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A review of evidence for foot structure from early Middle English.

This paper examines the strictly regional distribution in a handful of West Midlands counties of the first person singular pronoun, which contracts the spelling into a superscript variant . The data comes from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (LAEME) and the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LAEME).

In a recent article, Patrick Outhwaite discusses censorship in ‘two previously unknown early sixteenth-century manuscript copies of the Middle English translation of the Practica phisicalia, the recipe book of John of Burgundy (circa 1338-1390).’ While this authorial attribution is problematic, it is in fact only the latest instance in a long tradition of mis-crediting works to a fourteenth-century physician known as John of Burgundy, John with the beard (à la barba, cum barba, von barba) or, in some texts, John of Bordeaux. John’s name has been attached to the most widely circulated plague treatise in late-medieval and early-modern England, but also has been mis-attributed to a number of other medical texts, both historically and in recent years. What complicates matters further is that this same ‘John of Burgundy’ has been hopelessly tied up with what is now considered to be a fictional work: Mandeville’s Travels. He is sometimes identified as the real author of the work, sometimes as the narrator, and in other instances as a physician encountered by the narrator. Here we attempt to unpack what is known about the historical John of Burgundy, how a variety of medical works came to bear his name, and why modern scholars need to be wary of such attributions.

This paper articulates a model for examining medieval vernacular multi-text codices which is based on the dynamics we see in the contemporary use of social media, particularly personal blogs. Both media democratise the use of an existing specialised technology, accelerate the development of this technology, and serve as vehicles for the maintenance of social relationships. This model is illustrated with examples drawn from The Findern Manuscript, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.1.6, and the blog In the Middle.

Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period's philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds' Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge trouble the significance of pain and its relationships with punishment and performance; these works admit the unreliability of pain and fear, even as they harness the formidable power pain holds throughout Middle English literature. This essay analyzes passages from all three texts to demonstrate their deep skepticism about the signifying power of pain alongside their abiding investments in pain's utility. I argue that these texts ultimately challenge Middle English drama's dominant discourses of patriarchy and empire by way of their representations of pain.

British Library Harley MS 3954’s Book of Sir John Mandeville has ninety-nine images, and another thirty-five blanks, carefully framed in thin lines of ink as part of the ruling of the manuscript. As is so often the case, the blanks appear more frequently toward the end. On the final folio (69v) there appears a neatly framed blank space (Figure 1). The manuscript’s final text block appears just below this space and tells us of “a bok of Latyn that conteyned al that and myche more, aff wych bok the mappa mundi was mad.” As if to tantalize the reader, “mappa mundi” is rubricated and so stands out from the black ink in which the rest of the page (and the book) is written. While I sat there, staring at the blank space, and the red name for an absent image, I caught myself dreaming of finding a new mappa mundi hidden within that empty frame, the perfect place for a map of the world according to Mandeville. What would it look like, and what would imagining it tell us about the Book’s portrayal of Jews?

This essay considers the use of the modern term ‘monstrous races’ to describe the wondrous beings found in Herodotus, Pliny, The Wonders of the East, world maps and elsewhere. Considering the etymology and history of the word ‘race,’ a series of modern definitions are tested out on figures found in the images and texts of the British Library MS Harley 3954 Book of John Mandeville, the BL MS Tiberius B.v Marvels of the East, The King of Tars, Cursor Mundi and other medieval sources. The essay questions whether the term, often rooted in modern notions about the fixity of divisions of peoples, is helpful for describing medieval concepts. The essay further explores how the term ‘monstrous races’ reifies the culture of the medieval authors and illuminators – often in practice ‘white’ European Christians – as a ‘race,’ and implicitly, if unintentionally, elevates this group as normative.

This study centers on issues of marginality and monstrosity in medieval England. In the middle ages, geography was viewed as divinely ordered, so Britain's location at the periphery of the inhabitable world caused anxiety among its inhabitants. Far from the world's holy center, the geographic margins were considered monstrous. Medieval geography, for centuries scorned as crude, is now the subject of several careful studies. Monsters have likewise been the subject of recent attention in the growing field of 'monster studies', though few works situate these creatures firmly in their specific historical contexts. This study sits at the crossroads of these two discourses (geography and monstrosity), treated separately in the established scholarship but inseparable in the minds of medieval authors and artists.