Ardis Butterfield teaches at Yale. She is the president of the International Network for the Study of Lyric.
The Winchester Bible (c.1150-80).
‘Apsalm consoles the sad, restrains the joyful, tempers the angry, refreshes the poor and chides the rich man to know himself,’ wrote Niceta of Remesiana, a fourth-century bishop from what is now Serbia. His far better-known contemporary Augustine of Hippo praised the psalms in more flamboyant terms:
How loudly I cried out to you, my God, as I...
David Wallace’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine ‘itineraries’: Paris to Béarn; Calais to London; St Andrews to Finistère; Basel to Danzig; Avignon to Naples; Palermo to Tunis; Cairo to Constantinople; Mount Athos to Muscovy; Venice to Prague....
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognise ‘how it really was’. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940)
I am finding it very hard to write a Chaucer biography. Commissioned an uncomfortably long time ago, I have delayed and fussed, despaired and dithered, and...
Some 25 years after Alsace had been returned to France at the end of the Second World War, I took an opportunity to work there for a few months, in the belief that it would improve my French. A...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.