Download or read book Political Allegory in Late Medieval England written by Ann W. Astell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ann W. Astell here affords a radically new understanding of the rhetorical nature of allegorical poetry in the late Middle Ages. She shows that major English writers of that era—among them, William Langland, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet—offered in their works of fiction timely commentary on current events and public issues. Poems previously regarded as only vaguely political in their subject matter are seen by Astell to be highly detailed and specific in their veiled historical references, implied audiences, and admonitions. Astell begins by describing the Augustinian and Boethian rhetorical principles involved in the invention of allegory. She then compares literary and historical treatments of key events in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, finding an astonishing match of allusions and code words, especially those deriving from puns, titles, heraldic devices, and personal cognizances, as well as repeated proverbs, prophecies, and exempla. Among the works she discusses are John Ball's Letters and parts of Piers Plowman, which she presents as two examples of allegorical literature associated with the Peasants' Revolution of 1381; Gower's allegorical representation of the Merciless Parliament of 1388 in Confessio Amantis; and Chaucer's brilliant literary handling of key events in the reign of Richard II. In addition Astell argues for a precise dating of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight between 1397 and 1399 and decodes the work as a political allegory.
Download or read book Political culture in later medieval England written by Michael J. Braddick and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an important collection of pioneering essays penned by the late Simon Walker, a highly respected historian of late medieval England. One of the finest scholars of his generation, Walker's writing is lucid, inspirational, and has permanently enriched our understanding of the period. The eleven essays featured here examine themes such as kingship, lordship, warfare and sanctity. There are specific studies on subjects such as the changing fortunes of the family of Sir Richard Abberbury; Yorkshire's Justices of the Peace; the service of medieval man-at-arms, Janico Dartasso; Richard II's views on kingship, political saints, and an investigation of rumour, sedition and popular protest in the reign of Henry IV. An introduction by G.L. Harriss looks back across Walker's career, and discusses the historiographical context of his work. Both the new and previously published pieces here will be essential reading for those working on the late medieval period.
Download or read book Political Culture in Late Medieval Britain written by Linda Clark and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eight studies of aspects of C15 England, united by a common focus on the role of ideas in political developments of the time. The concept of "political culture" has become very fashionable in the last thirty years, but only recently has it been consciously taken up by practitioners of late-medieval English history, who have argued for the need to acknowledge the role of ideas in politics. While this work has focused on elite political culture, interest in the subject has been growing among historians of towns and villages, especially as they have begun to recognise the importance of both internal politics and national government in the affairs of townsmen and peasants. This volume, the product of a conference on political culture in the late middle ages, explores the subject from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of spheres. It is hoped that it will put the subject firmly on the map for the study of late-medieval England and lead to further exploration of political culture in this period. Contributors CAROLINE BARRON, ALAN CROMARTIE, CHRISTOPHER DYER, MAURICE KEEN, MIRI RUBIN, BENJAMIN THOMPSON, JOHN WATTS, JENNY WORMALD. LINDA CLARK is editor, History of Parliament; CHRISTINE CARPENTER is Reader in History, University ofCambridge.
Download or read book Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland written by Antony J. Hasler and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-10 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to treat English and Scottish material of its period together, and responds to European literary contexts, the dialogue between vernacular and Latin matter, and current critical theory. In so doing it claims that public and occasional writing evokes a counter-discourse in the secrecies and subversions of medieval love-fictions. The result is a poetry that queries and at times cancels the very authority to speak that it so proudly promotes.
Download or read book The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages written by Chris Given-Wilson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Download or read book Political Life in Medieval England 1300 1450 written by W Mark Ormrod and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 1995-08-07 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the dimensions of political society and the major preoccupations of English politics between the later years of Edward I's reign and the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses.
Download or read book Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England written by G. L. Harriss and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How power was distributed and exercised is a key issue in understanding attitudes and assumptions in late medieval England. The essays in this volume all deal with those who had the power to make political decisions, whether kings, nobles or gentry, courtiers or clergy. While ultimately power rested on force, it was enshrined in the law and more usually exercised by influence and by the dangling of reward. Most disputes were settled without violence, if often with recourse to prolonged struggles in the courts, but those who offended against established interests could be punished severely, as the cases of Sir John Mortimer and of Bishop Reginald Pecock show. These essays, presented to Gerald Harriss, who has done so much to illuminate the history of the period, show not only how power was exercised but also how men of the time thought about it. Contributors: Rowena E. Archer, Christine Carpenter, Jeremy Catto, Rosemary Horrox, R.W. Hoyle, Maurice Keen, Dominic Luckett, Philippa Maddern, S.J. Payling, Edward Powell, Anthony Smith, Simon Walker, Christopher Woolgar, Edmund Wright.
Download or read book Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland written by Antony Hasler and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Medieval Ovid Frame Narrative and Political Allegory written by A. Gerber and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ovid's Metamorphoses played an irrefutably important role in the integration of pagan mythology in Christian texts during the Middle Ages. This book is the only study to consider this Ovidian revival as part of a cultural shift disintegrating the boundaries between not only sacred and profane literacy but also between academic and secular politics.
