Alliterative Metre and Medieval English Literary History

‘Seiknes Incurabill’: The Evolution of Literary Representations of Leprosy in Medieval and Early Modern English Narratives

This paper examines the use of leprosy as a literary motif in poetry, narrative literature, and homilies from England and Scotland between the 1200s and 1500s, the time period during which a shift in leprosy’s literary connotations is visible. It tracks the changes in leprosy’s meaning, as it moves from a disease signifying holy suffering and nearness to God to a physical representation of a di...

Medieval English medicine

quite separate. This had been an historical development deriving from the Viennese influence at the beginning of the century. Which was the better arrangement is difficult to say and this book does not attempt an answer. It deals almost exclusively with military psychiatry and as such is a mine of useful information. However, a lack of trained neurologists is recorded (pp. 250 and 448), and it ...

Dating medieval English charters

Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuous documentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social, economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (written in Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England. Of these, at least one million were left undated, largely due to administrative changes ...

Quantifying Prosodic Variability in Middle English Alliterative Poetry

Interest in the mathematical structure of poetry dates back to at least the 19 century: after retiring from his mathematics position, J. J. Sylvester wrote a book on prosody called The Laws of Verse. Today there is interest in the computer analysis of poems, and this paper discusses how a statistical approach can be applied to this task. Starting with the definition of what Middle English allit...

Comparative Literary History