1. "The vanishing leper" and "The murmuring monk" : two medieval urban legends / Richard Firth Green -- 2. Don't cry for me, Augustinus : Dido and the dangers of empathy / Thomas Hahn -- 3. The new plow and the old : law, orality, and the figure of Piers the Plowman in B / Stephen Yeager -- 4. The exegesis of tears in Lambeth homily / M.J. Toswell -- 5. Mingling with the English in Lazamon's Brut / Fiona Somerset -- 6. Unquiet graves : Pearl and the hope of reunion / Alastair Minnis -- 7. Mercantile gentility in Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38 / Michael Johnston -- 8. Resident aliens : the literary ecology of medieval mice / Lisa J. Kiser -- 9. Toward the common good : punishing fraud among the victualers of medieval London / Barbara A. Hanawalt -- 10. The ignorance of the laity : Twelve tracts on Bible translation / Nicholas Watson -- 11. York merchants at prayer : the confessional formula of the Bolton hours / Robyn Malo -- 12. A London legal miscellany, popular law, and medieval print culture / Kathleen E. Kennedy -- 13. Tourists and Tabulae in late-medieval England / Michael Van Dussen -- 14. Oral performance and the force of the law : Taillefer at Hastings and Antgulilibix in Smithers / Andrew Taylor.
Summary:
"In the medieval period, as in the media culture of the present, learned and popular forms of talk were intermingled everywhere. They were also highly mobile, circulating in speech, writing, and symbol, as performances as well as in material objects. The communication through and between different media we all negotiate in daily life did not develop from a previous separation of orality and writing, but from a communications network not unlike our own, if slower, and similarly shaped by disparities of access. Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media, edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, develops a variety of approaches to the labor of imaginatively reconstructing this network from its extant artifacts. Truth and Tales includes fourteen essays by medieval literary scholars and historians. Some essays focus on written artifacts that convey high or popular learning in unexpected ways. Others address a social problem of concern to all, demonstrating the genres and media through which it was negotiated. Still others are centered on one or more texts, detailing their investments in popular as well as learned knowledge, in performance as well as writing. This collective archaeology of medieval media provides fresh insight for medieval scholars and media theorists alike"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.