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 Scribal Correction and Literary Craft written by Daniel Wakelin and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 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 Vernacular Law written by Ada Maria Kuskowski and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Custom was fundamental to medieval legal practice. Whether in a property dispute or a trial for murder, the aggrieved and accused would go to lay court where cases were resolved according to custom. What custom meant, however, went through a radical shift in the medieval period. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, custom went from being a largely oral and performed practice to one that was also conceptualized in writing. Based on French lawbooks known as coutumiers, Ada Maria Kuskowski traces the repercussions this transformation – in the form of custom from unwritten to written and in the language of law from elite Latin to common vernacular – had on the cultural world of law. Vernacular Law offers a new understanding of the formation of a new field of knowledge: authors combined ideas, experience and critical thought to write lawbooks that made disparate customs into the field known as customary law.
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 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the methods and knowledge to understand how and why paper was used in medieval writing and beyond.
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: A comprehensive, innovative study of how medieval people envisioned heaven, hell, and purgatory - images and imaginings that endure today.
Download or read book Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia written by Jonas Wellendorf and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The coming of Christianity to Northern Europe resulted in profound cultural changes. In the course of a few generations, new answers were given to fundamental existential questions and older notions were invalidated. Jonas Wellendorf's study, the first monograph in English on this subject, explores the medieval Scandinavian reception and re-interpretation of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. This original work draws on a range of primary sources ranging from Prose Edda and Saxo Grammaticus' History of the Danes to less well known literary works including the Saga of Barlaam and the Hauksbók manuscript (c.1300). By providing an in-depth analysis of often overlooked mythological materials, along with translations of all textual passages, Wellendorf delivers an accessible work that sheds new light on the ways in which the old gods were integrated into the Christian worldview of medieval Scandinavia.
Download or read book Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England written by Sarah Elliott Novacich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Elliott Novacich explores the ways in which the plots of sacred history were preserved and repurposed in Medieval English literature.
Download or read book Openness in Medieval Europe written by Manuele Gragnolati and published by ICI Berlin Press. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume challenges the persistent association of the Middle Ages with closure and fixity. Bringing together a range of disciplines and perspectives, it identifies and uncovers forms of openness which are often obscured by modern assumptions, and demonstrates how they coexist with, or even depend upon, enclosure and containment in paradoxical and unexpected ways. Explored through notions such as porosity, vulnerability, exposure, unfinishedness, and inclusivity, openness turns out to permeate medieval culture, unsettling boundaries, binaries, and clear-cut distinctions.
Download or read book The Classicist Writings of Thomas Walsingham written by Sylvia Federico and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2016 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative reading of the "literary" works of Thomas Walsingham, highlighting his reaction to contemporary historical events.
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 ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous and Bedan vitae, through twelfth-century ecclesiastical histories and miracle collections produced at Durham, to his late medieval appearances in Latin meditations, legendaries, and vernacular verse. Whitehead reveals the coherence of these texts as one tradition, exploring the way that ideologies and literary strategies persist across generations. An innovative addition to the literature of insular spirituality and hagiography, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert emphasises the related categories of place and asceticism. It charts Cuthbert's conceptual alignment with a range of institutional, masculine, northern, and national spaces, and examines the distinctive characteristics and changing value of his ascetic lifestyle and environment - frequently constituted as a nature sanctuary - interrogating its relation to his other jurisdictions.
Download or read book The City of Poetry written by David G. 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: What did it mean to be a poet in fourteenth-century Italy? What counted as poetry? In an effort to answer these questions, this book examines the careers of four medieval Italian poets (Albertino Mussato, Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio) who wrote in both Latin and the Italian vernacular. In readings of defenses of poetry, speeches and letters on public laurel-crowning ceremonies, and other theoretical and poetic texts, this book shows how these poets viewed their authorship of poetic works as a function of their engagement in a human community. Each poet represents a model of the poet as a public intellectual - a poet-theologian - who can intervene in public affairs thanks to his authority within texts. The City of Poetry provides a new historicized approach to understanding poetic culture in fourteenth-century Italy which reshapes long-standing Romantic views of poetry as a timeless and sublimely inspired form of discourse.
