Download or read book The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages written by Judson Boyce Allen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1982-12-15 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the definition of literature in the late medieval period is based on manuals of writing and on literary commentary and glosses. It defines a method of reading which may now profitably explain medieval texts, and identifies new primary medieval evidence which may ground and guide new reading. Allen chooses texts whose commentary tradition provides the greatest opportunity for completeness. The most important of these is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Medieval readings of Ovid bring into focus a number of major literary questions—the problems of fable and fiction, of unity imposed by miscellany poetry, of allegorical commentary, and of Christian use of pagan culture—all in connection with text which furnished medieval authors with more stories than any other single source except possibly the Bible. Allen also studies commentaries on the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius, the Thebaid of Statius, the De nuptiis of Martianus Capella, the medieval Christian hymn-book, and the Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Together these texts represent the range of medieval literature—a literature which, Allen concludes, was taken as direct ethical discourse, logically conducted and artfully organized within a system of language that also assimilated the natural world and sought to absorb its audience.
Download or read book The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages written by Judson B. Allen and published by . This book was released on with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sung Birds written by Elizabeth Eva Leach and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is birdsong music? The most frequent answer to this question in the Middle Ages was resoundingly "no." In Sung Birds, Elizabeth Eva Leach traces postmedieval uses of birdsong within Western musical culture. She first explains why such melodious sound was not music for medieval thinkers and then goes on to consider the ontology of music, the significance of comparisons between singers and birds, and the relationship between art and nature as enacted by the musical performance of late-medieval poetry. If birdsong was not music, how should we interpret the musical depiction of birdsong in human music-making? What does it tell us about the singers, their listeners, and the moral status of secular polyphony? Why was it the fourteenth century that saw the beginnings of this practice, continued to this day in the music of Messiaen and others?Leach explores medieval arguments about song, language, and rationality whose basic terms survive undiminished into the present. She considers not only lyrics that have their singers voice the songs or speech of birds but also those that represent other natural, nonmusical, sounds such as human cries or the barks of dogs. The dangerous sweetness of birdsong was invoked in discussions of musical ethics, which, because of the potential slippage between irrational beast and less rational woman in comparisons with rational human masculinity, depict women's singing as less than fully human. Leach's argument comes full circle with the advent of sound recording. This technological revolution-like its medieval equivalent, the invention of the music book-once again made the relationship between music and nature an acute preoccupation of Western culture.
Download or read book Literary Theory and Criticism in the Later Middle Ages written by Ardis Butterfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-31 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection makes a new, profound and far-reaching intervention into the rich yet little-explored terrain between Latin scholastic theory and vernacular literature. Written by a multidisciplinary team of leading international authors, the chapters honour and advance Alastair Minnis's field-defining scholarship. A wealth of expert essays refract the nuances of theory through the medium of authoritative Latin and vernacular medieval texts, providing fresh interpretative treatment to known canonical works while also bringing unknown materials to light.
Download or read book Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages written by Thorlac Turville-Petre and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-26 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1989, Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages is an anthology of texts looking at the tradition of alliterative poetry in medieval English literature. The book presents lesser known alliterative Middle English poems, which are unmodernised and include explanatory footnotes designed to give clarity to the text and enable critical response to the texts. The book illustrates the great range and variety of alliterative verse, both rhymed and unrhymed. The poems range from descriptions of armies, bloody battles, dramatic storms and dreams of goddesses. Whatever the subject, social and political satire, theological controversy and moral admonition is always given a lively and interesting setting. The book contains a succinct and incisive introductory material and a carefully selected bibliography which will encourage further reading.
Download or read book Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages written by Eleanor Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-05-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.
Download or read book Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages written by Aldo D. Scaglione and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1963 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Chiefly an essay in the cultural context of the Decameron.'
Download or read book Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry written by Jessica Rosenfeld and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.
