Download or read book Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages written by Peter Godman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual analysis with close attention to style and form, it offers a major contribution to the history of the medieval conscience.
Download or read book The Life Course in Old English Poetry written by Harriet Soper and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-30 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first book-length study of the whole lifespan in Old English verse, Harriet Soper reveals how poets depicted varied paths through life, including their staging of entanglements between human life courses and those of the nonhuman or more-than-human. While Old English poetry sometimes suggests that uniform patterns shape each life, paralleling patristic traditions of the ages of man, it also frequently disrupts a sense of steady linearity through the life course in striking ways, foregrounding moments of sudden upheaval over smooth continuity, contingency over predictability, and idiosyncrasy over regularity. Advancing new readings of a diverse range of Old English poems, Soper draws on an array of supporting contexts and theories to illuminate these texts, unearthing their complex and fascinating depictions of ageing through life. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Download or read book Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales written by Robert J. Meyer-Lee and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Canterbury tales IV-V and literary value -- Clerk -- Merchant -- Squire -- Franklin.
Download or read book The Afterlife of St Cuthbert written by Christiania Whitehead and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the textual representation of Cuthbert, the premier northern English saint, from the seventh to fifteenth centuries.
Download or read book Scribal Correction and Literary Craft written by Daniel Wakelin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.
Download or read book The European Book in the Twelfth Century written by Erik Kwakkel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-26 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'long twelfth century' (1075–1225) was an era of seminal importance in the development of the book in medieval Europe and marked a high point in its construction and decoration. This comprehensive study takes the cultural changes that occurred during the 'twelfth-century Renaissance' as its point of departure to provide an overview of manuscript culture encompassing the whole of Western Europe. Written by senior scholars, chapters are divided into three sections: the technical aspects of making books; the processes and practices of reading and keeping books; and the transmission of texts in the disciplines that saw significant change in the period, including medicine, law, philosophy, liturgy, and theology. Richly illustrated, the volume provides the first in-depth account of book production as a European phenomenon.
Download or read book The Linguistic Past in Twelfth Century Britain written by Sara Harris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-12 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How was the complex history of Britain's languages understood by twelfth-century authors? This book argues that the social, political and linguistic upheavals that occurred in the wake of the Norman Conquest intensified later interest in the historicity of languages. An atmosphere of enquiry fostered vernacular literature's prestige and led to a newfound sense of how ancient languages could be used to convey historical claims. The vernacular hence became an important site for the construction and memorialisation of dynastic, institutional and ethnic identities. This study demonstrates the breadth of interest in the linguistic past across different social groups and the striking variety of genre used to depict it, including romance, legal translation, history, poetry and hagiography. Through a series of detailed case studies, Sara Harris shows how specific works represent key aspects of the period's imaginative engagement with English, Brittonic, Latin and French language development.
Download or read book Paper in Medieval England written by Orietta Da Rold and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-01 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orietta Da Rold provides a detailed analysis of the coming of paper to medieval England, and its influence on the literary and non-literary culture of the period. Looking beyond book production, Da Rold maps out the uses of paper and explains the success of this technology in medieval culture, considering how people interacted with it and how it affected their lives. Offering a nuanced understanding of how affordance influenced societal choices, Paper in Medieval England draws on a multilingual array of sources to investigate how paper circulated, was written upon, and was deployed by people across medieval society, from kings to merchants, to bishops, to clerks and to poets, contributing to an understanding of how medieval paper changed communication and shaped modernity.
Download or read book Imagining the Medieval Afterlife written by Richard Matthew Pollard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where do we go after we die? This book traces how the European Middle Ages offered distinctive answers to this universal question, evolving from Antiquity through to the sixteenth century, to reflect a variety of problems and developments. Focussing on texts describing visions of the afterlife, alongside art and theology, this volume explores heaven, hell, and purgatory as they were imagined across Europe, as well as by noted authors including Gregory the Great and Dante. A cross-disciplinary team of contributors including historians, literary scholars, classicists, art historians and theologians offer not only a fascinating sketch of both medieval perceptions and the wide scholarship on this question: they also provide a much-needed new perspective. Where the twelfth century was once the 'high point' of the medieval afterlife, the essays here show that the afterlives of the early and later Middle Ages were far more important and imaginative than we once thought.
Download or read book Middle English Mouths written by Katie L. Walter and published by . This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First full-length study of the mouth's centrality to discourses of physical, ethical and spiritual 'good' in Middle English literature.
Download or read book Becoming a Poet in Anglo Saxon England written by Emily V. Thornbury and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining historical, literary and linguistic evidence from Old English and Latin, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England creates a new, more complete picture of who and what pre-Conquest English poets really were. It includes a study of Anglo-Saxon words for 'poet' and the first list of named poets in Anglo-Saxon England. Its survey of known poets identifies four social roles that poets often held - teachers, scribes, musicians and courtiers - and explores the kinds of poetry created by these individuals. The book also offers a new model for understanding the role of social groups in poets' experience: it argues that the presence or absence of a poetic community affected the work of Anglo-Saxon poets at all levels, from minute technical detail to the portrayal of character. This focus on poetic communities provides a new way to understand the intersection of history and literature in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book The City of Poetry written by David Lummus and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-17 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how medieval Italian poets viewed their authorship of poetry as a function of their engagement in a human community.
Download or read book Reconstructing Alliterative Verse written by Ian Cornelius and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-20 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the history and development of English alliterative meter, and considers why the form has remained so enigmatic.
Download or read book Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature written by Olivia Holmes and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olivia Holmes explores the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents against the backdrop of medieval religion and didacticism.
Download or read book Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing written by Edwin D. Craun and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late medieval Church obliged all Christians to rebuke the sins of others, especially those who had power to discipline in Church and State: priests, confessors, bishops, judges, the Pope. This practice, in which the injured party had to confront the wrong-doer directly and privately, was known as fraternal correction. Edwin Craun examines how pastoral writing instructed Christians to make this corrective process effective by avoiding slander, insult, and hypocrisy. He explores how John Wyclif and his followers expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against mendicants and clerical wealth. Finally, he traces how major English reformist writing - Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Book of Margery Kempe - expanded the practice to justify their protests, to protect themselves from repressive elements in the late Ricardian and Lancastrian Church and State, and to urge their readers to mount effective protests against religious, social, and political abuses.
Download or read book A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century written by Mark Faulkner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-28 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It discusses numerous neglected or unknown texts, focusing particularly on documents, chronicles and sermons. To tell the story of this pivotal period, it adopts approaches from both literary criticism and historical linguistics, finding a synthesis for them in a twenty-first century philology. It develops new methodologies for addressing major questions about twelfth-century texts, including when they were written, how they were read and their relationship to earlier works. Essential reading for anyone interested in what happened to English after the Norman Conquest, this study lays the groundwork for the coming decade's work on transitional English.
Download or read book Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England written by Andrew Kraebel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-05 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of the origins of the English Bible, revealing the complex continuities between Latin commentaries and English translations.
