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False Fables And Exemplary Truth
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Book Synopsis False Fables and Exemplary Truth by : E. Allen
Download or read book False Fables and Exemplary Truth written by E. Allen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study charts relationships between moral claims and audience response in medieval exemplary works by such poets as Chaucer, Gower, Robert Henryson, and several anonymous scribes. In late medieval England, exemplary works make one of the strongest possible claims for the social value of poetic fiction. Studying this debate reveals a set of local literary histories, based on both canonical and non-canonical texts, that complicate received notions of the didactic Middle Ages, the sophisticated Renaissance, and the fallow fifteenth century in between.
Book Synopsis False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by : Elizabeth Allen
Download or read book False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature written by Elizabeth Allen and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2005-08-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study charts relationships between moral claims and audience response in medieval exemplary works by such poets as Chaucer, Gower, Robert Henryson, and several anonymous scribes. In late medieval England, exemplary works make one of the strongest possible claims for the social value of poetic fiction. Studying this debate reveals a set of local literary histories, based on both canonical and non-canonical texts, that complicate received notions of the didactic Middle Ages, the sophisticated Renaissance, and the fallow fifteenth century in between.
Book Synopsis Objects of affection by : Myra Seaman
Download or read book Objects of affection written by Myra Seaman and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book’s pages – human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible – collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript’s material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.
Book Synopsis The politics of Middle English parables by : Mary Raschko
Download or read book The politics of Middle English parables written by Mary Raschko and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of Middle English parables examines the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology and social practice in late-medieval England. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections as well as in lives of Christ and devotional treatises. While most scholarship approaches the translated stories as stable vehicles of Christian teaching, this book highlights the many variations and points of conflict across Middle English renditions of the same story. In parables related to labour, social inequality, charity and penance, the book locates a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. Analysis of these diverse retellings reveals not what a given parable meant in a definitive sense but rather how Middle English parables inscribe the ideologies, power structures and cultural debates of late-medieval Christianity.
Book Synopsis The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower by : Ana Saez-Hidalgo
Download or read book The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower written by Ana Saez-Hidalgo and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-31 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower reviews the most current scholarship on the late medieval poet and opens doors purposefully to research areas of the future. It is divided into three parts. The first part, "Working theories: medieval and modern," is devoted to the main theoretical aspects that frame Gower’s work, ranging from his use of medieval law, rhetoric, theology, and religious attitudes, to approaches incorporating gender and queer studies. The second part, "Things and places: material cultures," examines the cultural locations of the author, not only from geographical and political perspectives, or in scientific and economic context, but also in the transmission of his poetry through the materiality of the text and its reception. "Polyvocality: text and language," the third part, focuses on Gower’s trilingualism, his approach to history, and narratological and intertextual aspects of his works. The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower is an essential resource for scholars and students of Gower and of Middle English literature, history, and culture generally.
Download or read book “Curious, if True” written by Amy Bright and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-30 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fantastic has occupied the literary imagination of readers and scholars across historical, theoretical, and cultural contexts. Representations of the fantastic in literature rely on formal and generic types, tropes, and archetypes to mediate between depictions of “fantasy” and “reality.” Present in myth and folklore, the gothic and neo-gothic, and contemporary and mainstream fantasy, the fantastic reach stretches into many conceptions of literature over time. “Curious, if True”: The Fantastic in Literature presents recent articles by graduate students on the fantastic and makes connections across category, genre, and historical periods. Fantasy is used as an organizing topic, a genre that has always allowed for a broad interpretation of its meaning. From magic realism, to high fantasy, sci-fi to the Gothic, this collection furthers the reach of fantasy in the study of English literature. The authors value tradition in their reading and their writing but are not afraid to reach across genre borders to show their understanding of “the fantastical in literature.” The ideas presented span years and literary periods, texts and genres, and show the undeniable value of interdisciplinary study to expand perspectives in the field of English.
