Download or read book The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages written by Burt Kimmelman and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1996 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary individualism first manifests itself in the twelfth century in word puzzles and overt self-naming, as well as in discussions about the nature of writing and the role of the poet in the world. Guillem IX, Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer, and Langland were poets and intellectuals. This engaging study traces their claims of authorship, not to a need for what modernity views as self-promotion, but rather to their interests in contemporary philosophical debates. Yet in their creations of both history and fiction, these poets anticipated modern narrative and its literary persona.

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 Medieval Theory of Authorship written by Alastair Minnis and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has often been held that scholasticism destroyed the literary theory that was emerging during the twelfth-century Renaissance, and hence discussion of late medieval literary works has tended to derive its critical vocabulary from modern, not medieval, theory. In Medieval Theory of Authorship, now reissued with a new preface by the author, Alastair Minnis asks, "Is it not better to search again for a conceptual equipment which is at once historically valid and theoretically illuminating?" Minnis has found such writings in the glosses and commentaries on the authoritative Latin writers studied in schools and universities between 1100 and 1400. The prologues to these commentaries provide valuable insight into the medieval theory of authorship. Of special significance is scriptural exegesis, for medieval scholars found the Bible the most difficult text to describe appropriately and accurately.

Download or read book Gender Poetry and the Form of Thought in Later Medieval Literature written by Jennifer Jahner and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-09 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of her career, Elizabeth Robertson has pursued innovative scholarship that investigates the overlapping domains of medieval philosophy, literature, and gender studies. This collection of essays, dedicated to her work, examines gender as a construct of language, a mode of embodiment, and a critical framework for thinking about the past. Its eleven contributors approach the figure of the gendered body in medieval English writing along several axes: poetic, philosophical, material-textual, and historical. The volume focuses on the ways that the medieval body becomes a site of inquiry and agency, whether in the form of the idealized feminine body of secular and religious lyric, the sexually permissive and permeable body of fabliau, or the intercessory body of religious devotional writing. The essays span a broad range of medieval literary works, from the lais of Marie de France to Pearl to Piers Plowman and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, and a broad range of methodological approaches, from philosophy to affect and manuscript studies. Taken together, they celebrate the scholarly career of Elizabeth Robertson while also presenting a coherent and multifaceted investigation of the intersections of gender and medieval literary practice.

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 Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England written by Matthew Fisher and published by Interventions: New Studies Med. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on new readings of some of the least-read texts by some of the best-known scribes of later medieval England, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England reconceptualizes medieval scribes as authors, and the texts surviving in medieval manuscripts as authored. Culling evidence from history writing in later medieval England, Matthew Fisher concludes that we must reject the axiomatic division between scribe and author. Using the peculiarities of authority and intertextuality unique to medieval historiography, Fisher exposes the rich ambiguities of what it means for medieval scribes to "write" books. He thus frames the composition, transmission, and reception--indeed, the authorship--of some medieval texts as scribal phenomena. History writing is an inherently intertextual genre: in order to write about the past, texts must draw upon other texts. Scribal Authorship demonstrates that medieval historiography relies upon quotation, translation, and adaptation in such a way that the very idea that there is some line that divides author from scribe is an unsustainable and modern critical imposition. Given the reality that a scribe's work was far more nuanced than the simplistic binary of error and accuracy would suggest, Fisher completely overturns many of our assumptions about the processes through which manuscripts were assembled and texts (both canonical literature and the less obviously literary) were composed.

