Readings in Medieval Poetry is a linked collection of essays on such poems as the Song of Roland, King Horn, Havelok, Sir Orfeo, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde, the alliterative Morte Arthure, The Siege of Jerusalem, Purity, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman. The connecting purpose is to open up a variety of kinds of medieval poetry to modern readers; and, while the methods used vary with the kinds of poetry being discussed, they frequently involve, along with historical treatments in terms of medieval practices and systems of ideas, the adoption and adaptation of theoretical frameworks borrowed from outside the medieval field.
Readings in Medieval Texts offers a thorough and accessible introduction to the interpretation and criticism of a broad range of Old and Middle English canonical texts from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. The volume brings together 24 newly commissioned chapters by a leading international team of medieval scholars. An introductory chapter highlights the overarching trends in the composition of English Literature in the Medieval periods, and provides an overview of the textual continuities and innovations. Individual chapters give detailed information about context, authorship, date, and critical views on texts, before providing fascinating and thought-provoking examinations of crucial excerpts and themes. This book will be invaluable for undergraduate and graduate students on all courses in Medieval Studies, particularly those focusing on understanding literature and its role in society.
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Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.
This study examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181-3), and John Gower's English poem, the Confessio Amantis (1390-3). James Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism, in which the concept of self is centered in the intellect and the imagination respectively, and shows the very different modes of thought that lie behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.
III: Subjectivity and the Self -- 6. Re-reading Troilus in Response to Tony Spearing -- 7. The English Charles: Subjectivity, Texts and Culture -- IV: Reading for Form -- 8. The Inescapability of Form -- 9. Destroyer of Forms: Chaucer's Philomela -- 10. Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as Dits -- 11. Poems without Form? Maiden in the mor lay Revisited -- 12. "I" and "We" in Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity -- V: Epilogue -- 13. Two Appreciations of A.C. Spearing -- 14. Announcing a Literary Find Apparently Related to the Gawain-poet -- Works Cited -- Index
How medieval songbooks were composed in collaboration with the community—and across languages and societies: “Eloquent…clearly argued.”—Times Literary Supplement Today we usually think of a book of poems as composed by a poet, rather than assembled or adapted by a network of poets and readers. But the earliest European vernacular poetries challenge these assumptions. Medieval songbooks remind us how lyric poetry was once communally produced and received—a collaboration of artists, performers, live audiences, and readers stretching across languages and societies. The only comparative study of its kind, Songbook treats what poetry was before the emergence of the modern category poetry: that is, how vernacular songbooks of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries shaped our modern understanding of poetry by establishing expectations of what is a poem, what is a poet, and what is lyric poetry itself. Marisa Galvez analyzes the seminal songbooks representing the vernacular traditions of Occitan, Middle High German, and Castilian, and tracks the process by which the songbook emerged from the original performance contexts of oral publication, into a medium for preservation, and, finally, into an established literary object. Galvez reveals that songbooks—in ways that resonate with our modern practice of curated archives and playlists—contain lyric, music, images, and other nonlyric texts selected and ordered to reflect the local values and preferences of their readers. At a time when medievalists are reassessing the historical foundations of their field and especially the national literary canons established in the nineteenth century, a new examination of the songbook’s role in several vernacular traditions is more relevant than ever.
"Gooth yet alway under": invention as movement in The house of fame -- "Ryght swich as ye felten": aligning affect and invention in The legend of good women -- A thing so strange: macrocosmic emergence in the Confessio amantis -- "The cronique of this fable": transformative poetry and the chronicle form in the Confessio amantis -- Empty songs, mighty men, and a startled chicken: satirizing the affect of invention in fragment VII of the Canterbury tales -- From ashes ancient come: affective intertextuality in Chaucer, Gower, and Shakespeare
