About this book

Writing in a Cold Climate: Belarusian Literature from the 1970s to the Present Day. By Arnold McMillin.

Belarusian literature, which survives and, indeed, flourishes in the face of unfavourable domestic political conditions, deserves to be far better known in the West. It continues to flourish as an important aspect of national consciousness in a semi-denationalized state, and at its best can compare with the literature of its Slav neighbours including Russia.

The present monograph, the first of its kind, attempts to describe and assess the work of nearly two hundred writers and literary groups, ranging over poetry, prose and drama. The coverage includes provincial as well as metropolitan literature and groupings, and pays particular attention to seven outstanding authors of the period, to historical writing which is particularly important in a country where history has been suppressed and denied, and to the youngest generation of talented poets and prose writers born in the early 1980s at the very end of the Soviet Union’s existence.

The book is extensively illustrated with examples of poetry in Belarusian with English translation, and of prose and drama translated into English. There is a comprehensive Bibliography of some seventeen hundred primary and secondary sources, and an extensive Index of Names to aid access to individual writers covered.

About the author

Arnold McMillin is Professor Emeritus of Russian Literature at University College London

About this book

An Anglo-Norman Dictionary. Second Edition. A-E. Gen. Ed. William Rothwell. Ed. by Stewart Gregory, William Rothwell & David Trotter, with the assistance of Michael Beddow, Virginie Derrien, Geert de Wilde, Lisa Jefferson & Andrew Rothwell. 2005. 2 vols in consecutive pagination: xlix + 624, iv + 625-1107 pp.

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary in its first edition (AND1, 1977-1992) was the only dictionary which attempted to provide coverage of medieval French as used in Britain. Perhaps inevitably, during the course of publication the Dictionary changed, but in the case of AND1, the modification towards the middle of the alphabet was radical, with the inclusion of material drawn from Elsie Shanks’s very substantial Dictionary of Law French, and the fichier assembled by J.P. Collas. Taken together, these two sources, which extensively explored the non-literary register of administrative and legal Anglo-Norman, dramatically changed the range and scale of AND1, so that the second half of the first edition is strikingly different from the first.

In the late 1980s, the decision was taken to revise the entire dictionary for what, in the event, is proving to be a massively altered second edition. Not only is the Shanks and Collas material now being incorporated into earlier letters; the new dictionary (‘AND2’) also draws on substantial quantities of hitherto unpublished documents which have appeared since the early 1970s. Lexical coverage has been enormously expanded in the fields of administration, law, science, botany, and medicine.

The revised edition draws extensively on concordanced and digitized texts, and it offers a well-developed coverage of locutions. It features, too, a substantially revised layout. The articles are broken down and made much more usable by including a summary of the main senses at the head of each article, numbered in a way that takes a reader directly to the relevant portion of the entry body. As well as speeding up the location of a particular sense, this layout offers a clear overview of the principal semantic pattern of a particular word.

About this book

Historicist Essays on Hispano-Medieval Narrative in Memory of Roger M. Walker. Ed. by Barry Taylor and Geoffrey West.

In this volume seventeen scholars from Great Britain, Ireland, Spain and the US pay tribute to the memory of Roger M Walker. His publications were chiefly in the field of Old Spanish narrative –– epic, romance, hagiography and the Libro de buen amor –– and the editors have sought to assemble contributions on these topics. Versions of some of the papers were presented at the symposium held in Professor Walker’s memory at Birkbeck College in October 1999.

About the dedicatee

Roger Walker was Professor of Spanish at Birkbeck College.

About this book

Europa Triumphans. Court & Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe. Ed. by J. R. Mulryne; Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly; Margaret Shewring. Published in conjunction with Ashgate. A landmark in the study of early modern Europe, this two-volume collection makes available for the first time a selection of the most important texts from court and civic festival books.

Festival entertainments were presented to mark such occasions as royal and ducal entries to capital cities, dynastic marriages, the birth and christening of heirs, religious feasts and royal and ducal funerals. Europa Triumphans represents the chronological and trans-European range of the court and civic festival. These festivals are considered not simply as texts, but as events, and are introduced by groups of scholars, each with a specialist knowledge of the political, social and cultural significance of the festival and of the iconography, spectacle, music, dance, voice and gesture in which they were expressed.

To demonstrate the geographic spread and political significance of festivals, and to illustrate the range of aesthetic languages they deploy, the festivals included in these two volumes are grouped in the following sections: Henri III; Genoa; Poland-Lithuania; The Netherlands; The Protestant Union; La Rochelle; Scandinavia; and The New World. These texts provide many valuable insights into the variety of political systems and historical circumstances that formed them.

Beautifully produced with 148 black-and-white and 23 colour illustrations, Europa Triumphans represents an invaluable reference source for the study of early modern Europe. It presents texts both in transcription and translated into English, and is supplemented with introductory essays and commentaries.

Europa Triumphans is co-published by Ashgate and the Modern Humanities Research Association, in conjunction with the AHRB Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick, UK.

About this book

The Eadwine Psalter. Text, Image, and Monastic Culture in Twelfth-Century Canterbury. Ed. by Margaret Gibson, T. A. Heslop, and Richard W. Pfaff. Published in conjunction with the Pennsylvania State University Press.

About this book

Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry. Volume Two: Characteristics and Techniques. Ed. by J. B. Hainsworth, under the General Editorship of A. T. Hatto.

About the dedicatee

A. T. Hatto was Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of London. J. B. Hainsworth is a Fellow of New College, Oxford.

About this book

Book Production and Letters in the Western European Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Conor Fahy. Ed. by Anna Laura Lepschy, John Took, and Dennis E. Rhodes.

About the dedicatee

Conor Fahy was Professor of Italian at Birkbeck College.

About this book

Myth and Legend in French Literature: Essays in Honour of A. J. Steele. Ed. by Keith Aspley, David Bellos, and Peter Sharratt.

About the dedicatee

A. J. Steele was Professor of French at the University of Edinburgh.

About this book

A Bibliography of Editions of the Writings of Benjamin Constant to 1833. By C. P. Courtney.

About the author

Dr Cecil Courtney is Emeritus Reader in French Intellectual History and Bibliography in the Department of French at the University of Cambridge.

About this book

Traditions of Heroic and Epic Poetry. Volume One: The Traditions. Ed. by A. T. Hatto. Founded upon the transactions of the London seminar on epic 1964-1972.

Twelve chapters by distinguished scholars in several epic literatures: Ancient Greek, Old Indian (the two Sanskrit Epics), Old French, Medieval Spanish, Medieval German, Serbo-Croat, Ob Ugrian (Vogul and Ostyak), Ossetic, Mongol (the contemporary tradition), Kirghiz (mid-nineteenth century), Ainu, and East African (the Bahima praise poems).

About the author

A. T. Hatto was Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of London.