Publisher's description:

Bringing together scholarship on multilingual and intercultural medieval Britain as never before, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain comprises over 600 authoritative entries spanning key figures, contexts, and influences in the literatures of Britain from the Saxon invasions of the fifth century to the transition from the Medieval to the Early Modern Period in the sixteenth. Unique in its approach, the Encyclopedia facilitates a fuller understanding of the complex literary landscape of the period by covering all the literatures of the Medieval British Isles and their direct influences, including Old and Middle English, Early Scots, Anglo-Norman, the Norse, Latin, and French of Britain, and the Celtic literature of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall. Covering all the important figures, texts, critical debates, methodologies, and cultural and historical contexts, the expertly written entries offer an authoritative yet accessible go-to resource for students and experienced scholars alike.

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature is a comprehensive, scholarly, authoritative, and critical overview of literature and theory comprising individual titles covering key literary genres, periods, and sub-disciplines. Available both in print and online, this groundbreaking resource provides students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in literature and literary studies.

Publisher's description:

Adémar de Chabannes (989–1034), monk at the abbey of Saint Cybard in Angoulême, historian, homilist, polemicist and musician extraordinaire, left behind some 451 folios of music with notation written in his own hand. These documents constitute the earliest identifiable musical autographs by several centuries. They provide essential data for musical practices at Saint Martial, where Adémar contributed to their production, and for Adémar’s personal and professional involvement in those practices. They also attest the introduction to the scriptorium at Saint Martial by Adémar of accurately heighting the neumes (symbols of musical notation) above the text to which the melody is sung.  Each pitch, therefore, receives a distinct position along the vertical axis of writing. This procedure shows the exact musical interval between notes, and expedites the reading and learning of the melodies. It remains today the standard convention for indicating pitch in modern Western notation.

The importance of this technique is impossible to overstate because Western music and its notation place higher importance on pitch than on many other elements, such as rhythm and timbre. Therefore heighting, the device by which notation precisely communicates pitch, holds a central place in the development of the musical language. In contrast, most of the notational dialects that appear in early music manuscripts from the medieval West use, to a greater or lesser degree, the vertical placement of signs to indicate melodic direction rather than pitch. After an overview of Adémar’s biography and musical activities, the study examines in detail the four surviving manuscripts in which Adémar inscribed musical notation, and then the notation itself. The study closes with a consideration of Adémar’s contributions to musical literacy through his introduction of accurate heighting. 

Publisher's description:

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic.

The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Heptameron, and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot’s famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft. Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic.

Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.

Publisher's description:

Seeking Sanctuary explores a curious aspect of premodern English law: the right of felons to shelter in a church or ecclesiastical precinct, remaining safe from arrest and trial in the king's courts. This is the first volume in more than a century to examine sanctuary in England in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Looking anew at this subject challenges the prevailing assumptions in the scholarship that this 'medieval' practice had become outmoded and little-used by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although for decades after 1400 sanctuary-seeking was indeed fairly rare, the evidence in the legal records shows the numbers of felons seeing refuge in churches began to climb again in the late fifteenth century and reached its peak in the period between 1525 and 1535. Sanctuary was not so much a medieval practice accidentally surviving into the early modern era, as it was an organism that had continued to evolve and adapt to new environments and indeed flourished in its adapted state. Sanctuary suited the early Tudor regime: it intersected with rapidly developing ideas about jurisdiction and provided a means of mitigating the harsh capital penalties of the English law of felony that was useful not only to felons but also to the crown and the political elite. Sanctuary's resurgence after 1480 means we need to rethink how sanctuary worked, and to reconsider more broadly the intersections of culture, law, politics, and religion in the years between 1400 and 1550.

From the publisher:

The Hussites, as the Bohemian reformists have come to be called, became one of the most vocal and influential reform movements of the late Middle Ages, with significance for the reformations of the sixteenth century and later. They represented an interchange between “town and gown” that was largely unprecedented in medieval Europe. Scholarship on the Hussites has a long and distinguished tradition, and current studies must continually contend with a historiography that is implicated in the nationalism, confessionalism, and politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This volume gives students and scholars a clear sense of the historiography and current trends in Hussite studies, as well as concise statements on major emphases in Hussite theology, ecclesiology, philosophy, and religious practice. Contributors are: Eliška Baťová, Pavlína Cermanová, Dušan Coufal, Phillip Haberkern, Ota Halama, David Holeton, Stephen Lahey, Jindřich Marek, Pavel Kolář, Olivier Marin, Petra Mutlová, Pavlína Rychterová, Pavel Soukup, Michael Van Dussen, and Blanka Zilynská. 

