ECL 565: Ecocriticism and Medieval Literature ECL 566: Legends of Alexander the Great in the Global Middle Ages ECL 510A: Chaucerian Afterlives ECL 510A: Outlaws in Medieval English and Icelandic Literature ECL 566: Literary Underworlds
Miniature (detail) of the three dead kings in the De Lisle Psalter (c. 1308-1340). East Anglia. BL MS Arundel 83, fol. 127r Introduction: The Paranormal in the Icelandic sagas In the introduction to their recent collection of essays Paranormal Encounters in Iceland, 1150-1400 editors Ármann Jakobsson and Miriam Mayburd observe that while nineteenth-century scholarship tended to ignore the…
Front Cover (AM 232 fol., 55r) Is reading more books your new year’s resolution? Interested in medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary, Icelandic literature, and manuscripts? Need a new paperweight? My book is now available and can be ordered from De Gruyter , Bookshop.org , and Amazon . The book is a study of the Old Norse-Icelandic Maríu saga and its manuscript history. Maríu saga was compiled in…
Titivillus (upper right), the demon responsible for scribal error and collecting idle talk, is thwarted by the Virgin of Mercy. Diego de la Cruz (c. 1485), Burgos, Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas. Pope Francis on the Plague of Gossip At the Angelus prayer delivered above St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, September 6, Pope Francis strayed from his planned remarks and declared gossiping a…
An Icelandic translation of Elisabeth of Schönau’s Visio de resurrectione in Copenhagen, Den Arnamagnæanske Samling, AM 764 4to (1376-1386), 16r. The Assumption of the Virgin Mary The Bible says little of the Virgin Mary’s life after the crucifixion. In the absence of any information about her death and the fate of her soul and earthly remains, speculation developed quickly in the early days of…
Pierart dou Tielt. Tractatus quartus bu Gilles li Muisit (Tournai, c. 1353). The people of Tournai bury victims of the Black Death. ms. 13076 - 13077 fol. 24v . As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has become a global illness and continues to infect and bring death, many have looked to previous pandemics (such as the 1918 flu and the “Black Death”) and their causes and consequences for any…
St. Maurice. Lucas Cranach the Elder and Workshop, 1520-25 (Met Museum) Medievalists have long resisted conversations about race and European medieval literature and culture. This is due in large part to their tendency to, incorrectly (as a number of scholars have shown), see race as a modern phenomenon with little bearing on medieval studies (see most recently Geraldine Heng and Cord J.…
Eldrit sr. Jóns Steingrímssonar. Landsbókasafn Íslands - Háskólabókasafn (Lbs) MS 1552 4to f. 1r. The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has become a global pandemic and brought not only illness and death but also panic and uncertainty. As it has spread societies have had to decide how they will confront this and future moments of crisis. Many are hoarding supplies to prepare themselves for a dystopian…