Dialectica:
Past Reading Selections for the Discussion Group

The citations below are listed alphabetically by author. After each citation, the date of the meeting in which it was discussed is given parenthetically.

Readings are selected by participants in the discussion group; anyone attending at least his or her second meeting is offered a place in the rotation of reading selection. Choices of readings reflect the interests of those doing the choosing--this is consistent with one of the discussion group's purposes, which is to stimulate us to think about unfamiliar topics and benefit from one another's expertise--but in choosing the readings, participants are also encouraged to make selections that will be accessible to an interdisciplinary audience.


Aers, David. "Faith, Ethics, and Community: Reflections on Reading Late Medieval English Writing." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 341-69. (9-5-00)
Barber, Richard. "From Courtesy to Chivalry." In The Knight and Chivalry, rev. ed. New York: Boydell Press, 2000. 67-94. (7-10-00)
Beckwith, Sarah. "A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe." In Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History. Ed. David Aers. Brighton, 1988. 34-57. (6-29-01)
Bennett, Judith M. "Medievalism and Feminism." Speculum 68 (1993): 309-31. (4-16-01)
Boenig, Robert. "The Anglo-Saxon Harp." Speculum 71 (1996): 290-320. (2-19-02)
Benton, John F. "The Court of Champagne as Literary Center." Speculum 36 (1961): 551-91. (7-23-02)
Bowers, John M. "Chaucer after Smithfield: From Postcolonial Writer to Imperialist Author." In The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. St. Martin's Press, 2000. 53-66. (7-8-02)
Briggs, Charles F. "Literacy, Reading, and Writing in the Medieval West." Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 397-420. (11-27-00)
Burnley, David. "Chaucer's Literary Terms." Anglia 114 (1996): 202-35. (6-12-00)
Burton, T. L. "The Crocodile as the Symbol of an Evil Woman: A Medieval Interpretation of the Crocodile-Trochilus Relationship." Parergon 20 (1978): 25-33. (8-28-01)
Cowdrey, H. E. J. "The Genesis of the Crusades: The Springs of Western Ideas of Holy War." In The Holy War. Ed. Thomas Patrick Murphy. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974. 9-32. (2-6-01)
Damian-Grint, Peter. "Truth, Trust, and Evidence in the Anglo-Norman Estoire." Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1995): 63-78. (10-16-00)
Dunbabin, Jean. "Meeting the Cost of University Education in Northern France, c. 1240-1340." History of Universities 10 (1991): 1-27. (7-24-01)
Einbinder, Susan L. "Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: Persecution and Poetry among Medieval English Jews." Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 145-62. (9-18-00)
Fleischman, Suzanne. "On the Representation of History and Fiction in the Middle Ages." History and Theory 22 (1983): 278-306. (4-17-00)
Grossman, Lev. "When Words Fail." Lingua Franca April 1999. 10-15. (6-11-01)
Hahn, Cynthia. "Visio Dei: Changes in Medieval Visuality." In Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw. Ed. Robert S. Nelson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 169-96. (12-12-00)
Hahn, Thomas. "The Difference the Middle Ages Makes: Color and Race before the Modern World." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 1-37. (5-29-01)
Hanawalt, Barbara A., ed. Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986, 1-17. (9-25-01)
Heaney, Seamus, trans. Beowulf. London: Faber, 1999. Introduction and ll. 1-145 (pp. ix-xxx and 1-7). (3-21-00)
Hodges, Laura F. "Chaucer's Friar: 'Typet' and 'Semycope.'" Chaucer Review 34 (2000): 317-43. (8-5-02)
Keickhefer, Richard. "The Specific Rationality of Medieval Magic." American Historical Review 99 (1994): 813-836. (10-2-00)
Kennedy, Edward Donald. King Arthur: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1996. Introduction, pp. xiii-xxxii. (8-7-00)
Knapp, Ethan. "Bureaucratic Identity and the Construction of the Self in Hoccleve's Formulary and La Male Regle." Speculum 74 (1999): 357-76. (5-30-00)
Kolve, V. A. Excerpt from Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984. 308-49. (1-22-01)
