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The Roman de la Rose was a major bestseller--largely due to its robust treatment of "natural" sexuality. This study concentrates on the ways in which Jean de Meun, in imitation of Ovid, assumed the mock-magisterium (or mastership) of love. Alastair J. Minnis considers allegorical versus literalistic expression in the poem, Jean's provocative use of plain and sometimes obscene language, the challenge of its homosocial and perhaps even homoeroti...

Phantom limb pain' designates the sensations which emanate from limbs that in reality are missing. First coined in the American Civil War, Alastair Minnis traces the medieval parallels for this concept. Is a complete body necessary for personhood? These issues were as absorbing for medieval thinkers as they are for neuroscientists today.

Medieval literature and art abounds in descriptions of grotesque torments (punitive in hell, redemptive in purgatory) being meted out to the unhappy dead. But how can pain be experienced in the absence of the body? Can the main agents of suffering specified in Old Testament prophecies, fire and the worm, actually trouble a disembodied soul? The relative merits of material and metaphorical understandings of the economy of pain were debated thro...

Medieval literature and art abounds in descriptions of grotesque torments (punitive in hell, redemptive in purgatory) being meted out to the unhappy dead. But how can pain be experienced in the absence of the body? Can the main agents of suffering specified in Old Testament prophecies, fire and the worm, actually trouble a disembodied soul? The relative merits of material and metaphorical understandings of the economy of pain were debated thro...

In From Eden to Eternity, Alastair Minnis argues that Eden afforded an extraordinary amount of creative space to late medieval theologians, painters, and poets as they tried to understand the place that God had deemed worthy of the creature made in His image.

This anthology of newly-translated texts covers the single most important branch of medieval literary theory and criticism--the commentary tradition--in one of the most significant periods of its development. Fully annotated with notes and introductions, the selections encompass a wide range of topics--including authorship, ethics, symbolism, biography, poetics, allegory, and semiotics--and represent many important writers--including Dante, Pe...

Leading critic Alastair Minnis investigates the relationships between authority and the vernacular in the literature of late medieval England.

An accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the life and work of Geoffrey Chaucer.

In addition to the main traditions in Medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek, this comprehensive introduction to the literary theory and criticism produced during the Middle Ages covers all major European vernaculars, ranging from Irish to Old Norse, from Occitan to Middle High German and Italian. Special attention is given to the contribution of Dante Alighieri and his commentators, along with the debates on the relative merits of Latin and the I...

Alastair Minnis is Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English at Yale University and author of Fallible Authors: Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath and Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

A lively, accessible and wide-ranging introduction to the life and work of the fourteenth-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

Fallible AuthorsChaucer's Pardoner and Wife of BathAlastair Minnis"In pages rich with explication of scholastic, literary, and historical material, Minnis recovers a medieval notion of authorial fallibility."--Seth Lerer, TimesOnlineCan an outrageously immoral man or a scandalous woman teach morality or lead people to virtue? Does personal fallibility devalue one's words and deeds? Is it possible to separate the private from the public, to seg...

Leading critic Alastair Minnis investigates the relationships between authority and the vernacular in the literature of late-medieval England.

An innovative and important book."--Speculum"This valuable book . . . poses in a most interesting form the question of the relationship generally between literary theory and literary practice."--Times Higher Education Supplement"Stimulating and learned. . . . This book should serve as a milestone in medieval literary theory."--Yearbook of English Studies"No professional medievalist with a serious interest in literature can afford to leave this...