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 Authors of the Middle Ages Volume III Nos 7 11 written by N.F. Blake and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors of the Middle Ages is a series designed for research and reference. The aim is to combine, in one compact work, a biography of a medieval author with all the information needed for further research. The series is divided into two sub-series. The first, edited by M.C. Seymour, focuses on EnglishWriters of the Late Middle Ages and the second, edited by Patrick Geary, deals with Historical and Religious Writers of the Latin West. William Caxton was the first English printer and publisher of printed books. He translated many books into English and by the prologues and epilogues added to many of his printed works he helped to establish literary tastes and fashions at the end of the medieval period. The life of Reginald Peacock, bishop, heretic and author, reflects the many controversies of 15th-century England. Drawing on many contemporary sources and based on fresh research. Wendy Scase offers a new interpretation of an enigmatic writer. Douglas Gray traces the lives of the two poets Robert Henryson and William Dunbar. Among the several distinguished poets of late-medieval Scotland. Henryson stands out for his humanity, learned wit and imaginitive power; while Dunbar was one of the most spectacular, flamboyant and versatile Scottish poets of the Middle Ages. This study gives an account of the little that is known of their lives and extensively details both their works and later scholarship. John Capgrave (1393-1464) was an Augustinian friar, Cambridge theologian, hagiographer and chronicler who became Prior Provincial of his order. His life, presented here in the light of fresh research and with full documentation, illuminates the importance of the order in the troubled times of mid 15th-century England.

Download or read book From Song to Book written by Sylvia Huot and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the visual representation of an essentially oral text, Sylvia Huot points out, the medieval illuminated manuscript has a theatrical, performative quality. She perceives the tension between implied oral performance and real visual artifact as a fundamental aspect of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century poetics. In this generously illustrated volume, Huot examines manuscript texts both from the performance-oriented lyric tradition of chanson courtoise, or courtly love lyric, and from the self-consciously literary tradition of Old French narrative poetry. She demonstrates that the evolution of the lyrical romance and dit, narrative poems which incorporate thematic and rhetorical elements of the lyric, was responsible for a progressive redefinition of lyric poetry as a written medium and the emergence of an explicitly written literary tradition uniting lyric and narrative poetics. Huot first investigates the nature of the vernacular book in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, analyzing organization, page layout, rubrication, and illumination in a series of manuscripts. She then describes the relationship between poetics and manuscript format in specific texts, including works by widely read medieval authors such as Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meun, and Guillaume de Machaut, as well as by lesser-known writers including Nicole de Margival and Watriquet de Couvin. Huot focuses on the writers' characteristic modifications of lyric poetics; their use of writing and performance as theme; their treatment of the poet as singer or writer; and of the lady as implied reader or listener; and the ways in which these features of the text were elaborated by scribes and illuminators. Her readings reveal how medieval poets and book-makers conceived their common project, and how they distinguished their respective roles.

Download or read book Medieval Theory of Authorship written by Alastair J. Minnis and published by . This book was released on 1988-01-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 305 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 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 Excrement in the Late Middle Ages written by S. Morrison and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary book intergrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, concluding that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny.

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 Textual Poetics of German Manuscripts 1300 1500 written by Sarah Westphal and published by Camden House (NY). This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German literature of the later Middle Ages is a source of intense and diversified scholarship. But few studies focus on the production and circulation of literary manuscripts, or on what the medieval book can reveal about textuality and cultural reception. Westphal's book attempts to cast light on this gap in our knowledge. It treats an important kind of manuscript produced in German in the later medieval period, namely the collection of short texts written in couplets. Over 50 MSS of this type are analyzed and it is shown that scribes ordered their texts neither randomly nor according to strict criteria, but in ways that have to do with the literary system of the era. Manuscript organization precedes, but has a bearing on, the emergence of concepts of genre, authorship, and literary history. The book challenges the formalist assumption that the manuscript has only an external history as an artefact or possession, but that internally it is a mere receptacle.

Download or read book Engaging Words written by L. Amtower and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acts of reading appear everywhere in the late Middle Ages, from the margins of Books of Hours to self-portraits of authors in their studies. What relevance did this image have for the late medieval imagination? Engaging Words is an interdisciplinary study on the conception of reading in late medieval society. Beginning with an examination of the social conditions that produced a viable reading public, the book proceeds to examine popular tastes, the interrelationship between manuscript form and content, and finally the theory and poetry of late medieval authors. By drawing on images from late medieval culture as well as from historical documents and literary texts, Engaging Words shows how reading became a cultural metaphor in the late Middle Ages that transformed the way the Western world thought about identity and social roles.

Download or read book The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary written by S. Chaganti and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-09-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through interdisciplinary readings of medieval literature and devotional artifacts, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary shows how reliquaries shaped ideas about poetry and poetics in late-medieval England.