Its arguments are formulated through the works of Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Georges Bataille, & more. It covers texts from heroic verse narratives to devotional & penitential anthologies & relates these to the poem Beowulf. (2/2)

is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor.

at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular "plaything" is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world,

spaces of play? What happens when players go "out of bounds," or when games go "too far"? Moreover, what happens when we push the parameters of inquiry: when we play with traditional narratives of ludic culture, when we rewrite the rules?

An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays

early 1430s in Lydgate’s “aureate” style, these mummings provide rare insight into how performances were commissioned, created, and disseminated.

The Legend of St. George dramatizes the eponymous hero to honor the building of a guild hall for London armorers. Some embrace a comic or ludic tone, inviting audience participation, while others suggest proper behavior through Classical and Biblical exempla. Written from the late 1420s to the

or action to accompany occasions like pageants, royal processions, and pictorial representations. For example, Soteltes at the Coronation Banquet of Henry VI offers verses recited during themed subtleties (culinary conceits made of confectionary) at the titular king’s inaugural feast while

prolific fifteenth-century poet. Though Lydgate is known for his longer literary works, this edition compiles fifteen of his Middle English mummings, folk dramas typically performed at festivals, holy days, and royal or civic ceremonies. They may include music, spoken word, costuming, and gesture

lives the power of the tale and its ability to create a lasting impression on readers, both medieval and modern.

audiences would often define as "happiness" or "joy," and the significance that the book has had on the transference of this mirth to audiences.

This volume also celebrates the scholarship of Thomas H. Ohlgren, a medievalist whose work encompasses a number of different areas, but at its center

to as signifiers of the medieval age. These tales - from the skillfully crafted to the more rudimentary and plain - often make familiar to modern readers what seems so distant and foreign about the Middle Ages. This volume of essays focuses on the tale and its ability to create "mirth," what modern

medieval literature.

The great corpus that is medieval literature contains, at its very center, the tale. These verse and prose fictional narratives, as well as stories that are grounded in some degree of historical truth, are the foundation of what readers, scholars, and enthusiasts often point

specialist in medieval English studies. As Chaucer’s poem displays the contestive spirit of human affairs, so the collective spirit of these essays reflects vigorous debate and multi-faceted challenge.

reject social dogmas, often overturning them. The essays that make up this collection offer several provocative interpretations of the rivalrous and rebellious spirits that inhabit the worlds of Chaucer’s tales. The volume is intended for the dedicated teacher of Chaucer as well as for the

beguilings, and one-uppings that go on in the tales. By understanding the rivalries of the Canterbury world, we may then recognize why Chaucer so insists on the individuality of the characters he creates, why so many characters (rightly or wrongly) resist structures, and why they challenge or

in the stories as well as the links between them. Characters seem always ready to dispute, contradict, declaim, and contend about almost anything. A competitive spirit suffuses the work, from the tale-telling among pilgrims and the personal rivalries that develop on the pilgrimage to the conflicts,

heavenly goals, thereby justifying elite amusements.

late-fourteenth-century elite reader in its unique manuscript context, London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A X/2. The textual and visual games of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Cotton Nero manuscript allow a fourteenth-century English Christian aristocracy to align courtly gaming with