Book Synopsis Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England by : Krista A. Murchison
Download or read book Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England written by Krista A. Murchison and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First comprehensive survey of a major genre of medieval English texts: its purpose, characteristics, and reception.The "bestseller list" of medieval England would have included many manuals for penitents: works that could teach the public about the process of confession, and explain the abstract concept of sin through familiar situations. Among these 'bestselling' works were the Manuel des péchés (commonly known through its English translation Handlyng Synne), The Speculum Vitae, and Chaucer's Parson's Tale. This book is the first full-length overview of this body of writing and its material and social contexts. It shows that while manuals for penitents developed under the Church's control, they also became a site of the Church's concern. Manuals such as the Compileison (which was addressed to a much broader audience than its English analogue, Ancrene Wisse) brought learning that had been controlled by the Church into the hands of layfolk and, in so doing, raised significant concerns over who should have access to knowledge. Clerics worried that these manuals might accidentally teach people new sins, remind them of old ones, or become sites of prurient interest. This finding, and others explored in this book, call for a new awareness of the complications and contradictions inherent in late medieval orthodoxy and reveal plainly that even writing that happened firmly within the Church's control could promote new and complex ways of thinking about religion and the self.cess to knowledge. Clerics worried that these manuals might accidentally teach people new sins, remind them of old ones, or become sites of prurient interest. This finding, and others explored in this book, call for a new awareness of the complications and contradictions inherent in late medieval orthodoxy and reveal plainly that even writing that happened firmly within the Church's control could promote new and complex ways of thinking about religion and the self.cess to knowledge. Clerics worried that these manuals might accidentally teach people new sins, remind them of old ones, or become sites of prurient interest. This finding, and others explored in this book, call for a new awareness of the complications and contradictions inherent in late medieval orthodoxy and reveal plainly that even writing that happened firmly within the Church's control could promote new and complex ways of thinking about religion and the self.cess to knowledge. Clerics worried that these manuals might accidentally teach people new sins, remind them of old ones, or become sites of prurient interest. This finding, and others explored in this book, call for a new awareness of the complications and contradictions inherent in late medieval orthodoxy and reveal plainly that even writing that happened firmly within the Church's control could promote new and complex ways of thinking about religion and the self.
Book Synopsis Unperfect Histories by : Harriet Archer
Download or read book Unperfect Histories written by Harriet Archer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems in the voices of medieval rulers and rebels compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset, and Richard Niccols between 1574 and 1610 extended the Mirror's scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the texts' later manifestations profoundly influenced the work of Spenser and Shakespeare. Unperfect Histories is the first monograph to consider the text's early modern transmission history as a whole. In chapters on Baldwin, Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's complaint collections, it demonstrates that the Mirror is an invaluable witness to how verse history was conceptualized, written, and read across the period, and explores the ways in which it was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in response to changing contemporary concerns. The Mirror corpus encompasses topical allegory, nationalist polemic, and historiographical skepticism, as well as the macabre humour and metatextual play which have come to be known as hallmarks of Baldwin's mid-Tudor writings. What has not been recognised is the complex interaction of these themes and techniques right across the Mirror's history. Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's contributions are analysed for the first time here, both within their own literary and historiographical contexts, and in dialogue with Baldwin's early editions. This new reading offers a lively account of the texts' depth and variety, and provides insight into the extent of the Mirror's influence and ubiquity in early modern literary culture.
Book Synopsis The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England by : Michael Ullyot
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England written by Michael Ullyot and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Michael Ullyot makes two new arguments about the rhetoric of exemplarity in late Elizabethan and Jacobean culture: first, that exemplarity is a recursive cycle driven by rhetoricians' words and readers' actions; and second, that positive moral examples are not replicable, but rather aspirational models of readers' posthumous biographies. For example, Alexander the Great envied Achilles less for his exemplary life than for Homer's account of it. Ullyot defines the three types of decorum on which exemplary rhetoric and imitation rely, and charts their operations through Philip Sidney's poetics, Edmund Spenser's poetry, and the dedications, sermons, elegies, biographies, and other occasional texts about Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, and Henry, Prince of Wales. Ullyot expands the definition of occasional texts to include those that criticize their circumstances to demand better ones, and historicizes moral exemplarity in the contexts of sixteenth-century Protestant memory and humanist pedagogy. The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Early Modern England concludes that all exemplary subjects suffer from the problem of metonymy, the objection that their chosen excerpts misrepresent their missing parts. This problem also besets historicist literary criticism, ever subject to corrections from the archive, so this study concedes that its own rhetorical methods are exemplary.
