During the last decade, critics of medieval drama have demonstrated a propensity to move beyond emphasizing written texts and turned to the social and political circumstances of theatrical performances, and the skills of actors. This new attention is visible in a collection by Evelyn Birge Vitz,* N. F. Regalado, and M. Lawrence (Performing Medieval Narrative). Excellent also is the book by Philip Butterworth* (although restricted to England): Magic on the Early English Stage, which highlights the activities of jongleurs, their sleights of hand, skills, and deceptions. Another groundbreaking book is Julie Stone Peters’s The Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880:...

Wirnt von Grafenberg (fl. 1204–10) wrote Wigalois, an Arthurian verse romance which alludes to characters from Erec, Iwein, both by Hartmann von Aue (c.1160–after 1210), and Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach (first half of thirteenth century). Hartmann’s and Wolfram’s stories were of course well known ever since Chrétien de Troyes created the source tales (twelfth century). Grafenberg’s Wigalois itself consisted of 11708 verses in rhymed couplets. The hero Gwigalois is Gawein’s son, whose life is told in five parts: the hero’s upbringing in his mother’s fairy kingdom; his arrival at Arthur’s court and his adventures in the Arthurian...

The study of liturgical manuscripts has experienced a wealth of interdisciplinary activity in the last five years. Richard K. Emmerson has noted that examinations of illuminated manuscripts

have shifted from exclusive concern with stylistic and iconographic analyses to more extensive attention to the semiotics of representation and seeing and to the contextualization of image reception within social (e.g., interpretive communities) and material (e.g., the whole book) contexts.¹

Interdisciplinary analyses of deluxe illuminated manuscripts can thus provide contextualizations that include cultural and political considerations; for example, a recent analysis of the ordo of St. Louis demonstrates that this manuscript was “ordered...

L’histoire en français a été, au XVe siècle, avec la farce et le mystére, un des genres majeurs, et elle montre une étonnante vitalité dont il convient d’élucider les grandes tendances. Elle éclate en plusieurs genres, dont deux sont plus ou moins nouveaux, les mémoires et le journal. Il s’agit ici d’esquisser à grands traits les préliminaires, forcément incomplets, que j’ai pu établir en dirigeant des thèses de doctorat, comme celles de Peter F. Ainsworth (Froissart), Nicole Chareyron (Jean le Bel), Danick Florentin (Commynes), Elisabeth Gaucher (biographie chevaleresque), Marie Thérèse de Medeiros (Froissart), Emily Springer (Lalain), Hélène Wolff; en participant...

El propósito de este trabajo consiste en demostrar el uso del término escuela de traductores en España, sobre todo ella (verdadera) de Íñigo Lopez de Mendoza, marqués de Santillana (1398–1458). Partiendo del análisis del concepto de escuela, paso a precisar y actualizar su significado entendiendo por escuela de traductores una actividad traductora colectiva que bajo el impulso y el patrocinio de un mecenas, don Iñigo López de Mendoza, desarrolló su labor durante el siglo XV con el fin de satisfacer la demanda intelectual de esa época. Además, aplico dicho concepto de escuela a otros casos semejantes producidos a lo...

One of the most valuable manuscripts in Dutch literary history is the Gruuthuse Songbook.¹ This volume, copied five times during the last quarter of the fourteenth century and soon after, contains a series of 147 Middle Dutch lyrics, complete with musical notation. No other lyric texts from the period and before are known to preserve their original melodies; this gathering is the oldest complete collection of Dutch songs in existence. The current article presents a selection of ten poems from the Songbook, lyrics we translate into English verse; most of these songs have never appeared in English before and take...

In book ten, chapter five, of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), Victor Hugo depicts a superstitious King Louis XI of France sequestered with his advisors, resolving to hang the heroine Esmeralda as a witch despite her having claimed sanctuary in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. Asking advance forgiveness from the Virgin Mary, the king removes his hat and prays to one of several pilgrims’ badges pinned to the hood, a medal devoted to the Virgin of Paris.¹ Hugo’s fictional account of the king’s hat corresponds to fifteenth-c. accounts of apparel documented by historians during Louis’s lifetime. The portrait (fig. 1) shows...

A fable is a narrative episode (resulting in a moral), in which animals usually appear with the mental faculties of human beings but with their own physical characteristics. At times, humans are present with or without animals. This type of literature was particularly developed among the Greeks. Many of the most ancient fables have continued to be popular, in unbroken line, till the present day, including in animal epics. The earliest known fabulist was Aesop, a slave from the Island of Samos in the sixth century B.C., according to the testimony of Herodotus (II, 134).¹ (The editors.)

Poems that present...

English romances were written in verses, often by anonymous authors, and frequently based on French adventure stories. Some romances appeared in the first half of the thirteenth century, followed by many others in the 1300s and 1400s. They are somewhat moralistic and treat Arthurian material. (The editors.) The Middle English romance Sir Gowther¹ (c.1400; 757 verses) is often approached in terms of its connection to, and transmission from, the “Robert the Devil” narratives, specifically the French Robert le Diable (eleventh century, 5,078 verses) which is seen as its closest ancestor.² There are significant changes from this base text, however, that...

El propósito de mi investigación es analizar la imagen del judío sujeto como despolitizado y como mal lector, a la luz de la teoría del conocimiento en los Sermons de quaresma del san Vicente Ferrer (1350–1419), el influyente y prolífico dominico valenciano. En este corpus de textos, el judío es una figura crucial en razón de los siguientes motivos, todos ellos fuertemente conectados. En primer lugar, su aparición en los textos de los sermones es notoriamente recurrente; en segundo lugar, el público mismo al cual se dirigían los sermones estaba compuesto por miembros de la comunidad judía en la...

A notebook of Buitzruss, who studied at Heidelberg in the early fifteenth century, illustrates the practical outlook of the city’s academic community. Among the varieties of texts preserved in Conrad’s collection is a cookbook that has gone unnoticed thus far by scholars of European food history.¹ This set of culinary recipes appears in the midst of general rules about health, ritual magic, and other practically oriented texts taken down by Buitzruss and form a very interesting part of manuscript Clm 671.² Any literate reader would gain valuable knowledge for life in a late-medieval urban environment.

In his book Understanding the...