Volume 123, Issue 4

The present study aims at a twofold goal. It evaluates the early English loanwords of Italian origin which the MED , the OED and its nascent third edition record up to the middle of the sixteenth century and it exemplifies how the transfer of Romance loanwords into late Middle and early Modern English should be analyzed. The analysis shows that not more than about two dozens of Italian loanwords were borrowed directly. Only half of them have survived in present-day English. This is much less than what has been assumed so far because many loanwords of Italian origin were transmitted by French whereas others proved to be Latinisms. The transfer does not begin before c . 1400 and only gradually increases after 1500.

Most readers of, and commentators on Middle English romances confront them in monograph editions, composed from several manuscripts. Medieval readers and audiences generally accessed these works in manuscript collections, usually of miscellaneous materials. Dieter Mehl in 1969 and Gisela Guddat-Figge in 1976 drew attention to the important evidence of romances' situation in such manuscripts in throwing light on definitions of genre and reception, on the possible composition of the audience, and the individual tastes and literary judgements of the compilers of these collections. This study of the romances in one of the most important, wideranging miscellanies examines the design of this compilation, and in particular the processive arrangements of the ‘romance’ section, to demonstrate that the compiler, Robert Thornton, would seem to have a firm sense of different, distinctive romance types, and to have organized an anthology of the genre, deployed in sub-sections which proceed from ‘historical’ or heroic romance, through heroic/adventure composites, and adventure-courtly love works, to end on romances whose deployment of fantasy and improbability make them the polar opposite of the works which began the section. This study of the romances in situ permits the evaluation and comparison of subgenre groupings, and also provides some evidence for concluding that several of the works in this miscellany may have been composed for this collection, rather than having ‘lost’ sources.

Texts have their own lives and histories, in which periods of neglect may alternate with periods of acute interest. Ever since Simon Keynes's fresh edition of the Fonthill Letter appeared in 1992, accompanied by a translation and a brilliantly wide-ranging historical commentary, this text has attracted the interest of scholars from various disciplines, and it has found its way into two recent anthologies designed for undergraduate students.

A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of British Place-Names (John Insley) Gerhard Leitner, Australia's Many Voices: Australian English – The National Language ; Gerhard Leitner, Australia's Many Voices: Ethnic Englishes, Indigenous and Migrant Languages . Policy and Education (Manfred Markus) Masataka Miyawaki, James Harris's Theory of Universal Grammar: A Synthesis of the Aristotelian and Platonic Conceptions of Language (Ilse Wischer) Anatoly Liberman, Word Origins … and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone (Bernhard Diensberg) Tim William Machan, English in the Middle Ages (Thomas Kohnen) Seiichi Suzuki, The Metre of Old Saxon Poetry: The Remaking of Alliterative Tradition (Geoffrey Russom) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 5: MS C. A semi-diplomatic edition with introduction and indices , ed. Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 7: MS E , ed. Susan Irvine; The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 8: MS F , ed. Peter S. Baker (Reinhard Gleißner) Ardis Butterfield, Poetry and Music in Medieval France: From Jean Renart to Guillaume de Machaut (Karl Reichl) Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Annette Kern-Stähler) Peter Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays: A Comparative Study of the English Biblical Cycles and their Continental and Iconographic Counterparts ; Chester N. Scoville, Saints and the Audience in Middle English Biblical Drama ; Clifford Davidson, Deliver Us From Evil: Essays on Symbolic Engagement in Early Drama (Matthias Eitelmann) Marion Müller, These Savage Beasts Become Domestick: The Discourse on the Passions in Early Modern England (Eva Oppermann) Christopher Kendrick, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England (Ralph Pordzik) Elizabeth Spiller, Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge , 1580–1670 (Eckhard Lobsien) Peter Paul Schnierer, Entdämonisierung und Verteufelung. Studien zur Darstellungs- und Funktionsgeschichte des Diabolischen in der englischen Literatur seit der Renaissance (Alexander Bidell) The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , ed. John Richetti (Ulrich Broich) Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Rudolf Freiburg) Susanne Scholz, Objekte und Erzählungen. Subjektivität und kultureller Dinggebrauch im England des frühen 18. Jahrhunderts (Monika Gomille) The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–1830 , ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee (Susanne Schmid) Burkhard Schmidthorst, Mythos und Primitivismus in der Lyrik von T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats und Ezra Pound. Zur Kulturkritik in der klassischen Moderne (Stefan Welz) Herbert Grabes, Einführung in die Literatur und Kunst der Moderne und Postmoderne: Die Ästhetik des Fremden (Hans Ulrich Seeber) The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Irish Drama , ed. Shaun Richards (Heinz Kosok) Kai Merten, Antike Mythen – Mythos Antike: Posthumanistische Antikerezeption in der englischsprachigen Lyrik der Gegenwart (Franz Meier) Beyond Extremes: Repräsentation und Reflexion von Modernisierungsprozessen im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman , ed. Stefan Glomb und Stefan Horlacher (Jens Gurr) Charles A. Knight, The Literature of Satire (Ingo Berensmeyer) The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature , ed. Eva-Marie Kröller (Konrad Groß) Alan Palmer, Fictional Minds (Jarmila Mildorf) Jürgen Kamm und Bernd Lenz, Großbritannien verstehen (Merle Tönnies) The Encyclopaedia of Ireland , ed. Brian Lalor (Jochen Achilles)