Medieval Anglo-Irish Troubles
A Cultural Study of B.L. MS Harley 913
By (author) Deborah L Moore
A small, battered 14th-century Anglo-Irish manuscript full of ribald and taboo poems and stories holds the key to unlocking a medieval community’s troubled social, devotional and political history.
British Library MS Harley 913 is an early fourteenth-century trilingual manuscript whose paradoxically devotional and ribald contents display many distinct aspects of the Anglo-Irish sociopolitical reality of the day. However, several of its texts have, in the past, suffered from repeated scholarly misreadings, in part because scholars have not taken the time to seriously consider the manuscript’s contents as a whole, and in part because fluctuations in the political, social, and religious climate between Ireland and England have prejudiced how some scholars have approached these works. This book examines these texts, as well as their subsequent misinterpretations, in the order in which they occur in the manuscript and reveals the pattern of politicized discourse surrounding this important medieval Anglo-Irish cultural artefact that has hitherto obscured, rather than elucidated, the very personal interactions of some of the era’s key figures. For the first time, this volume allows readers to visualize the manuscript in its entirety and complexity. Texts touching on the taboos of incest, regicide, and witchcraft, together with the clandestine manoeuvrings of the power-hungry and influential, reveal a surprisingly complicated interlacing of events across medieval Ireland, England, and the Continent.
- By (author) Deborah L Moore
Other Titles in this Series
Alchemy, Medicine, and Commercial Book Production
A Codicological and Linguistic Study of the Voigts-Sloane Group of Middle English Manuscripts
Volume 9
The Making of the Vernon Manuscript
The Production and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. a. 1
Volume 6
Female Authorship, Patronage, and Translation in Late Medieval France
From Christine de Pizan to Louise Labe
Volume 13
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