Medieval into Renaissance. Essays for Helen Cooper. Ed. Andrew King, Matthew Woodcock.

• Joerg Fichte

This collection of twelve essays by scholars taught and supervised by Helen Cooper derives its name from her first monograph, Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance, in 1977. It is a programmatic title because it implies continuity, inheritance, and preservation as well as memory, rather than transition or novelty. As the two editors profess: “The recognition that medieval and Renaissance studies entail tracing patterns of both continuity and change, looking both backwards and forwards, and paying attention to specificities of genre, region, class, language and medium, places a particular premium upon the micro-historical approach and individual case-studies...”. The essays in this festschrift reflect this creed because they are all dedicated to the analysis of how the medieval is remembered or preserved during the sixteenth century and beyond “through imitation, adaptation, translation, continuity of ideas and practices, or through the printing and re-appropriation of medieval texts”.