King Robert of Sicily: A New Manuscript

PMLA ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 78 (5) ◽  
pp. 453-458
Author(s):  
Lillian Herlands Hornstein

The verse romance King Robert of Sicily (King Roberd of Cisyle) is the Middle English version of a well-known legend about The Proud King Humiliated (Deposed)—an arrogant and boastful king whose throne is taken over by an angel-substitute until the beggared monarch learns proper humility. Told of the Emperor Jovinian in the Latin Gesta Romanorum, the story had also appeared in other contexts in almost all the vernacular languages of Europe before the end of the fifteenth century. The tale must have been especially appealing to the English, to judge from the number of extant manuscripts heretofore known, nine manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This paper calls attention to still another manuscript, folio 2 of BM Additional MS. 34801. It has, strangely enough, never been noticed, although its existence was recorded in a catalogue over sixty years ago.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
Susanne Hafner

AbstractDeparting from the observation that the Middle English romance of Sir Perceval of Galles quotes from Genesis at two crucial moments, this study provides a coherent reading of the text, explaining some of its idiosyncrasies and triangulating it with the versions of Chrétien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach. What distinguishes the Middle English version from the continental texts are its purposeful absences, i. e. that which the author chooses to abbreviate or leave out altogether. The result is the story of a prelapsarian creature who stumbles through an Edenic landscape where time and mortality have been suspended and individual culpability does not exist. Sir Perceval’s non-existent biblical knowledge, blocked by his mother and ultimately brought to its end by a literal fall from his horse, leaves him invincible, ungendered and immortal. It also serves to explain his unapologetic violence as well as his complete lack of sexual desire. This bold experiment cannot last – Sir Perceval does eventually discover knighthood, masculinity and mortality. Unfortunately, these three are inseparably linked: being a knight, being a man and being dead are one and the same thing in Sir Perceval’s universe.


2004 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien ◽  
Carl F. Hostetter

2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
William S. Atwell

During the fifteenth century, especially during its middle decades, “almost all parts of the then-known world [i.e., Europe, the Middle East, and the economically advanced regions of Asia] experienced a deep recession. By then, the ‘state of the world’ was at a much lower level than it had reached in the early fourteenth century. During the depression of the fifteenth century, the absolute level of inter-societal trade dropped, currencies were universally debased (a sure sign of decreased wealth and overall productivity), and the arts and crafts were degraded” (Abu-Lughod 1993, 85; see also Lopez and Miskimin 1962; Lopez, Miskimin, and Udovitch 1970; Postan 1973, 41–48; Wallerstein 1974, 21–38; Munro 1998, 38–39). In much of Eurasia, the worst years of this “depression” probably ended sometime during the 1460s or 1470s. Over the next six or seven decades, economic conditions in many parts of the world improved significantly, reflected in dramatic increases in agricultural and handicraft production; in the volume of interregional and international trade; and, except for the western hemisphere where Afro-Eurasian diseases decimated native populations during the early sixteenth century, in demographic growth.


Author(s):  
María José Esteve-Ramos

Medical and scientific manuscripts have been the interest of scholarly attention in recent decades and as a natural consequence, editions of unstudied material have flourished (Alonso-Almeida, 2014 or Marqués-Aguado, T. et alii, 2008, among others). This book is a Middle English edition of one of the most popular works circulating in the late medieval England, known as Circa Instans. This book presents a revised edition of the text found in CUL MS Es 1.13. ff 1r-91v, housed in the Cambridge University Library.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Egi Putriana ◽  
Jufrizal Jufrizal ◽  
Fitrawati Fitrawati

The history of English language has three periods of time; Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. The linguistic forms in English development are different each period. This research aims to find out one of the changes, that is, the affix changes from Middle English to Modern English form that found in both of The Miller’s Tale Story Middle English and Modern English versions. This research also aims to find out the spelling changes in affixes. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The data, which are the collection of words that have affixes found in The Miller’s Tale, were identified based on the base of the words and its affixes and its were classified based on the type of its functions. Based on data analysis, there are seven affixes in Middle English which have been changed in Modern English form. These changes occur in the deletion of vowel, change of vowel, substitution of the affix, and elimination of the affix. The spelling change also influenced the change in suffixes. Some of the vocabularies change into the new words and some of the words change only in its vowel.


PMLA ◽  
1905 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 152-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Leftwich Ravenel

Attention has often been called to the extraordinary parallelism which exists between Sir Gowther, a fifteenth century English version of Robert the Devil, and the so-called Breton Lay of Tydorel. The latter is one of five anonymous romances published by Gaston Paris according to the manuscript in the National Library, which includes also the lays of Marie de France.


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-184
Author(s):  
Edward Fram

This chapter discusses the publication of the Babylonian Talmud by ’the Widow and Brothers Romm’ between 1880 and 1886 in Vilna, which is considered a landmark event from the perspective of rabbinic culture. The Babylonian Talmud included almost all of the commentaries and reference tools that had become part and parcel of printed volumes of the Talmud starting in the late fifteenth century. It talks about the ’Vilna Shas,’ which was considered a far cry from talmudic texts that had been known in the age of manuscripts and the early stages of print. It also mentions the fourteenth-century vellum Munich Codex Hebraicus MS 95, the oldest complete text of the Babylonian Talmud, which was noted to have sporadic corrections and glosses in the text and margins. As printing evolved in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, publishers added more material to volumes of the Talmud.


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