New Medieval Literatures 24

<b>This volume continues the series' engagement with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages showcasing the best new work in this field.</b><br><br><i>New Medieval Literatures</i> is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical archival philological and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies and embraces the range of European cultures capaciously defined.<br><br><br>Texts analysed here range in date from the late ninth or early tenth centuries to the fifteenth century and in provenance from the eastern part of the Hungarian kingdom to the British Isles. European understandings of the world are explored in several essays including historiographical perspectives on the Mongol Empire and world-building in the romances of the Round Table. In their consideration of translation - of English diplomatic texts into French of the Latin <i>Boethius</i> into Old English of Old Turkic and Mongolian into Latin - several contributors reveal complex medieval multilingual societies while <i>translatio</i> is shown to be weaponised in international scholarly rivalries. Bibliophilia book collection and book production inform identity-formation shaping both nationalisms and the many-layered identities of fifteenth-century merchants. Several essays engage revealingly with economic humanities. Account books provide traces of book production capacity in the unlikely location of Calais; credit finance provides metaphors for human relations with the divine in the <i>Book</i> of mystic Margery Kempe; and women broker credit in real-world scenarios too. Other essays engage with sensory studies: sight and optics are shown to inform ethnography while smell and taste - often considered beyond the reach of language - emerge as surprisingly central in some religious and philosophical writings.