Project MUSE®: Early Middle English - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Early Middle English.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2019) through current issueLatest Articles: Early Middle EnglishTWOProject MUSE®Early Middle English2516-90922516-9084Latest articles in Early Middle English. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Acknowledgements
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961429
<p></p>
THE EDITORS OF this volume are grateful, above all, to Adrienne Williams Boyarin of the University of Victoria, Editor of Early Middle English, and to Simon Forde, Director and Editor-in-Chief of Arc Humanities Press, for their unstinting support of this volume. We are also indebted to the anonymous external readers who provided expert reviews. We sincerely thank our contributors, Keith Busby, Richard Firth Green, Steven Justice, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Nancy Pope, David Raybin, and Suzanne Yeager, who scrupulously delved into topics that would have pleased Carter enormously. Special thanks are due to Nancy and Kathryn for being part of this volume's initial conception, and to Tania Colwell and Martine
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallAcknowledgements2025-06-06text/htmlen-USAcknowledgements2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®28532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06Preface
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961430
<p></p>
IN THE RECENT collection What Kind of Thing Is a Middle English Lyric?, editors Cristina Maria Cervone and Nicholas Watson construct a chapbook of "new medieval lyrics" from eight modern poems that collectively delineate a "new medieval" aesthetic. In it, Carter Revard is the only author featured twice, in "A Trinity-Riddle" and "What the Eagle Fan Says."2 A spirit of Native American naturalism powers both lyrics. The first encodes an elemental solution: snow, ice, water. The second gives voice to, as William Paden notes, "a Native American fan made of eagle's feathers and used in a ritual dance of Arizona."3 Both also evoke the alliterative rhythmic styling of long-line, unrhymed, caesural Old English riddles
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallPreface2025-06-06text/htmlen-USPreface2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®241092026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961431
<p></p>
IN 1992, WHEN I was a few years into a full-time teaching position, I travelled to England to look at manuscripts in London and Oxford, bringing along a suitably official letter from our dean to verify my status and intended objects of study. At the turnstile entrance to the Old Reading Room of the British Library, however, the person I encountered was not convinced. "Are you working on a thesis?" she asked skeptically. "No," I replied, "I have my degree," describing again my project and a list of manuscripts I wanted to study. The gatekeeper appeared unmoved. Just then a deep and familiar voice greeted me, as if continuing a conversation. "Hello, Tom! What are you looking at today?" It was Carter Revard, whom the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallIntroduction2025-06-06text/htmlen-USIntroduction2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®332822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06Interdisciplinary Carter Revard
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961432
<p></p>
ONE OF THE events opening the New Chaucer Society's Biennial Congress at the University of Toronto in 2018 was a poetry reading by Carter Revard of his own Indigenous poetry and the Middle English poems he studied and taught. Later that week, Revard told me it was the first time he had been invited to speak to an academic audience both as a medieval scholar and as a Native American writer. The apparent divide between his fields had struck me as odd many years earlier, when Revard was my dissertation advisor. I asked him once, "Do you ever feel as though you have a split personality?" To which he replied, "No, I feel as though I have two legs to walk on." As he spoke, he illustrated his words by walking his first
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallInterdisciplinary Carter Revard2025-06-06text/htmlen-USInterdisciplinary Carter Revard2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®883132026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06Documents of Pilgrimage: Harley 2253 and the Palmers' Guild of Ludlow
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961433
<p></p>
BARON GEOFFREY DE GENEVILLE (ca. 1226–1314) received on a Sunday during Lent the gift of one salmon, according to a fragmentary scrap, a ledger of domestic accounts, that survives as a parchment flyleaf in London, British Library, MS Harley 2253.1 The year of this piscine gift was probably 1309.2 The donation came from a substantial noble household headed by Joan Mortimer, Geneville's granddaughter, and her husband Roger, situated in Ardmulchan, Co. Meath, Ireland. Geneville's son Peter being deceased, the octogenarian magnate had conveyed to Peter's daughter Joan, in December 1307, the bulk of his estates before retiring in 1308 to the Dominican monastery in Trim, where he lived his final years. Geneville's vast
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallDocuments of Pilgrimage: Harley 2253 and the Palmers' Guild of Ludlow2025-06-06text/htmlen-USDocuments of Pilgrimage: Harley 2253 and the Palmers' Guild of Ludlow2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®2141172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06Harley 2253 and the Languages of the Law
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961434
<p></p>
I CAN'T REMEMBER when I first met Carter Revard, but it must have been during one of my visits to Washington University at the invitation of Norris Lacy. I do, however, have vivid memories of spending time with him during his period as the Sutton Chair in the Humanities and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma in the Spring of 1989, an appointment no doubt facilitated by another great medievalist and poet, the late George Economou. I sat in on the medieval seminars Carter gave to graduate students in the English Department and attended the university lecture he gave in Norman. We corresponded frequently in the following years, particularly when I was working on multilingual "miscellanies"
