Paul Huson’s Dame Fortune’s Wheel Tarot illustrates for the first time the earliest, traditional tarot card interpretations collected by Jean-Baptiste Alliette, aka Etteilla, a Parisian fortune-teller. Unlike other modern decks, the images are unadorned by the occult speculations of Mathers, Waite, or Crowley. This book is a pictorial companion to the deck. In addition to detailed descriptions of the cards’ symbolism and significance—with both upright and reversed meanings—Dame Fortune’s Wheel Tarot provides meticulous full-color reproductions of Huson’s original designs for all 79 cards, including an extra Significator card specified by Etteilla that may be used optionally, and full instructions for how to lay out the cards for divination.

p.B. J. Whiting savors proverbial expressions and has devoted much of his lifetime to studying and collecting them; no one knows more about British and American proverbs than he. The present volume, based upon writings in British North America from the earliest settlements to approximately 1820, complements his and Archer Taylor's Dictionary of American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases, 1820-1880. It differs from that work and from other standard collections, however, in that its sources are primarily not "literary" but instead workaday writings - letters, diaries, histories, travel books, political pamphlets, and the like. The authors represent a wide cross-section of the populace, from scholars and statesmen to farmers, shopkeepers, sailors, and hunters. Mr. Whiting has combed all the obvious sources and hundreds of out-of-the-way publications of local journals and historical societies. This body of material, "because it covers territory that has not been extracted and compiled in a scholarly way before, can justly be said to be the most valuable of all those that Whiting has brought together," according to Albert B. Friedman. "What makes the work important is Whiting's authority: a proverb or proverbial phrase is what BJW thinks is a proverb or proverbial phrase. There is no objective operative definition of any value, no divining rod; his tact, 'feel, ' experience, determine what's the real thing and what is spurious."

Vol. for 1888 includes dramatic directory for Feb.-Dec.; vol. for 1889 includes dramatic directory for Jan.-May.

The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.

Guillaume de Machaut (1300-1377) was the master poet of fourteenth-century France. He established models for much of the vernacular poetry written by subsequent generations, and he was instrumental in institutionalizing the lay reader. In particular, his longest and most important work, the Voir dit, calls attention to the coexistence of public and private reading practices through its intensely hybrid form: sixty-three poems and ten songs invite an oral performance, while forty-six private prose letters as well as elaborate illustration and references to it's own materiality promote a physical encounter with the book. In Controlling Readers, Deborah McGrady uses Machaut's corpus as a case study to explore the impact of lay literacy on the culture of late-medieval Europe. Arguing that Machaut and his bookmakers were responding to contemporary debates surrounding literacy, McGrady first accounts for the formal invention of the lay reader in medieval art and literature, then analyses Machaut and his bookmakers' innovative use of both narrative and bibliographical devices to try to control the responses of his readers and promote intimate and sensual reading practices in place of the more common public performances of court culture. McGrady's erudite and exhaustive study is key to understanding Machaut, his works, and his influence on the history of reading in the fourteenth century and beyond.

The Arthurian verse-novel Wigalois, written by the German knight Wirnt von Grafenberg in the early years of the thirteenth century, tells a story which was well known in the medieval period, appearing in eight versions of four languages. This first English translation makes accessible to a new audience the adventure-filled tale of the hero's knightly education and quest for honor, and his ultimate recognition of Sir Gawain as his long-lost father. The translator's introduction compares Wirnt's work with other treatments of the Wigalois material in France, England, and Italy; discusses the German sources and reception of the novel; and offers a careful literary analysis.