The lay of Yonec is composed of 562 lines of eight syllables, riming in couplets. The substance of this charming lay of Marie de France is as follows:—

There lived in Britain an old knight, who was so jealous of his young wife's beauty that he confined her in a tower and placed her under the care of his sister, an aged widow. The knight passed his time in the chase, while his young wife had no solace but in her tears. One morning in April, after he had set off on his usual occupation, the fair lady began her lamentations as she was wont to do. She execrated the hour when she was born, and the avarice of her parents, who had married her to an old jealous tyrant.

Among the many baffling problems of Chaucerian scholarship are those connected with the Squire's Tale. To undertake a satisfactory solution of these is to court disaster. The attempt confounds us. One may, however, with all modesty endeavor to fix one's bearings in the area of story-land to which this poem belongs. To know where we are is almost as gratifying as to discover a source, and it is sometimes more instructive. If, then, I can do anything to further a survey of the narrative neighborhood of the Squire's Tale and its nearest analogue, the Cléomadès, my work may be serviceable. Perhaps, too, this paper may put in a clearer light the probabilities in regard to Chaucer's method and inspiration while at work upon one of his best known Tales of Canterbury.

“Essays on the Court Wits as individuals, however well done,” John Harold Wilson observed a few years ago, “have always been somewhat unsatisfactory because of a natural tendency to treat the subject of the essay as a phenomenon taken bodily from his cultural environment.” Sir George Etherege has suffered as much as any other important Restoration writer from this critical failing of examining a literary figure outside the context of his own age. The result has been a totally attenuated picture of Etherege as a rather superficial rake; and this has been paralleled by an equally attenuated understanding of his plays. This critical failing is due in large part, I think, to the lack of information about his life.

Chaucer Writes about more varieties of amatory experience than any other English poet except Shakespeare. Whether in this abundance we have God's plenty or the devil's I will leave to Dryden and Father Denomy and try to comment only on this point of view as he relates the love visions and Troilus and Criseyde.

The divided self in James’s fiction may be regarded as an inevitable structural consequence of James’s desire to dramatize the problem of the free spirit in an enslaving world. But the divided self required by art is not essentially different from the divided self known to psychology, and an understanding of the anxieties of that self, particularly of the “obsessive imagery” James uses to depict those anxieties, enriches our understanding of James’s work. The fear of a world that threatens one’s being issues in an elaborate development of an escape motif; of imagery of seizure by the eye and by the world of appearances; and of imagery of petrification, reflecting a dread of being turned into a mere tool or machine. James’s vision of “the great trap of life” permits him to come to terms with his own limitations and culminates in a searching philosophic examination of the problem of free will and determinism.

In Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark (London, 1796) is a passage connecting two other interesting people, and not hitherto noticed so far as I find. It reads:

Among the many forms of poetic composition cultivated by the troubadours of Provence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one of the most distinctive is that listed in the Leys d'Amors under the name enueg. This word, a Provençal form of the Latin inodium, means literally ‘vexation,’ or ‘that which is vexing;’ and technically it designates a poem which treats the annoyances of life from mere trifles to serious insults, from improprieties at the table to serious misdemeanors. This kind of poem, differing essentially in subject matter from the conventional erotic poetry of the time, belongs rather to that class known as sirventés; poetry which treats public or private affairs with either praise or censure. Like many of the sirventés, the enueg has now and then a didactic purpose; but in most cases the poet voices his own likes or dislikes without any ulterior motive.

Malcolm El Win'S treatment of Charles Reade's documentary method is for the most part sound, yet his suggested sources for the “flood scenes” of Put Yourself in His Place (1870) are incomplete and misleading. While he is correct in saying that Reade “enacted his principal researches at Sheffield”, and that “the scene of the novel [Sheffield] is thinly disguised under the name of Hillsborough”, he is wrong in assuming that Reade derived his “flood scenes” from the materials included in one of his notebooks.

The legendary Life of Judas the Betrayer, based, it is usually said, on the Greek myth of Œdipus, is found in almost every language and country of mediæval Europe. It was written down in Latin as early as the twelfth century. By the end of the thirteenth century it was turned into the vernacular in lands as far apart as Wales, Catalonia, and Bohemia. At the close of the Middle Ages it had become the possession of the folk, and since that period—to some extent even during the fifteenth century—it has spread northward and eastward into Scandinavia, Finland, Russia, and Bulgaria. It was related in Greek, probably in the Middle Ages, although the manuscripts are of a much later date. It was still told orally in Galicia at the end of the last century. As a regular part of the ecclesiastical literature of the West it received canonization, so to say, late in the thirteenth century, in the great legendary of Jacopo da Voragine; but, on the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that in the Middle Ages, so far as I have been able to learn, none of the reputable church writers (with the exception of Jacopo) recognized or even mentioned it. And furthermore, mediaeval sculptors and carvers of wood and ivory, who gave themselves with so much zeal to the plastic representation of legendary matter, completely eschewed or overlooked the ‘early life’ of Judas. Not indeed that either the church writers or artists sought to avoid contact with such a wicked character; on the contrary, they devoted considerable space to him, rejecting only his apocryphal career. However this omission may be explained, the fact must be recognized as of some interest.

