Fifteenth-Century Studies 35 (PDF)

Annual volume of essays treating topics ranging from physical impairment to narrative afterlife and time.

The fifteenth century defies consensus on fundamental issues; most scholars agree, however, that the period outgrew the Middle Ages, that it was a time of transition and a passage to modern times. Fifteenth-Century Studiestreats diverse aspects of the period, including liberal and fine arts, historiography, medicine, and religion. Volume 35 addresses topics including physical impairments as depicted in surgical handbooks printed in Germany and as reflected through eyeglasses for the blind (a therapy proposed by French vernacular poets); literary constructions of women in de Meun's Cité des Dames and in hagiographic legends of Spain; the evolution of the Order of theGarter as dramatized in Shakespeare; serious elements in French farces; the festival context of Villon's Pet-au-Deable; Boethius in the late Middle Ages; A Revelation of Purgatory and Chaucer's Prioress; Piers Plowman in one British Library manuscript; and narrative afterlife and time in Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Book reviews conclude the volume.

Contributors: Milagros Alameda-Irizarry, Chiara Benati, EdelgardE. DuBruck, Rosanne Gasse, Chelsea Honeyman, Noel Harold Kaylor Jr., James N. Ortego II, E. L. Risden, Julie Singer, Geri L. Smith, Martin W. Walsh.

Matthew Z. Heintzelman is Curator of the Austria/Germany Study Center and Rare Book Cataloger at Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, Saint John's University, Minnesota; Barbara I. Gusick is Professor Emerita of English at Troy University Dothan; Martin W. Walsh is Head of the Drama Program at the University of Michigan's Residential College.