In the first modern edition of the poem since 1863, James H. Morey presents The Prik of Conscience to a new audience of students of the Middle Ages. The famous fourteenth century poem leads its audience on a path of penance. Attributed to the mystic Richard Rolle, it became one of the most popular poems in medieval England and appears in about 130 manuscripts, more than any other Middle English poem. This edition is the first to offer extensive annotations and a gloss, making it accessible to students at all levels of proficiency in Middle English.
Marginality assumes a variety of forms in current discussions of the Middle Ages. Modern scholars have considered a seemingly innumerable list of people to have been marginalized in the European Middle Ages: the poor, criminals, unorthodox religious, the disabled, the mentally ill, women, so-called infidels, and the list goes on. If so many inhabitants of medieval Europe can be qualified as "marginal," it is important to interrogate where the margins lay and what it means that the majority of people occupied them. In addition, we scholars need to reexamine our use of a term that seems to have such broad applicability to ensure that we avoid imposing marginality on groups in the Middle Ages that the era itself may not have considered as such. In the medieval era, when belonging to a community was vitally important, people who lived on the margins of society could be particularly vulnerable. And yet, as scholars have shown, we ought not forget that this heightened vulnerability sometimes prompted so-called marginals to form their own communities, as a way of redefining the center and placing themselves within it. The present volume explores the concept of marginality, to whom the moniker has been applied, to whom it might usefully be applied, and how we might more meaningfully define marginality based on historical sources rather than modern assumptions. Although the volume’s geographic focus is Europe, the chapters look further afield to North Africa, the Sahara, and the Levant acknowledging that at no time, and certainly not in the Middle Ages, was Europe cut off from other parts of the globe.
What strange transactions take place in the mobile spaces between loci? How does the flow of forces between fixed points enliven texts, suggest new connections, and map out the dizzying motion of myriad interactions? The essays in this volume were first presented at the 2014 New Chaucer Society Congress in Reykjavik, Iceland where a meeting of minds in a shared intermediate space initiated dialogue from diverse perspectives and wended its way through the invisible spaces between concrete categories, objects, and entities. The resulting volume asks a core question: what can we learn by tarrying at the nexus points and hubs through which things move in and out of texts, attempting to trace not the things themselves or their supposedly stable significations, but rather their forms of emergence and retreat, of disorder and disequilibrium? The answer is complex and intermediate, for we ourselves are emerging and retreating within our own systems of transit and experiencing our own disequilibrium. Scholarship, like transit, is never complete and yet never congeals into inertia. Through the manifold explorations of the dynamic transit, transports, scapes, and flows found within literary-and Chaucerian-thought-worlds, new vistas of motion and motivation emerge. Following John Urry's mobile sociology, the volume advances the notion that we can no longer view either social worlds or textual worlds as uniform surfaces upon which one can trace or write a history of the horizontal movements of humans and human mentalities; rather, everything is in constant motion: objects, images, information/ideas, and mobility is thus also vertical, involving human and non-human actants. The essays in this volume consider, then, how medieval literary texts in Chaucer's period rewarp time and space by the means of sophisticated transit and transport structures, which might be traced within specific works but also across works, such as in text networks. Motive entities within literature twist and turn, interact and collide, and destabilise predictable trajectories with unpredictable vigor. TABLE OF CONTENTS // James L. Smith, "Introduction: Transport, Scape, Flow: Medieval Transit Systems" - Christopher Roman, "Bios in The Prik of Conscience: The Apophatic Body and the Sensuous Soul" - Jennie Friedrich, "Concordia discors: The Traveling Heart as Foreign Object in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde" - Robert Stanton, "Whan I schal passyn hens: Moving With/In The Book of Margery Kempe" - Carolynn Van Dyke, "Animal Vehicles: Mobility beyond Metaphor" - Sarah Breckenridge Wright, "Building Bridges to Canterbury" - Thomas R. Schneider, "Chaucer's Physics: Motion in The House of Fame"
Reading English Verse in Manuscript, c.1350-c.1500 is the first book-length history of reading for later Middle English poetry. While much past work in the history of reading has revolved around marginalia, this book consults a wider range of evidence, from the weights of books in medieval bindings to relationships between rhyme and syntax. It combines literary-critical close readings, detailed case studies of particular surviving codices, and systematic manuscript surveys drawing on continental European traditions of quantitative codicology to demonstrate the variety, vitality, and formal concerns visible in the reading of verse in this period. The small-and large-scale formal features of poetry affected reading subtly but extensively, determining how readers might move through books and even shaping physical books themselves. Readers' responses to one formal feature, rhyme, meanwhile, evince a habitual but therefore deep-rooted formalism which can support and enhance close readings today. Reading English Verse in Manuscript sheds fresh light on poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve, but also shows how their works were read in manuscript in the context of a much larger mass of anonymous poems that influenced canonical poems, in a pattern of mutual influence.
The author argues that in these devotional works (which appealed to a broad readership in late medieval England) Rolle successfully refines traditional affective strategies to develop an implied reader-identity, the individual soul seeking the love of God, which empowers each and every reader in his or her own spiritual journey."--Jacket.
This volume explores the complex relations of texts and their contextualising elements, drawing particularly on the notions of paratext, metadiscourse and framing. It aims at developing a more comprehensive historical understanding of these phenomena, covering a wide time span, from Old English to the 20th century, in a range of historical genres and contexts of text production, mediation and consumption. However, more fundamentally, it also seeks to expand our conception of text and the communicative ‘spaces’ surrounding them, and probe the explanatory potential of the concepts under investigation. Though essentially rooted in historical linguistics and philology, the twelve contributions of this volume are also open to insights from other disciplines (such as medieval manuscript studies and bibliography, but also information studies, marketing studies, and even digital electronics), and thus tackle opportunities and challenges in researching the dynamics of text and framing phenomena in a historical perspective.
