Thomas Hahn’s work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies – careful attention to texts and their contexts, cross-cultural readings, and theoretically-informed analysis – to highlight the literary culture of late medieval England afresh. Addressing long-established canonical works such as Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Malory alongside understudied traditions and manuscripts, this book will be of interest to literary scholars of the later Middle Ages who, like Hahn, work across boundaries of genre, tradition, and chronology.

An interdisciplinary and trans-historical investigation of the representation of ethics in Arthurian Literature. From its earliest days, the Arthurian legend has been preoccupied with questions of good kingship, the behaviours of a ruling class, and their effects on communities, societies, and nations, both locally and in imperial and colonizing contexts. Ethical considerations inform and are informed by local anxieties tied to questions of power and identity, especially where leadership, service, and governance are concerned; they provide a framework for understanding how the texts operate as didactic and critical tools of these subjects. This book brings together chapters drawing on English, Welsh, German, Dutch, French, and Norse iterations of the Arthurian legend, and bridging premodern and modern temporalities, to investigate the representation of ethics in Arthurian literature across interdisciplinary and transhistorical lines. They engage a variety of methodologies, including gender, critical race theory, philology, literature and the law, translation theory, game studies, comparative, critical, and close reading, and modern editorial and authorial practices. Texts interrogated range from Culhwch and Olwen to Parzival, Roman van Walewein, Tristrams Saga, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Malory's Morte Darthur. As a whole, the approaches and findings in this volume attest to the continued value and importance of the Arthurian legend and its scholarship as a vibrant field through which to locate and understand the many ways in which medieval literature continues to inform modern sensibilities and institutions, particularly where the matter of ethics is concerned.

Since its rediscovery by nineteenth-century scholarship, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, though it has also not gained a great deal of notoriety beyond the scholars of Middle English romance. It is hoped that the present volume will encourage study of the entire manuscript as a valuable witness to the devotional habits, cultural values, and popular tastes of late medieval England.

The human protagonists of medieval romance are works in progress. They are learners, taught by an unexpected set of teachers: non-human animals including horses, hawks, lions, and the various quarry of the hunt. These "creature teachers" show humans how to be more perfectly human—how to love, fight, survive, and live according to medieval culture’s highest ideals. Zöopedagogies explores the pedagogical role of animals in medieval romance, a genre whose fantastical elements enable animal characters to behave in ways inspired by, but not limited to their real-world actions. Situated at the intersection of animal studies and medieval studies, Zöopedagogies claims medieval roots for posthumanism by telling a new story about the role of animals in constructing Western culture. Bonnie Erwin brings together a diverse array of texts, including chivalric romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and popular romances like Bevis of Hampton and Richard Coer de Lyon. She puts these into conversation with medieval texts on natural science, horsemanship, hawking, and hunting that inform the representation of creatures who teach. In so doing, she reveals a rich and nuanced sense of animals as participants in interspecies collaborative culture-making.

The J.B. Treatise is a collection of lore and information from the later fifteenth century on a range of topics considered essential learning for anyone aspiring to the English gentry. It has hitherto been known principally by way of an eclectic medley of filler material in the printed Boke of St Albans (1486), but survives in numerous variant forms in twenty-two, mostly unrelated, manuscripts. The treatise’s foremost concerns are hawking and hunting, but it differs from other contemporary treatises on these sports by concentrating on terminology rather than praxis. Much of its information is presented in the form of lists of terms, suggesting that it served mainly as a lexical primer rather than a manual of practical instruction. This study – which includes four major variant texts, explanatory notes, a glossary and complete collations of the ‘J.B.’ lists of collective nouns and carving terms – is the first comprehensive survey of all known versions of the J.B. Treatise, whose contents will be of interest to English medievalists in a range of disciplines, including history, literature and linguistics. This second edition of the J.B. Treatise includes comprehensive updates to the introduction, notes, and glossary to account for new scholarship, including numerous emendations to the OED prompted by lexical evidence presented in the first edition (2003). It also incorporates a revised bibliography and references to new editions of medieval texts.