Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England

Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: D. S. Brewer
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2018-03-02
Genre: Anglo-Norman literature
ISBN: 9781843844907

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Excerpts from texts (with translation) from the French of medieval England offer a guide to medieval literary theory.

The Idea of the Vernacular

The Idea of the Vernacular
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 532
Release: 1999
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780271017587

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This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 1280 and 1520 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the &"mother tongue&" during a period of revolutionary change for the English language. The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the &"courtly&" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors. Besides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. The Idea of the Vernacular will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory.

The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry

The Refrain and the Rise of the Vernacular in Medieval French Music and Poetry
Author: Jennifer Saltzstein
Publisher: DS Brewer
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2013
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1843843498

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A survey of the use of the refrain in thirteenth and fourteenth-century French music and poetry, showing how it was skilfully deployed to assert the validity of the vernacular. The relationship between song quotation and the elevation of French as a literary language that could challenge the cultural authority of Latin is the focus of this book. It approaches this phenomenon through a close examination of the refrain, a short phrase of music and text quoted intertextually across thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century musical and poetic genres. The author draws on a wide range of case studies, from motets, trouvère song, plays, romance, vernacular translations, and proverb collections, to show that medieval composers quoted refrains as vernacular auctoritates; she argues that their appropriation of scholastic, Latinate writing techniques workedto authorize Old French music and poetry as media suitable for the transmission of knowledge. Beginning with an exploration of the quasi-scholastic usage of refrains in anonymous and less familiar clerical contexts, the book goeson to articulate a new framework for understanding the emergence of the first two named authors of vernacular polyphonic music, the cleric-trouvères Adam de la Halle and Guillaume de Machaut. It shows how, by blending their craftwith the writing practices of the universities, composers could use refrain quotation to assert their status as authors with a new self-consciousness, and to position works in the vernacular as worthy of study and interpretation. Jennifer Saltzstein is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Oklahoma.

Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad
Author: Jane Gilbert
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2020-03-12
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0198832451

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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.

The Idea of the Vernacular

The Idea of the Vernacular
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 506
Release: 1999
Genre: English literature
ISBN: 9780859895927

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This anthology collects and analyzes a sample of texts from the late Middle Ages concerned with the writing or reading process. Some 60 prologues and other excerpts are drawn from literary texts as well as from religious, philosophical, historical and other kinds of writing.

Language and Culture in Medieval Britain

Language and Culture in Medieval Britain
Author: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne
Publisher: York Medieval Press
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2009
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9781903153277

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Groundbreaking surveys of the complex interrelationship between the languages of English and French in medieval Britain.

From Script to Print

From Script to Print
Author: Henry John Chaytor
Publisher:
Total Pages: 182
Release: 1974
Genre: Literature, Medieval
ISBN:

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The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England

The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England
Author: William Calin
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 604
Release: 1994-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1442655259

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he French presence in English literary history in the centuries following the Conquest has to some extent been glossed over or treated as an interlude. During this period, roughly 1100-1420, French, like Latin, was the language of the educated; in the courts of England, and for nobles, clerics, and the rising commercial elements, communication was multilingual. In his ground-breaking study, William Calin explores indepth this era of medieval English literature and culture in relation to its distinctly French influences and contemporaries. He examines the Anglo-Norman contribution to medieval literature, concentrating on romance and hagiography; the great continental French texts, such as Prose Lancelot and the Romance of the Rose, which had a dominant role in shaping literature in English; and the English response to the French cultural world - the two 'modes' in English where the French presence was most significant: court poetry (Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve) and Middle English romance. This book is grounded in French sources both well-known and relatively obscure. Translations of the Old French makeThe French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England accessible to scholars and students of Medieval English, comparatists, and historians, as well as those proficient in French. Calin develops a synthesis of medieval French and English literature that will be especially useful for classroom study.

Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Vernacular Literary Theory in the Middle Ages
Author: Walter Haug
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006-11-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521027993

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The first edition of this book appeared in German in 1985, and set a new agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. Rather than seeing vernacular writers' reflections on their art, such as are found in prologues, epilogues and interpolations in literary texts, as merely deriving from established Latin traditions, Walter Haug shows that they marked the gradual emancipation of an independent vernacular poetics that went hand in hand with changing narrative forms. While focussing primarily on medieval German writers, Haug also takes into account French literature of the same period, and the principles underlying his argument are equally relevant to medieval literature in English or any other European language. This ground-breaking study is now available in English for the first time.

Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages

Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages
Author: Ardis Butterfield
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2023-03-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108619495

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This collection makes a new, profound and far-reaching intervention into the rich yet little-explored terrain between Latin scholastic theory and vernacular literature. Written by a multidisciplinary team of leading international authors, the chapters honour and advance Alastair Minnis's field-defining scholarship. A wealth of expert essays refract the nuances of theory through the medium of authoritative Latin and vernacular medieval texts, providing fresh interpretative treatment to known canonical works while also bringing unknown materials to light.