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Through a carefully-chosen selection of medieval love letters, Myra Stokes and Ad Putter explore the blurred boundary between literary art and actual missives. This anthology brings together epistolary poems, model letters and real letters and includes critical editions of seven remarkable and substantial texts not easily available elsewhere.
List of contents
Part I. Introduction: The Art of the Love Letter: 1. Art and Actuality: an Overview; 2. Occasions; Ways and Means; Male and Female Voices; 3. Clerics and Convents; Part II. Fictional and Instructional Models; Text 1. Boncompagno da Signa: Rota Veneris; Text 2. London, British Library, Harley MS 3988; Text 3. The Parliament of Love; Part III. Actual Letters (Drafts, Copies, Missives); Text 4. the Norfolk Letters: the Abbot to the Nun; Text 5. Oxford, Corpus Christi, MS 154; Text 6. the Armburgh Love-Letters; Text 7. Pierre de Hagenbach and the Canoness at Remiremont – The Council of Remiremont – Conrad Pfettisheim's Account of Pierre de Hagenbach.
About the author
Myra Stokes's published work ranges across the languages and literatures of other European vernaculars as well as Old and Middle English. Her books include Justice and Mercy in Piers Plowman (1984; reprinted 2020), The Language of Jane Austen (1991) and (as co-author) Studies in the Metre of Alliterative Verse (2007). With Ad Putter she edited The Works of the Gawain Poet (Penguin English Poets, 2014).Ad Putter is Fellow of the British Academy and Professor of Medieval English Literature at the University of Bristol, where he directs the Centre for Medieval Studies. His publications include An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (1996), The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, co-edited with Elizabeth Archibald (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and North Sea Crossings: The Literary Heritage of Anglo-Dutch Relations, 1066–1688, co-authored with Sjoerd Levelt (2021).
Summary
Through a carefully-chosen selection of medieval love letters, Myra Stokes and Ad Putter explore the blurred boundary between literary art and actual missives. This anthology brings together epistolary poems, model letters and real letters and includes critical editions of seven remarkable and substantial texts not easily available elsewhere.
Foreword
A carefully chosen selection of medieval love letters, with lucid translations, that explores the interactions between art and actuality.
