This chapter takes on the metaphor of the ‘monument’and turns from anonymous romance texts to thosecomposed by named authors, in particular by GeoffreyChaucer. As a metaphor, the monument highlightscurated longevity as resistance to erasure.Monuments are crafted in the present to ensure thelong-term memory of a particular version of thepast. Thus, when he invokes Chaucer’s Squire’s Talein Book IV of his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenserdefines Chaucer’s work as a ‘monument’, albeit onedefaced by time. The idea of the monument, then, isbound up with the idea of the ruin. Thus, Spenserpresents Chaucer as a monumental ruin, one uponwhich he can build for future audiences.Importantly, he does not seek to erase Chaucer, buthe highlights Chaucer’s incompleteness. This chaptercompares Spenser’s treatment of the Squire’s Talewith a less well-known seventeenth-century Squire’sTale composed by poet John Lane, who, like Spenser,uses the romance genre to build upon the ‘ruin’ ofthe past. Exploring both of these authors throughthe framework of the ‘monument’ reveals their variedapproaches to the place of the ‘father of Englishpoetry’ in literary history. Both authors useChaucer’s romance as a monumental foundation uponwhich they might define themselves, Spenser as akindred spirit, a poet, and Lane as an antiquarianscholar interested in restoring what time hasdefaced.

This chapter centres on Edward Banister, an Elizabethanscribe and recusant Catholic who used printed booksas the exemplars for his early modern manuscripts ofMiddle English romance. Banister’s manuscripts,which include copies of Sir Degore, Sir Eglamour,Sir Isumbras, The Jest of Sir Gawain and Robert theDevil, have received little critical attention, andsince the identification of the scribe in 1978,questions about how Banister’s biography andCatholic identity relate to his romance manuscriptshave yet to be asked. This chapter, thus,interrogates the connections between the scribe’srecusant identity and his interest in the romancegenre and manuscript medium. The metaphor of the‘collage’ allows us to more fully comprehend theinterplay of time and technology, creation anddestruction in Banister’s history and manuscripts.We see technological collage in the ways Banistercombines the aesthetics of print and manuscript, andwe see cultural collage when we consider Banister’sposition as a practising Catholic in the midst of achanging religious world.

This chapter centres the metaphor of the ‘museum’ toexplore one of the most popular Middle Englishromances to persist across the Reformation divide:Guy of Warwick. It compares the presentation ofGuy’s artefacts in John Lydgate’s Guy of Warwickwith Samuel Rowlands’s 1609 Famous History of Guy,Earl of Warwick. Both Lydgate’s and Rowlands’s Guynarratives present textual representations ofartefacts associated with Guy’s romance. Objectslike Guy’s sword, the axe of the giant Colbrond andthe rib of the Dun Cow that Guy was supposed to havekilled in Coventry become central to the longevityof Guy’s romance and to some authors’ conceptions ofthe material pre-conquest past. While Lydgate’snarrative positions these objects as relics,signalling the triumphs of Christianity over time,Rowlands’s text ‘musealises’ the artefacts, makingthem portals to and preservers of the distant,tenth-century past. Guy’s objects, in Rowlands’stext, become tourist sites and museum pieces. Inboth Lydgate’s poem and Rowlands’s, though, theartefacts feed off of the narratives that describethem; books become virtual museums or virtualreliquaries. The chapter ends with a comparisonbetween Guy’s artefacts and those associated withthe legends of King Arthur, demonstrating thedifferent perspectives on the role of the romancepast in the world of the present.

Extra Help gives you the logic behind the noun endings, vastly reducing the number of endings you need to learn. Extra Material introduces some of the different jobs that the Greek genitive case can do.

In the Extra Help we invite you to think about ‘reading Greek with understanding’ rather than translating. In the Extra Material you will meet the major contexts in which the accusative case can appear.

In this chapter, we will examine the Old Testament’s role in religious communities as an authoritative revelation from God – the concept of “scripture” common to the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These texts hardly began as the books that now comprise the Bible; rather, what we will discover is a lengthy, complex development of authoritative texts from oral to written to canon.

This chapter will take us inside the ancient world of the Old Testament’s formation. Words, considered powerful, were painstakingly preserved through centuries in the hands of anonymous authors and editors, scribes and scholars. Texts were collected into books and went through a process of use and standardization by the ancient Israelites, beginning as early as the tenth century bceand lasting through the Babylonian exile and beyond – emerging finally in the canonical form we know today as the Old Testament.