FIVE LEAVES of the Skeireins (I, II, V, VI, VII) are in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, where they form Cod. E 147 parte superiore, 4° maj. Leaf VI, which bears the Arabic page numbers 309–310, disappeared from the codex at some time in the course of World War II, probably in 1943. In August of that year Milan underwent three successive nights of heavy bombing, in which thirteen halls of the Ambrosiana were destroyed, ten others damaged, and some 80,000 volumes burned beyond recognition. Fortunately, the Ambrosian Gothic palimpsests were rushed to safety and so escaped the fate of the Giessen document. In 1948 the Ambrosiana provided the writer with fluorescent type ultraviolet photographs of I, II, V, and VII but reported that VI was missing or misplaced. In 1950 a decipherment of I, II, V, and VII was published, followed in 1954 by a reading of the Vatican leaves (III, IV, VIII), but the absence of VI still precluded any attempt to complete the study of the manuscript. Finally, in 1955 it became possible to examine the Skeireins fragments in Vatican City and Milan, and, at the same time, to look for the missing leaf. Leaf VI proved to be misplaced in Cod. Ambros. A. How it came there is a matter for conjecture, but the haste and confusion produced by the 1943 bombing may well account for the misplacement.

Everywhere I turn, there seems to be a new bandwagon waiting with bold claims on how it will save the humanities. I'm curious. I'm excited. I'm also weary.

The MOOC (massive open online course) explosion happened, and I participated with glee. It let no revolution in its wake. I love the deeply interdisciplinary and interactive shape of life for students at Design Tech High School in Silicon Valley but fear there's a dark side to Oracle's bankrolling it with upward of $43 million. And, in the bloating of middle management and infusion of cash into e.learning units on campuses across the country, we might be seeing “management theorists” lurking in sheep's clothes out to create a workforceready. only population. I worry for the twenty-two million students served in college—and especially all the rest not being served.

Although French fable literature played a prominent part in the evolution of the Æsopic Fable in the Middle Ages, no general account of its history and development has as yet been written by any modern scholar. Single collections of French fables dating from this period have been published from time to time in more or less critical editions, and certain phases of the more general field have been investigated by various scholars, but it is believed that the present paper may justly claim to be the first general survey of Old French Fable Literature within certain well-defined limits.

Needless to say, it is not with an American agrarian revolt of the end of last century, nor with the fortunes of a German political party that this paper is concerned, but rather with that fruitful and significant grouping of a score or more of contemporary French novelists under the banner of a common conception of the novel, its aims and appropriate media. If the name “Populism” is misleading because of certain political implications, one can at least be thankful that André Thérive and Léon Lemonnier in the consultations that preceded the launching of the new school a little over three years ago rejected labels such as “humilism” and “demotism” which might have proved even more puzzling.

Although Puritans in the Elizabethan period were of many varieties, dramatists agreed in representing them by a single type. Whether this type was originally drawn from life, or was evolved from the presentation of the Hypocrite in the morality plays, there can be no doubt that the conventional Puritan of the Elizabethan stage was little more than an abstraction. Real Puritans even then were of many minds: some stood for Calvinism and some for re-baptism; some for a militant church and some for a passive; some were democratic and would let the congregation rule, and some believed in a presbyterian form of government. Others joined the Puritans merely because they objected to so much royal interference. The existence of so many diverse views among the Puritans may to some extent have necessitated a broad characterization of them. Thompson has shown, however, that even when dealing with a particular sect, as for example the Family of Love, Elizabethan playwrights failed to discriminate.

Questions of divine intercession and the human transmission of God's word were central to Enlightenment debates about what we would now call media. De foe's neglected Essay upon Literature begins as an argument for the divine origins of writing, but its focus on writing as God's git to humans gives way to a new kind of history, concerned with the development of human communications (oral tradition, writing systems, the invention of printing, and so on). By identifying histories of mediation, like Defoe's, as a distinct genre, we see new links between texts by such wildly diverse authors as Edward Stillingleet, William Temple, William Warburton, Adam Smith, and the Marquis de Con dorcet. Defoe's attempt to articulate an emergent area of intellectual inquiry and his understanding of literature as writing in general rather than as a subcategory of writing challenge us to think through our own generic classiications and hierarchies in the digital age.