The rhetorical strategies of the speechmaker become more interesting as the involvement and risk assumed by the audience increase. Battle orations given by military leaders to their troops just before fighting the enemy provide the ultimate in audience involvement and risk. Of some 200 chronicles of northern Europe from the twelfth and thirteenth…

Noting that different audiences have constructed widely varying interpretations of the figure and work of Margery Kempe ("The Book of Margery Kempe" dates from the beginning of the 15th century), this paper examines the subversiveness of Margery's rhetoric for medieval audiences and for modern audiences and students. The paper first…

While there has been a great deal of debate about enlarging the canon, less attention has been paid to how students respond to "new" literary figures such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, or to how instructors should incorporate them into an already cramped literature survey course. Instructors must consider some questions that…

Advantage should be taken of the increased interest in teaching Old English literature, in translation, at the college and high school levels. The study of "Beowulf" and other Old English literature has proved to be a stimulating experience for students at the United States Air Force Academy and at Georgia College. At the academy, the…

A founding co-editor of Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) examines the costs and benefits of networked electronic communication for scholars. Some of the tools that have the potential to change the way scholars work include: online reference; online productivity information; e-mail as a productivity tool; and formal online publishing endeavors. A…

The Occitan movement in Southern France should be studied in the light of a world-wide political reality of our days, the surfacing of ethnic minorities which are beginning to voice cultural and political demands in almost all large industrialized or developing countries. The first step for a minority group to come into existence is almost without…

Although modern readers often find the interpretation of medieval literature difficult, they should be encouraged to use their imagination to resolve the dilemmas they encounter. Often, these are the same issues with which medieval audiences had to wrestle and which the poets intended to raise. W. Iser's and H. R. Jauss's principles of…

Even though medieval manuscripts represent the most voluminous surviving artifact from the Middle Ages, the very nature of this resource presents challenges for usage. In an effort to preserve medieval manuscripts and to create broader and more economical access to their contents, many libraries have in recent decades sought to provide filmed…