York Minster

Books on the Move, Tracking copies through Collections and the Book Trade edited by Robin Myers, Michael Harris and Giles Mandelbrote

From the publisher: Movements of books, both as individual volumes and as collections, have sometimes covered long distances across many centuries. Subject to the vagaries of war, shipwreck and personal ruin, as well as the intervention of the book trade and of collectors, the travels of books often have an intricately detailed and compelling story to tell. One of the most active areas of current research in book history is concerned with interpreting the clues from individual copies and piecing together the documentary evidence to provide this narrative.

In this volume, leading specialists in book history consider examples from the sixteenth to the twentieth century to chart some of the paths followed by books through the European network of print. This may focus on the large collections accumulated by Renaissance scholars, but may equally involve tracking multiple copies of the same work through the marks of ownership left by unknown readers. Books on the Move represents an important contribution to an understanding of the shifting interactions over time between libraries, collectors and the book trade.

Shelf Mark: 094.142 MYE

Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570-1625 by Stefania Tutino

From the publisher: This book examines the Catholic elaboration on the relationship between state and Church in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Among the several factors which have contributed to the complex process of state-formation in early modern Europe, religious affiliation has certainly been one of the most important, if not the most important. Within the European context of the consolidation of both the nation-state entities and the state-Churches, "Catholicism in England in the 16th and 17th centuries" presents peculiar elements which are crucial to understanding the problems at stake, from both a political and a religious point of view. Catholics in early modern England were certainly a minority, but a minority of an interestingly doubled kind. On the one hand, they were a 'sect' among many others. On the other hand, Catholicism was a 'universal', catholic religion, in a country in which the sovereign was the head - or governor - of both political and ecclesiastical establishments. In this context, this monograph casts light on the mechanisms through which a distinctive religious minority was able to adapt itself within a singular political context.

In the most general terms, this book contributes to the significant question of how different religious affiliations could (or might) be integrated within one national reality, and how political allegiance and religious belief began to be perceived as two different identities within one context. Current scholarship on the religious history of early modern England has considerably changed the way in which historians think about English Protestantism. Recent works have offered a more nuanced and accurate picture of the English Protestant Church, which is now seen not as a monolithic institution, but rather as complex and fluid. This book offers a complementary view of the English Catholic Church as an organism within which the debate over how to combine the catholic feature of the Church of Rome with its status of a minority 'sect' involved a profound redefinition of both political and theological issues.

Shelf Mark: C 82.42 TUT

The English "Loathly Lady" Tales edited by S. Elizabeth Passmore and Susan Carter

From the publisher: “In the earliest versions [of the Loathly Lady tales], the Irish sovereignty hag tales, her excessive body allegorizes the nature of sovereignty; the Loathly Lady is the shape of success in power contestation. Because the vehicle of the allegory is gendered, however, and because the motif’s fictional flesh is sexually active, these ideas about control are entangled with personal power politics. These factors make the motif curiously promiscuous, an intersection of ideas that generates other ideas, sometimes unexpectedly, always provocatively. . . . “This volume concentrates on the medieval English Loathly Lady tales, written a little later than the Irish tales, and developing the motif as a vehicle for social ideology. Geoffrey Chaucer’s "Wife of Bath’s Tale" and John Gower’s "Tale of Florent" are the better known of the English Loathly Lady tales, but "The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle," the balladic versions—the "Marriage of Sir Gawain" and "King Henry" (and even "Thomas of Erceldoune")—all use shape-shifting female flesh to convey ideas about the nature of women, about heretosexual relations, and about national identity.”

Shelf Mark MA 71 PAS

The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo-Saxon Culture edited by Paul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal

From the publisher:

This collection represents most of the papers delivered on the conference theme of the Fifth Meeting (1991) of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, which was the first ISAS meeting in the United States. Accordingly, the conference (and its volume) considered mainly how the subject of Anglo-Saxon Studies is conducted in the United States. After an Introduction by the dean of Anglo-Saxon Studies in America, Fred C. Robinson, the seventeen papers discuss Historiography, Medieval Reception of Anglo-Saxon England, Art and Archaeology, Literary Approaches, and Manuscript Studies. There is an Index of the whole, manuscript citations included.

Robin Fleming on Henry Adams, J. R. Hall on 19th-century study in America, Helen Damico on Klaeber, and William Stoneman on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts in America provide new insights into how Anglo-Saxon England crossed the Atlantic, Janet L. Nelson on Francia, George H. Brown on Alcuin's debt to Bede, David A. E. Pelteret on Wales and the Normans, and Herbert Broderick on Genesis iconography show how Anglo-Saxon culture was an export item in the Middle Ages. The late Robert Deshman on art, Rosemary Cramp on archaeology, Ursula Schaefer on orality and literacy, and Rosemary Huisman on modern literary theory severally describe the present state and future directions of disciplines and sub-disciplines. The concluding section shows that the art of studying manuscripts is alive and well: Jonathan Wilcox on Vercelli X, Andreas Fischer on the West Saxon Gospels, Peter J. Lucas on Junius and Judith, Joyce Hill on Ælfric's Lives of Saints, and Robert McColl Millar and Alex Nichols on Ælfric's De Initio Creaturae so bear witness.

Shelf Mark Q 42.01 SZA

Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama by Clifford Davidson

From the publisher: Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama is designed to open up a broader scope of study which calls attention to both social organization and material culture as integrally related to the civic drama of England in cities such as Coventry, York, and Chester. It addresses many questions that have been frequently asked about the sources and design of those things which were used in the production of plays. The book will serve as a model for future interdisciplinary research based on records, archaeological finds, evidence from the visual arts, and the playtexts themselves. Illustrated with more than a hundred photographs and drawings.

Shelf Mark: MA 62 DAV

Also in the Library

• Holy Terrors Gargoyles on Medieval Buildings by Janetta Rebold Benton. Shelf Mark: LB 9.5 BEN
• The history of the Yorkshire Museum and its geological collections by Barbara J. Pyrah. Shelf Mark: Q 42.74 PYR
• Sir Francis Walsingham: A Courtier in an Age of Terror by Derek Wilson. Shelf Mark: Q 42.055 WAL/WIL
• Gregorian Chants: An Illustrated History of Religious Chanting by Colin R. Shearing. Shelf Mark: LM 3.5 SHE
• Albrecht Durer and his Legacy, the Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist by Giulia Bartrum. Shelf Mark: LJ 9.3 DUR/BAR
• Holocaust and Memory by Barbara Engelking. Shelf Mark: Q 40.5315 ENG