Download or read book The Performance of Middle English Culture written by James J. Paxson and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 1998 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First detailed examination of theatricality in Chaucer and in Middle English literature and culture as a whole. Theatricality as a cultural process is vitally important in the middle ages; it encompasses not only the thematic importation of dramatic images into the Canterbury Tales, but also the social and ideological `performativities' of the mystery and morality plays, metadramatic investments, and the ludic energies of Chaucerian discourses in general. The twelve essays collected here address for the first time this intersection, using contemporary theoryand historical scholarship to treat a number of important critical problems, including the anthropology of theatrical performance; gender; allegory; Chaucerian metapoetics; intertextual play and jouissance; social mediationand rhetoric; genre; and the institutionality of medieval studies. JAMES J. PAXSON is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida; LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER is Professor of English at Indiana University; SYLVIA TOMASCHis Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, City University of New York. Contributors: KATHLEEN ASHLEY, MARLENE CLARK, RICHARD DANIELS, ALFRED DAVID, RICHARD K. EMMERSON, JOHN GANIM, WARREN GINSBERG, ROBERT W. HANNING, SHARON KRAUS, SETH LERER, WILLIAM MCLELLAN, PAMELA SHEINGORN, PETER W. TRAVIS

Download or read book Writing the Oral Tradition written by Mark Amodio and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a splendid, rewarding book destined to reshape critical thinking about medieval poetry in English. Amodio combines groundbreaking theory with a deep, wide-ranging command of relevant scholarship to offer a uniquely inclusive perspective on an enormous and disparate collection of Old and Middle English poetry." --John Miles Foley, University of Missouri, Columbia "This is a well-conceived, well-structured, and well-written book that fills a significant gap in current scholarly discourse. Amodio is extremely well-informed about current oral theory, and presents a beautifully integrated thesis. This clear-sighted and provocative book both promises and delivers much." --Andy Orchard, University of Toronto Mark Amodio's book focuses on the influence of the oral tradition on written vernacular verse produced in England from the fifth to the fifteenth century. His primary aim is to explore how a living tradition articulated only through the public, performance voices of pre-literate singers came to find expression through the pens of private, literate authors. Amodio argues that the expressive economy of oral poetics survives in written texts because, throughout the Middle Ages, literacy and orality were interdependent, not competing, cultural forces. After delving into the background of the medieval oral-literate matrix, Writing the Oral Tradition develops a model of non-performative oral poetics that is a central, perhaps defining, component of Old English vernacular verse. Following the Norman Conquest, oral poetics lost its central position and became one of many ways to articulate poetry. Contrary to many scholars, Amodio argues that oral poetics did not disappear but survived well into the post-Conquest period. It influenced the composition of Middle English verse texts produced from the twelfth to the fourteenth century because it offered poets an affectively powerful and economical way to articulate traditional meanings. Indeed, fragments of oral poetics are discoverable in contemporary prose, poetics, and film as they continue to faithfully emit their traditional meanings.

Download or read book Language and Culture in Medieval Britain written by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2013 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this volume form a new cultural history focused round, but not confined to, the presence and interactions of francophone speakers, writers, readers, texts and documents in England from the 11th to the later 15th century.

Download or read book The Performance Tradition of the Medieval English University written by Thomas Meacham and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-01-20 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a truly paradigm-shifting study that reads a key text in Latin Humanist studies as the culmination, rather than an early example, of a tradition in university drama. It persuasively argues against the common assumption that there was no "drama" in the medieval universities until the syllabus was influenced by humanist ideas, and posits a new way of reading the performative dimensions of fourteenth and fifteenth-century university education in, for example, Ciceronian tuition on epistolary delivery. David Bevington calls it "an impressively learned discussion" and commends the sophistication of its use of performativity theory.

Download or read book Law Book Culture in the Middle Ages written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-02-01 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law | Book | Culture in the Middle Ages takes a detailed view on the role of manuscripts and the written word in legal cultures, spanning the medieval period across western and central Europe.

Download or read book Medieval English Drama written by Katie Normington and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval English Drama provides a fresh introduction to the dramatic and festive practices of England in the late Middle Ages. The book places particular emphasis on the importance of the performance contexts of these events, bringing to life a period before permanent theatre buildings when performances took place in a wide variety of locations and had to fight to attract and maintain the attention of an audience. Showing the interplay between dramatic and everyday life, the book covers performances in convents, churches, parishes, street processions and parades, and in particular distinguishes between modes of outdoor and indoor performance. Katie Normington aids the reader to a fuller understanding of these early English dramatic practices by explaining the significance of the place of performance, the particularities of spectatorship for each event and how the conventions of the form of drama were manipulated to address its reception. Audiences considered range from cloistered members, congregations and parish members to urban citizens, nobles and royalty. Undergraduate students of literature of this period will find this an approachable and illuminating guide.

