Edwards, A.S.G. 1942- (Anthony Stockwell Garfield Edwards)

PERSONAL:

Born July 4, 1942, in Scarborough, England; married, 1975; children: two. Education: University of Reading, B.A.; McMaster University, M.A.; University of London, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, De Montfort University, Clephan Bldg., Leicester LE1 9BH, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Professor at University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, Wales; De Montfort University, Leicester, England, professor of English, 2006—. Visiting Professor at University of Washington, 1988, University of Colorado, and Bristol University; Helen Cam fellow at Girton College.

MEMBER:

Society of Antiquaries.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Canada Council Leave fellowship, 1976-77; SSHRCC Leave fellowship, 1983-84; Guggenheim fellow, 1988-89.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) George Cavendish, Metrical Visions, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1980.

(Editor, with Derek Pearsall) Middle English Prose: Essays on Bibliographical Problems, Garland (New York, NY), 1981.

(Editor) John Skelton: The Critical Heritage, Routledge & Kegan Paul (Boston, MA), 1981.

Stephen Hawes, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1983.

(Editor) Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to Major Authors and Genres, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1984.

(With R.E. Lewis and N.F. Blake) Index of Printed Middle English Prose, Garland (New York, NY), 1985.

(Editor and author of introduction) Manuscript Pepys 2006: A Facsimile, Pilgrim Books (Norman, OK), 1985.

(Editor, with Elizabeth Archibald) A Companion to Malory, D.S. Brewer (Rochester, NY), 1996.

(Editor, with Julia Boffey) The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and "The Kingis Quair": A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, D.S. Brewer (Oxford, England), 1997.

(Editor, with Vincent Gillespie and Ralph Hanna) The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, British Library (London, England), 2000.

(Editor, with Jeremy Griffiths) The Tollemache Book of Secrets: A Descriptive Index and Complete Facsimile with an Introduction and Transcriptions Together with Catherine Tollemache's Receipts of Pastery, Confectionary &c, Roxburghe Club (London, England), 2001.

(Editor, with Julia Boffey) Medieval Manuscripts: In the Norlin Library & the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado at Boulder: A Summary Catalogue, Pegasus Press (Fairview, NC), 2002.

(Editor) Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts ("English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700" series, Volume 10) British Library (London, England), 2002.

(Editor) A Companion to Middle English Prose, D.S. Brewer (Rochester, NY), 2004.

(Editor and author of introduction) The Life of St Edmund, King and Martyr: John Lydgate's Illustrated Verse Life Presented to Henry VI: A Facsimile of British Library MS Harley 2278, British Library (London, England), 2004.

(Editor, with Peter Paul) Scribes and Transmission in English Manuscripts 1400-1700, British Library (London, England), 2005.

(Editor, with Julia Boffey) A New Index of Middle English Verse, British Library (London, England), 2005.

Contributor to books, including The Riverside Chaucer, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1987; Chaucerian Religious Tales, edited by C.D. Benson and E. Robertson, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1990; and Readings in Middle English Romance, edited by C. Meale, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1994. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Medieval Studies, Chaucer Review, English Studies, American Benedictine Review, Scriptorium,Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Medievalia and Humanistica, Speculum, Medium Aevum, and Times Literary Supplement. Member of editorial boards, including Variorum Chaucer, Yale Edition of the Works of St. Thomas More, Review, Text, and English Manuscript Studies; advisory editor, Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography; general editor, Index of Middle English Prose.

SIDELIGHTS:

A.S.G. Edwards, a professor of English, has edited a number of scholarly works, manuscript studies, and reference books on Medieval and early Renaissance literature. An internationally renowned textual scholar, Edwards has also published extensively in academic journals and has served on a number of editorial boards, including the Variorum Chaucer.

Edwards and Elizabeth Archibald coedited A Companion to Malory, a collection of original essays about Sir Thomas Malory, the fifteenth-century English author who wrote Le Morte D'Arthur, the most famous prose version of the Arthurian legends. The essays in the volume address three major topics: "Malory in Context," "The Art of the Morte D'Arthur," and "Posterity." According to Toshiyuki Takamiya, writing in Notes and Queries, the first part of the collection "includes historical, social, and contextual discussions of Malory, such as the nature of chivalry and the relationship between the earlier writers of Arthurian history and Malory. The last three articles—on Malory's sources by Terence McCarthy, on his language and style by Jeremy Smith, and Peter Field's succinct but extremely useful account of the Malory life-records— make indispensable tools of reference for Malory studies." "The Art of the Morte D'Arthur" presents discussions of the major sections of the text, and "Posterity" addresses the critical influence of Malory's work. "The structure of this collection is sound: Even the table of contents proves helpful to a reader interested in a particular tale or issue in Malory," noted Karen Cherewatuk in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology. "Nonetheless, the third section of the book is dwarfed by the first two—perhaps appropriately since, despite A.S.G. Edward's fine essay, the Morte's influence is small until the Victorian period." Cherewatuk also remarked that a "patient reader will find that each essay offers both good coverage of basic issues and fresh insights" and described A Companion to Malory as "the single book on Malory every Middle English scholar should read."

Edwards and coeditor Julia Boffey examine "The Kingis Quair," a fifteenth-century poem attributed to King James I of Scotland, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and "The Kingis Quair": A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24. Phillipa Hardman, writing in the Modern Language Review, stated that the editors "draw together the evidence of the contents, the literary context, and the structure of the manuscript to establish convincingly the Scottish nature of the compilation, arguing that the desire to affirm ‘a distinctively Scottish literary identity’ was an important impulse in its making," adding: "This is a facsimile of major importance to the study of the Chaucer tradition and of late-medieval Scottish literary activity, made doubly valuable by the authors' scrupulous investigations of its history both before and after its arrival in the Bodleian Library." Edwards also edited The Life of St Edmund King and Martyr: John Lydgate's Illustrated Verse Life Presented to Henry VI: A Facsimile of British Library MS Harley 2278, a work that "enables the reader to experience … something of the visual and intellectual pleasure that Henry VI must have enjoyed when he received the book in 1439," remarked Nicholas Rogers in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Australian Library Journal, November, 2003, Neil Boness, "A Decoration and Delight," review of Decoration and Illustration in Medieval English Manuscripts, p. 390.

English Historical Review, November, 2001, M.B. Parkes, review of The English Medieval Book: Studies in Memory of Jeremy Griffiths, p. 1257.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, January, 2006, Nicholas Rogers, review of The Life of St Edmund King and Martyr: John Lydgate's Illustrated Verse Life Presented to Henry VI: A Facsimile of British Library MS Harley 2278, p. 149.

Journal of English and Germanic Philology, July, 1998, Karen Cherewatuk, review of A Companion to Malory, p. 420.

Modern Language Review, October, 1999, Phillipa Hardman, review of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and "The Kingis Quair": A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Arch. Selden. B. 24, p. 1072.

Notes and Queries, September, 1997, Toshiyuki Takamiya, review of A Companion to Malory, p. 386.

Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, spring, 2001, review of The English Medieval Book, p. 122.