Download or read book Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire written by Fellow of King's College Cambridge and Newton Trust Lecturer in English Nicolette Zeeman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-20 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious study links William Langland's great poem Piers Plowman to wider medieval enquiries into the nature of intellectual and spiritual desire. Zeeman's radical approach opens up a completely fresh reading of Piers Plowman and sheds light on the history of medieval psychology.
Download or read book Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature written by Rebecca Davis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.
Download or read book The Arts of Disruption written by Nicolette Zeeman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-22 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue - in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science - but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and Piers Plowman offers a series of new readings of the allegorical poem Piers Plowman: but it is also a book about allegory. It argues not just that there are distinctively disruptive 'arts' that occur in allegory, but that allegory, because it is interested in the difficulty of making meaning, is itself a disruptive art. The book approaches this topic via the study of five medieval allegorical narrative structures that exploit diegetic conflict and disruption. Although very different, they all bring together contrasting descriptions of spiritual process, in order to develop new understanding and excite moral or devotional change. These five structures are: the paradiastolic 'hypocritical figure' (such as vices masked by being made to look like 'adjacent' virtues), personification debate, violent language and gestures of apophasis, narratives of bodily decline, and grail romance. Each appears in a range of texts, which the book explores, along with other connected materials in medieval rhetoric, logic, grammar, spiritual thought, ethics, medicine, and romance iconography. These allegorical narrative structures appear radically transformed in Piers Plowman, where the poem makes further meaning out of the friction between them. Much of the allegorical work of the poem occurs at the points of their intersection, and within the conceptual gaps that open up between them. Ranging across a wide variety of medieval allegorical texts, the book shows from many perspectives allegory's juxtaposition of the heterogeneous and its questioning of supposed continuities.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman written by Andrew Cole and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive study of the fascinating medieval poem Piers Plowman, consolidating the most enduring work with groundbreaking new research.
Download or read book Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law written by Arvind Thomas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poet's words and the lawyer's world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal "makyngs" in England's great Middle English poem by William Langland. Focusing on Piers Plowman's preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions' representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explores how the "literary" informs and transforms the "legal" until they finally cannot be separated. Thomas shows how the poem's narrative voice, metaphor, syntax and style not only reflect but also act upon properties of canon law, such as penitential procedures and authoritative maxims. Langland's mobilization of juridical concepts, Thomas insists, not only engenders a poetics informed by canonist thought but also expresses an alternative vision of canon law from that proposed by medieval jurists and today's medievalists.
Download or read book Piers Plowman written by William Langland and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By conservatively editing one important witness of Piers Plowman, Vaughan takes a new generation of students to an early version of this great medieval poem.
Download or read book Reading Piers Plowman written by Emily Steiner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lucid and comprehensive study of Piers Plowman, one of the most magnificent literary works of the Middle Ages.
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: Reasserts the central importance of medieval scholastic literary theory through a collection of newly-commissioned expert essays.
Download or read book The politics of Middle English parables written by Mary Raschko and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The politics of Middle English parables examines the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology and social practice in late-medieval England. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections as well as in lives of Christ and devotional treatises. While most scholarship approaches the translated stories as stable vehicles of Christian teaching, this book highlights the many variations and points of conflict across Middle English renditions of the same story. In parables related to labour, social inequality, charity and penance, the book locates a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. Analysis of these diverse retellings reveals not what a given parable meant in a definitive sense but rather how Middle English parables inscribe the ideologies, power structures and cultural debates of late-medieval Christianity.
Download or read book A Companion to British Literature Volume 1 written by Heesok Chang and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to British Literature, Medieval Literature, 700 - 1450
Download or read book The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth Century English Literature written by Philip Knox and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title provides a new account of the literary history of fourteenth-century England, arguing that many of this period's most distinctive literary experiments emerge through a productive dialogue with the 'Romance of the Rose', a jointly-authored medieval French poem.
