scholarly journals Monograph of the Lias Ammonites of the British Isles by Thomas Wright (in two volumes). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2015. No. of pages: 1-328 + 329-503. Price: Volume 1 £33-00; Volume 2 £22-99. ISBN 978-1-108-08140-5 (volume 1), 978-1-108-08141

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (6) ◽  
pp. 970-970
Author(s):  
John Whicher
Keyword(s):  
British Isles ◽  
Cambridge University

Lancelot of the Laik and the Literary Manuscript Miscellany in 15th- and 16th-century Scotland

Insular Books ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Wingfield
Keyword(s):  
English Translation ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
University Library ◽  
Scottish Parliament ◽  
New Arcadia ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Manuscript Copy

This chapter begins by introducing the most significant features of Scottish literary manuscript miscellanies, such as: their relatively late date, in comparison with surviving miscellanies from elsewhere in the British Isles; their copying by scribes who also functioned as notary publics, writers to the signet, and merchants; their links to some of Scotland’s most prominent book-owning families; and their inclusion of material derived from print and from south of the border. The remainder of the chapter offers a necessarily brief case study of one particular Older Scots literary manuscript miscellany (Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.1.5) in which the Older Scots romance, Lancelot of the Laik, is placed alongside a selection of Scottish courtesy texts and legal material, a series of English and Scottish prophecies, several acts of the Scottish parliament, an English translation of Christine de Pisan’s Livre du Corps de Policie, and the only surviving manuscript copy of Sir Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia.

‘The best English-Irish poetry before Yeats’

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Moulden
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Language Poetry ◽  
Irish Language ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Traditional Songs ◽  
High Level

‘[T]he best Irish-English poetry before Yeats’: thus, in The Listener in 1970, John Holloway described a genre of exuberantly worded songs that employed complex patterns of rhyme deriving from Irish language poetry, many of which were among the nineteenth-century ballad sheet collections of Sir Frederic Madden, held in Cambridge University library. Items in this form seem to have surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century, soon after the appearance of the earliest eight-page songbook to be printed in Ireland, and probably the first anywhere in the ‘British Isles’. This essay traces the development of this genre towards, perhaps its finest manifestation, the luxuriously florid bawdry of ‘The Cuckoo’s Nest’, probably composed by the northern-born but Drogheda-based weaver poet John Sheil (c.1784–1872). Many commonly known and apparently innocuous traditional songs are found as bawdry in early collections and employ a range of sexual metaphors, well understood at that time among men but not (openly) among women or more recently. The combination of verbal flourish and double entendre together with a consummate control over the complexity of rhyme and rhythm forced John Holloway to recognize vernacular verse as, not a debased version of ‘educated’ poetry, but as a genre with its own standards, a parallel form that bears comparison at a high level.

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