Book Synopsis Transforming Talk by : Susan E. Phillips
Download or read book Transforming Talk written by Susan E. Phillips and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Popular reading in English c. 1400–1600 by : Elisabeth Salter
Download or read book Popular reading in English c. 1400–1600 written by Elisabeth Salter and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about reading practice and experience in late medieval and early modern England. It focuses on the kinds of literatures that were more readily available to the widest spectrum of the population. Four case studies from many possibilities have been selected, each examining a particular type of popular literature under the headings ‘religious’, ‘moral’, ‘practical’ and ‘fictional’. A key concern of the book is how we might use particular types of evidence in order to understand more about reading practice and experience, so issues of method and approach are discussed fully in the opening chapter. One distinctive element of this book is that it attempts to uncover evidence for the reading practices and experiences of real, rather than ideal, readers, using evidence that is found within the material of a book or manuscript itself, or within the structure of a specific genre of literature. Salter attempts to negotiate a path through a set of methodological and interpretive issues in order to arrive at a better understanding of how people may have read and what they may have read. This, in turn, leads on to how we may interpret the evidence that manuscripts and early printed books provide for the ways that medieval and early modern people engaged with reading. This book will be of interest to academics and research students who study the history of reading, popular culture, literacy, manuscript and print culture, as well as to those interested more generally in medieval and early modern society and culture.
Book Synopsis Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England by : Katherine C. Little
Download or read book Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth-Century England written by Katherine C. Little and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-16 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores sixteenth-century humanism as an origin for the idea of literature as good, even great, books. It argues that humanists located the value of books not only in the goodness of their writing-their eloquence--but also in their capacity to shape readers in good and bad behavior, thoughts, and feelings, in other words, in their morality. To approach humanism in this way, by attending to its moral interests, is to provide a new perspective on periodization, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / early modern. That is, humanists did not so much rupture with medieval ideas about literature or with medieval models as they adapted and altered them, offering a new confidence about an old idea: the moral instructiveness of pagan, classical texts for Christian readers. This revaluation of literature was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, humanist confidence inspired authors to invent their own good books--good in style and morals--in morality plays such as Everyman and the Christian Terence tradition and in educational treatises such as Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke of the Governour. On the other hand, humanism placed a new burden on authors, requiring their work to teach and delight. In the wake of humanism, authors struggled to articulate the value of their work for readers, returning to a pre-humanist path that they associated with Geoffrey Chaucer. This medieval-inflected doubt pervades the late sixteenth-century writings of the most prolific and influential Elizabethans-Robert Greene, George Gascoigne, and Edmund Spenser.
Book Synopsis Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature by : Kisha G. Tracy
Download or read book Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature written by Kisha G. Tracy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-06 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the traditional relationship between the act of confessing and the act of remembering is manifested through the widespread juxtaposition of confession and memory in Middle English literary texts and, furthermore, that this concept permeates other manifestations of memory as written by authors in a variety of genres. This study, through the framework of confession, identifies moments of recollection within the texts of four major Middle English authors – Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and the Gawain-Poet – and demonstrates that these authors deliberately employed the devices of recollection and forgetfulness in order to indicate changes or the lack thereof, both in conduct and in mindset, in their narrative subjects. Memory and Confession in Middle English Literature explores memory’s connection to confession along with the recurring textual awareness of confession’s ability to transform the soul; demonstrating that memory and recollection is used in medieval literature to emphasize emotional and behavioral change.
