This semester is my first time teaching the Canterbury Tales to doctoral students. To rise to their level, I decided manuscripts would be a big part of…
What follows is, as the title promises, the beginning of what is, by my current count, Chapter 3 of my Book2 [the next bit is…
The 218-line “A Disputation Betwyx þe Body and Wormes” (hereafter Disputation) survives only in British Library, Additional 37049, a much studied mid-fifteenth-century miscellany likely produced for…
Cross posted to In the Middle, where you can comment; or find us on Facebook. Because the field’s so crowded, I’m reluctant to call the “Disputisoun…
by KARL STEEL First, of course, read Jeffrey on Allan Mitchell’s Becoming Human, which I’m co-endorsing as a masterpiece. I’m promising you my own, briefer…
Today we considered a little-studied genre that comprises animal complaint poetry and animal testaments. Our texts were the late antiqueTestamentum Porcelli, two Middle English works,…
Our bit of animal news today is the recent, horrific report about factory-farmed pigs being fed the ground up corpses of piglets. One farmer’s response to this…
From the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt. by KARL STEEL Here’s a macaronic, presumably late 15th-century poem from Peniarth MS 356b, which I ran across yesterday in…
From the Friar’s Tale, Jill Mann ed. “Thow lixt! quod she, ‘By my savacioun, Ne was I nevere er now, widwe ne wif, Somoned unto…
I think this will be the last bit I’ll post to ITM, at least in this round of sharing. A bit of a roadmap of…
