This New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer brings together preeminent scholars from around the world and adopts a novel approaching, beginning with the basics: Chaucer's words. Each chapter explores a single word from the Chaucerian corpus to develop readings that extend across the author's works. Without being limited to a particular text or theoretical approach, contributors model scholarly thinking in action, posing questions and offering analyses from textual, theoretical, historical, and material approaches. The result is a comprehensive collection of essays that illuminates Chaucer's aesthetics, philosophical complexity, and continued relevance. Part innovative scholarship, part how-to manual, the volume includes apparatus to help less experienced readers of Chaucer negotiate its contents. In addition to fourteen main essays, the volume also includes three response essays, each modelling how a seasoned scholar uses the chapters to develop his or her own thinking about Chaucer. Thus, the companion offers something to audiences of all levels who wish to read, research, and enjoy Chaucer, his language, and his works.

Since 2014, when The Medieval Globe first presented the latest interdisciplinary scholarship on the Black Death as a global pandemic, the pace and intensity of research has intensified. This follow-up volume features two extended essays laying out evidence that the Second Plague Pandemic was already ravaging China by the second quarter of the thirteenth century—over a century before it made its appearance in the greater Mediterranean region. In a core contribution, Robert Hymes presents an extensive analysis of Chinese medical texts, showing that physicians were adapting their terminology and treatments to the emergence of a virulent new disease: plague. In an overarching essay, Monica H. Green summarizes the current state of our knowledge about the timing and expanse of the Black Death, showing how combined evidence from genetics and a reconstructed documentary record can create a coherent new narrative of one of the largest, and longest, pandemics in history.

<I>New Readings on Women and Early Medieval English Literature and Culture</I> showcases current and original scholarship relating to women in Early Medieval English culture and in Early Medieval English studies and promises to stimulate new work in those areas. Recognizing the plasticity of gender structures, roles, and relations in Early Medieval English literature and culture as well as within the modern discipline of Early Medieval English Studies, the essays reveal pluralities of gender bequeathed to us and encourage us to rethink power/gender dynamics in our present moment.

This book presents a reconstruction of the socio-economic, ethnic, cultural, and political history of the Carpathian-Danubian area in the eighth and ninth centuries at a period when nomadic peoples from the east including the Bulgars, Avars, and Khazars migrated here. The work is based on a comprehensive analysis of narrative and archaeological sources including sites, artefacts, and goods in the basin bordered by the Tisza river in the west, the Danube in the south, and the Dniestr river in the east, covering swathes of modern-day Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia, and Hungary.

In such a wide-ranging, long-standing, and international field of scholarship as Beowulf, one might imagine that everything would long since have been thoroughly investigated. And yet as far as the absolutely crucial question of the poem’s origins is concerned, that is not the case. This cross-disciplinary study by Bo Gräslund argues that the material, geographical, historical, social, and ideological framework of Beowulf cannot be the independent literary product of an Old English Christian poet, but was in all essentials created orally in Scandinavia, which was a fertile seedbed for epic poetry. Through meticulous argument interwoven with an impressive assemblage of data, archaeological and otherwise, Gräslund offers possible answers to the questions of the provenance of the Geats, the location of Heorot, and many more, such as the significance of Sutton Hoo and the signification of the Grendel kin and dragon in the sixth century when the events of the poem, coinciding with cataclysmic events in northern Europe, took place.