[PDF] Documentary Culture And The Making Of Medieval English Literature eBook

Author : Emily Steiner
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 19,20 MB
Release : 2003-05-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521824842

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Emily Steiner describes the rich intersections between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late medieval England.

Author : Emily Steiner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 22,94 MB
Release : 2021-08-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0192650831

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What would medieval English literature look like if we viewed it through the lens of the compendium? In that case, John Trevisa might come into focus as the major author of the fourteenth century. Trevisa (d. 1402) made a career of translating big informational texts from Latin into English prose. These included Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, an enormous universal history, Bartholomaeus Anglicus's well-known natural encyclopedia De proprietatibus rerum, and Giles of Rome's advice-for-princes manual, De regimine principum. These were shrewd choices, accessible and on trend: De proprietatibus rerum and De regimine principum had already been translated into French and copied in deluxe manuscripts for the French and English nobility, and the Polychronicon had been circulating England for several decades. This book argues that John Trevisa's translations of compendious informational texts disclose an alternative literary history by way of information culture. Bold and lively experiments, these translations were a gamble that the future of literature in England was informational prose. This book argues that Trevisa's oeuvre reveals an alternative literary history more culturally expansive and more generically diverse than that which we typically construct for his contemporaries, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century European writers compiled massive reference books which would shape knowledge well into the Renaissance. This study maintains that they had a major impact on English poetry and prose. In fact, what we now recognize to be literary properties emerged in part from translations of medieval compendia with their inventive ways of handling vast quantities of information.

Author : Emily V. Thornbury
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 47,10 MB
Release : 2014-01-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1107051983

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A groundbreaking study of pre-Conquest English poets that rethinks the social role of Anglo-Saxon verse.

Author : Suzanne M. Yeager
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 40,71 MB
Release : 2008-11-06
Category : History
ISBN : 052187792X

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An original study of the political, religious and literary uses of representations of the holy city in the fourteenth century.

Author : D. H. Green
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 24,82 MB
Release : 2009-04-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0521513359

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D. H. Green shows how German romances found ways to debate and challenge the conventional antifeminism of the medieval period.

Author : Katie L. Walter
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 539 pages
File Size : 33,28 MB
Release : 2018-06-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1108565204

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The mouth, responsible for both physical and spiritual functions - eating, drinking, breathing, praying and confessing - was of immediate importance to medieval thinking about the nature of the human being. Where scholars have traditionally focused on the mouth's grotesque excesses, Katie L. Walter argues for the recuperation of its material 'everyday' aspect. Walter's original study draws on two rich archives: one comprising Middle English theology (Langland, Julian of Norwich, Lydgate, Chaucer) and pastoral writings; the other broadly medical and surgical, including learned encyclopaedias and vernacular translations and treatises. Challenging several critical orthodoxies about the centrality of sight, the hierarchy of the senses and the separation of religious from medical discourses, the book reveals the centrality of the mouth, taste and touch to human modes of knowing and to Christian identity.

Author : Jessica Rosenfeld
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 32,91 MB
Release : 2010-12-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1139495259

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Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.

Author : Joseph Taylor
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 275 pages
File Size : 16,30 MB
Release : 2022-12-22
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1009192280

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Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages offers a literary history of the North-South divide, examining the complexities of the relationship – imaginative, material, and political – between North and South in a wide range of texts. Through sustained analysis of the North-South divide as it emerges in the literature of medieval England, this study illustrates the convoluted dynamic of desire and derision of the North by the rest of country. Joseph Taylor dissects England's problematic sense of nationhood as one which must be negotiated and renegotiated from within, rather than beyond, national borders. Providing fresh readings of texts such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads and the Towneley plays, this book argues for the North's vital contribution to processes of imagining nation in the Middle Ages and shows that that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism.

Author : Michael Van Dussen
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 48,22 MB
Release : 2012-03
Category : History
ISBN : 1107016797

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The first examination of cultural exchanges between England and Bohemia after 1382, eventually leading to the suppression of heresy.

Author : Ralph Hanna
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 390 pages
File Size : 35,12 MB
Release : 2005-06-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780521848350

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Ralph Hanna charts the generic and linguistic features particular to London writing.