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallHarley 2253 and the Languages of the Law2025-06-06text/htmlen-USHarley 2253 and the Languages of the Law2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®1006922026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06A Taste for Complex Narrators: The Self-Satirizing Poet's Voice in Lyrics from Harley 2253 and Harley 913
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961435
<p></p>
ONE OF MY abiding memories of Carter is of an ebullient lecture he gave to a standing-room-only Kalamazoo audience. He held up his well-thumbed copy of N. R. Ker's facsimile of London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, explaining that every page of this unlikely and untidy manuscript had in fact been carefully planned—and why.1 No one had ever imagined that someone could get into the head of a scribe-compiler like that. In those days, what is now called Manuscript Studies was still in its infancy, and scribes were still usually viewed as hapless functionaries whose inattention or stupidity modern editors had to correct. As the popular limerick about the Kane and Donaldson Piers Plowman put it, "When we edit a text
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallA Taste for Complex Narrators: The Self-Satirizing Poet's Voice in Lyrics from Harley 2253 and Harley 9132025-06-06text/htmlen-USA Taste for Complex Narrators: The Self-Satirizing Poet's Voice in Lyrics from Harley 2253 and Harley 9132025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®1607792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06Medieval Foremothers and Female Audiences: Women's Crusader Identities and the Cultural Contexts of The King of Tars
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961436
<p></p>
Reverence for forefathers and foremothers—those who lovingly pass lore to their descendants and their descendants' descendants—is, indeed, a common thread for both medievalist and Native American cultures.THE AUTHOR OF The King of Tars had choices in the portrayal of the main character, the Christian Princess of Tars.3 With her marriage impending, would she or would she not struggle with the obligation of the religious conversion of her "Saracen" fiancé? One look at the "Constance group," a body of texts to which The King of Tars is related, shows the main female character to be blithely free of the problem of converting her fiancé into a proper Christian husband.4 As Lillian Herlands Hornstein puts it, in Nicholas
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallMedieval Foremothers and Female Audiences: Women's Crusader Identities and the Cultural Contexts of The King of Tars2025-06-06text/htmlen-USMedieval Foremothers and Female Audiences: Women's Crusader Identities and the Cultural Contexts of The King of Tars2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®1890862026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06The Two Franciscans of Piers Plowman B 8 (C 10, A 9)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961437
<p></p>
MY FIRST MEETING with Carter Revard nearly set me to flight. Plainly trying to put me at ease (I was a grad student about to give my first job talk), he admitted he had discovered, belatedly and with embarrassment, that there was a second John Delves.1 This did not help: I hadn't known there was a first and I couldn't guess the context; my ignorance had to show. Certainly it did, but my ignorance was no problem for him. It never became one. My senior colleague for three years, he remained gallantly indifferent to my shortcomings and warmly, unstintingly generous. In 1986 (I think) he gave me the typescript of his note on the word title in Piers Plowman B 11.2 These five pages, which modestly sought no more than to
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallThe Two Franciscans of Piers Plowman B 8 (C 10, A 9)2025-06-06text/htmlen-USThe Two Franciscans of Piers Plowman B 8 (C 10, A 9)2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®1216322026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06Chester's Minstrel Army: A Revisionary History
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961438
<p></p>
AS BOTH POET and scholar Carter Revard brought many distant voices back to life. I can lay no claim to a share in the first of his avocations, but I like to think that this most humane of medievalists would have enjoyed a fellow scholar's attempt to revivify an episode long lost to literary history.On Midsummer's Day, 1642, a gentleman named Peter Leycester witnessed a curious ceremony in the city of Chester.2 Robert Needham, the Lord of Dutton by virtue of his wife, with "many gentlemen of his friends and acquaintance, having a banner displayed before him, and a drum and trumpet," rode to the Eastgate of the city, where he heard himself proclaimed "Lord Leader, Conductor, and, under his Highness, Protector of all
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallChester's Minstrel Army: A Revisionary History2025-06-06text/htmlen-USChester's Minstrel Army: A Revisionary History2025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®919552026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06Gentle Readers? A Naughty Parlour Game in Digby 86
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439
<p></p>
IN BOTH FRANCE and England during the thirteenth century, and in England until at least the late fifteenth century, groups of men and women played a parlour game that was, to say the least, risqué. As the game was played, each player in turn would make a blind choice of one of the many quatrains in a lengthy poem, which would then be read aloud to the assembled players by the game's Master of Ceremonies, Ragemon (King Ragman), who acts something like a King of the Ribalds, or a Merry Devil. Some players would receive favourable, others disastrous fortunes. In a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman version, players included both men and women; in a fifteenth-century Middle English version, the players (except for the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/961439">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/750/image/coversmallGentle Readers? A Naughty Parlour Game in Digby 862025-06-06text/htmlen-USGentle Readers? A Naughty Parlour Game in Digby 862025-06-062025TWOProject MUSE®770812026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-06-06