Book Synopsis Annotated Chaucer bibliography by : Mark Allen
Download or read book Annotated Chaucer bibliography written by Mark Allen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 886 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extremely thorough, expertly compiled and crisply annotated comprehensive bibliography of Chaucer scholarship between 1997 and 2010
Book Synopsis John Gower and the Limits of the Law by : Conrad van Dijk
Download or read book John Gower and the Limits of the Law written by Conrad van Dijk and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2013 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the ways in which Gower's poetry engages with contemporary law and legal questions. It has long been thought that John Gower was probably a lawyer before turning to poetry, and this study reveals his active engagement with contemporary legal debates; they include constitutional questions, jurisdictional issues, private vengeance, jurisprudential concepts (such as equity and the rigor iuris), and aspects of criminal law. The author argues that the Confessio Amantis in particular demonstrates Gower's uncertainty about how to reconcile the ideal of a just law with alternative modes of justice, such as self-help, royal discretion, and divine will. The book also examines the parallel development of the exemplum and casus in medieval literature. Exempla frequently create a sense of narrative closure by means of some form of punishment, or as Gower would put it, "vengeance". How then do we set Gower's reputation as a sympathetic writer alongside his frequent desire forclosure and punishment? What are the limits of exemplarity and law? These questions are answered by reading Gower in relation to the volatile politics of the Ricardian period, and in comparison with the poetic concerns of contemporary writers such as Chaucer and Langland. In so doing, the book provides a searching introduction to the intersection between literature and law in the late fourteenth century. Dr. Conrad van Dijk is Assistant Professor of English at Concordia University College of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada).
Book Synopsis Machines of the Mind by : Katharine Breen
Download or read book Machines of the Mind written by Katharine Breen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-05-17 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Katharine Breen challenges our understanding of how medieval authors received philosophical paradigms from antiquity in their construction and use of personification in their writings. She shows that our modern categories for this literary device (extreme realism versus extreme rhetoric, or novelistic versus allegorical characters) would've been unrecognizable to their medieval practitioners. Through new readings of key authors and works--including Prudentius's "Psychomachia," Langland's "Piers Plowman," Boethius's "Consolation of Philosophy," and Deguileville's "Pilgrimage of Human Life"--she finds that medieval writers accessed a richer, more fluid literary domain than modern critics have allowed. Breen identifies three different types of personification--Platonic, Aristotelian, and Prudentian--inherited from antiquity that both gave medieval writers a surprisingly varied spectrum with which to paint their characters, while bypassing the modern confusion of conflicting relationships between personifications and persons on the path connecting divine power and human frailty. Recalling Gregory the Great's phrase "machinae mentis" (machines of the mind), Breen demonstrates that medieval writers applied personification with utility and subtlety, much the same way that, within the category of hand-tools, an open-end wrench differs in function from a hex-key wrench or a socket wrench. It will be read by medievalists working at the crossroads of religion, philosophy, and literature, as well as scholars interested in character-making and gendered relationships among characters, readers, and texts beyond the Middle Ages"--
Book Synopsis Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman by : Alastair Bennett
Download or read book Preaching and Narrative in Piers Plowman written by Alastair Bennett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-11 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Langland's Piers Plowman was written and read during a "golden age" of English preaching. The poem describes a world where sermons took many different forms and were delivered in many different contexts, from public events in the life of the realm to pastoral instruction in the parish. It dramatises preaching as part of its allegorical action, showing how sermons shaped their listeners' understanding of the world; it also includes polemical critique of corrupt, self-interested preaching, and offers radical prescriptions for its reform. This book argues that Langland's central insight into the way that sermons moved and engaged their audiences had to do with their characteristic use of narrative. Preachers in the poem address listeners who are absorbed in the concerns of their present moment, and encourage them to new forms of social and spiritual endeavour by locating that moment in a larger, interpreted plot: the story of an individual life, or an emergent community, or of salvation history as a whole. The book employs a critical vocabulary derived from Paul Ricoeur to describe the process by which these narratives are composed, and to show how they mediate and reconfigure their listeners' experiences.