Download or read book Time Work and Culture in the Middle Ages written by Jacques Le Goff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When I studied these manuals, a source then little exploited, I noticed that the academic, like the merchant, was justified by reference to the labor he accomplished. The novelty of the academics thus ultimately appeared to lie in their role as intellectual workers. My attention was therefore drawn to two notions whose ideological avatars I attempted to trace through the concrete social conditions in which they developed. These notions were labor and time. Under these two heads I maintain two open files, from which some of the articles collected here are drawn. I am still persuaded that attitudes toward work and time are essential aspects of social structure and function, and that the study of such attitudes offers a useful tool for the historian who wishes to examine the societies in which they develop."--Preface, page xii

Download or read book Middle English Literature written by George Kane and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1951 Middle English Literature applies methods of literary evaluation to certain Middle English works. Arguing that previous literary criticism has largely focused on the commentary of their historical, social, philological and religious content, the book suggests that it has led to a thinking that Middle English literature is without artistic value and therefore cannot be compared effectively with later works of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. While traditional analysis has been beneficial to scientific and historical findings, this text seeks to look deeper into the artistic merits of the works and the authors that wrote them, arguing that the authors of these Middle English texts, wrote with the same motivations and experiences of these later authors which in turn informed the artistic basis of these Middle English works. The book looks at Middle English texts through three main areas: the Metrical Romances, the Religious Lyrics and Piers Plowman.

Download or read book The Medieval Culture of Disputation written by Alex J. Novikoff and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-10-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholastic disputation, the formalized procedure of debate in the medieval university, is one of the hallmarks of intellectual life in premodern Europe. Modeled on Socratic and Aristotelian methods of argumentation, this rhetorical style was refined in the monasteries of the early Middle Ages and rose to prominence during the twelfth-century Renaissance. Strict rules governed disputation, and it became the preferred method of teaching within the university curriculum and beyond. In The Medieval Culture of Disputation, Alex J. Novikoff has written the first sustained and comprehensive study of the practice of scholastic disputation and of its formative influence in multiple spheres of cultural life. Using hundreds of published and unpublished sources as his guide, Novikoff traces the evolution of disputation from its ancient origins to its broader impact on the scholastic culture and public sphere of the High Middle Ages. Many examples of medieval disputation are rooted in religious discourse and monastic pedagogy: Augustine's inner spiritual dialogues and Anselm of Bec's use of rational investigation in speculative theology laid the foundations for the medieval contemplative world. The polemical value of disputation was especially exploited in the context of competing Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Bible. Disputation became the hallmark of Christian intellectual attacks against Jews and Judaism, first as a literary genre and then in public debates such as the Talmud Trial of 1240 and the Barcelona Disputation of 1263. As disputation filtered into the public sphere, it also became a key element in iconography, liturgical drama, epistolary writing, debate poetry, musical counterpoint, and polemic. The Medieval Culture of Disputation places the practice and performance of disputation at the nexus of this broader literary and cultural context.

Download or read book Performing Arguments written by Maura Giles-Watson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-03-04 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Performing Arguments: Debate in Early English Poetry and Drama proposes a fresh performance-centered view of rhetoric by recovering, tracing, and analyzing the trope and tradition of aestheticized argumentation as a mode of performance across several early ludic genres: Middle English debate poetry, the fifteenth-century ‘disguising’ play, the Tudor Humanist debate interlude, and four Shakespearean works in which the dynamics of debate invite the plays’ reconsideration under the new rubric of ‘rhetorical problem plays.’ Performing Arguments further establishes a distinction between instrumental argumentation, through which an arguer seeks to persuade an opponent or audience, and performative argumentation, through which the arguer provides an aesthetic display of verbal or intellectual skill with persuasion being of secondary concern, or of no concern at all. This study also examines rhetorical and performance theories and practices contemporary with the early texts and genres explored, and is further influenced by more recent critical perspectives on resonance and reception and theories of audience response and reconstruction.

Download or read book Music and Performance in the Later Middle Ages written by E. Upton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-28 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book seeks to understand the music of the later Middle Ages in a fuller perspective, moving beyond the traditional focus on the creative work of composers in isolation to consider the participation of performers and listeners in music-making.

Download or read book New Medieval Literatures written by David Lawton and published by . This book was released on 2003-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Medieval Literaturesis an annual containing the best new interdisciplinary work in medieval textual studies. Volume 6 deals in depth with one of the most important of medieval vernacular writers, Geoffrey Chaucer, his closest successor, Thomas Hoccleve, and his most important precursor in England, Marie de France.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages written by Jody Enders and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically and broadly defined as the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages encompass a millennium of cultural conflicts and developments. A large body of mystery, passion, miracle and morality plays cohabited with song, dance, farces and other public spectacles, frequently sharing ecclesiastical and secular inspiration. A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of theatre between 500 and 1500, and imaginatively pieces together the puzzle of medieval theatre by foregrounding the study of performance. Each of the ten chapters of this richly illustrated volume takes a different theme as its focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100 1500 written by Larry Scanlon and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-18 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging survey of the most important medieval authors and genres, designed for students of English.

Download or read book Shakespeare and the Middle Ages written by Martha W. Driver and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every generation reinvents Shakespeare for its own needs, imagining through its particular choices and emphases the Shakespeare that it values. The man himself was deeply involved in his own kind of historical reimagining. This collection of essays examines the playwright's medieval sources and inspiration, and how they shaped his works. With a foreword by Michael Almereyda (director of the Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke) and dramaturge Dakin Matthews, these thirteen essays analyze the ways in which our modern understanding of medieval life has been influenced by our appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.

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 Performance Cognitive Theory and Devotional Culture written by J. Stevenson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-05-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture, Jill Stevenson uses cognitive theory to explore the layperson s physical encounter with live religious performances, and to argue that laypeople s interactions with other devotional media - such as books and art objects - may also have functioned like performance events. By revealing the remarkable resonance between cognitive science and medieval visual theories, Stevenson demonstrates how understanding medieval culture can enrich the study of performance generally. She concludes by applying her theories of medieval performance culture to contemporary religious forms, including creationist museums, Hell Houses, and megachurches.