Larissa Tracy & Geert H.M. Claassens 
Medieval English and Dutch Literatures: the European Context 
Essays in Honour of David F. Johnson

This collection honours the scholarship of Professor David F. Johnson, exploring the wider view of medieval England and its cultural contracts with the Low Countries, and highlighting common texts, motifs, and themes across the textual traditions of Old English and later medieval romances in both English and Middle Dutch.


Few scholars have contributed as much to the wider view of medieval England and its cultural contacts with the Low Countries than Professor David F. Johnson. His wide-ranging scholarship embraces both the textual traditions of Old English, especially in manuscript production, and later medieval romances in both English and Middle Dutch, highlighting their common texts, motifs, and themes.


Taking Johnson’s work as its starting point and model, the essays collected here investigate early English manuscript production and preservation, illuminating the complexities of reinterpreting Old English poetry, particularly
Beowulf, and then go on to pursue those nuances through later English and Middle Dutch Arthurian romances and drama, including
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, and the
Roman van Walewein. They explore a plethora of material, including early medieval textual traditions and stone sculpture, and draw on a range of approaches, such as Body and Disability Theories
. Overall, the aim is to bring multiple disciplines into dialogue with each other, in order to present a richer and more nuanced view of the medieval literary past and cross-cultural contact between England and the Low Countries, from the pre-Conquest period to the late-Middle Ages, thus forming a most appropriate tribute to Professor Johnson’s pioneering work.

Зміст

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations


Introduction: Medieval English and Dutch Literature in its European Context and the Work of David F. Johnson

Larissa Tracy and Geert H. M. Claassens


1. Reconstructing a Lost Manuscript of the Old English Gospels

Roy M. Liuzza


2. The Reception of the Old English Version of Gregory the Great’s
Dialogues between the Conquest and the Close of the Nineteenth Century

Rolf H. Bremmer Jr


3. An Unrecorded Copy of Heinrich Krebs’s
An Anglo-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Dialogues, Printer’s Proofs

Thomas A. Bredehoft and Rachel C. S. Duke


4. The Body as Media in Early Medieval England

Martin Foys


5. Who Snatched Grendel in
Beowulf 852b?

Stephen Harris


6. ‘Mobile as Wishes’: Anchoritism, Intersubjectivity, and Disability in the
Liber confortatorius

Danielle Allor and Stacy S. Klein


7. The Presence of the Hands: Sculpture and Script in the Eighth to Twelfth Centuries

Catherine Karkov and Elaine Treharne


8. Perceval’s Name and the Gifts of the Mother

Thomas D. Hill


9. A Relaxed Knight and an Impatient Heroine: Ironizing the Love Quest in the Second Part of the Middle Dutch
Ferguut

Marjolein Hogenbirk


10. Multilingualism in
Van den vos Reynaerde and its Reception in
Reynardus Vulpes

Bart Besamusca


11. Three Characters as Narrator in the
Roman van Walewein

Roel Zemel


12. As the Chess-Set Flies: Arthurian Marvels in Chaucer’s
Squire’s Tale and the
Roman van Walewein

Jamie C. Fumo


13. For a Performer’s Personal Use: The Corrector’s Lines in the Lower Margin of the Middle Dutch
Lanceloet Manuscript

Frank Brandsma


14. ‘Oft leudlez alone’: The Isolation of the Hero and Its Consequences in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

K. S. Whetter


15. Shifting Skin: Passing as Human, Passing as Fay in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Larissa Tracy


16. The Lover Caught Between his Mother and his Maiden in
Lanseloet van Denemerken

Geert H. M. Claassens


17. Afterlives: The Abbey at Amesbury and the ‘Rehabilitation’ of Guinevere in Malory and the Stanzaic
Morte Arthur

Christopher Jensen


18. The Importance of Being an Arthurian Mother

Elizabeth Archibald


Select Bibliography

Bibliography of David F. Johnson’s Works

Index

Tabula Gratulatoria

Про автора

ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD is Professor of English Studies at Durham University, and Principal of St Cuthbert’s Society.