Download or read book Biblical Paradigms in Medieval English Literature written by Lawrence Besserman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the intricate and unusual relationship between the sacred and secular spheres of English medieval culture, positing that the assimilation of sacred and secular motifs could be in either direction, or even in both directions. That is, medieval English writers could appropriate biblical paradigms to express secular themes, and vice versa. Codicological, psychoanalytic, feminist, and new historicist insights inform readings of Beowulf, Middle English lyric poetry, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Malory, among others. Besserman elucidates the structural and thematic complexity of the integration of biblical and biblically derived sacred diction, imagery, character types, and themes in the works under consideration, identifying within them new biblical sources and analogues and providing fresh insights into the contextual meaning and significance of the biblical paradigms they deploy. This book highlights the shaping influence of biblical and biblically derived sacred paradigms on exemplary literature produced in the middle Ages.
Download or read book Middle English Biblical Poetry written by Cathy Hume and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new analysis of the neglected genre of medieval Biblical poetry.Medieval England had a thriving culture of rewriting the Bible in art, drama, and literature in Latin, French and English. Middle English biblical poetry was central to this culture, and although these poems have suffered from critical neglect, sometimes dismissed as mere "paraphrase", they are rich, innovative and politically engaged. Read in the same gentry and noble households as secular romance, biblical poems borrow and adapt romance plots and motifs, present romance-inflected exotic settings, and share similar concerns: reputation, order, family and marriage. This book explores six poems from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that retell episodes from the Old Testament: the ballad-like Iacob and Iosep, two lives of Adam and Eve; an alliterative version of the Susanna story, the Pistel of Susan; and the Gawain-poet's Patience and Cleanness. Each chapter identifies new sources and influences for the poems, including from biblical glosses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.sses and manuscript illustration. The book also investigates the poems' relationships with contemporary cultures of literature and religion, including with secular romance, and offers new readings of each poem and its cultural functions, showing how they bridge the chasm between medieval Christian England and the Jews and pagans of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world. It also considers reading contexts, arguing that the poems and their manuscripts offer hints about the social class and gender of their household audiences.nder of their household audiences.
Download or read book 2014 written by Raluca Radulescu and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-01-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of the BIAS is, year by year, to draw attention to all scholarly books and articles directly concerned with the matière de Bretagne. The bibliography aims to include all books, reviews and articles published in the year preceding its appearance, an exception being made for earlier studies which have been omitted inadvertently. The present volume contains over 700 entries on relevant publications that were published in 2013.
Download or read book Chaucer s Prayers written by Megan E. Murton and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2020 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a culture as steeped in communal, scripted acts of prayer as Chaucer's England, a written prayer asks not only to be read, but to be inhabited: its "I" marks a space that readers are invited to occupy. This book examines the implications of accepting that invitation when reading Chaucer's poetry. Both in his often-overlooked pious writings and in his ambitious, innovative pagan narratives, the "I" of prayer provides readers with a subject-position thatcan be at once devotional and literary - a stance before a deity and a stance in relation to a poem. Chaucer uses this uniquely open, participatory "I" to implicate readers in his poetry and to guide their work of reading. In examining Christian and pagan prayers alongside each other, Chaucer's Prayers cuts across an assumed division between the "religious" and "secular" writings within Chaucer's corpus. Rather, it emphasizes continuities andapproaches prayer as part of Chaucer's broader experimentation with literary voice. It also places Chaucer in his devotional context and foregrounds how pious practices intersect with and shape his poetic practices. These insightschallenge a received view of Chaucer as an essentially secular poet and shed new light on his poetry's relationship to religion.
Download or read book Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature written by Albrecht Classen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-05 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Toleration and Tolerance in Medieval European Literature aims to examine and unearth the critical investigations of toleration and tolerance presented in literary texts of the Middle Ages. In contrast to previous approaches, this volume identifies new methods of interpreting conventional classifications of toleration and tolerance through the emergence of multi-level voices in literary, religious, and philosophical discourses of authorities in medieval literature. Accordingly, this volume identifies two separate definitions of toleration and tolerance, the former as a representative of a majority group accepts a member of the minority group but still holds firmly to the believe that s/he is right and the other entirely wrong, and tolerance meaning that all faiths, convictions, and ideologies are treated equally, and the majority speaker is ready to accept that potentially his/her position is wrong. Applying these distinct differences in the critical investigation of interaction and representation in context, this book offers new insight into the tolerant attitudes portrayed in medieval literature of which regularly appealed, influenced and shaped popular opinions of the period.