Download or read book Late Medieval Prison Writing and the Politics of Autobiography written by Joanna Summers and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy has long been taken as one of the seminal works of the Middle Ages, yet despite the study of many aspects of the Consolation's influence, the legacy of the figure of the writer in prison has not been explored. A group of late-medieval authors, Thomas Usk, James I of Scotland, Charles d'Orléans, George Ashby, William Thorpe, Richard Wyche, and Sir Thomas Malory, demonstrate the ways in which the imprisoned writer is presented, both within and outside the Boethian tradition. The presentation of an imprisoned autobiographical identity in each of these authors' texts, and the political motives behind such self-presentation are examined in this study, which also questions whether the texts should be considered to from a genre of early autobiographical prison literature.
Download or read book The Livery Collar in Late Medieval England and Wales written by Matthew Ward and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 5 Livery Collars in Wales and the Edgecote Connection
Download or read book Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theorizing Legal Personhood in Late Medieval England offers an account of the fluidity and artificiality of legal personhood before the individualistic turn in law vis-à-vis juristictional pluralism.
Download or read book The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature written by Erin K. Wagner and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2024-04-22 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.
Download or read book Anglo Saxon Saints Lives as History Writing in Late Medieval England written by Cynthia Turner Camp and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2015 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking assessment of the use medieval English history-writers made of saints' lives. The past was ever present in later medieval England, as secular and religious institutions worked to recover (or create) originary narratives that could guarantee, they hoped, their political and spiritual legitimacy. Anglo-SaxonEngland, in particular, was imagined as a spiritual "golden age" and a rich source of precedent, for kings and for the monasteries that housed early English saints' remains. This book examines the vernacular hagiography produced in a monastic context, demonstrating how writers, illuminators, and policy-makers used English saints (including St Edmund) to re-envision the bonds between ancient spiritual purity and contemporary conditions. Treating history and ethical practice as inseparable, poets such as Osbern Bokenham, Henry Bradshaw, and John Lydgate reconfigured England's history through its saints, engaging with contemporary concerns about institutional identity, authority, and ethics. Cynthia Turner Camp is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia.
Download or read book Medieval Ovid Frame Narrative and Political Allegory written by A. Gerber and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-03-20 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ovid's Metamorphoses played an irrefutably important role in the integration of pagan mythology in Christian texts during the Middle Ages. This book is the only study to consider this Ovidian revival as part of a cultural shift disintegrating the boundaries between not only sacred and profane literacy but also between academic and secular politics.
Download or read book Lordship and Literature written by Elliot Kendall and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-05-08 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A ground-breaking approach to the politics of late medieval texts, Lordship and Literature investigates the importance of the great household to late fourteenth-century English culture and society. A sustained new reading of John Gower's major English poem, Confessio Amantis, shows how deeply the great household informed the way Gower and his contemporaries imagined their world. Exploring royal government and gentry ambitions, this thoroughly interdisciplinary book views the period's politics and literature in terms of a household-based economy of power. The great household rode immense political shockwaves in the late fourteenth century, when royal aggrandizement and economic crisis in the wake of the Black Death challenged dominant modes of aristocratic power. Lordship and Literature examines responses to these challenges, analysing texts including the Appeal of the Merciless Parliament, imagination of lordly power by Chaucer, Gower, and Clanvowe, and parliamentary controversy over livery and justice. The economics of power-described by thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Marcel Mauss-spans Ricardian political and literary culture, informing elite politics and love allegory alike. Competing models of household politics, and their literary force, are revealed here in wide-ranging interpretations of exchange (of women, hospitality, livery, loyalty, retribution) in Gower's complex and influential poem. Lordship and Literature locates Confessio Amantis firmly in its historical moment, arguing that the poem belongs to a powerful yet embattled aristocratic politics.
Download or read book Authorship and First person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England written by Stephanie A. V. G. Kamath and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2012 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of medieval vernacular allegories, across a number of languages, offers a new idea of what authorship meant in the late middle ages. The emergence of vernacular allegories in the middle ages, recounted by a first-person narrator-protagonist, invites both abstract and specific interpretations of the author's role, since the protagonist who claims to compose thenarrative also directs the reader to interpret such claims. Moreover, the specific attributes of the narrator-protagonist bring greater attention to individual identity. But as the actual authors of the allegories also adapted elements found in each other's works, their shared literary tradition unites differing perspectives: the most celebrated French first-person allegory, the erotic Roman de la Rose, quickly inspired an allegorical trilogy of spiritual pilgrimage narratives by Guillaume de Deguileville. English authors sought recognition for their own literary activity through adaptation and translation from a tradition inspired by both allegories. This account examines Deguileville's underexplored allegory before tracing the tradition's importance to the English authors Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate, with particular attention to the mediating influence of French authors, including Christine de Pizan and Laurent de Premierfait. Through comparative analysis of the late medieval authors who shaped French and English literary canons, it reveals the seminal, communal model of vernacular authorship established by the tradition of first-person allegory. Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath is Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
