Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England
Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England

Author: Sarah Elliott Novacich

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-03-10

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1316828581

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Sarah Elliott Novacich explores how medieval thinkers pondered the ethics and pleasures of the archive. She traces three episodes of sacred history - the loss of Eden, the loading of Noah's ark, and the Harrowing of Hell - across works of poetry, performance records, and iconography in order to demonstrate how medieval artists turned to sacred history to think through aspects of cultural transmission. Performances of the loss of Eden blur the relationship between original and record; stories of Noah's ark foreground the difficulty of compiling inventories; and engagements with the Harrowing of Hell suggest the impossibility of separating the past from the present. Reading Middle English plays alongside chronicles, poetry, and works of visual art, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England considers how poetic form, staging logistics, and the status of performance all contribute to our understanding of the ways in which medieval thinkers imagined the archive.

New Approaches to the Archive in the Middle Ages
New Approaches to the Archive in the Middle Ages

Author: Emily N. Savage

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-03-25

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 100385236X

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This volume brings together scholars of history, manuscript studies, and art and architectural history to examine in conversation the varieties of medieval archival acts, the heterogeneity of collections, and the motivations of collectors. It is united by the historically flexible concept of the archive, and contributors examine material from Seville to Prague, from the early Christian period through the Reformation. Premodern collections and archival practices are increasingly becoming the subject of academic inquiry. Chapter authors investigate how institutional, communal, and familial identity accrued to material culture, including illuminated manuscripts, ecclesiastic vestments, ancient sarcophagi, and reliquaries. Others examine the social impulses behind the documentation of such collections, namely through the creation of inventories, but also in the production, management, and use of parchment records, including cartularies, estate records, and legal documents. Finally, contributors question how medieval people evaluated historical age and outmoded artistic styles; shaped and promoted collective memory through preservation, display, and ritual; and attached value, both monetary and symbolic, to their collections. The volume is cross-disciplinary and will appeal to a variety of readers, both in and out of academia. Curators, librarians, and archivists working with medieval collections will find it valuable, as will heritage professionals and charities involved in the care of properties which presently or formerly contained medieval treasuries, libraries, and archives.

Chaucer and the Late Medieval World
Chaucer and the Late Medieval World

Author: Lillian M. Bisson

Publisher: MacMillan

Published: 2000-02

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780333800362

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Divided between the outer world of affairs and the inner world of poetic insight, Chaucer sought to make sense of his changing, conflicting world. In this volume, the author examines the societal issues that the poet explored in his work. She focuses on three major areas of medieval life: religion; class/commerce; and gender, all of which were experiencing considerable change in the 14th century. The book builds a bridge between an unmediated encounter with Chaucer's texts and the more specialized discussions found in most contemporary criticism, and provides a detailed analysis of Christian culture. By placing each topic in a broad cultural context, should help the reader to better understand the questions that teased Chaucer's imagination into poetry and to enter into the cultural conversation with which he engaged his audience.

The Theology of Debt in Late Medieval English Literature
The Theology of Debt in Late Medieval English Literature

Author: Anne Schuurman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2023-12-31

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 1009385968

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Exploring debt's permutations in Middle English texts, Anne Schuurman makes the bold claim that the capitalist spirit has its roots in Christian penitential theology. Her argument challenges the longstanding belief that faith and theological doctrine in the Middle Ages were inimical to the development of market economies, showing that the same idea of debt is in fact intrinsic to both. The double penitential-financial meaning of debt, and the spiritual paradoxes it creates, is a linchpin of scholastic and vernacular theology, and of the imaginative literature of late medieval England. Focusing on the doubleness of debt, this book traces the dynamic by which the Christian ascetic ideal, in its rejection of material profit and wealth acquisition, ends up producing precisely what it condemns. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century
A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century

Author: Mark Faulkner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-07-28

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1009033093

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A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century offers a new narrative of what happened to English language writing in the long twelfth century, the period that saw the end of the Old English tradition and the beginning of Middle English writing. It discusses numerous neglected or unknown texts, focusing particularly on documents, chronicles and sermons. To tell the story of this pivotal period, it adopts approaches from both literary criticism and historical linguistics, finding a synthesis for them in a twenty-first century philology. It develops new methodologies for addressing major questions about twelfth-century texts, including when they were written, how they were read and their relationship to earlier works. Essential reading for anyone interested in what happened to English after the Norman Conquest, this study lays the groundwork for the coming decade's work on transitional English.

Middle English Mouths
Middle English Mouths

Author: Katie L. Walter

Publisher:

Published: 2018-06-21

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1108426611

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First full-length study of the mouth's centrality to discourses of physical, ethical and spiritual 'good' in Middle English literature.

Paper in Medieval England
Paper in Medieval England

Author: Orietta Da Rold

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1108840574

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Explains the methods and knowledge to understand how and why paper was used in medieval writing and beyond.

Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages
Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages

Author: Mark Chinca

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-08-25

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 1108808433

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How did new literatures begin in the Middle Ages and what does it mean to ask about such beginnings? These are the questions this volume pursues across the regions and languages of medieval Europe, from Iceland, Scandinavia, and Iberia through Irish, Welsh, English, French, Dutch, Occitan, German, Italian, Czech, and Croatian to Medieval Greek and the East Slavonic of early Rus. Focusing on vernacular scripted cultures and their complicated relationships with the established literary cultures of Latin, Greek, and Church Slavonic, the volume's contributors describe the processes of emergence, consolidation, and institutionalization that make it possible to speak of a literary tradition in any given language. Moreover, by concentrating on beginnings, the volume avoids the pitfalls of viewing earlier phenomena through the lens of later, national developments; the result is a heightened sense of the historical contingency of categories of language, literature, and territory in the space we call 'Europe'.