Download or read book Staging Contemplation written by Eleanor Johnson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-08-17 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics. Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor Johnson argues instead for the pervasiveness and accessibility of contemplative works to medieval audiences. By drawing together ostensibly diverse literary genres—devotional prose, allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays—Staging Contemplation paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world. Johnson further argues that the contemplative genre played a crucial role in the exploration of the English vernacular as a literary and theological language in the fifteenth century, tracing how these works engaged modes of disfluency—from strained syntax and aberrant grammar, to puns, slang, code-switching, and laughter—to explore the limits, norms, and potential of English as a devotional language. Full of virtuoso close readings, this book demonstrates a sustained interest in how poetic language can foster a participatory experience of likeness to God among lay and devotional audiences alike.
Download or read book The European Book in the Twelfth Century written by Erik Kwakkel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-31 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'long twelfth century' (1075–1225) was an era of seminal importance in the development of the book in medieval Europe and marked a high point in its construction and decoration. This comprehensive study takes the cultural changes that occurred during the 'twelfth-century Renaissance' as its point of departure to provide an overview of manuscript culture encompassing the whole of Western Europe. Written by senior scholars, chapters are divided into three sections: the technical aspects of making books; the processes and practices of reading and keeping books; and the transmission of texts in the disciplines that saw significant change in the period, including medicine, law, philosophy, liturgy, and theology. Richly illustrated, the volume provides the first in-depth account of book production as a European phenomenon.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of English Poetry written by Michael O'Neill and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 1117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary-historical account of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon writings to the present.
Download or read book Rhetoric Beyond Words written by Mary Carruthers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-08 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses collaborative activities across the visual arts to show the power of non-verbal rhetoric in the Middle Ages.
Download or read book Tropologies written by Ryan McDermott and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2016-04-15 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tropologies is the first book-length study to elaborate the medieval and early modern theory of the tropological, or moral, sense of scripture. Ryan McDermott argues that tropology is not only a way to interpret the Bible but also a theory of literary and ethical invention. The “tropological imperative” demands that words be turned into works—books as well as deeds. Beginning with Augustine, Jerome, and Gregory the Great, then treating monuments of exegesis such as the Glossa ordinaria and Nicholas of Lyra, as well as theorists including Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Martin Luther, and others, Tropologies reveals the unwritten history of a major hermeneutical theory and inventive practice. Late medieval and early Reformation writers adapted tropological theory to invent new biblical poetry and drama that would invite readers to participate in salvation history by inventing their own new works. Tropologies reinterprets a wide range of medieval and early modern texts and performances—including the Patience-Poet, Piers Plowman, Chaucer, the York and Coventry cycle plays, and the literary circles of the reformist King Edward VI—to argue that “tropological invention” provided a robust alternative to rhetorical theories of literary production. In this groundbreaking revision of literary history, the Bible and biblical hermeneutics, commonly understood as sources of tumultuous discord, turn out to provide principles of continuity and mutuality across the Reformation’s temporal and confessional rifts. Each chapter pursues an argument about poetic and dramatic form, linking questions of style and aesthetics to exegetical theory and theology. Because Tropologies attends to the flux of exegetical theory and practice across a watershed period of intellectual history, it is able to register subtle shifts in literary production, fine-tuning our sense of how literature and religion mutually and dynamically informed and reformed each other.
Download or read book Ethics and Power in Medieval English Reformist Writing written by Edwin D. Craun and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-18 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The late medieval Church obliged all Christians to rebuke the sins of others, especially those who had power to discipline in Church and State: priests, confessors, bishops, judges, the Pope. This practice, in which the injured party had to confront the wrong-doer directly and privately, was known as fraternal correction. Edwin Craun examines how pastoral writing instructed Christians to make this corrective process effective by avoiding slander, insult, and hypocrisy. He explores how John Wyclif and his followers expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against mendicants and clerical wealth. Finally, he traces how major English reformist writing - Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Book of Margery Kempe - expanded the practice to justify their protests, to protect themselves from repressive elements in the late Ricardian and Lancastrian Church and State, and to urge their readers to mount effective protests against religious, social, and political abuses.
