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John J. Thompson, The 'Cursor mandi. Poem, Texts and Contexts, Medium YEvurn Monographs, NS XIX (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 1998). xii + 193 pp. ISBN 0-905570-12-7. l 11.00.
Cursor mandi is mainly known these days as a text useful for showing philology students the effects of Middle English dialect differences (the text has been transmitted both in the original pure northern and in various southerly forms). The more adventurous might know it as an excerpted set text (see J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers, Early Middle English Verse and Prose, pp. 184-95). But, of course, there is quite a lot more to the poem than this - in fact, 30,000 lines of versified history, from...