Alliterative Revivals.

Alliterative Revivals explores the historical consciousness of nine late medieval alliterative poems: St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wars of Alexander, The Siege of Jerusalem, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Gologras and Gawain, De Tribus Regibus Mortuis, The Awntyrs off Arthure, and Somer Sunday. Alliterative Revivals examines the ways in which these poems exploit history and spectacle, as they stage encounters between various pasts and the late medieval English present. The staging of history in these poems allows fourteenth-century contemporaries to rethink contemporary relationships between monarchy and nobility, ecclesiastical authority and lay piety, courtly and provincial culture, western Christendom and its easterly others, and the living and their dead progenitors. [CC]

Rev. by:

• Richard Dance, Notes & Queries n.s. 50 (2003): 455–56;
• Ralph Hanna, YLS 17 (2003): 223–24;
• Anne W. Astell, Speculum, 80 (2005), 206-7;
• Eric Eliason, Arthuriana, 14 (2004), 98-99;
• Patricia Clare Ingham, Modern Language Quarterly, 66 (2005): 115-19;
• Scott Kleinman, Envoi, 10 (2004 for Fall 2001): 108-21;
• Stephanie Trigg, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 26 (2004), 369-72;
• Annie Sutherland, Review of English Studies, n.s. 55 (2004), 787-88.