New Medieval Literatures 19

Essays in this volume trace institutional histories, examining the textual and memorial practices of religious institutions across the British Isles; explore language games that play with meaning in Anglo-French poetry; examine the interplay of form and matter in Italian song; position Old Norse sagas in an ecocritical and a postcolonial framework; consider the impact of papal politics on Middle English poetry; and read allegorical poetry as a privileged site for asking fundamental questions about the nature of the mind. Texts discussed include lives of St Aebbe of Coldingham, with a focus on the twelfth-century Latin Vita and its afterlives; a range of Latin and vernacular works associated with institutional houses, including the Vie de Edmund le rei by Denis Piramus and the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis; both the didactic and lyrical writings of Walter de Bibbesworth; the trecento Italian caccia, especially examples by Vincenzo da Rimini and Lorenzo Masini; Bárðar saga, Egils saga, and other Old Norse works that reveal the traces of encounters with a racial other; John Gower's Confessio Amantis, in striking juxtaposition with late-medieval accounts of ecclesiastical crisis; and Alain Chartier's Livre de l'Espérance.