First English translation of the Dutch version of the Old French Fergus, with accompanying text. Some time in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, Guillaume le clerc composed the story of Fergus, the homo silvaticus who develops into a formidable knight; he was playing a literary game with Chrétien de Troyes, especially with his Conte du Graal, and he created a romance in which the main character features as a "new" Perceval in a realistically depicted Scottish landscape. Shortly thereafter, perhaps as early as 1250, the story was translated into Middle Dutch. The Ferguut, however, is an adaptation of the Old French Fergus, rather than a slavish translation: although the translator followed his Old French original fairly faithfully for the first part, thereafter the poet - and most likely a second author - continued his work from memory, and clearly without the Old French version to hand. The result is a romance which possesses all the appeal of the Old French Fergus, but at the same time reveals something of the Middle Dutch romancer's tastes and techniques. This volume offers the first ever English translation, facing a new edition of the text, and will thus bring this important work to a wider audience; it is accompanied by an introduction, variants and rejected readings, and critical notes. David F. Johnson is Professor of English, Florida State University; Geert H.M. Claassens is Professor of Middle Dutch Literature at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

The focus of this book is medieval vernacular literature in Western Europe. Chapters are written by experts in the area and present the current scholarship at the time this book was originally published in 1996. Each chapter has a bibliography of important works in that area as well. This is a thorough and reliable guide to trends in research on medieval Arthuriana.

From the twelfth century onwards the legends of King Arthur and his knights, including the Tristan legend, spread across Europe, producing a vast range of adaptations and new stories. German and Dutch literature were of central importance in this expansion of Arthurian material from the 12th to 16th century. This title deals with this topic.

The Arthurian myth is one of the most fundamental and abiding ones of Western culture. The legend of King Arthur and his knights was no less popular in the medieval Low Countries than it was anywhere else in medieval Europe. It gave rise to a varied corpus of Middle Dutch Arthurian verse romances, most of which are contained in a single manuscript, the so-called Lancelot Compilation of MS The Hague, KB, 129 A10. This manuscript of the early fourteenth century contains a cycle of verse narratives that rivals in its scope and thematic concerns the better known Old French Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian tales and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur. This volume contains new critical work on these and other Middle Dutch Arthurian romances, twelve studies by eleven established scholars in the field of Arthurian literature. In addition to this new scholarship, the volume is provided with an extensive introduction to the Arthurian literature of the medieval Low Countries, as well as summaries of all the extant Middle Dutch Arthurian texts. As such it should prove of interest to Arthurian specialists and enthusiasts alike, many of whom will discover a new body of Arthurian tales, at once both familiar and new, in a heretofore relatively neglected area of Arthurian studies.

Parallel text and translation of Arthurian romances in Latin. Latin is the language not only of numerous Arthurian chronicles - including the most important of all, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britannie - but also of a small number of important but largely neglected romancesconcerning Arthur and his knights. Several of these romances clearly take their inspiration from the chronicle tradition, and their authors sometimes join romance adventures with actual events and characters (such as Henry II) inorder to give the appearance of history to Arthurian fiction. Ranging in date from the late twelfth to the fourteenth century, these romances include De ortu Waluuanii (in which Gawain defeats the Persian champion for thepeace of Jerusalem), Historia Meriadoci, Arthur and Gorlagon, and Draco Normannicus. These four texts are presented here in facing text and translation, and accompanied by a thorough introduction and extensive notes.

First English translation of Iwein [B], a German adaptation of Chrétien's famous Yvain.

An examination of French to English translation in medieval England, through the genre of the prologue. The prologue to Layamon's Brut recounts its author's extensive travels "wide yond thas leode" (far and wide across the land) to gather the French, Latin and English books he used as source material. The first Middle English writer to discuss his methods of translating French into English, Layamon voices ideas about the creation of a new English tradition by translation that proved very durable. This book considers the practice of translation from French into English in medieval England, and how the translators themselves viewed their task. At its core is a corpus of French to English translations containing translator's prologues written between c.1189 and c.1450; this remarkable body of Middle English literary theory provides a useful map by which to chart the movement from a literary culture rooted in Anglo-Norman at the end of the thirteenth century to what, in the fifteenth, is regarded as an established "English" tradition. Considering earlier Romance and Germanic models of translation, wider historical evidence about translation practice, the acquisition of French, the possible role of women translators, and the manuscript tradition of prologues, in addition to offering a broader, pan-European perspective through an examination of Middle Dutch prologues, the book uses translators' prologues as a lens through which to view a period of critical growth and development for English as a literary language. Elizabeth Dearnley gained her PhD from the University of Cambridge.