Download or read book Machaut s Legacy written by R. Barton Palmer and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Machaut's Legacy deepens our appreciation of the poet's wide-ranging accomplishments and influences, which span from the Middle Ages to the postmodern era. It stakes out exciting new territories and provocative theses, all of which enhance our understanding of this genius of world literature."--Tison Pugh, author of Chaucer's (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages "This richly erudite volume contextualizes Machaut as a seminal medieval poet whose work extends its reach well into the modern era. Machaut's Legacy pulls the reader through almost 700 years of literary history, illustrating the extraordinary influence that this writer had on his contemporaries, as well as his lasting impact on the modern novel."--Lynn T. Ramey, author of Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages "Truly brilliant. Makes a claim to a paradigm shift in how we envisage the history of literature. Palmer and Kimmelman make an excellent case for Machaut as the major innovator in narrative and that his genre, the dit, heralds modernism or even postmodernism."--William Calin, author of The Lily and the Thistle: The French Tradition and the Older Literature of Scotland "An ambitious work that seeks, with great acuity, the origin of the kind of 'novel' in the dit and not in the romaunt. It examines the development of the judgment poetry format through the study of three texts by Machaut, pondering on this intricate form."--Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, author of A New History of Medieval French Literature A daring rewrite of literary history, contributors to this volume argue that the medieval poet, composer, and musician Guillaume de Machaut was the major influence in narrative craft during the late Middle Ages and long after. Examining Machaut's series of debate poems, part of the French tradition of dit amoureux (love tales), contributors highlight the genre's authorial self-consciousness, polyvocality, and ambiguity of judgment. They contend that Machaut led the way in developing and spreading these radical techniques and that his innovations in form and content were forerunners of the modern novel. R. Barton Palmer, Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and director of film studies at Clemson University, is coeditor of An Anthology of Medieval Love Debate Poetry. Burt Kimmelman, professor of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, is the author of The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona.
Download or read book Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages written by Glending Olson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies attitudes toward secular literature during the later Middle Ages. Exploring two related medieval justifications of literary pleasure—one finding hygienic or therapeutic value in entertainment, and another stressing the psychological and ethical rewards of taking time out from work in order to refresh oneself—Glending Olson reveals that, contrary to much recent opinion, many medieval writers and thinkers accepted delight and enjoyment as valid goals of literature without always demanding moral profit as well. Drawing on a vast amount of primary material, including contemporary medical manuscripts and printed texts, Olson discusses theatrics, humanist literary criticism, prologues to romances and fabliaux, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. He offers an extended examination of the framing story of Boccaccio's Decameron. Although intended principally as a contribution to the history of medieval literary theory and criticism, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages makes use of medical, psychological, and sociological insights that lead to a fuller understanding of late medieval secular culture.
Download or read book Chaucer and the Ethics of Time written by Gillian Adler and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer’s sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was sometimes viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer’s diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters’ ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.
Download or read book Dante s Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy written by Nicolino Applauso and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante's Comedy and the Ethics of Invective in Medieval Italy proposes a new approach to invective and comic poetry in Italy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and opens the way for an innovative understanding of Dante’s masterpiece. The Middle Ages in Italy offer a wealth of vernacular poetic invectives—polemical verses aimed at blaming specific wrongdoings of an individual, group, city or institution— that are both understudied and rarely juxtaposed. No study has yet provided a scholarly examination of the connection between this medieval invective tradition, and its elements of humor, derision, and reprehension in Dante’s Comedy. This book argues that these comic texts are rooted in and actively engaged with the social, political, and religious conflicts of their time. Political invective has a dynamic ethical orientation that is mediated by a humor that disarms excessive hostility against its individual targets, providing an opening for dialogue. While exploring medieval comic poems by Rustico Filippi (from Florence), Cecco Angiolieri (from Siena), and Folgore da San Gimignano, this study unveils new biographical data about these poets retrieved from Italian state archives (most of these data are published here in English for the very first time), and ultimately shows what the medieval invective tradition can add to our understanding of Dante’s Comedy.
