An invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires,
Review of English Studies
New Medieval Literatures
is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces both the British Isles and Europe.
Essays in this volume engage with the relations between humans and nonhumans; the power of inanimate objects to animate humans and texts; literary deployments of medical, aesthetic, and economic discourses; the language of friendship; and the surprising value of early readers' casual annotations. Texts discussed include
Beowulf
, works by Rolle, Chaucer, Langland, Gower, and Lydgate; lyrics of the Occitan troubadour Marcabru and the French poet Richard de Fournival; and the Anglo-Saxon versions of Boethius's
De Consolatione Philosophiae
and Augustine's
Soliloquia
.