Adultery in Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur
Malory handles the theme of adultery in Le Morte d'Arthur as a function of his typology of knighthood. Each type—Heroic, Worshipful and True—has a different understanding of what constitutes knightly honor and has a correspondingly different attitude toward the commission and punishment of adultery.
An edition of 'Contemplations of the dread and love of God'
This thesis presents an edition of Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God, a late Middle English devotional prose text for which no critical edition is currently available. I have transcribed and collated the text from all sixteen extant manuscripts and the 1506 printed edition. An investigation of the errors and variants according to the classical method of textual criticism has yielded little in the way of conclusive results, and it has therefore not proved possible to construct a stemma of manuscripts from the corpus of evidence as it now exists. My edition therefore uses one manuscript (Maidstone MS Museum 6) as a base; I emend the text of Maidstone where necessary, and cite variants from all the other witnesses to show all differences of substance. A full critical apparatus is provided, comprising: the text with variants, textual notes and glossary. The introduction includes a full description of all the manuscripts and the two early printed editions, an outline of the methods of textual criticism applied and their results, and an explanation of the choice of base manuscript; information about the language of the Maidstone manuscript and the date of the text are also provided, as is an outline of my editorial principles. The thesis also contains two appendices. The first of these deals briefly with the twenty-two instances where individual chapters of Contemplations appear in other manuscript compilations; the second discusses the English and Latin prayers which follow the full text in some manuscripts.
Sexual variance in society and history
The practice of publishing an author's collected essays has in the past been indulged in mainly by the elder statesmen of science and the arts, or by their colleagues wishing to commemorate a birthday, death, or anniversary. There is today, however, a growing tendency for others to use the technique, thus allowing their articles to render double service, in periodical and in anthology. Only the introduction and one of the twelve chapters of this book appear here for the first time, the remainder having been published already in journals. Nevertheless, Rosenberg's scholarly essays are stimulating and thought-provoking, dealing primarily with the ways in which the sciences, social thought and values, and the institutional structure of science have interacted, and how scientific concepts have ordered society, particularly as concerns the American scientific community. Being a historian of medicine, many of his examples come from this field: the medical profession and society; sexuality, heredity and disease; the influence ofscientific research on medicine; the evaluation of health. The book can therefore be recommended to those concerned with the history of medicine and science, although many may wish to avoid its high price by perusing the onrginal articles which are to be found in readily available journals.