Collected here are fourteen articles by one of the leading Renaissance scholars of our age. They range in time from her first critical essay in 1929 to her last in 1964, and reflect the major concerns of her scholarly career. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This is the biography of Rosemond Tuve, a remarkable woman scholar, who rose to honor and acclaim in the United States and abroad. Her story is told mainly in her own compelling voice through personal letters, diaries, and lectures. Tuve was an internationally recognized Renaissance scholar. She was the first visiting woman English professor to Harvard University in 1958, and to Princeton University in 1961. A reading of Rosemond Tuve is a reflection on education and rewards of the life of the mind.
In this analysis of Milton's artistry as an epic poet, John G. Demaray offers a fresh perspective on one of the world's great epic poems. Placing Paradise Lost against the background of Renaissance theatrical and literary formspageants, baroque spectacles, masques, musical dramas, and Continental heroic worksDemaray offers the first extended critical reading of the poem as a unique theatrical epic incorporating heroic conventions, theological materials, and elements of visual pageantry. He examines Milton's early experiments in prophetic verse and theatrical forms, the poet's exposure to Italian theater and art during travels in 163839, and the influence of classical, Continental, and British works upon evolving drafts of Paradise Lost. He relates the epic in new ways to the writings of Jonson, Dryden, and others. Readers interested in seventeenth-century literature, Renaissance and baroque theater, the epic, religious writings, and the creative processes of Milton's imagination will all find many original insights in Milton's Theatrical Epic.
All readers of literary history and criticism will benefit from this edition of letters by William Empson, one of the foremost writers and critics of the twentieth century. This correspondence shows him working out his ideas for all of his major books as well as complementary studies in writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Marvell, Coleridge, and Joyce. The edition also gives the fullest possible picture of his robust interactions with many other prominent writers,including the likes of F. R. Leavis, Helen Gardner, Frank Kermode, Christopher Norris, and I. A. Richards.
What Kind of a Thing Is a Middle English Lyric? considers issues pertaining to a corpus of several hundred short poems written in Middle English between the twelfth and early fifteenth centuries. The chapters draw on perspectives from varied disciplines, including literary criticism, musicology, art history, and cognitive science. Since the early 1900s, the poems have been categorized as “lyrics,” the term now used for most kinds of short poetry, yet neither the difficulties nor the promise of this treatment have received enough attention. In one way, the book argues, considering these poems to be lyrics obscures much of what is interesting about them. Since the nineteenth century, lyrics have been thought of as subjective and best read without reference to cultural context, yet nonetheless they are taken to form a distinct literary tradition. Since Middle English short poems are often communal and usually spoken, sung, and/or danced, this lyric template is not a good fit. In another way, however, the very differences between these poems and the later ones on which current debates about the lyric still focus suggest they have much to offer those debates, and vice versa. As its title suggests, this book thus goes back to the basics, asking fundamental questions about what these poems are, how they function formally and culturally, how they are (and are not) related to other bodies of short poetry, and how they might illuminate and be illuminated by contemporary lyric scholarship. Eleven chapters by medievalists and two responses by modernists, all in careful conversation with one another, reflect on these questions and suggest very different answers. The editors’ introduction synthesizes these answers by suggesting that these poems can most usefully be read as a kind of “play,” in several senses of that word. The book ends with eight “new Middle English lyrics” by seven contemporary poets.
Originally published in 1988, this volume contains papers from, and commissioned after, "The Passing of Arthur", a conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies in November 1986. No Arthurian story is experienced without some foreknowledge of its end, which the text acknowledges through a complex range of methods. This collection takes this as its point of origin, suggesting that all such narratives concern the passing of Arthur, even indirectly, so the chapters not only look at the death of Arthur but the passing on and development of the Arthurian literature. The figure of Arthur and the Round Table continues to fascinate contemporary readers. This interesting collection presents a wide range of Arthurian studies approaches representing some of the vast scholarship on the genre.
Foreword by Paul A. Olson - Buzones Etymology - The Manuel des Péchés - Classical Origin of 'Circumstances' in the Medieval Confessional - The Cultural Tradition of Handlyng Synne - Marie de France, Lais, - Cumhthach Labhras an Lonsa - Chaucerian Tragedy - St. Foy among the Thorns - Amors de terra lonhdana - De Amore of Andreas Capellanus - Why the Devil Wears Green - On Conjointure - The Book of the Duchess - Chaucer Criticism - "And for my land thus hastow mordred me?" - Chaucer and the "Commune Profit" The Manor - The Intellectual, Artistic and Historical Context - Religion and Stylistic History - Simple Signs from Everyday Life - Chaucer and Christian Tradition - The Wife of Bath and Midas - Date and Purpose of Troilus - Who Were "The People"? - Economic and Social Consequences of the Plague - Probable Date and Purpose of Knight's Tale - The Physician's Comic Tale - Wisdom and "The Manciple's Tale"
Fifteen classic essays illuminate a broad cross-section of the intellectual history of the Renaissance. The Journal of the History of Ideashas, over the years, published many important articles on the Renaissance; this selection provides a significant index of American scholarship in the field in the first twenty-five years of the journal's publication. Apart from the quality of the papers, the main criterion of selection has been their diversity. The editors aimed to present a broad cross-section of the intellectual history of the Renaissance, and have on the whole preferred comprehensive rather than monographic studies. The so-called problem of the Renaissance is represented by FERGUSON; the historical thought of the period by WEISINGER, BARON, and REYNOLDS; its social, moral and religious thought by ADAMS, RICE and TRINKAUS; humanism by GRAY; philsophy and science by CASSIRER, RANDALL and BOUWSMA; literature by TUVE; the visual artsby SCHAPIRO; and music by LOWINSKY. First published 1968.
