Medieval Welsh Literature and its European Contexts: Essays in Honour of Professor Helen Fulton (Issn)

Situates Celtic languages and literatures in relation to European movements, in the tradition of Helen Fulton's groundbreaking research. Professor Helen Fulton's influential scholarship has pioneered our understanding of the links between Welsh and European medieval literature. The essays collected here pay tribute to and reflect that scholarship, by positioning Celtic languages and literatures in relation to broader European movements and conventions. They include studies of texts from medieval Wales, Ireland, and the Welsh March, alongside discussions of continental multicultural literary engagements, understood as a closely related and analogous field of enquiry. Contributors present new investigations of Welsh poetry, from the pre-Conquest poetry of the princes to late-medieval and early Tudor urban subject matters; Welsh Arthuriana and Irish epic; the literature of the Welsh March - including the writings of the Gawain-poet; and the multilingual contexts of medieval and post-medieval Europe, from the Dutch speakers of polyglot medieval Calais to the Romantic poet Shelley's probable ownership of a Welsh Bible. Front cover 1 Contents 6 Illustrations 8 Contributors 9 Introduction: Medieval Welsh Literature and its European Contexts 10 1 Horseplay: Another Look at Rhieingerdd Efa 16 2 Ale-wives in Welsh Poetry c. 1450-c. 1650 29 3 A Forest, a Spring, and a Lion: Nature in Three Romances 44 4 Territorial Narrative in the Mabinogi 64 5 Making War, Love, and Porridge in the Cath Maige Tuired 77 6 Locating St Brendan in Medieval Wales 90 7 The Lorica of Laidcenn and Early English Glossaries 105 8 A Romance of England and Wales 123 9 Female Spirituality as Spectral Presence in the Medieval Welsh March and its Writings 140 10 Adam Usk’s Epitaph(s): Shaping Identity in a Medieval Borderland 159 11 Borders in Translation: English Resistance to Borderless Empire in Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine 181 12 The Cely and Johnson Letters and the Languages of Calais, 1347-1558 199 13 Shelley’s Welsh Bible 218 Tribute: Helen Fulton and Welsh Medieval Studies 230 Bibliography of Professor Helen Fulton’s Key Publications 236 Index 241 Tabula Gratulatoria 247 Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures 248 Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures Previously Published 249