What books must every amateur English speaking medievalist study and be familiar with to avoid being mocked and laughed at by actual educated medievalists? Can I have a list please?
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What books must every amateur English speaking medievalist study and be familiar with to avoid being mocked and laughed at by actual educated medieval...
Beowulf comes to mind. You can't go wrong with really developing a deep understanding of Beowulf.
what's a medievalist? I *think* I know what you mean but from fbpt
there's too much blur over times and places, listing beowulf and whatsits from 1600AD is like combining Egyptian 1st Dynasty with Late Byzantium.
I'd go with Constantine VII's Imperial Administration and Paul the Deacons History of Langoboardia as an introduction to the Byzantine-Norman culture - which is basically the bedrock of the time and place you're thinking of.
Paradoxes of Defence - 1599 - Silver was a potato but he was right about the italians
The Quest of the Holy Grail - around late gothic era - while french in origins, it is decent
Ecclesiastical History of the English People - 731 AD - It was ok, and is a good introduction to medieval mindset, but boring as frick
The Alexiad - 1148 - continuation about medieval mindset
Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX: Volume II: Books XI-XX - while for neuroBlack folk, it is a mandatory read if you feel like you want to be intellectual around specialists
Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings -980 to 1010 - it is good but you will suffer trying to guess the meaning of many, many innuendos
these are few examples of things that come to mind. Now post 3 (three) black cat pictures as a payment method. I accept jpg aswell as png.
Good list, I will pay off a part of OP's debt.
Thank you kind sir(s), I want to learn French but am too scatterbrained to teach myself
Doing the Arthurian legends in original French sounds like great fun
I will hopefully eventually learn the language
Livre de Poche has a great collection of medieval literature. I suggest looking through the titles here
https://www.livredepoche.com/collections/lettres-gothiques
and seeing if you can find English translations. It shouldn't be too hard for major titles like Roman de la Rose, Chrétien de Troyes, Chanson de Roland. But for other titles it may be a bit harder like some of the Fabliaux (but there is probably a collection of translated Fabliaux somwhere). Most of the titles are French in origin but some of them are major titles from other countries like Egil's Saga.
There also may be an English paralle to Livre de Poches Lettres Gothiques, thought I don't know of any major English publisher with a medieval collection intended to for the general public.
Black cat number 3
>English medievalist
LMAO
You should be a French medievalist instead. The body of literature is much richer than English medieval literature. Even medieval literature the English try to claim (Arthurian legends) are actually French medieval literature (Chrétien de Troyes, Vulgate Cycle, etc).
>Even medieval literature the English try to claim (Arthurian legends) are actually French medieval literature
Literally the other way round
>literally the other way around
>Le Morte de Arthur is a bad translation of Lancelot du Lac (Vulgate Cycle)
???
All the French romances are just gay versions of British folklore
Is there a reason nobody has mentioned Chaucer? Is it considered so obvious it's not worth mentioning?
I'll be honest that I wasn't quite sure what OP was asking for. Is he asking for medieval texts in general across all Europe/languages, or is he asking for medieval texts composed in (Middle) English? My understanding is that the latter category if quite nonexistent in terms of "literature". That most works written by English medieval authors are "scientifick", religious, and composed in Latin. A work written in English during that time period seems rare, and even rarer for it to be fictional in nature. Because in fact, the only work that comes to mind for me is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Everything else I can think of is a religious text: Piers Plowman, The Book of Margery Kempe, Divine Revelations of Love.
I could be entirely wrong though. I know Very little about English medieval literature.
After a cursory Google search, I think my estimation is quite right.
https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/works
Only 7 works are listed here for English medieval literature.
https://www.easternct.edu/speichera/understanding-literary-history-all/medieval-english-literature.html
Another website giving a good overview of English medieval literature. Most notably the page mentions how a lot of texts were written in Latin, many texts are religious in nature, and texts were often written in French as well since it was the language of the court. Yes the English royals spoke (bad) French at court. Not to mention Old French and Breton derive from the Anglo-Norman language.
Ok what's the point I'm making? Pretty much every significant English medieval text has already been mentioned in this thread.
