Text and facing page translation of key texts for the Tristan legend. These first volumes of the series Arthurian Archives present the Old French verse texts devoted to Tristan and Iseut. Authoritative critical editions are complemented by parallel translations, with introduction, variants and rejected readings, and critical notes. The Tristan tradition in medieval France is dominated by two longer poems by Beroul and Thomas, both included in these volumes; the full contents of the two volumes are: I. Béroul, TheRomance of TristranNORRIS J. LACY; Les Folies Tristan: La Folie Tristan (Berne) and La Folie Tristan (Oxford) SAMUEL N. ROSENBERG II. Thomas, Tristan STEWART GREGORY; `The Carlisle Fragment' of Thomas's Tristan IAN SHORT; Marie de France, Chevrefeuil RICHARD O'GORMAN; Tristan Ménestrel and Tristan RossignolKAREN FRESCO NORRIS J. LACY is Professor of French at the Pennsylvania State University.

Medieval Sex Lives examines courtly song as a complex cultural product and social force in the early fourteenth century, exploring how it illuminates the relationship between artistic production and the everyday lives of the elites for whom this music and poetry was composed and performed. In a focused analysis of the Oxford Bodelian Library's Douce 308 manuscript—a fourteenth-century compilation that includes over five hundred Old French lyrics composed over two centuries alongside a narrative account of elaborate courtly festivities centered on a week-long tournament—Elizabeth Eva Leach explores two distinct but related lines of inquiry: first, why the lyric tradition of "courtly love" had such a long and successful history in Western European culture; and, second, why the songs in the Bodleian manuscript would have been so important to the book's compilers, owners, and readers. The manuscript's lack of musical notation and authorial attributions make it unusual among Old French songbooks; its arrangement of the lyrics by genre invites inquiry into the relationship between this long musical tradition and the emotional and sexual lives of its readers. Combining an original account of the manuscript's contents and their likely social milieu with in-depth musical and poetic analyses, Leach proposes that lyrics, whether read or heard aloud, provided a fertile means of propagating and enabling various sexual scripts in the Middle Ages. Drawing on musicology, literary history, and the sociology and psychology of sexuality, Medieval Sex Lives presents a provocative hypothesis about the power of courtly songs to model, inspire, and support sexual behaviors and fantasies.

Have you ever thought about the history behind many of the words we use today? Meanings change so much through time that words often have completely different meanings today to the meanings they had in the past. This book poses the question: what if the words we use now still meant what they meant in the past? It takes a less than reverent ramble through the byways and backwaters of English etymology to find answers to burning questions like: Why can men never be hysterical? How can saying your prayers give you the gift of the gab? Why can't you truly be another brick in the wall? Which fruit may have led to the conquest of Mexico? Would a bachelor choose a wife with eight legs or eighty decades? Who is the biggest cheat in history? Why should you beware of fire-breathing dragons when digging your garden? Why should north be south and south be north? Why would you give a plough to someone with a high fever? If you really want to find the answers to these questions and many more, then this is the book for you!

Examines the poetic device in the Old French lyrics of the trouvere poet and composer, who flourished about 1200. Combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, beginning with a statistical analysis of the poems' structure and rhyme words to establish the rules governing the expression in the poetic system. Then surveys such themes as singing and saying, loyalty and disloyalty, joy and grief, and life and death. Includes translations and the original text of excerpts. Probably a revised Ph.D. dissertation. No subject index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR