Chaucer And Religious Controversies In The Medieval And Early Modern Eras

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Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Author : Nancy Bradley Warren
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268105839
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (681 download)

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Book Synopsis Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras by : Nancy Bradley Warren

Download or read book Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras written by Nancy Bradley Warren and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras adopts a comparative, boundary-crossing approach to consider one of the most canonical of literary figures, Geoffrey Chaucer. The idea that Chaucer is an international writer raises no eyebrows. Similarly, a claim that Chaucer's writings participate in English confessional controversies in his own day and afterward provokes no surprise. This book breaks new ground by considering Chaucer's Continental interests as they inform his participation in religious debates concerning such subjects as female spirituality and Lollardy. Similarly, this project explores the little-studied ways in which those who took religious vows, especially nuns, engaged with works by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition. Furthermore, while the early modern "Protestant Chaucer" is a familiar figure, this book explores the creation and circulation of an early modern "Catholic Chaucer" that has not received much attention. This study seeks to fill gaps in Chaucer scholarship by situating Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition in an international textual environment of religious controversy spanning four centuries and crossing both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. This book presents a nuanced analysis of the high stakes religiopolitical struggle inherent in the creation of the canon of English literature, a struggle that participates in the complex processes of national identity formation in Europe and the New World alike.

Tropologies

Author : Ryan McDermott
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268087091
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis Tropologies by : Ryan McDermott

Download or read book Tropologies written by Ryan McDermott and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tropologies is the first book-length study to elaborate the medieval and early modern theory of the tropological, or moral, sense of scripture. Ryan McDermott argues that tropology is not only a way to interpret the Bible but also a theory of literary and ethical invention. The “tropological imperative” demands that words be turned into works—books as well as deeds. Beginning with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, then treating monuments of exegesis such as the Glossa ordinaria and Nicholas of Lyra, as well as theorists including Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and others, Tropologies reveals the unwritten history of a major hermeneutical theory and inventive practice. Late medieval and early Reformation writers adapted tropological theory to invent new biblical poetry and drama that would invite readers to participate in salvation history by inventing their own new works. Tropologies reinterprets a wide range of medieval and early modern texts and performances—including the Patience-Poet, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, the York and Coventry cycle plays, and the literary circles of the reformist King Edward VI—to argue that “tropological invention” provided a robust alternative to rhetorical theories of literary production. In this groundbreaking revision of literary history, the Bible and biblical hermeneutics, commonly understood as sources of tumultuous discord, turn out to provide principles of continuity and mutuality across the Reformation’s temporal and confessional rifts. Each chapter pursues an argument about poetic and dramatic form, linking questions of style and aesthetics to exegetical theory and theology. Because Tropologies attends to the flux of exegetical theory and practice across a watershed period of intellectual history, it is able to register subtle shifts in literary production, fine-tuning our sense of how literature and religion mutually and dynamically informed and reformed each other.

Miserere Mei

Author : Clare Costley King'oo
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268084610
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (68 download)

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Book Synopsis Miserere Mei by : Clare Costley King'oo

Download or read book Miserere Mei written by Clare Costley King'oo and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2012-05-31 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Miserere Mei, Clare Costley King'oo examines the critical importance of the Penitential Psalms in England between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. During this period, the Penitential Psalms inspired an enormous amount of creative and intellectual work: in addition to being copied and illustrated in Books of Hours and other prayer books, they were expounded in commentaries, imitated in vernacular translations and paraphrases, rendered into lyric poetry, and even modified for singing. Miserere Mei explores these numerous transformations in materiality and genre. Combining the resources of close literary analysis with those of the history of the book, it reveals not only that the Penitential Psalms lay at the heart of Reformation-age debates over the nature of repentance, but also, and more significantly, that they constituted a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement across the many polarities that are often said to separate late medieval from early modern culture. Miserere Mei features twenty-five illustrations and provides new analyses of works based on the Penitential Psalms by several key writers of the time, including Richard Maidstone, Thomas Brampton, John Fisher, Martin Luther, Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and Richard Verstegan. It will be of value to anyone interested in the interpretation, adaptation, and appropriation of biblical literature; the development of religious plurality in the West; the emergence of modernity; and the periodization of Western culture. Students and scholars in the fields of literature, religion, history, art history, and the history of material texts will find Miserere Mei particularly instructive and compelling.

Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640

Author : Lynneth Miller Renberg
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1783277475
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (832 download)

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Book Synopsis Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640 by : Lynneth Miller Renberg

Download or read book Women, Dance and Parish Religion in England, 1300-1640 written by Lynneth Miller Renberg and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively exploration of the medieval and early modern attitudes towards dance, as the perception of dancers changed from saints dancing after Christ into cows dancing after the devil.

Translating Christ in the Middle Ages

Author : Barbara Zimbalist
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268202214
Total Pages : 426 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (682 download)

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Book Synopsis Translating Christ in the Middle Ages by : Barbara Zimbalist

Download or read book Translating Christ in the Middle Ages written by Barbara Zimbalist and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study reveals how women’s visionary texts played a central role within medieval discourses of authorship, reading, and devotion. From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, women across northern Europe began committing their visionary conversations with Christ to the written word. Translating Christ in this way required multiple transformations: divine speech into human language, aural event into textual artifact, visionary experience into linguistic record, and individual encounter into communal repetition. This ambitious study shows how women’s visionary texts form an underexamined literary tradition within medieval religious culture. Barbara Zimbalist demonstrates how, within this tradition, female visionaries developed new forms of authorship, reading, and devotion. Through these transformations, the female visionary authorized herself and her text, and performed a rhetorical imitatio Christi that offered models of interpretive practice and spoken devotion to her readers. This literary-historical tradition has not yet been fully recognized on its own terms. By exploring its development in hagiography, visionary texts, and devotional literature, Zimbalist shows how this literary mode came to be not only possible but widespread and influential. She argues that women’s visionary translation reconfigured traditional hierarchies and positions of spiritual power for female authors and readers in ways that reverberated throughout late-medieval literary and religious cultures. In translating their visionary conversations with Christ into vernacular text, medieval women turned themselves into authors and devotional guides, and formed their readers into textual communities shaped by gendered visionary experiences and spoken imitatio Christi. Comparing texts in Latin, Dutch, French, and English, Translating Christ in the Middle Ages explores how women’s visionary translation of Christ’s speech initiated larger transformations of gendered authorship and religious authority within medieval culture. The book will interest scholars in different linguistic and religious traditions in medieval studies, history, religious studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England

Author : Robert E. Stillman
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268200432
Total Pages : 557 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (682 download)

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Book Synopsis Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England by : Robert E. Stillman

Download or read book Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England written by Robert E. Stillman and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 557 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book challenges the adequacy of identifying religious identity with confessional identity. The Reformation complicated the issue of religious identity, especially among Christians for whom confessional violence at home and religious wars on the continent had made the darkness of confessionalization visible. Robert E. Stillman explores the identity of “Christians without names,” as well as their agency as cultural actors in order to recover their consequence for early modern religious, political, and poetic history. Stillman argues that questions of religious identity have dominated historical and literary studies of the early modern period for over a decade. But his aim is not to resolve the controversies about early modern religious identity by negotiating new definitions of English Protestants, Catholics, or “moderate” and “radical” Puritans. Instead, he provides an understanding of the culture that produced such a heterogeneous range of believers by attending to particular figures, such as Antonio del Corro, John Harington, Henry Constable, and Aemilia Lanyer, who defined their pious identity by refusing to assume a partisan label for themselves. All of the figures in this study attempted as Christians to situate themselves beyond, between, or against particular confessions for reasons that both foreground pious motivations and inspire critical scrutiny. The desire to move beyond confessions enabled the birth of new political rhetorics promising inclusivity for the full range of England’s Christians and gained special prominence in the pursuit of a still-imaginary Great Britain. Christian Identity, Piety, and Politics in Early Modern England is a book that early modern literary scholars need to read. It will also interest students and scholars of history and religion.

Chaucer and Religion

Author : Helen Phillips
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 1843842297
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Chaucer and Religion by : Helen Phillips

Download or read book Chaucer and Religion written by Helen Phillips and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2010 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucer's writings (the 'Canterbury Tales', lyrics and dream poems and Troilus) are here freshly examined in relation to the religions, the religious traditions and the religious controversies of his era.

Politique

Author : Paul Strohm
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Politique by : Paul Strohm

Download or read book Politique written by Paul Strohm and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking points of departure from Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, Paul Strohm deploys superior powers of textual and linguistic analysis to uncover a 'pre-Machiavellian moment': an historical phase which saw political discourse deployed with unprecedented slipperiness and subtlety; a time when it was thought possible not just to follow Fortune, but to jam her turning wheel. That this should have occurred in the fifteenth century, a period regarded as too dull, tradition-bound, or chaotic for significant discursive innovation, is just one of the surprises of this remarkable book. Little-regarded writers such as Fortescue and Pecock, Whethamstede and Warkworth, emerge as figures of compelling interest; John Lydgate, once dismissed as Chaucer's dullest successor, opens paths to the Mirror for Magistrates and to the heart of Shakespearean history. This book is recommended to scholars and students of medieval and Renaissance history and literature and to all those fascinated by languages of conspiracy, destiny, and government. -David Wallace, University of Pennsylvania

Wisdom's Journey

Author : Steven Rozenski
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268202753
Total Pages : 454 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (682 download)

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Book Synopsis Wisdom's Journey by : Steven Rozenski

Download or read book Wisdom's Journey written by Steven Rozenski and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steven Rozenski reopens old discussions and addresses new ones concerning late medieval devotional texts, particularly those showing continental and German influences. For many, Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible into German has come to define the spirit of the Protestant Reformation. But there existed a host of devotional and mystical writings translated into the vernacular that had more profound impacts upon lay religious practices and experiences well into the seventeenth century. Steven Rozenski explores this devotional and mystical literature in his focused study of English translations and adaptations of the works of Henry Suso, Catherine of Siena, and Thomas à Kempis, and the common devotional culture manifested in the work of Richard Rolle. In Wisdom’s Journey, Rozenski examines the forms and strategies of late medieval translation, of early modern engagement with Continental medieval devotion, and of the latter’s literary afterlives in English-speaking communities. Suso’s Rhineland mysticism, the book shows, found initial widespread influence, translation, and adaptation followed by a gradual decline; Catherine of Siena’s Italian spirituality saw continued use and retranslation in post-Reformation recusant communities paralleled by vehement denunciation by English Protestants; and Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ attained a remarkably consistent expansion of popularity, translation, and acceptance among both Catholic and Protestant readers well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wisdom’s Journey traces this path as it reshapes our understanding of English devotional and mystical literature from the 1400s to the 1600s, illuminating its wider European context before and after the Reformations of the sixteenth century. Written primarily for scholars in medieval mysticism, Reformation studies, and translation studies, the book will also appeal to readers interested in medieval studies and English literature more broadly.

Festive Enterprise

Author : Jill P. Ingram
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268109109
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (681 download)

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Book Synopsis Festive Enterprise by : Jill P. Ingram

Download or read book Festive Enterprise written by Jill P. Ingram and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2021-03-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Festive Enterprise reveals marketplace pressures at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama. In Festive Enterprise, Jill P. Ingram merges the history of economic thought with studies of theatricality and spectatorship to examine how English Renaissance plays employed forms and practices from medieval and traditional entertainments to signal the expectation of giving from their audiences. Resisting the conventional divide between medieval and Renaissance, Festive Enterprise takes a trans-Reformation view of dramaturgical strategies, which reflected the need to generate both income and audience assent. By analyzing a wide range of genres (such as civic ceremonial, mummings, interludes, scripted plays, and university drama) and a diverse range of venues (including great halls, city streets, the Inns of Court, and public playhouses), Ingram demonstrates how early moderns borrowed medieval money-gatherers’ techniques to signal communal obligations and rewards for charitable support of theatrical endeavors. Ingram shows that economics and drama cannot be considered as separate enterprises in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Rather, marketplace pressures were at the heart of dramatic form in medieval and Renaissance drama alike. Festive Enterprise is an original study that traces how economic forces drove creativity in drama from medieval civic processions and guild cycle plays to the early Renaissance. It will appeal to scholars of medieval and early modern drama, theater historians, religious historians, scholars of Renaissance drama, and students in English literature, drama, and theater.

Medieval Manuscripts and Their Provenance

Author : A S G Edwards
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
ISBN 13 : 184384723X
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Medieval Manuscripts and Their Provenance by : A S G Edwards

Download or read book Medieval Manuscripts and Their Provenance written by A S G Edwards and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays about the creation, circulation, and collection of medieval manuscripts. The essays collected here celebrate the work of Barbara Shailor, the distinguished scholar of medieval manuscripts. They explore various aspects of their provenance. The subjects addressed range from studies of the history of individual manuscripts, to the evidence afforded by the understanding of their textual traditions, to the significance of the identification of fragments, to the roles of individual scholars and collectors. As a whole the volume contributes to a wider understanding of how the history and ownership of medieval manuscripts can be fruitfully examined, a flourishing area of interest in the field.

Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages

Author : Ardis Butterfield
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108619495
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (86 download)

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Book Synopsis Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages by : Ardis Butterfield

Download or read book Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages written by Ardis Butterfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition

Author : R. D. Perry
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 1512826030
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (128 download)

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Book Synopsis Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition by : R. D. Perry

Download or read book Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition written by R. D. Perry and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Coterie Poetics and the Beginnings of the English Literary Tradition, R. D. Perry reveals how poetic coteries formed and maintained the English literary tradition. Perry shows that, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Edmund Spenser, the poets who bridged the medieval and early modern periods created a profusion of coterie forms as they sought to navigate their relationships with their contemporaries and to the vernacular literary traditions that preceded them. Rather than defining coteries solely as historical communities of individuals sharing work, Perry reframes them as products of authors signaling associations with one another across time and space, in life and on the page. From Geoffrey Chaucer’s associations with both his fellow writers in London and with his geographically distant French contemporaries, to Thomas Hoccleve’s emphatic insistence that he was “aqweyntid” with Chaucer even after Chaucer’s death, to John Lydgate’s formations of “virtual coteries” of a wide range of individuals alive and dead who can only truly come together on the page, the book traces how writers formed the English literary tradition by signaling social connections. By forming coteries, both real and virtual, based on shared appreciation of a literary tradition, these authors redefine what should be valued in that tradition, shaping and reshaping it accordingly. Perry shows how our notion of the English literary tradition came to be and how it could be imagined otherwise.

Fifteenth-Century Lives

Author : Karen A. Winstead
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268108552
Total Pages : 259 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (681 download)

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Book Synopsis Fifteenth-Century Lives by : Karen A. Winstead

Download or read book Fifteenth-Century Lives written by Karen A. Winstead and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Fifteenth-Century Lives, Karen A. Winstead identifies and explores a major shift in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives. As she demonstrates, starting in the 1410s and ’20s, hagiography became more character-oriented, more morally complex, more deeply embedded in history, and more politically and socially engaged. Further, it became more self-consciously literary and began to feature women more prominently—and not only traditional virgin martyrs but also matrons and contemporary holy women. Winstead shows that this literature placed a premium on scholarship and teaching. Hagiography celebrated educators and scholars to a greater extent than ever before and became a vehicle for educating readers about Christian dogma. Focusing both on authors well known, such as John Lydgate and Margery Kempe, and on others less known, such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Winstead argues that the values promoted by fifteenth-century hagiography helped to shape the reformist impulses that eventually produced the Reformation. Moreover, these values continued to influence post-Reformation hagiography, both Protestant and Catholic, well into the seventeenth century. In exploring these trends in fifteenth-century hagiography, identifying the factors that contributed to their emergence, and tracing their influence in later periods, Fifteenth-Century Lives marks an important contribution to revisionary scholarship on fifteenth-century literature. It will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval English literature and late medieval religion.

New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature

Author : Amy N. Vines
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 161146286X
Total Pages : 223 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (114 download)

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Book Synopsis New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature by : Amy N. Vines

Download or read book New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature written by Amy N. Vines and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-07-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature honors the career and scholarship of Denise N. Baker. Contributors include both early career and established scholars, and the collected essays examine a broad range of medieval mystical and religious literature, such as the writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland.

Chaucer

Author : Marion Turner
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691210152
Total Pages : 626 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis Chaucer by : Marion Turner

Download or read book Chaucer written by Marion Turner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life--yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales." -- Publisher's description.

The Medieval Hospital

Author : Nicole R. Rice
Publisher : University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN 13 : 0268205108
Total Pages : 551 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (682 download)

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Book Synopsis The Medieval Hospital by : Nicole R. Rice

Download or read book The Medieval Hospital written by Nicole R. Rice and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2023-04-15 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicole Rice’s original study analyzes the role played by late medieval English hospitals as sites of literary production and cultural contestation. The hospitals of late medieval England defy easy categorization. They were institutions of charity, medical care, and liturgical commemoration. At the same time, hospitals were cultural spaces sponsoring the performance of drama, the composition of medical texts, and the reading of devotional prose and vernacular poetry. Such practices both reflected and connected the disparate groups—regular religious, ill and poor people, well-off retirees—that congregated in hospitals. Nicole Rice’s The Medieval Hospital offers the first book-length study of the place of hospitals in English literary history and cultural practice. Rice highlights three English hospitals as porous sites whose practices translated into textual engagements with some of urban society’s most pressing concerns: charity, health, devotion, and commerce. Within these institutions, medical compendia treated the alarming bodies of women and religious anthologies translated Augustinian devotional practices for lay readers. Looking outward, religious drama and socially charged poetry publicized and interrogated hospitals’ caring functions within urban charitable economies. Hospitals provided the auspices, audiences, and authors of such disparate literary works, propelling these texts into urban social life. Between ca. 1350 and ca. 1550, English hospitals saw massive changes in their fortunes, from the devastation of the Black Death, to various fifteenth-century reform initiatives, to the creeping dissolutions of religious houses under Henry VIII and Edward VI. This volume investigates how hospitals defined and defended themselves with texts and in some cases reinvented themselves, using literary means to negotiate changed religious landscapes.