Download or read book Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages written by Katharine W. Jager and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-03 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures. This collection of essays considers the extra-literary and extra-textual methods by which vernacular forms and genres were obtained and examines the roles that performance and orality play in the reception and dissemination of those genres, arguing that late medieval vernacular forms can be used to delineate the interests and perspectives of the subaltern. Via an interdisciplinary approach, contributors use theories of multimodality, translation, manuscript studies, sound studies, gender studies, and activist New Formalism to address how and for whom popular, vernacular medieval forms were made.
Download or read book Knowing Poetry written by Adrian Armstrong and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the later Middle Ages, many writers claimed that prose is superior to verse as a vehicle of knowledge because it presents the truth in an unvarnished form, without the distortions of meter and rhyme. Beginning in the thirteenth century, works of verse narrative from the early Middle Ages were recast in prose, as if prose had become the literary norm. Instead of dying out, however, verse took on new vitality. In France verse texts were produced, in both French and Occitan, with the explicit intention of transmitting encyclopedic, political, philosophical, moral, historical, and other forms of knowledge. In Knowing Poetry, Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay explore why and how verse continued to be used to transmit and shape knowledge in France. They cover the period between Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose (c. 1270) and the major work of Jean Bouchet, the last of the grands rhétoriqueurs (c. 1530). The authors find that the advent of prose led to a new relationship between poetry and knowledge in which poetry serves as a medium for serious reflection and self-reflection on subjectivity, embodiment, and time. They propose that three major works—the Roman de la rose, the Ovide moralisé, and Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy—form a single influential matrix linking poetry and intellectual inquiry, metaphysical insights, and eroticized knowledge. The trio of thought-world-contingency, poetically represented by Philosophy, Nature, and Fortune, grounds poetic exploration of reality, poetry, and community.
Download or read book The Poet s Art written by Julian Weiss and published by Ssmll. This book was released on 1990 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of literary theory in Castile between 1400 and 1460.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Piers Plowman written by David Strong and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-04-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines William Langland’s late medieval poem, The Vision of Piers Plowman, in light of contemporary intellectual thought. David Strong argues that where the philosophers John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham revolutionize the view of human potential through their theories of epistemology, ethics, and freedom of the will, Langland vivifies these ideas by contextualizing them in an individual’s search for truth and love. Specifically, the text ponders the intersection between reason and the will in expressing love. While scholars have consistently noted the text’s indebtedness to these higher strains of thought, this is the first book-length study in over thirty years that explores the depth of this interconnection, and the only one that considers the salience of both Scotus and Ockham. It is essential reading for medieval literary specialists and students as well as any cultural historian who desires to augment their knowledge of truth and love.
Download or read book Chaucer Langland and Fourteenth Century Literary History written by Anne Middleton and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-04-14 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anne Middleton's essays have been among the most vigorous, learned, and influential in the field of medieval English literature. Their 'crux-busting' energies have illuminated local obscurities with generous learning lightly wielded. Their historically- and theoretically-informed meditations on the nature of poetic discourse traced how the generation of Chaucer and Langland devised a category of the literary that could embody a ethos of engaged, worldly consensus and make that consensus available to imaginative and rational consideration. And their reflections on the enterprise of literary study found a rational way, free of cant, to understand the work of the literary scholar. This volume reprints eight essays: ’The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II,’ ’Chaucer's 'New Men' and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales,’ ’The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: 'Ensamples Mo than Ten' as a Method in the Canterbury Tales,’ ’The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,’ ’Narration and the Invention of Experience: Episodic Form in Piers Plowman,’ ’Making a Good End: John But as a Reader of Piers Plowman,’ ’William Langland's 'Kynde Name': Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England,’ ’Life in the Margins, or, What's an Annotator to Do?’ It includes one essay previously unpublished, ’Playing the Plowman: Legends of Fourteenth-Century Authorship.’