I'm embarrassed to say this but I assumed there was a deluge of content similar to Piers Plowman and Chaucer which wasn't talked about or studied much simply because it's not particularly useful or relevant to most people.
I guess I need to learn how to read French
Well Chaucer came towards the end of the medieval era and he was influential in making English a respected literary language. I think French was still the official language when he wrote The Book of the Duchess. So there really wasn't much of an opportunity for a lot of Middle English poetry to be written and nobody cared about preserving whatever was written.
I don't really think you should listen to this guy
. It's very uncontroversial and obvious to say that French is massively more relevant as a language for medieval literature, and all the same OP is clearly showing an interest in early English materials with a specific focus on the medieval, not just the small subset Middle English literature that actually merits a place in the overall canon. Also why would you think religious texts are not relevant to the question? Seems like a nonsensical assumption in this context.
The big later ones would be Chaucer's sphere of influence (primarily Gower, Hoccleve and Lydgate), the Alliterative Revival, the Matter of England, the Katherine Group, and mystery plays. Before that is Anglo-Norman (I don't know really anything about this but the wiki article seems pretty comprehensive), and before that is Old English, the major works of which are conveniently listed and translated on the Rutgers Old English Poetry Project website. Rochester has a similar site that offers Middle English texts but it doesn't seem to offer the same sort of curated list so you'll have to search for the text you want or go through the entire list with separate entries for everything down to the anonymous lyrics. Still a great resource though.
But honestly, just learn French unless you want to focus specifically on Old English, the languages and the cultures are too intertwined at this period, it really doesn't make sense to try and get by without it. You don't have to do a separate regimen for that though, it's probably more efficient that way but you can literally just learn languages while you read, anyone who says otherwise is trying to hold you back - and obviously there's plenty of overlap between French and English. German might also serve you well just in terms of linguistic connections even though they were in a more separate sphere politically/culturally. And afaik their body of medieval lit is also significantly larger than that of English.
>But honestly, just learn French unless you want to focus specifically on Old English, the languages and the cultures are too intertwined at this period, it really doesn't make sense to try and get by without it.
This. Not only was feudalism introduced to England by the Norman Conquests, but feudalism differed from country to country (often county to county as well) so drastically that to speak of a unified feudal way of government is the same as to speak of a unified concept of clay pots. England was a far more bureaucratized and centralized feudalism than was known anywhere else in its day. Even in France feudal relations were noticeably weaker outside of the heartlands of the Carolingian Empire. Without any knowledge of France during that period it would be impossible to even construct a coherent view of what medievalism constituted.
>spends whole post """debunking""" another anon
>in the last paragraph agrees with the anon he was """debunking"""
kys
Saying you need French to understand medieval lit (really you need Latin too, but French is probably a better place to start) is not the same thing as saying Middle English literature is totally irrelevant to someone with a specific interest in the period(!) and that religious literature should be ignored(!). Also the implied assumption that he was referring only to late medieval literature, since he made no mention of Old English, is a little weird. The posts just smacked of bad-faith resentment-based dismissiveness in a way that wouldn’t necessarily be obvious to OP so I felt it was worth countersignalling. I know anything other than a total agreement or disagreement short circuits your brain because we’re supposed to be on le epic flamewar site, but maybe try to calm down a bit and realize that sometimes people are actually interested in reaching the correct/true answer to a complicated question, as opposed to just bashing their heads against each other until they sustain serious brain damage.
King Arthur
Always of use:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_literature#Notable_literature_of_the_period
>Wikipedia
No thanks!
>What books must every amateur English speaking medievalist study and be familiar with to avoid being mocked and laughed at
Not quite Medieval, but the Sarum Missal.
Oh boy!
Prydain was captured by the Angles-Saxons when their chieftains named Hengist and Horsa (a general and a witch) made a marriage contract in Upper Saxony.
When they came to the Prydain, they became federates of the great Ambrose Aurelian, the purple-robed Gaelic leader of all the Prydain.
After him reigned the great Cunegadis Arsuf, the same King Arthur, the named brother of King Goddodin, King Cau.