Download or read book Cultural Difference and Material Culture in Middle English Romance written by Dominique Battles and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the cultural distinctions and conflicts between Anglo-Saxons and Normans originating with the Norman Conquest of 1066 prevailed well into the fourteenth century and are manifest in a significant number of Middle English romances including King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and others. Specifically, the study looks at how the material culture of these poems (architecture, battle tactic, landscapes) systematically and persistently distinguishes between Norman and Anglo-Saxon cultural identity. Additionally, it examines the influence of the English Outlaw Tradition, itself grounded in Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Norman Conquest, as expressed in specific recurring scenes (disguise and infiltration, forest exile) found in many Middle English romances. In the broadest sense, a significant number of Middle English romances, including some of the most well-read and often-taught, set up a dichotomy of two ruling houses headed by a powerful lord, who compete for power and influence. This book examines the cultural heritage behind each of these pairings to show how poets repeatedly contrast essentially Norman and Anglo-Saxon values and ruling styles.
Download or read book Romance and Its Contexts in Fifteenth century England written by Raluca L. Radulescu and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2013 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the anonymous pious Middle English romances and Sir Thomas Malory's 'Morte Darthur' have rarely been studied in relation to each other, they in fact share at least two thematic concerns, vocabularies of suffering and genealogical concerns, as this book demonstrates. By examining a broad cultural and political framework stretching from Richard II's deposition to the end of the Wars of the Roses through the prism of piety, politics and penitence, the author draws attention to the specific circumstances in which Sir Isumbras, Sir Gowther, Roberd of Cisely, Henry Lovelich's 'History of the Holy Grail' and Malory's 'Morte' were read in fifteenth-century England. In the case of the pious romances this implies a study of their reception long after their original composition or translation centuries earlier; in Lovelich's case, an examination of metropolitan culture leads to an opening of the discussion to French romance models as well as English chronicle writing.
Download or read book Beowulf s Popular Afterlife in Literature Comic Books and Film written by Kathleen Forni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beowulf's presence on the popular cultural radar has increased in the past two decades, coincident with cultural crisis and change. Why? By way of a fusion of cultural studies, adaptation theory, and monster theory, Beowulf's Popular Afterlife examines a wide range of Anglo-American retellings and appropriations found in literary texts, comic books, and film. The most remarkable feature of popular adaptations of the poem is that its monsters, frequently victims of organized militarism, male aggression, or social injustice, are provided with strong motives for their retaliatory brutality. Popular adaptations invert the heroic ideology of the poem, and monsters are not only created by powerful men but are projections of their own pathological behavior. At the same time there is no question that the monsters created by human malfeasance must be eradicated.
Download or read book The Manuscript and Meaning of Malory s Morte Darthur written by Kevin Sean Whetter and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2017 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the rubricated letters in the Morte makes a convincing case for the design being by Malory himself. The red-ink names that decorate the Winchester manuscript of Malory's Morte Darthur are striking; yet until now, no-one has asked why the rubrication exists. This book explores the uniqueness and thematic significance of the physical layout of the Morte in its manuscript context, arguing that the layout suggests, and the correlations between manuscript design and narrative theme confirm, that the striking arrangement is likely to have been the product of authorial design rather than something unusual dreamed up by patron, scribe, reader, or printer. The introduction offers a thorough account of not only the textual tradition of the Morte, but also the ways in which scholarship to date has not done enough with the manuscript contexts of Malory's Arthuriad. The book then goes on to establish the singularity and likely provenance of Winchester's rubrication of names. In the second half of the study the author elucidates the narrative significance of this rubrication pattern, outlining striking connections between manuscript layout and major narrative events, characters, and themes. He suggests that the manuscript mise-en-page underscores Malory's interest in human character and knighthood, creating a memorializing function similar to the many inscribed tombs that dominate the landscape of the Morte's narrative pages. Inshort, Winchester's design creates a memorializing tomb for Arthurian chivalry. K.S. WHETTER is Professor of English at Acadia University, Canada.
