Spring Preview for Medieval Institute Publications
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The Middle English Castle of Love and Robert Grosseteste's Anglo-Norman Original, Le Chasteau d'amour
Edited by Dana M. Symons
This new edition of the Middle English Castle of Love includes a French text of Le château d’amour, Robert Grosseteste’s Anglo-Norman poem that forms the basis of the medieval English translation. Rich biblical allusions and architectural imagery showcase the popular allegory of Virgin Mary as castle of love, set within Grosseteste’s influential interpretation of the allegory of the four daughters of God, where medieval romance motifs, feudal structures, and legal principles illuminate the central theme of salvation history.
ISBN 978-1-58044-695-2 (paperback), 978-1-58044-696-9 (hardback), 978-1-58044-697-6 (PDF) © 2025
Authenticity in Medieval and Early Modern Literature
Edited by Rebecca Menmuir
What does it mean to be authentic? The term is as pervasive today as it is difficult to define. To be ‘authentic’ in the Middle Ages or Early Modernity was no less of a complex task, albeit framed in ways different to today’s concept of authenticity as an individualistic or capitalistic venture (think ‘being true to oneself’ or ‘brand authenticity’).
This volume examines a range of Medieval and Early Modern approaches to authenticity in literature, asking how authenticity was defined, privileged, constructed, and contested in the periods covered.
Essays trace the shifting status of authenticity across four literary categories which most test the concept of premodern authenticity: forgeries, histories, translations, and continuations. Contributions engage with works across Latin, Greek, English, French, and Irish, and set authenticity in conversation with medieval and modern perspectives on authority, truth, and morality.
Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ISBN 978-1-50152-172-0 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-50151-829-4 (ebook) © 2025
Vikings, Knights, Elves, and Ogres: Essays in Honor of Shaun F.D. Hughes
Edited by Eric R. Carlson, Dorsey Armstrong, and Arielle C. McKee
In his nearly half a century in the English Department of Purdue University, Shaun Hughes has had an incalculable impact on both his students and his colleagues, and this volume acknowledges the debt that generations of scholars in medieval studies owe to him. This festschrift highlights Dr. Hughes’s decades of research in a variety of fields: Old English language and literature, Middle English language and literature, Old Norse language and literature, and Tolkien.
ISBN 978-1-50151-892-8 (hardcover), 978-1-50151-132-5 (PDF), 978-1-50151-134-9 (EPUB) © 2025
Women, Politics, and Social Networks in the Sagas of Norwegian Kings
By Markus Eldegard Mindrebø
The medieval Old Norse kings’ sagas have been thoroughly studied for centuries for their vivid representation of Scandinavia’s Viking Age past, but women have frequently been overlooked in scholarly discussions of the political culture found within the texts. Women, Politics, and Social Networks in the Sagas of Norwegian Kings remedies this by showing that in their accounts of early Norwegian history, the kings’ sagas portray certain women as structurally enabled to enter and shape male-dominated political spaces. Through their participation in, interaction with, and manipulation of, multifaceted elite networks based around interpersonal bonds of kinship, friendship, and lordship, many such women play active and socially sanctioned roles as aristocratic power brokers.
ISBN 978-1-50152-121-8 (hardcover), 978-1-50151-759-4 (PDF), 978-1-50151-760-0 (EPUB) © 2025
Gaming the Medieval English Text: "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"and the Cotton Nero A X/2 Manuscript
By Julie Nelson Couch and Kimberly K. Bell
This book combines medieval manuscript study with contemporary cultural game theory to show how the Middle English romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, launches a multidimensional game with its late-fourteenth-century elite reader. The reading games in SGGK extend to the layout of the poem as found in its one extant manuscript, London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A X/2. This study offers a more comprehensive examination of games and gaming in SGGK and the manuscript as a whole, its four poems and its illustrations, than has been published to date. Reading, before printed editions, was an activity that involved interacting with the visual layout of the text on the page. The authors find that a medieval reader’s ludic interaction with this singular medieval codex could amuse but also serve as a means to serious ends, specifically redemptive knowledge. Couch and Bell conclude that the textual and visual games of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Cotton Nero A X/2 manuscript allow a fourteenth-century English Christian aristocracy to align courtly gaming with heavenly goals, thereby justifying elite amusements.
ISBN 978-1-50151-854-6 (hardcover), 978-1-50151-416-6 (PDF), 978-1-50151-444-9 (EPUB) © 2025