King Arsuf, the Gaelic emperor of all the Gaels of Prydain (the modern islands of England, Ireland and the French peninsula of Brittany) ruled his lands wisely and fairly, until the sons of Hengist and Khorsa, pressed by the Slavs, began an invasion of Prydain. Then Arthur died, and his greatest ally, and his brother Mordraig of Camelodunom in Welsh.
The remnants of those very Gaels who were loyal to Arsuf fled to Armorica, where they recreated the ancient society, along with Camelodunum and the forest of Broseldiand.
By the way, St. George the Victorious was not only a symbol of knights, he was a symbol of witches.
Witches did not worship Satan, moreover, they despised Satan, and it was believed that all magical creatures were werewolves, fairies, etc. oppose Satan.
Witches were mischievous, but they weren't the scary creatures you see in the movies. They didn't eat babies, they didn't make flying potions out of their fat.
Witches turned into cats, they stole their goodies from rich people, as cats steal theirs. They sucked milk from a cow's udder, but did not kill them, much less drink the blood.
Spiders and caramors were considered male sorcerers. These insects were scary, but harmless to humans. The web that the spider weaves was considered by the Indians as a "net against nightmares."
Rereading Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages, a Century Later
https://annas-archive.org/md5/9a961844c4366bdec04e5320b9bd4520
The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature
https://annas-archive.org/md5/e092a1066eb924dc6c75a377e5bdec6d
Why rereading and not the original?
Bumping because I think it would be great for IQfy to have more medieval amateurs (amateurs in the true sense). And I highly recommend learning French. It opens up so many literary avenues.
>And I highly recommend learning French. It opens up so many literary avenues.
Do you recommend a particular way of doing this?
No because I'm not "self-taught". I learned it because I took French all throughout middle school, high school, and two semesters in college. My biggest recommendation is when you learn it, don't just learn it to read. You should also learn how to speak, converse, and write in French. That way you practice all aspects of the language. Being able to speak and write in the language will give you a better understanding. I don't really know what to suggest. Look for a class at a local college or community center or library.
I am embarrassingly old but hopefully going to college in the near future for the first time. I'm sure I can learn French there. Appreciate the guidance
You might be able to find a French grammar book and learn the basics. The big things are learning pronouns, verb conjugations in the major tenses (présent, futur, passé composé, imparfait, and conditional), and how sentences are constructed. From that point it's just building vocabulary, but you'll notice that many French words are very similar to English words where you can almost instantly intuit the meaning.
Sandberg - French for Reading
You can find it easily on libgen. Not for speaking but for pure reading it is probably the best guide you will find
I am doing this right now
What I would recommend is reading this book and using anki
A cool thing about this book is that you get example sentences for nearly all of the vocabulary so you don't need to put much effort into making sentence cards
I think it helps learning how to pronounce French before you start reading it btw
Beowulf
Canterbury Tales and other Chaucer
The Divine Comedy
Proslogium
The History of the Kings of England
The Song of Roland
The Mabinogion
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Decamaron
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Parzival
Le Morte D'Arthur
Piers Plowman
The Nibelungenlied
Tristan
The Alexiad, also the anonymous Norman chronical of the First Crusade
The Cloud of Unknowing
At least some Eckhart
Cid
Yvain
Marco Polo
Mandeville
The Consolation of Philosophy
City of God
Confessions
On the Incarnation
Maybe not reading all of them but being familiar and reading excerpts.
Might as well add De Trinitate too since it's genius and good background for the Latin Church. De Doctrina too but it is more dry. Soliloquies too.
Also Catherine of Siena.
Which Beowulf translation is considered best? I know not Healey
Heaney is fine? I read Kennedy first and that's always been one I like. Alexander is fine too.
There is a big book of general medieval studies called something like "Medieval Ages (XXX-1XXX)" with a massive bibliography in the back and a lot of citations to primary amd secondary sources it's in your city library. I would start there if I were in your place.
What can anons tell me about Gregory of Tours?
I bought Norton Critical Editions of Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman
I want to do the Arthurian legends but will probably wait til I know some French
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text-online
There are tons of Medieval middle english texts available online right here, OP.
Yes, French is probably more key for chivalric stuff, but there's still plenty to study from Britain. It's just that it takes training to study either way.