Download or read book Language and Community in Early England written by Emily Butler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-04-28 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the development of English as a written vernacular and identifies that development as a process of community building that occurred in a multilingual context. Moving through the eighth century to the thirteenth century, and finally to the sixteenth-century antiquarians who collected medieval manuscripts, it suggests that this important period in the history of English can only be understood if we loosen our insistence on a sharp divide between Old and Middle English and place the textuality of this period in the framework of a multilingual matrix. The book examines a wide range of materials, including the works of Bede, the Alfredian circle, and Wulfstan, as well as the mid-eleventh-century Encomium Emmae Reginae, the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, the Ancrene Wisse, and Matthew Parker’s study of Old English manuscripts. Engaging foundational theories of textual community and intellectual community, this book provides a crucial link with linguistic distance. Perceptions of distance, whether between English and other languages or between different forms of English, are fundamental to the formation of textual community, since the awareness of shared language that can shape or reinforce a sense of communal identity only has meaning by contrast with other languages or varieties. The book argues that the precocious rise of English as a written vernacular has its basis in precisely these communal negotiations of linguistic distance, the effects of which were still playing out in the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth century. Ultimately, the book argues that the tension of linguistic distance provides the necessary energy for the community-building activities of annotation and glossing, translation, compilation, and other uses of texts and manuscripts. This will be an important volume for literary scholars of the medieval period, and those working on the early modern period, both on literary topics and on historical studies of English nationalism. It will also appeal to those with interests in sociolinguistics, history of the English language, and medieval religious history.
Download or read book The Accommodated Jew written by Kathy Lavezzo and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-21 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: England during the Middle Ages was at the forefront of European antisemitism. It was in medieval Norwich that the notorious "blood libel" was first introduced when a resident accused the city's Jewish leaders of abducting and ritually murdering a local boy. England also enforced legislation demanding that Jews wear a badge of infamy, and in 1290, it became the first European nation to expel forcibly all of its Jewish residents. In The Accommodated Jew, Kathy Lavezzo rethinks the complex and contradictory relation between England’s rejection of "the Jew" and the centrality of Jews to classic English literature. Drawing on literary, historical, and cartographic texts, she charts an entangled Jewish imaginative presence in English culture. In a sweeping view that extends from the Anglo-Saxon period to the late seventeenth century, Lavezzo tracks how English writers from Bede to Milton imagine Jews via buildings—tombs, latrines and especially houses—that support fantasies of exile. Epitomizing this trope is the blood libel and its implication that Jews cannot be accommodated in England because of the anti-Christian violence they allegedly perform in their homes. In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish house not only serves as a lethal trap but also as the site of an emerging bourgeoisie incompatible with Christian pieties. Lavezzo reveals the central place of "the Jew" in the slow process by which a Christian "nation of shopkeepers" negotiated their relationship to the urban capitalist sensibility they came to embrace and embody. In the book’s epilogue, she advances her inquiry into Victorian England and the relationship between Charles Dickens (whose Fagin is the second most infamous Jew in English literature after Shylock) and the Jewish couple that purchased his London home, Tavistock House, showing how far relations between gentiles and Jews in England had (and had not) evolved.
Download or read book Arthurian Literature XXXI written by Elizabeth Archibald and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arthurian Literature has established its position as the home for a great diversity of new research into Arthurian matters. It delivers fascinating material across genres, periods, and theoretical issues. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Download or read book Storytelling as Plague Prevention in Medieval and Early Modern Italy written by Martin Marafioti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through close readings of five Italian collections of novellas written over a 500-year period, Martin Marafioti explores the literary tradition of storytelling, and particularly its efficacy as a healing tool following traumatic visitations from the plague. In this study, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron provides the framework for later authors. Although Boccaccio was not the first writer to deal with pestilence or epidemics in a literary work, he was the first to unite the topos of a life-threatening context with a public health disaster like the Black Death, and certainly the first author to propose storytelling as a means of prophylaxis in times of plague. Marafioti goes on to analyze Franco Sacchetti's Trecento Novelle, Giovanni Sercambi's Novelliere, Celio Malespini's Duecento Novelle, and Francesco Argelati's Decamerone, following in its longue-durée the ups and down, structurally and thematically, of the realistic novella as a genre.
