From Literacy To Literature England 1300 1400

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From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300-1400

Author : Christopher Cannon
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191084832
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300-1400 by : Christopher Cannon

Download or read book From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300-1400 written by Christopher Cannon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first lessons we learn in school can stay with us all our lives, but this was nowhere more true than in the last decades of the fourteenth century when grammar-school students were not only learning to read and write, but understanding, for the first time, that their mother tongue, English, was grammatical. The efflorescence of Ricardian poetry was not a direct result of this change, but it was everywhere shaped by it. This book characterizes this close connection between literacy training and literature, as it is manifest in the fine and ambitious poetry by Gower, Langland and Chaucer, at this transitional moment. This is also a book about the way medieval training in grammar (or grammatica) shaped the poetic arts in the Middle Ages fully as much as rhetorical training. It answers the curious question of what language was used to teach Latin grammar to the illiterate. It reveals, for the first time, what the surviving schoolbooks from the period actually contain. It describes what form a 'grammar school' took in a period from which no school buildings or detailed descriptions survive. And it scrutinizes the processes of elementary learning with sufficient care to show that, for the grown medieval schoolboy, well-learned books functioned, not only as a touchstone for wisdom, but as a knowledge so personal and familiar that it was equivalent to what we would now call 'experience'.

The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature

Author : Raluca Radulescu
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 0429588984
Total Pages : 521 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (295 download)

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Book Synopsis The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature by : Raluca Radulescu

Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature written by Raluca Radulescu and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-30 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature offers a new, inclusive, and comprehensive context to the study of medieval literature written in the English language from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Middle Ages. Utilising a Trans-European context, this volume includes essays from leading academics in the field across linguistic and geographic divides. Extending beyond the traditional scholarly discussions of insularity in relation to Middle English literature and ‘isolationism’, this volume: Oversees a variety of genres and topics, including cultural identity, insular borders, linguistic interactions, literary gateways, Middle English texts and traditions, and modern interpretations such as race, gender studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism. Draws on the combined extensive experience of teaching and research in medieval English and comparative literature within and outside of anglophone higher education and looks to the future of this fast-paced area of literary culture. Contains an indispensable section on theoretical approaches to the study of literary texts. This Companion provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to medieval literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on English literature.

How to Read Middle English Poetry

Author : Daniel Sawyer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198895267
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis How to Read Middle English Poetry by : Daniel Sawyer

Download or read book How to Read Middle English Poetry written by Daniel Sawyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Read Middle English Poetry guides readers through poetry between 1150 and 1500, for study and pleasure. Chapters give down-to-earth advice on enjoying and analyzing each aspect of verse, from the choice of single words, through syntax, metre, rhyme, and stanza-design, up to the play of larger forms across whole poems. How to Read Middle English Poetry covers major figures?such as Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, and Robert Henryson?but also delves into exciting anonymous lyrics, romances, and drama. It shows, too, how some modern poets have drawn on earlier poems, and how Middle English and early Scots provide crucial standpoints from which to think through present-day writing. Contextual sections discuss how poetry was heard aloud, introduce manuscripts and editing, and lay out Middle English poetry's ties to other tongues, including French, Welsh, and Latin. Critical terms are highlighted and explained both in the main text and in a full indexed glossary, while the uses of key tools such as the Middle English Dictionary are described and modeled. References to accessible editions and electronic resources mean that the book needs no accompanying anthology. At once thorough, wide-ranging, and practical, How to Read Middle English Poetry is indispensable for students exploring Middle English or early Scots, and for anyone curious about the heart of poetry's history.

English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil c. 1400-1550

Author : Matthew Day
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192698885
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil c. 1400-1550 by : Matthew Day

Download or read book English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil c. 1400-1550 written by Matthew Day and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English Humanism and the Reception of Virgil c. 1400-1550 reassesses how the spread of Renaissance humanism in England impacted the reception of Virgil. It begins with the first signs of humanist influence in the fifteenth century, and ends at the height of the English Renaissance during the mid-Tudor period. This period witnessed the first extant English translations of Virgil's Aeneid, by William Caxton (1490), Gavin Douglas (1513), and the Earl of Surrey (c. 1543). It also marked the first printings of Virgil's works in England by Richard Pynson (c. 1515) and Wynkyn de Worde (1510s-1520s). Through a fine-grained analysis of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions, Matthew Day questions how and to what extent Renaissance humanism impacted readers' and translators' approaches to Virgil. Building on current scholarship in the fields of book history, classical reception, and translation studies, it draws attention to substantial continuities between the medieval and humanist reception of Virgil's works. Humanist study of Virgil, and indeed of classical poetry more generally, continued to draw many of its aims, methods, and conventions from well-established medieval traditions of learning. In emphasizing the very gradual pace of humanist development and the continuous influence of medieval scholarship, the book comes to a more qualified view of how humanism did and (just as importantly) did not affect Virgilian reading and translation. While recognizing humanist innovations and discoveries, it gives due attention to the understudied, yet far more numerous examples of consistency and traditionalism.

Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500

Author : Hannah Bower
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192666126
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 by : Hannah Bower

Download or read book Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 written by Hannah Bower and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Middle English Medical Recipes and Literary Play, 1375-1500 is the first detailed, book-length study of Middle English medical recipes in their literary, imaginative, social, and codicological contexts. Analysing recipe collections in over seventy late medieval manuscripts, this book explores how the words and structures of recipes could contribute to those texts' healing purpose, but could also confuse, impede, exceed, and redefine that purpose. The study therefore presents a challenge to recipes' traditional reputation as mundane, unartful texts written and read solely for the sake of directing practical action. Crucially, it also relocates these neglected texts and overlooked manuscripts within the complex networks forming medieval textual culture, demonstrating that—though marginalized in modern scholarship—medical recipes were actually linguistically, formally, materially, and imaginatively interconnected with many other late medieval discourses, including devotional writings, romances, fabliaux, and Chaucerian poetry. The monograph thus models for readers modes of analysis and close reading that might be deployed in relation to recipes in order to understand better their allusive, fragmentary, and playful qualities as well as their wide-ranging influence on medieval imaginations.

John Trevisa's Information Age

Author : Emily Steiner
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192650831
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (926 download)

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Book Synopsis John Trevisa's Information Age by : Emily Steiner

Download or read book John Trevisa's Information Age written by Emily Steiner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-20 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Reading Chaucer in Time

Author : Kara Gaston
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192594311
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Chaucer in Time by : Kara Gaston

Download or read book Reading Chaucer in Time written by Kara Gaston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. Reading for form can mean reading for formation. Understanding processes through which a text was created can help us in characterizing its form. But what is involved in bringing a diachronic process to bear upon a synchronic work? When does literary formation begin and end? When does form happen? These questions emerge with urgency in the interactions between English poet Geoffrey Chaucer and Italian trecento authors Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Francis Petrarch. In fourteenth-century Italy, new ways were emerging of configuring the relation between author and reader. Previously, medieval reading was often oriented around the significance of the text to the individual reader. In Italy, however, reading was beginning to be understood as a way of getting back to a work's initial formation. This book tracks how concepts of reading developed within Italian texts, including Dante's Vita nova, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida, and Petrarch's Seniles, impress themselves upon Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Canterbury Tales. It argues that Chaucer's poetry reveals the implications of reading for formation: above all, that it both depends upon and effaces the historical perspective and temporal experience of the individual reader. Problems raised within Chaucer's poetry thus inform this book's broader methodological argument: that there is no one moment at which the formation of Chaucer's poetry ends; rather its form emerges in and through process of reading within time.

Matter and Making in Early English Poetry

Author : Taylor Cowdery
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1009223755
Total Pages : 343 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (92 download)

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Book Synopsis Matter and Making in Early English Poetry by : Taylor Cowdery

Download or read book Matter and Making in Early English Poetry written by Taylor Cowdery and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-29 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is literature made from? During the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, this question preoccupied the English court poets, who often claimed that their poems were not original creations, but adaptations of pre-existing materials. Their word for these materials was 'matter,' while the term they used to describe their labor was 'making,' or the act of reworking this matter into a new – but not entirely new – form. By tracing these ideas through the work of six major early poets, this book offers a revisionist literary history of late- medieval and early modern court poetry. It reconstructs premodern theories of making and contrasts them with more modern theories of literary labor, such as 'authorship.' It studies the textual, historical, and philosophical sources that the court tradition used for its matter. Most of all, it demonstrates that the early English court poets drew attention to their source materials as a literary tactic, one that stressed the process by which a poem had been made.

What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric?

Author : Cristina Maria Cervone
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812298519
Total Pages : 561 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? by : Cristina Maria Cervone

Download or read book What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? written by Cristina Maria Cervone and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as “lyrics,” the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa. As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of “play,” in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight “new Middle English lyrics” by seven contemporary poets.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

Author : Helen Cooper
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192886738
Total Pages : 668 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford History of Poetry in English by : Helen Cooper

