Philological Quarterly

In Patience, the Gawain-poet's retelling of the story of Jonah and the whale, the moment of Jonah's comeuppance conjures an image of a cathedral: he tumbles into the filthy jaws "as mote in at a munster dor" (268). (1) There in the belly of the whale,...

Scholars have long recognized that Soul and Body, an Old English poem that depicts a damned soul berating the body it once inhabited, was intended to serve as a spiritually prophylactic work. The soul is brutal as it enumerates the sins the body has...

The saints played a significant role in the life of any medieval Christian: structuring the sense of time through their feast days, appearing in church paintings and sculptures, featuring in sermons and Gospel readings, acting as intercessors and patrons...

Medievalists have been arguing about minstrels for nearly two and a half centuries. This argument is both older than, and fundamental to, medieval studies as an academic discipline. Indeed, perhaps the only older, longer-running argument in the study...

This essay examines three recent books focused on the fifteenth century--Robert Meyer-Lee's Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge U. Press, 2007), Daniel Wakelin's Humanism, Reading, and English Literature: 1430-1530 (Oxford U. Press, 2007),...