Download or read book Mary Magdalene in Medieval Culture written by Peter Loewen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-03-26 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative and multidisciplinary collection visits representations and interpretations of Mary Magdalene in the medieval and early modern periods, questioning major scholarly assumptions behind the examination of female saints and their depictions in medieval artworks, literature, and music. Mary Magdalene’s many and various characterizations from reformed prostitute to conversion-figure to devotee of Christ to "apostle to the apostles" to spiritual advisor to the Prince of Marseilles to hermit in the desert, to list just a few examples, mean that the many conflicted representations of Mary Magdalene apply to a staggering variety of cultural material, including art, liturgy, music, literature, theology, hagiography, and the historical record. Furthermore, Mary Magdalene has grown into an extremely popular and controversial figure due to recent books and movies concerning her, and due to a groundswell of general speculation concerning her relationship to Jesus: was she his acquaintance, follower, companion, wife, family-member, or lover? This volume employs a broad spectrum of theoretical methodologies in order to present poststructuralist, postcolonial, postmodernist, hagiographic, and feminist readings of the figure of Mary Magdalene, addressing and interrogating her conflicting roles and the precise relationship between her sacred and secular representations.
Download or read book The Signifying Power of Pearl written by Jane Beal and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book enhances our understanding of the exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, Middle English dream vision poem Pearl. Situating the study in the contexts of medieval literary criticism and contemporary genre theory, Beal argues that the poet intended Pearl to be read at four levels of meaning and in four corresponding genres: literally, an elegy; spiritually, an allegory; morally, a consolation; and anagogically, a revelation. The book addresses cruxes and scholarly debates about the poem’s genre and meaning, including key questions that have been unresolved in Pearl studies for over a century: * What is the nature of the relationship between the Dreamer and the Maiden? * What is the significance of allusions to Ovidian love stories and the use of liturgical time in the poem? * How does avian symbolism, like that of the central symbol of the pearl, develop, transform, and add meaning throughout the dream vision? * What is the nature of God portrayed in the poem, and how does the portrayal of the Maiden’s intimate relationship to God, her spiritual marriage to the Lamb, connect to the poet’s purpose in writing? Noting that the poem is open to many interpretations, Beal also considers folktale genre patterns in Pearl, including those drawn from parable, fable, and fairy-tale. The conclusion considers Pearl in the light of modern psychological theories of grieving and trauma. This book makes a compelling case for re-reading Pearl and recognizing the poem’s signifying power. Given the ongoing possibility of new interpretations, it will appeal to those who specialize in Pearl as well as scholars of Middle English, Medieval Literature, Genre Theory, and Literature and Religion.
Download or read book Oxford Guides to Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde written by Barry Windeatt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a comprehensive critical guide to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. This new edition has been comprehensively revised in light of the latest scholarly and critical research and with a fully updated bibliography. It includes a full account of Chaucer's imaginative deployment of his sources, and an extended survey of this narrative poem's innovative combination of a range of generic identities. The chapters explain how Chaucer builds thematic significance into his poem's symmetrical structure, and the poem's distinctive variety in style and language, as well as a full commentary on the poem's concerns with love in the contexts of time and mutability and human free will. The Guide explores the poem as an extended debate about the nature and value of love, and how love was conceptualized and experienced as a form of service in quest of compassionate reward, a quasi-religious devotion, and a potentially fatal illness always in hope of cure. The subjectivities of the chief protagonists are fully analysed, as is the poem's problematic ending. Alongside discussions of theme and structure, there is also an account of what the extant manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde may reveal about the poem's early genesis, and a unique survey of responses to Troilus from its own times to the present day. Barry Windeatt's contribution to the series is a comprehensive single-volume guide to Troilus and Criseyde, bringing together a wide range of material and providing a readable commentary on all aspects of the work. Combining the informative substance of a reference book with the coherence of a critical reading, the Guide has taken its place as the standard introduction to Troilus and Criseyde since its first publication in 1992.
Download or read book Sin and Filth in Medieval Culture written by Martha Bayless and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-07-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer, the book shows how filth was regarded as fundamental to an understanding of human history. This theological significance explains the prominence of filth and dung in all genres of medieval writing: there is more dung in theology than there is in Chaucer. The author also demonstrates the ways in which the religious understanding of filth and sin influenced the secular world, from town planning to the execution of traitors. As part of this investigation the book looks at the symbolic order of the body and the ways in which the different aspects of the body were assigned moral meanings. The book also lays out the realities of medieval sanitation, providing the first comprehensive view of real-life attempts to cope with filth. This book will be essential reading for those interested in medieval religious thought, literature, amd social history. Filled with a wealth of entertaining examples, it will also appeal to those who simply want to glimpse the medieval world as it really was.
