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 and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages written by Arvind Thomas and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019-03-14 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 Imagined Romes written by C. David Benson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-05-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the conflicting representations of ancient Rome—one of the most important European cities in the medieval imagination—in late Middle English poetry. Once the capital of a great pagan empire whose ruined monuments still inspired awe in the Middle Ages, Rome, the seat of the pope, became a site of Christian pilgrimage owing to the fame of its early martyrs, whose relics sanctified the city and whose help was sought by pilgrims to their shrines. C. David Benson analyzes the variety of ways that Rome and its citizens, both pre-Christian and Christian, are presented in a range of Middle English poems, from lesser-known, anonymous works to the poetry of Gower, Chaucer, Langland, and Lydgate. Benson discusses how these poets conceive of ancient Rome and its citizens—especially the women of Rome—as well as why this matters to their works. An insightful and innovative study, Imagined Romes addresses a crucial lacuna in the scholarship of Rome in the medieval imaginary and provides fresh perspectives on the work of four of the most prominent Middle English poets.
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 The Oxford Handbook of Christmas written by Timothy Larsen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-21 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of all aspects of Christmas across the globe, from the specifically religious to the purely cultural. The contributions are drawn from a distinguished group of international experts from across numerous disciplines, including literary scholars, theologians, historians, biblical scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, art historians, and legal experts. The volume provides authoritative treatments of a range of topics, from the origins of Christmas to the present; decorating trees to eating plum pudding; from the Bible to contemporary worship; from carols to cinema; from the Nativity Story to Santa Claus; from Bethlehem to Japan; from Catholics to Baptists; from secularism to consumerism. Christmas is the biggest celebration on the planet. Every year, a significant percentage of the world's population is draw to this holiday—from Cape Cod to Cape Town, from South America to South Korea, and on and on across the globe. The Christmas season takes up a significant part of the entire year. For many countries, the holiday is a major force in their national economy. Moreover, Christmas is not just a modern holiday, but has been an important feast for most Christians since the fourth century and a dominant event in many cultures and countries for over a millennium. The Oxford Handbook of Christmas provides an invaluable reference point for anyone interested in this global phenomenon.
Download or read book William Langland s Piers Plowman written by William Langland and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1996-12 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum
Download or read book Memory and the English Reformation written by Alexandra Walsham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recasts the Reformation as a battleground over memory, in which new identities were formed through acts of commemoration, invention and repression.
Download or read book Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras written by Nancy Bradley Warren and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras adopts a comparative, boundary-crossing approach to consider one of the most canonical of literary figures, Geoffrey Chaucer. The idea that Chaucer is an international writer raises no eyebrows. Similarly, a claim that Chaucer's writings participate in English confessional controversies in his own day and afterward provokes no surprise. This book breaks new ground by considering Chaucer's Continental interests as they inform his participation in religious debates concerning such subjects as female spirituality and Lollardy. Similarly, this project explores the little-studied ways in which those who took religious vows, especially nuns, engaged with works by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition. Furthermore, while the early modern "Protestant Chaucer" is a familiar figure, this book explores the creation and circulation of an early modern "Catholic Chaucer" that has not received much attention. This study seeks to fill gaps in Chaucer scholarship by situating Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition in an international textual environment of religious controversy spanning four centuries and crossing both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. This book presents a nuanced analysis of the high stakes religiopolitical struggle inherent in the creation of the canon of English literature, a struggle that participates in the complex processes of national identity formation in Europe and the New World alike.
Download or read book The Cambridge Introduction to Satire written by Jonathan Greenberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive overview for both beginning and advanced students of satiric forms from ancient poetry to contemporary digital media.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Ireland Volume 1 600 1550 written by Brendan Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-31 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thousand years explored in this book witnessed developments in the history of Ireland that resonate to this day. Interspersing narrative with detailed analysis of key themes, the first volume in The Cambridge History of Ireland presents the latest thinking on key aspects of the medieval Irish experience. The contributors are leading experts in their fields, and present their original interpretations in a fresh and accessible manner. New perspectives are offered on the politics, artistic culture, religious beliefs and practices, social organisation and economic activity that prevailed on the island in these centuries. At each turn the question is asked: to what extent were these developments unique to Ireland? The openness of Ireland to outside influences, and its capacity to influence the world beyond its shores, are recurring themes. Underpinning the book is a comparative, outward-looking approach that sees Ireland as an integral but exceptional component of medieval Christian Europe.
