David Lawton & Laura Ashe 
New Medieval Literatures 18 

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 real and metaphorical relations between humans and nonhumans, with particular focus on spiders, hawks, and demons; discuss some of the earliest Middle English musical and, it is argued, liturgical compositions; describe the generic flexibility and literariness of medical discourse;consider strategies of affective and practical devotion, and their roles in building a community; and offer an example of the creativity of fifteenth-century vernacular religious literature. Texts discussed include the Old English riddles and Alfredian translations of the psalms; the lives of saints Dunstan, Godric, and Juliana, in Latin and English;
Piers Plowman, in fascinating juxtaposition with Hugh of Fouilloy’s
Aviarium; medical remedybooks and uroscopies, many from unedited manuscripts; and the fifteenth-century English
Life of Job.


LAURA ASHE is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor at Worcester College, Oxford; PHILIP KNOX is University Lecturer in English and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; WENDY SCASE is Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Birmingham; DAVID LAWTON is Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis.


Contributors: Jenny C. Bledsoe, Heather Blurton, Hannah Bower, Megan Cavell, Cathy Hume, Hilary Powell, Isabella Wheater

Table of Content

Arachnopobia and Early English Literature – Megan Cavell

Demonic Daydreams: Mind-Wandering and Mental Imagery in the Medieval Hagiography of St Dunstan – Hilary Powell

The Songs of Godric of Finchale: Vernacular Liturgy and Literary History – Heather Blurton

Sympathy for the Demon: Affective Instruction in the Katherine Group – Jenny C. Bledsoe

Peynte it with
Aves: Langland’s Hawks,
covetise, and Hugh of Fouilloy’s
Aviarium – Isabella Wheater

Similes We Cure By: The Poetics of Late Medieval Medical Texts – Hannah Bower

The
Life of Job: Bible Translation, Poem or Play? – Cathy Hume

About the author

CATHY HUME is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol.