Middle English Marvels

“This book offers a tantalizing glimpse into an intriguing topic, the convergence of marvels, morality, and spectacle. By selecting the marvellous, Williams has chosen to consider a key feature of medieval literature, one that includes divine intervention, supernatural transformations, and the wondrous workings of technology.”

—Natalie Goodison Medium Aevum

“Middle English Marvels articulates a new aspect to our understanding of the role of marvels, it adds dimension to our understanding of the importance of magic in vernacular literary culture, and it demonstrates the extent to which wonder was mobilized to foster moral contemplation. Grounded in deft textual interpretation, this book will be a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on marvels and wonder for scholars in literary and medieval studies.”

—E. R. Truitt Speculum

“A universal appeal underlies this book's particular exploration of how Middle English literary spectacles function in a handful of 14th-century texts. . . . Williams contributes to the scholarly discussion material that will be useful for understanding traditional elements such as plot, character, and theme and also postmodern interest in identity and alterity.”

—A. P. Church Choice

“Williams’s book adds to growing scholarly interest in medieval magic and marvels. She demonstrates that these themes functioned differently in medieval literature than they did in medieval scientific and theological writings, which were more interested in drawing sharp distinctions between the natural and miraculous or the magical and the divine.”

—Andrew Fogleman Comitatus

“Dr. Williams offers a close reading and deep meditation on important poems from this period, thoroughly engages and profits from the secondary literature, and leads her readers into a new way of appreciating the power of story to occasion personal and collective development, then and now.”

—Patrick Madigan Heythrop Journal

“Presents a fascinating perspective on perceptions of the marvellous and magical in the high Middle Ages, especially in terms of how it relates to other aspects of the study of mediaeval magic.”

—Fortean Times

“A well-written, accessible, and insightful volume, and one of clear interest to scholars of Middle English literature, particularly of romance. And it may well prove very useful, too, for teaching. . . . The value of this study is in the further speculation on texts like those discussed it stimulates, and on larger questions about language and literary tradition—and the role wonder can play in our own ethical engagement with the world.”

—Lisa M. C. Weston Modern Philology

“A subtle, readable, and learned analysis of the ‘theory of the marvelous’ developed by writers of Middle English romances. This book makes a significant contribution not only to romance studies itself but also to the growing body of work on the flexible relationships between the different types of medieval wonder and on their aesthetic and ethical implications. Middle English Marvels will be of equal interest to scholars and their students.”

—Nicholas Watson, coeditor of The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love

“Williams’s deft survey of fourteenth-century Middle English literary texts reveals a moral theory of the marvelous, which she traces from the actions it provokes in Orfeo and Lybeaus Desconus to the reflections it inspires in the Canterbury Tales. Through investigations of spectacle and the cognitive effects of wonder, situated in contexts ranging from genre to manuscripts to history and philosophy, Middle English Marvels offers a new understanding of how magic encourages moral contemplation in characters and readers, then and now.”

—Myra Seaman, coeditor of Fragments for a History of a Vanishing Humanism

“An insightful study that examines literary magic in fourteenth-century England on its own terms. Through a series of subtle readings, Tara Williams identifies a previously unnoticed concatenation of magic, spectacle, and reflections on morality among a group of vernacular romances that construct their own view of the marvelous. This book makes a valuable contribution to magic studies and to affect studies through the ethical use of wonder.”

—Lee Manion, author of Narrating the Crusades: Loss and Recovery in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature

“There is no shortage of works on marvel, wonder, and magic in Middle English literature and beyond. Yet, despite entering this fairly well-trodden field, Williams's study offers a novel theory of the marvelous in Middle English literature that is moreover firmly contextualized within the historical context of the fourteenth century and deftly illustrated through a detailed analysis of a selection of key texts from the period.”

—Sif Rikhardsdottir Studies in the Age of Chaucer

“This a solid albeit selective study of a number of romance texts that go against the grain of their times, well documented in terms of its recognition of recent relevant secondary studies. Its greatest contribution is to stress that the medieval public for romance and the marvelous was not simply awestruck by a wonder but recognized its disparity with the quotidian as the fortuitous occasion for reflection and perhaps personal reassessment.”

—William Sayers Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft

“Williams's work is a welcome addition to romance criticism and Middle English literary scholarship. Beyond these immediate fields, those readers with an interest in questions of gender and monstrosity, morality and ethics, and of course magic and the marvelous should certainly avail themselves of this book, which will appeal to scholars, students, and individuals with a general interest in these subjects, thanks in no small part to Williams's skill in writing accessibly and engagingly, as well as critically.”

—Melissa Ridley Elmes Preternature

“Williams’s book extends the considerable amount of work on a number of interlocking concepts that has been produced over the last few decades: on ‘marvels’ and the ‘marvelous’; ‘wonder’ (what one does when one is faced with a marvel, or something marvelous); ‘magic and the supernatural,’ treated as parallel notions; the ‘otherworld,’ or ‘otherworlds.’”

—Marilyn Corrie Journal of British Studies