Download or read book The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth century American Literature written by Jonathan Senchyne and published by Studies in Print Culture and t. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true scale of paper production in America from 1690 through the end of the nineteenth century was staggering, with a range of parties participating in different ways, from farmers growing flax to textile workers weaving cloth and from housewives saving rags to peddlers collecting them. Making a bold case for the importance of printing and paper technology in the study of early American literature, Jonathan Senchyne presents archival evidence of the effects of this very visible process on American writers, such as Anne Bradstreet, Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, William Wells Brown, and other lesser-known figures. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature reveals that book history and literary studies are mutually constitutive and proposes a new literary periodization based on materiality and paper production. In unpacking this history and connecting it to cultural and literary representations, Senchyne also explores how the textuality of paper has been used to make social and political claims about gender, labor, and race.
Download or read book Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English written by Donka Minkova and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-13 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2003 study uses evidence from early English verse to reconstruct the course of some central phonological changes in the history of the language. It builds on the premise that alliteration reflects faithfully the acoustic identity and similarity of stressed syllable onsets. Individual chapters cover the history of the velars, the structure and history of vowel-initial syllable onsets, the behaviour of onset clusters, and the chronology and motivation of cluster reduction (gn-, kn-, hr-, hl-, hn-, hw-, wr-, wl-). Examination of the patterns of group alliteration in Old and Middle English reveals a hierarchy of cluster-internal cohesiveness which leads to new conclusions regarding the causes for the special treatment of sp-, st-, sk- in alliteration. The analysis draws on phonetically based Optimality-Theoretic models. The book presents valuable information about the medieval poetic canon and elucidates the relationship between orality and literacy in the evolution of English verse.
Download or read book A History of Solitude written by David Vincent and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-05-06 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perceived renunciation of the world, which could lead to psychological disorder and anti-social behaviour. Vincent explores the successive attempts of religious authorities and political institutions to manage solitude, taking readers from the monastery to the prisoner’s cell, and explains how western society’s increasing secularism, urbanization and prosperity led to the development of new solitary pastimes at the same time as it made traditional forms of solitary communion, with God and with a pristine nature, impossible. At the dawn of the digital age, solitude has taken on new meanings, as physical isolation and intense sociability have become possible as never before. With the advent of a so-called loneliness epidemic, a proper historical understanding of the natural human desire to disengage from the world is more important than ever. The first full-length account of its subject, A History of Solitude will appeal to a wide general readership.
Download or read book A Dictionary of English Folklore written by Jacqueline Simpson and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 997 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there any legends about cats? Is Cinderella an English story? What is (or was) a Mumming Play? The subject of folklore covers an extremely wide field, with connections to virtually every aspect of life. It ranges from the bizarre to the seemingly mundane. Similarly, folklore is as much afeature of the modern technological age as the ancient world, of every part of the country, both urban and rural, and of every age group and occupation. Containing 2,000 entries, from dragons to Mother Goose, May Day to Michaelmas, this new reference work is an absorbing and entertaining guide to English folklore. Aimed at a broad general readership, the dictionary provides an authoritative reference source on such legendary characters as the Babesin the Wood, Jack the Giant Killer, and Robin Hood, and gives entertaining and informative explanations of a wide range of subjects in folklore, from nosebleeds and wishbones to cats and hot cross buns.
Download or read book Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England written by M. Healy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2001-11-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did early modern people imagine their bodies? What impact did the new disease syphilis and recurrent outbreaks of plague have on these mental landscapes? Why was the glutted belly such a potent symbol of pathology? Ranging from the Reformation through the English Civil War, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England is a unique study of a fascinating cultural imaginary of 'disease' and its political consequences. Healy's original approach illuminates the period's disease-impregnated literature, including works by Shakespeare, Milton, Dekker, Heywood and others.
Download or read book In the Dust of This Planet written by Eugene Thacker and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2011-08-26 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 Amazon Best Seller in Philosophy Criticism. The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live – a central motif of the horror genre. In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. In Thacker's hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z's back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in this podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW8OK4_1gQ
Download or read book The Curious Eye written by Erin Webster and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Curious Eye explores early modern debates over two related questions: what are the limits of human vision, and to what extent can these limits be overcome by technological enhancement? In our everyday lives, we rely on optical technology to provide us with information about visually remote spaces even as we question the efficacy and ethics of such pursuits. But the debates surrounding the subject of technologically mediated vision have their roots in a much older literary tradition in which the ability to see beyond the limits of natural human vision is associated with philosophical and spiritual insight as well as social and political control. The Curious Eye provides insight into the subject of optically-mediated vision by returning to the literature of the seventeenth century, the historical moment in which human visual capacity in the West was first extended through the application of optical technologies to the eye. Bringing imaginative literary works by Francis Bacon, John Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Aphra Behn together with optical and philosophical treatises by Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, the volume explores the social and intellectual impact of the new optical technologies of the seventeenth century on its literature. At the same time, it demonstrates that social, political, and literary concerns are not peripheral to the optical science of the period but, rather, an integral part of it, the legacy of which we continue to experience.
