Engaging Words

Engaging Words
Author: L. Amtower
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1349629987

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Acts of reading appear everywhere in the late Middle Ages, from the margins of Books of Hours to self-portraits of authors in their studies. What relevance did this image have for the late medieval imagination? Engaging Words is an interdisciplinary study on the conception of reading in late medieval society. Beginning with an examination of the social conditions that produced a viable reading public, the book proceeds to examine popular tastes, the interrelationship between manuscript form and content, and finally the theory and poetry of late medieval authors. By drawing on images from late medieval culture as well as from historical documents and literary texts, Engaging Words shows how reading became a cultural metaphor in the late Middle Ages that transformed the way the Western world thought about identity and social roles.

Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature

Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature
Author: Graham Williams
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018-05-17
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1137540699

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This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.

Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture

Negotiating Boundaries in Medieval Literature and Culture
Author: Valerie B. Johnson
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2022-03-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501514210

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Thomas Hahn’s work laid the foundations for medieval romance studies to embrace the study of alterity and hybridity within Middle English literature. His contributions to scholarship brought Robin Hood studies into the critical mainstream, normalized the study of historically marginalized literature and peoples, and encouraged scholars to view medieval readers as actively encountering others and exploring themselves. This volume employs his methodologies – careful attention to texts and their contexts, cross-cultural readings, and theoretically-informed analysis – to highlight the literary culture of late medieval England afresh. Addressing long-established canonical works such as Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, and Malory alongside understudied traditions and manuscripts, this book will be of interest to literary scholars of the later Middle Ages who, like Hahn, work across boundaries of genre, tradition, and chronology.

Richard II

Richard II
Author: Nigel Saul
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300149050

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Richard II is one of the most enigmatic of English kings. Shakespeare depicted him as a tragic figure, an irresponsible, cruel monarch who nevertheless rose in stature as the substance of power slipped from him. By later writers he has been variously portrayed as a half-crazed autocrat or a conventional ruler whose principal errors were the mismanagement of his nobility and disregard for the political conventions of his age. This book—the first full-length biography of Richard in more than fifty years—offers a radical reinterpretation of the king. Nigel Saul paints a picture of Richard as a highly assertive and determined ruler, one whose key aim was to exalt and dignify the crown. In Richard's view, the crown was threatened by the factiousness of the nobility and the assertiveness of the common people. The king met these challenges by exacting obedience, encouraging lofty new forms of address, and constructing an elaborate system of rule by bonds and oaths. Saul traces the sources of Richard's political ideas and finds that he was influenced by a deeply felt orthodox piety and by the ideas of the civil lawyers. He shows that, although Richard's kingship resembled that of other rulers of the period, unlike theirs, his reign ended in failure because of tactical errors and contradictions in his policies. For all that he promoted the image of a distant, all-powerful monarch, Richard II's rule was in practice characterized by faction and feud. The king was obsessed by the search for personal security: in his subjects, however, he bred only insecurity and fear. A revealing portrait of a complex and fascinating figure, the book is essential reading for anyone with an interest in the politics and culture of the English middle ages.

Authors of the Middle Ages. Volume I, Nos 1–4

Authors of the Middle Ages. Volume I, Nos 1–4
Author: David C. Fowler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2016-12-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351956388

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Authors of the Middle Ages is a new series designed for research and reference. Each part, by an expert on the subject, gives an account of the facts known about a particular Author’s life and immediate historical context, together with a review of subsequent scholarship. This is supported by citation of all known contemporary references; a dated and classified list of manuscripts and editions; a bibliography of secondary sources; and appendices listing or printing the key literary and documentary sources. The aim is to combine, in one compact work, a bibliography of a medieval author with all the information needed for further research. Each will be available individually, or in a collection with three other contemporary Authors. Authors of the Middle Ages is divided into two sub-series, English Writers of the Late Middle Ages and historical and Religious Writers of the Latin West.

Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages

Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages
Author: Mark Chinca
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2022-08-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 110847764X

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A ground-breaking investigation into the emergence of new written literatures in the vernacular languages of medieval Europe.

Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad
Author: Jane Gilbert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-02-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192568604

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The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. The field of medieval francophone literary culture outside France was for many years a minor and peripheral sub-field of medieval French literary studies (or, in the case of Anglo-Norman, of English studies). The past two decades, however, have seen a major reassessment of the use of French in England, in the Low Countries, in Italy, and in the eastern Mediterranean, and this impacts significantly upon the history of literature in French more generally. This book is the first to look at the question overall, rather than just at one region. It also takes a more sustained theorised approach than other studies, drawing particularly on Derrida and on Actor-Network Theory. It discusses a wide range of texts, some of which have hitherto been regarded as marginal to French literary history, and makes the case for this material being more central to the literary history of French than was allowed in more traditional approaches focused narrowly on 'France'. Many of the arguments in Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad are grounded in readings of texts in manuscript (rather than in modern critical editions), and sustained attention is paid throughout to manuscripts that were produced or travelled outside the kingdom of France.

A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature

A Companion to Old and Middle English Literature
Author: Laura Lambdin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 447
Release: 2002-06-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313011117

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Old and Middle English literature can be obscure and challenging. So, too, can the vast body of criticism it has elicited. Yet the masters of medieval literature often drew on similar texts, since imitation was admired. For this reason, recent scholarship has often focused on the importance of genre. The genre in which a work was written can illuminate the author's intentions and the text's meaning. Read in light of a genre's parameters, a given work can be considered in relation to other works within the same category. This reference is a comprehensive overview of Old and Middle English literature. Chapters focus on particular genres, such as Allegorical Verse, Balladry, Beast Fable, Chronicle, Debate Poetry, Epic and Heroic, Lyric, Middle English Parody/Burlesque, Religious and Allegorical Verse, and Romance. Expert contributors define the primary characteristics of each genre and discuss relevant literary works. Chapters provide extensive reviews of scholarship and close with detailed bibliographies. A more thorough bibliography of major scholarly studies closes the book.