced medieval debate over universals. Breen identifies three different types of personification—Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian—that gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters. Through a series of new readings of major authors and works, from Plato to Piers Plowman, Breen illuminates how medieval personifications embody the full range of positions between philosophical realism and nominalism, varying according to the convictions of individual authors and the purposes of individual works. Recalling Gregory the Great’s reference to machinae mentis (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, employing methods of personification as tools that serve different functions. Machines of the Mind offers insight for medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as for scholars interested in literary character-building and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages.

Arranged alphabetically, with a brief introduction that clearly defines the scope and purpose of the book. Illustrations include maps, B/W photographs, genealogical tables, and lists of architectural terms.

By his contemporaries, Raoul de Houdenc was 'mentioned in the same breath as Chrétien de Troyes as one of the masters of French poetry' (Keith Busby, The New Arthurian Encyclopaedia).

Scholars and students working on the early courtly and chivalric literature of medieval Europe will have often felt the need for contemporary theoretical material with which to illustrate their arguments about courtesy and chivalry in romances, etc. The present volume, which presents critical editions of the two earliest didactic poems of this kind in the vernacular (both date from the first quarter of the thirteenth century), was conceived partly to fill this need. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in Old French literature, but also to those studying other literatures; both texts are known to have circulated in England in the fourteenth century and are therefore of importance for anglicists; L’Ordene de Chevalerie was adapted into Middle Dutch and Italian several times and provides excellent material for comparatists, netherlandists and italianists; moreover, given the germinal place of Old French literature in the culture of the Middle Ages, both poems are worthy of study in the context of the evolution of the ideals of courtesy and chivalry as European literary phenomenon. Each critical text is accompanied by an extensive literary introduction and philological apparatus, and translations into modern English prose have been appended to render the poems more accessible to non-romanists.

Scholars and students working on the early courtly and chivalric literature of medieval Europe will have often felt the need for contemporary theoretical material with which to illustrate their arguments about courtesy and chivalry in romances, etc. The present volume, which presents critical editions of the two earliest didactic poems of this kind in the vernacular (both date from the first quarter of the thirteenth century), was conceived partly to fill this need. This book will be of interest not only to specialists in Old French literature, but also to those studying other literatures; both texts are known to have circulated in England in the fourteenth century and are therefore of importance for anglicists; L'Ordene de Chevalerie was adapted into Middle Dutch and Italian several times and provides excellent material for comparatists, netherlandists and italianists; moreover, given the germinal place of Old French literature in the culture of the Middle Ages, both poems are worthy of study in the context of the evolution of the ideals of courtesy and chivalry as European literary phenomenon. Each critical text is accompanied by an extensive literary introduction and philological apparatus, and translations into modern English prose have been appended to render the poems more accessible to non-romanists.

The late Middle English Weye of Paradys and its French source La Voie de Paradis use the theme of the allegorical journey to Paradise. Essentially they are popular guides to confession, adaptations for the layman of more specialized works in Latin such as Raymond of Pennaforte's Summa de Poenitentia. This edition presents critical texts of both The Weye of Paradys and La Voie de Paradis and analyzes the relations of the English text with its immediate (French) and distant (Latin) sources. This work makes the English and French texts available in print for the first time and places them in the wider field of popular penitential literature.

Here is presented for the first time an extraordinary medieval text, the first Old French Vie des Pères. The Vie des Pères is in fact a collective text comprising three branches and, at its fullest, over seventy individually enclosed pious tales / miracles. The first Vie – the first forty-one or -two tales – dates from the first third of the thirteenth century. It is a vitally significant but hitherto neglected part of the Old French canon. Indeed, in his preface to this volume Michel Zink, one of the most respected medievalists of his generation, notes that the qualities of the Vie des Pèrs ‘devraient valoir à son auteur une place au voisinage de celle qu’occupent pour nous celui de la Chanson de Roland ou Chrétien de Troyes.’ The tales are remarkably well written and offer fascinating glimpses of thirteenth-century life and spirituality. They were also extremely popular in Medieval France. Sharing close links with a number of traditions – fabliaux, Saints’ Lives, Miracles of the Virgin, Romance, Sermons – the Vie des Pères has value for those interested in many branches of vernacular literature, codicology, lexicography, art history, theology and philology. Tales of Vice and Virtue – the first sustained analysis of the entire first Vie des Pères to be published – is a groundbreaking book providing readers new to the text with detailed commentaries, offering abundant intertextual information for romance philologists, and suggesting many new areas for further research.