Matthews, Karen Rose. "Reading Romanesque Sculpture: The Iconography and Reception of the South Portal Sculpture at Santiago de Compostela." Gesta 39 (2000): 3-12. (4-3-01)
Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Pp. ix-xvii and 1-25. (2-15-00)
Moffat, Douglas with Vincent P. McCarren. "A Bibliographical Essay on Editing Methods and Authorial and Scribal Intention." In A Guide to Editing Middle English. Ed. Vincent P. McCarren and Douglas Moffat. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. (2-28-00)
Morey, James H. "Peter Comestor, Biblical Paraphrase, and the Medieval Popular Bible." Speculum 68 (1993): 6-35. (8-6-01)
Morey, James H. "Plows, Laws, and Sanctuary in Medieval England and in the Wakefield Mactacio Abel." Studies in Philology 95 (1998): 41-55. (7-9-01)
Neel, Carol. "The Origins of the Beguines." Signs 14 (1989): 321-41. (10-30-00)
Odenstedt, Bengt. "A New Theory of the Origin of the Runic Script: Richard L. Morris's Book Runic and Mediterranean Epigraphy." In Old English Runes and Their Continental Background. Ed. Alfred Bammesberger. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1991. (1-31-00)
O'Donnell, James. "Augustine: Elements of Christianity." Online at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod/twayne/aug2.html. Orig. published in the Twayne World Authors Series, 1985. (11-14-00)
O'Neill, Patrick P. "The Old English Introductions to the Prose Psalms of the Paris Psalter: Sources, Structure, and Composition." Studies in Philology 78.5 (1981): 20-38. (2-19-01)
Page, Christopher. "Listening to the Trovères." Early Music 25 (1997): 639-59. (8-19-02)
Page, Christopher. "Minstrels and the Knightly Class." Chap. 2 of The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France, 1100-1300. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. 42-60. (9-5-01)
Pearson, Kathy L. "Nutrition and the Early-Medieval Diet." Speculum 72 (1997): 1-32. (9-20-01)
Peters, Edward and Walter P. Simons. "The New Huizinga and the Old Middle Ages." Speculum 74 (1999): 587-620. (5-15-00)
Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Trans. Teresa Waugh. New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984. Pp. 9-21, 65-78, and 89-93. (6-27-00)
Randel, Don Michael. "Reading Composers Reading." Acta 17 (1993): 89-107. (5-1-01)
Robinson, Peter and Kevin Taylor. "Publishing an Electronic Textual Edition: The Case of The Wife of Bath's Prologue on CD-ROM." Computers and the Humanities 32.4 (1998): [pp?]. (5-2-00)
Scherb, Victor I. "Blasphemy and the Grotesque in the Digby Mary Magdalene," Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 225-40. (1-23-02)
Schultz, James A. "Medieval Adolescence: The Claims of History and the Silence of German Narrative." Speculum 66 (1991): 519-39. (5-14-01)
Sheehy, Maurice. "The Bible and the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis." In Irland und die Christenheit: Bibelstudien und Mission / Ireland and Christendom: The Bible and the Mission. Ed. Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987. 277-83. (7-25-00)
Tarvers, Josephine K. "The Alleged Illiteracy of Margery Kempe: A Reconsideration of the Evidence." Medieval Perspectives 11 (1996): 113-24. (1-9-01)
Tomasch, Sylvia. "Judecca, Dante's Satan, and the Dis-placed Jew." In Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages. Ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. 247-66. (4-3-00)
Toshi Hiko Izutsu, "Mysticism and the Linguistic Problem of Equivocation in the Thought of 'Ayn al-Qudat Hamadani," in Creation and the Timeless Order of Things: Essays in Islamic Mysticism (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 1994), 98-118. (2-4-02)
Treitler, Leo. "Oral, Written, and Literate Process in the Transmission of Medieval Music." Speculum 56 (1981): 471-91. (3-19-01)
Weiss, Daniel H. "Biblical History and Medieval Historiography: Rationalizing Strategies in Crusader Art."
MLN 108 (1993): 710-37. (3-6-01)
Wenzel, Siegfried. "The Joyous Art of Preaching; or, the Preacher and the Fabliau." Anglia 97 (1979): 304-25. (9-10-01)
Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking "Gnosticism": An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. 3-28. (8-21-00)

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