Publisher's description: 

Medicine at Monte Cassino offers unprecedented insights into the revolutionary arrival of Arabic medicine to medieval Europe by exploring the oldest manuscript of Constantine the African’s Pantegni, which is identified here, for the first time, as a product of the skilled team of scribes and scholars working directly under the supervision of Constantine himself at the eleventh-century abbey of Monte Cassino.

Fleeing his North-African homeland for Italy, Constantine the African arrived in Salerno and then joined the abbey of Monte Cassino south of Rome in c. 1077. He dedicated his life to the translation of more than two dozen medical texts from Arabic into Latin. These great efforts produced the first substantial written body of medical theory and practice in medieval Europe. His most important contribution, an encyclopedia he called the Pantegni (The Complete Art), was translated and adapted from the Complete Book of the Medical Art by the Persian physician ‘Ali ibn al-‘Abbās al-Mağūsī (d. 982). This monograph focuses on the oldest manuscript of the Pantegni,Theorica, which represents a work-in-progress with numerous unusual features. 

This study, for the first time, identifies Monte Cassino as the origin of this oldest Pantegni manuscript, and asserts that it was made during Constantine’s lifetime. It further demonstrates how a skilled team of scribes and scholars assisted the translator in the complex process of producing this Latin version of the Arabic text. Several members of this production team are identified, both in the Pantegni manuscript and in other copies of Cassinese manuscripts. 

The book breaks new ground by identifying a range of manuscripts produced at Monte Cassino under Constantine’s direct supervision, as evidenced by their material features, script, and contents. In rare detail, this study explores some of the challenges met by ‘Team Constantine’ as they sought to reveal new knowledge to the West, which in turn revolutionized medical understanding throughout medieval Europe.

Publisher's Description: 

Since the 1970s, the craft brewing industry has grown in popularity. However, with the introduction of the Internet and the consequent globalization of cultures and economies, craft beer marketing has increasingly evoked the medieval past in order to appeal to our collective sense of a lost community, and even a lost purity. This book discusses the desire for the local, the non-corporate, and the pre-modern in the discourse of craft brewing, which has become a form of ideological resistance to corporate capitalism, forming a strong counter-cultural narrative. However, such discourses also reinforce colonial histories of purity and conquest while effacing indigenous voices, and there are troubling intersections between the desire for a medieval past and the desire to preserve the imaginary “whiteness” of that past. Such considerations are particularly relevant now, during a time in which white nationalist groups (many of which turn to a medieval past for inspiration) are increasing in influence and visibility. Moving from beer in the Middle Ages to beer in 2019, this book deploys analysis of literary and historical texts, advertisements, labels, and interviews with craft brewers and writers to argue that craft beer is much more than a delicious drink and a social connector; its marketing, its appeal, and its ubiquitous presence in middle class North America reveals a powerful cultural desire for the past in a world that privileges the present.

Congrats to editor Ruth Wehlau and her contributors on the publication of Darkness, Depression, and Descent in Anglo-Saxon England, out now from Medieval Institute Publications! See the publisher's note below:

This collection of essays examines the motifs of darkness, depression, and descent in both literal and figurative manifestations within a variety of Anglo-Saxon texts, including the Old English Consolation of Philosophy, Beowulf, Guthlac, The Junius Manuscript, The Wonders of the East, and The Battle of Maldon. Essays deal with such topics as cosmic emptiness, descent into the grave, and recurrent grief. In their analyses, the essays reveal the breadth of this imagery in Anglo-Saxon literature as it is used to describe thought and emotion, as well as the limits to knowledge and perception. The volume investigates the intersection between the burgeoning interest in trauma studies and darkness and the representation of the mind or of emotional experience within Anglo-Saxon literature.

Congrats to Erik Kwakkel on the publication of Books Before Print, out now from ARC Humanities Press.

From the publisher:
This beautifully illustrated book provides an accessible introduction to the medieval manuscript and what it can tell us about the world in which it was made and used. Captured in the materiality of manuscripts are the data enabling us to make sense of the preferences and habits of the individuals who made up medieval society. With short chapters grouped under thematic headings, Books Before Print shows how we may tap into the evidence and explores how manuscripts can act as a vibrant and versatile tool to understand the deep historical roots of human interaction with written information. It highlights extraordinary continuities between medieval book culture and modern-world communication, as witnessed in medieval pop-up books, posters, speech bubbles, book advertisements, and even sticky notes.

https://arc-humanities.org/products/b-66111-110116-18-6912-2/