Download or read book The Typographic Imaginary in Early Modern English Literature written by Rachel Stenner and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2018-07-04 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The typographic imaginary is an aesthetic linking authors from William Caxton to Alexander Pope, this study centrally contends. Early modern English literature engages imaginatively with printing and this book both characterizes that engagement and proposes the typographic imaginary as a framework for its analysis. Certain texts, Rachel Stenner states, describe the people, places, concerns, and processes of printing in ways that, over time, generate their own figurative authority. The typographic imaginary is posited as a literary phenomenon shared by different writers, a wider cultural understanding of printing, and a critical concept for unpicking the particular imaginative otherness that printing introduced to literature. Authors use the typographic imaginary to interrogate their place in an evolving media environment, to assess the value of the printed text, and to analyse the roles of other text-producing agents. This book treats a broad array of authors and forms: printers’ manuals; William Caxton’s paratexts; the pamphlet dialogues of Robert Copland and Ned Ward; poetic miscellanies; the prose fictions of William Baldwin, George Gascoigne, and Thomas Nashe; the poetry and prose of Edmund Spenser; writings by John Taylor and Alexander Pope. At its broadest, this study contributes to an understanding of how technology changes cultures. Located at the crossroads between literary, material, and book historical research, the particular intervention that this work makes is threefold. In describing the typographic imaginary, it proposes a new framework for analysis of print culture. It aims to focus critical engagement on symbolic representations of material forms. Finally, it describes a lineage of late medieval and early modern authors, stretching from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, that are linked by their engagement of a particular aesthetic.
Download or read book Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry written by Jennifer A. Lorden and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Firmly establishes the importance of early affective devotion in the hybrid poetics of the earliest English poetry.
Download or read book Reading English Verse in Manuscript c 1350 c 1500 written by Daniel Sawyer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 is the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. While much past work in the history of reading has revolved around marginalia, this book consults a wider range of evidence, from the weights of books in medieval bindings to relationships between rhyme and syntax. It combines literary-critical close readings, detailed case studies of particular surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys drawing on continental European traditions of quantitative codicology to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period. The small-and large-scale formal features of poetry affected reading subtly but extensively, determining how readers might move through books and even shaping physical books themselves. Readers' responses to one formal feature, rhyme, meanwhile, evince a habitual but therefore deep-rooted formalism which can support and enhance close readings today. Reading English Verse in Manuscript sheds fresh light on poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, but also shows how their works were read in manuscript in the context of a much larger mass of anonymous poems that influenced canonical poems, in a pattern of mutual influence.
Download or read book The Roman de la Rose and Thirteenth Century Thought written by Jonathan Morton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-16 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thirteenth-century allegorical dream vision, the Roman de la Rose, transformed how medieval literary texts engaged with philosophical ideas. Written in Old French, its influence dominated French, English and Italian literature for the next two centuries, serving in particular as a model for Chaucer and Dante. Jean de Meun's section of this extensive, complex and dazzling work is notable for its sophisticated responses to a whole host of contemporary philosophical debates. This collection brings together literary scholars and historians of philosophy to produce the most thorough, interdisciplinary study to date of how the Rose uses poetry to articulate philosophical problems and positions. This wide-ranging collection demonstrates the importance of the poem for medieval intellectual history and offers new insights into the philosophical potential both of the Rose specifically and of medieval poetry as a whole.
Download or read book Chaucer written by Marion Turner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life -- yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker. To understand his accomplishment, she reconstructs in unprecedented detail the cosmopolitan world of Chaucer's adventurous life, focusing on the places and spaces that fired his imagination. Uncovering important new information about Chaucer's travels, private life, and the early circulation of his writings, this innovative biography documents a series of vivid episodes, moving from the commercial wharves of London to the frescoed chapels of Florence and the kingdom of Navarre, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side. The narrative recounts Chaucer's experiences as a prisoner of war in France, as a father visiting his daughter's nunnery, as a member of a chaotic Parliament, and as a diplomat in Milan, where he encountered the writings of Dante and Boccaccio. At the same time, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of Chaucer's writings, taking the reader to the Troy of Troilus and Criseyde, the gardens of the dream visions, and the peripheries and thresholds of The Canterbury Tales. By exploring the places Chaucer visited, the buildings he inhabited, the books he read, and the art and objects he saw, this landmark biography tells the extraordinary story of how a wine merchant's son became the poet of The Canterbury Tales." -- Publisher's description.
Download or read book Voices and Books in the English Renaissance written by Jennifer Richards and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Voices and Books in the English Renaissance offers a new history of reading that focuses on the oral reader and the voice- or performance-aware silent reader, rather than the historical reader, who is invariably male, silent, and alone. It recovers the vocality of education for boys and girls in Renaissance England, and the importance of training in pronuntiatio (delivery) for oral-aural literary culture. It offers the first attempt to recover the voice—and tones of voice especially—from textual sources. It explores what happens when we bring voice to text, how vocal tone realizes or changes textual meaning, and how the literary writers of the past tried to represent their own and others' voices, as well as manage and exploit their readers' voices. The volume offers fresh readings of key Tudor authors who anticipated oral readers including Anne Askew, William Baldwin, and Thomas Nashe. It rethinks what a printed book can be by searching the printed page for vocal cues and exploring the neglected role of the voice in the printing process. Renaissance printed books have often been misheard and a preoccupation with their materiality has led to a focus on them as objects. However, Renaissance printed books are alive with possible voices, but we will not understand this while we focus on the silent reader.
