Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302)
Poems and Carols (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Douce 302)

Author: John the Blind Audelay

Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications

Published: 2009-10-01

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 158044444X

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Audelay's idiosyncratic devotional tastes, interesting personal life history, and declared political affiliations-loyalty to king, upholder of estates, anxiety over heresy-make him worthy of careful study beside his better-known contemporaries. Of particular note: MS Douce 302 preserves Audelay's own alliterative Marcolf and Solomon, a poem thought to be descended from Langland's Piers Plowman. The Audelay Manuscript also contains unique copies of other alliterative poems of the ornate style seen in Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pistel of Swete Susan. These pieces are Paternoster and Three Dead Kings, both set at the end of the book. Whether or not they are Audelay's own compositions, they seem certain to be his own selections. Audelay also displays a persistent habit of sequencing materials in generic and devotionally affective ways. His is a pious sensibility delicately honed by reverence for the liturgy and by an awe of God. That Audelay's poetry can awaken us to new poetic sensitivities in medieval devotional verse is reason enough to bring him into the ambit of canonical fifteenth-century English poets.

Wallington’s World
Wallington’s World

Author: Paul S. Seaver

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780804714327

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Seventeenth-century England has been richly documented by th lives of kings and their great ministers, the nobility and gentry, and bishops and preachers, but we have very little firsthand information on ordinary citizens. This unique portrait of the life, thought, and attitudes of a London Puritan turner (lathe worker) is based on the extraordinary personal papers of Nehemiah Wallington—2,600 surviving pages of memoirs, religious reflections, political reportage, and letters. Coming to maturity during the reign of James I, Wallington witnessed the persecution of Puritans during Archbishop Laud’s ascendancy under Charles I, welcomed what he thought would be the godly revolution brought by the Long Parliament, and watched with increasing disillusionment the falure of that dream under the Rump republic and the Cromwellian Protectorate. The author reconstructs Wallington’s inner world, allowing us to see what an ordinary man made of a lifetime of reading Puritan doctrine and listening to the sermons of Puritan preachers. For the first time we can penetrate the mind of one of those who made up the London mob calling for the end of episcopacy and the death of the Earl of Strafford in 1641, who welcomed the revolution, if not the war that followed, and who finally came to approve the death of his king.

Daniel Heinsius, Auriacus, sive Libertas saucia (Orange, or Liberty Wounded), 1602
Daniel Heinsius, Auriacus, sive Libertas saucia (Orange, or Liberty Wounded), 1602

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 9004425365

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This is the first edition since its original publication of Daniel Heinsius’ Latin tragedy Auriacus, sive Libertas saucia (Orange, or Liberty Wounded, 1602), with an introduction, a parallel English translation, and a commentary. Centering on the assassination of William of Orange, one of the leaders of the Dutch Revolt against King Philip II of Spain, Auriacus was Heinsius’ history drama, with which he aimed to raise Dutch drama to the level of classical drama. Highly influential, the tragedy contributed to the construction of a national identity in the Low Countries and launched Heinsius’ long career as an internationally celebrated poet and professor at Leiden University.