Poetry. Jan Owen writes of childhood and nature, of relationships, travel, art and science. Many poems in THE OFFHAND ANGEL shuttle between widely differing perspectives: the local and the exotic, the cosmic and the microcosmic, the physical and the metaphysical. A sense of transience and loss is balanced by the sensuousness and musicality of her work, and by a driving curiosity about the world.
London, British Library, MS Additional 10304 contains the unique copy of one of the only two known English translations of Boccaccio’s ‘De Mulieribus Claris’ prior to modern times (the other being that by Henry Parker, Lord Morley (EETS OS 214 (l943)). The present text consists of twentyone of Boccaccio’s 106 lives of famous women, translated into seven-line stanzas. It exists in printed form only in the edition by Gustav Schleich (1924), not now readily accessible, and in selections edited by Julius Zupitza (1892). It is of interest and significance in several respects: as an instance of the cultivation of Italian humanist writing in fifteenth-century England, and in particular of the reception of Boccaccio; as an example of verse in the Chaucerian tradition on the subject of women; and as an example of selective adaptation in translation from Latin to the vernacular. The Introduction to this edition includes consideration of language and versification, and an analysis of the Middle English translator’s strategies of selection from the source. The text is followed by a commentary including exposition of difficult passages, notes on significant modification of the source, and points of lexicographical interest, a select glossary, and an index of proper names.
An original study of Sir John Lubbock, written by an expert on both collecting practices and Sir John Lubbock. A chance to learn more about the man who gave the nation bank holidays and the Ancient Monuments Act to protect our heritage. An engaging chronological approach, accessible even for those with no prior knowledge of John Lubbock.
Le Morte D'Arthur is Sir Thomas Malory's richly evocative and enthralling version of the Arthurian legend. Recounting Arthur's birth, his ascendancy to the throne after claiming Excalibur, his ill-fated marriage to Guenever, the treachery of Morgan le Fay and the exploits of the Knights of the Round Table, it magically weaves together adventure, battle, love and enchantment. Le Morte D'Arthur looks back to an idealized Medieval world and is full of wistful, elegiac regret for a vanished age of chivalry. Edited and published by William Caxton in 1485, Malory's prose romance drew on French and English verse sources to give an epic unity to the Arthur myth, and remains the most magnificent re-telling of the story in English.