Download or read book The Oxford History of Poetry in English written by Helen Cooper and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 668 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume occupies both a foundational and a revolutionary place. Its opening date—1100—marks the re-emergence of a vernacular poetic record in English after the political and cultural disruption of the Norman Conquest. By its end date—1400—English poetry had become an established, if still evolving, literary tradition. The period between these dates sees major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression. Middle English poetry reflects the influence of multiple contexts—history, social institutions, manuscript production, old and new models of versification, medieval poetic theory, and the other literary languages of England. It thus emphasizes the aesthetic, imaginative treatment of new and received materials by medieval writers and the formal craft required for their verse. Individual chapters treat the representation of national history and mythology, contemporary issues, and the shared doctrine and learning provided by sacred and secular sources, including the Bible. Throughout the period, lyric and romance figure prominently as genres and poetic modes, while some works hover enticingly on the boundary of genre and discursive forms. The volume ends with chapters on the major writers of the late fourteenth-century (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Gower) and with a look forward to the reception of something like a national literary tradition in fifteenth-century literary culture.

The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature

Author : Philip Knox
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192847171
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature by : Philip Knox

Download or read book The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature written by Philip Knox and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides a new account of the literary history of fourteenth-century England, arguing that many of this period's most distinctive literary experiments emerge through a productive dialogue with the 'Romance of the Rose', a jointly-authored medieval French poem.

Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England

Author : Michael Johnston
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 1501516485
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (15 download)

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Book Synopsis Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England by : Michael Johnston

Download or read book Poets and Scribes in Late Medieval England written by Michael Johnston and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-10-23 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Susanna Fein’s long and distinguished scholarly career has helped to redefine how we understand the role of scribes and manuscripts from late medieval England. She has carried out groundbreaking research on seminal manuscripts (e.g., Harley 2253, the Thornton Manuscripts, John Audley’s autograph manuscript, and the Auchinleck Manuscript). She has written extensively on the more complex and challenging metrical forms the period produced. And she has edited foundational primary texts and collections of essays. A wide range of scholars have been influenced by Fein’s work, many of whom present original research—much of it following trails first laid down by Fein—in this volume.

Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta

Author : Jennifer Jahner
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 0198847726
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (988 download)

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Book Synopsis Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta by : Jennifer Jahner

Download or read book Literature and Law in the Era of Magna Carta written by Jennifer Jahner and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of poetry and political thought in late twelfth- and thirteenth-century England explores how Latin, French, and Middle English political poetry and Latin grammar and rhetoric shaped ideas about constitutional governance, the common good, and just rule.

Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms

Author : Jessica Brantley
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812298454
Total Pages : 377 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms by : Jessica Brantley

Download or read book Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms written by Jessica Brantley and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2022-11-22 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself. Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.

Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650

Author : Eric Weiskott
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN 13 : 0812297474
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (122 download)

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Book Synopsis Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 by : Eric Weiskott

Download or read book Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650 written by Eric Weiskott and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2021-01-15 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would English literary history look like if the unit of measure were not the political reign but the poetic tradition? The earliest poems in English were written in alliterative verse, the meter of Beowulf. Alliterative meter preceded tetrameter, which first appeared in the twelfth century, and tetrameter in turn preceded pentameter, the five-stress line that would become the dominant English verse form of modernity, though it was invented by Chaucer in the 1380s. While this chronology is accurate, Eric Weiskott argues, the traditional periodization of literature in modern scholarship distorts the meaning of meters as they appeared to early poets and readers. In Meter and Modernity in English Verse, 1350-1650, Weiskott examines the uses and misuses of these three meters as markers of literary time, "medieval" or "modern," though all three were in concurrent use both before and after 1500. In each section of the book, he considers two of the traditions through the prism of a third element: alliterative meter and tetrameter in poems of political prophecy; alliterative meter and pentameter in William Langland's Piers Plowman and early blank verse; and tetrameter and pentameter in Chaucer, his predecessors, and his followers. Reversing the historical perspective in which scholars conventionally view these authors, Weiskott reveals Langland to be metrically precocious and Chaucer metrically nostalgic. More than a history of prosody, Weiskott's book challenges the divide between medieval and modern literature. Rejecting the premise that modernity occurred as a specifiable event, he uses metrical history to renegotiate the trajectories of English literary history and advances a narrative of sociocultural change that runs parallel to metrical change, exploring the relationship between literary practice, social placement, and historical time.

The Middle English Book

Author : Michael Johnston
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192871773
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (928 download)

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Book Synopsis The Middle English Book by : Michael Johnston

Download or read book The Middle English Book written by Michael Johnston and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-08-24 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Middle English Book analyzes 202 literary manuscripts from late medieval England (1350-1500) and argues that most readers looked to scribes in their immediate vicinity to acquire copies of literature. It examines various forms of writing practiced by scribes throughout the late medieval English countryside and shows that the production of documents underscored the wide availability of literary copying. As a result, when a reader acquired a manuscript,they were most often tapping into local networks of document production.