PIMSPontifical Institute
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Mediaeval Studies

Many are linked by their interest in Rome’s intellectual legacy to the Middle Ages, the way, for instance, medieval readers understood Ovid (Frank Coulson and David Gura), or the use to which vernacular writers like Chaucer and Gower might put both Ovid (Richard Firth Green) and Statius (James Simpson). Some illuminate various aspects of Anglo-Latin works by authors like Walter of Peterborough (Stephanie Batkie), John Gower (Bob Yeager and Matthew Irvin), and Thomas Gascoigne (Michael Van Dussen), while others investigate the Latin discourse of fifteenth-century London (Rita Copeland) and of the great abbeys of St Albans, Glastonbury, and Canterbury (Andrew Galloway and James Carley). Further, several authors reflect Carlson’s own interest in the social contexts of vernacular literary discourse, both English and French: Geoff Rector on Hue of Roteland, Andrew Taylor on Jean Froissart, Michael Bennett on John Gower, and John Scattergood on Charles d’Orléans. The collection concludes with two bibliographic studies (Julia Boffey on late fifteenth-century bills of fare and Ana Sáez-Hidalgo on Katherine of Aragon’s books), and with A.S.G. Edwards’ brief life of the American editor of John Lydgate, Henry Bergen, a scholar who may have shared Carlson’s left-leaning convictions but whose work was far less wide-ranging than his.

Excerpt

The introduction

Editors

Richard Firth Green is Academy Professor of English at The Ohio State University and author of Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (1980), A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (1999), and Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (2016). He is a fellow of the Medieval Academy of America and has been President of the New Chaucer Society.

R.F. Yeager is Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of West Florida, and founder and president of the John Gower Society. He has written on Chaucer, manuscripts, early printed books, and extensively on Gower, including John Gower’s Poetic (1990), and has translated Gower’s minor Latin works (2005) and French verse (2011). His current project is a literary biography of John Gower.

Contents

Plates  •  ix
Abbreviations  •  x
Acknowledgments  •  xi

Introduction  •  1

Geoff Rector  •  Urbanity, Obscenity, and the Hereford Affinities of Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon (ca. 1180)  •  8
Frank T. Coulson  •  Telling Tales: The “Song of the Muses” in Medieval Latin Commentaries on Ovid’s Metamorphoses  •  27
David T. Gura  •  Ovid at St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury: The Metamorphoses Paraphrase of John of London  •  45
James Simpson  •  Capaneus’s Atheism and Criseyde’s Reading in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde  •  67
Richard Firth Green  •  John Gower and Chaucer’s Fabliaux  •  82
Michael Bennett  •  Shades of Gower: Latin Texts and Social Contexts  •  101
Matthew W. Irvin  •  The Vox Revoiced in Gower’s Carmen super multiplici viciorum pestilencia  •  120
R.F. Yeager  •  Gower, Grosseteste, and De lucis scrutinio  •  139
Stephanie L. Batkie  •  Compositos in compedibus: Scribal Panegyric in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B.214  •  157
Andrew Taylor  •  Truly Martyred: Froissart on the Killing of Civilians  •  175
John Scattergood  •  Power Games in the English Poetry of Charles of Orléans  •  192
Rita Copeland  •  The Porous Genres of Persuasion: A London Preacher and a Royal Advisor in the Fifteenth Century  •  210
Michael Van Dussen  •  Thomas Gascoigne on the Jews and the Apocalypse  •  224
Andrew Galloway  •  “Vertu to purchace”: John Lydgate, John Whethamstede, and the First Specific Payment for Writing an English Poem  •  245
James P. Carley  •  William of Malmesbury’s Vita Dunstani: The Dispute between Glastonbury and Canterbury over St Dunstan’s Relics  •  264
Julia Boffey  •  John Morton’s Feast and the Transmission of Bills of Fare in Late Medieval English Manuscripts and Printed Books  •  284
Ana Sáez-Hidalgo  •  The Lineage of Books in Tudor Anglo-Spanish Relations  •  297
A.S.G. Edwards  •  The Quest for Henry Bergen (1873–1950): The Life and Times of a Middle English Editor  •  318

Publications of David R. Carlson  •  334

Contributors  •  341
Index of Manuscripts  •  345
General Index  •  348

Endorsement

“This tribute volume for David Carlson fills an impressive role in celebrating his wide and varied interests. The contributors, all distinguished in their own fields, supplement his work with articles on subjects from Ovidian commentary to the management of feasts, from the improprieties of the Hereford market-place to the movements of manuscripts and books. There will be few medievalists who will not both enjoy it and learn from it.” — Helen Cooper, University of Cambridge

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