Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature

Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature

Author: Charlotte Brewer

Publisher: DS Brewer

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1843843544

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Essays on the many key aspects of medieval literature, reflecting the significant impact of Professor Derek Brewer. Derek Brewer (1923-2008) was one of the most influential medievalists of the twentieth century, first through his own publications and teaching, and later as the founder of his own academic publishing firm. His working life of some sixty years, from the late 1940s to the 2000s, saw enormous advances in the study of Chaucer and of Arthurian romance, and of medieval literature more generally. He was in the forefront of such changes, and his understandings ofChaucer and of Malory remain at the core of the modern critical mainstream. Essays in this collection take their starting point from his ideas and interests, before offering their own fresh thinking in those key areas of medieval studies in which he pioneered innovations which remain central: Chaucer's knight and knightly virtues; class-distinction; narrators and narrative time; lovers and loving in medieval romance; ideals of feminine beauty; love, friendship and masculinities; medieval laughter; symbolic stories, the nature of romance, and the ends of storytelling; the wholeness of Malory's Morte Darthur; modern study of the medieval material book; Chaucer's poetic language and modern dictionaries; and Chaucerian afterlives. This collection builds towards an intellectual profile of a modern medievalist, cumulatively registering how the potential of Derek Brewer's work is being reinterpreted and is renewing itself now and into the future of medieval studies. Charlotte Brewer is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford; Barry Windeatt is Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Contributors: Elizabeth Archibald, Charlotte Brewer, Mary Carruthers, Christopher Cannon, Helen Cooper, A.S.G. Edwards, Jill Mann, Alastair Minnis, Derek Pearsall, Corinne Saunders, James Simpson, A.C. Spearing, Jacqueline Tasioulas, Robert Yeager, Barry Windeatt.


English Alliterative Verse

English Alliterative Verse

Author: Eric Weiskott

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-10-27

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1107169658

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A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.


Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England

Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England

Author: Matthew Fisher

Publisher: Interventions: New Studies Med

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780814211984

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Based on new readings of some of the least-read texts by some of the best-known scribes of later medieval England, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England reconceptualizes medieval scribes as authors, and the texts surviving in medieval manuscripts as authored. Culling evidence from history writing in later medieval England, Matthew Fisher concludes that we must reject the axiomatic division between scribe and author. Using the peculiarities of authority and intertextuality unique to medieval historiography, Fisher exposes the rich ambiguities of what it means for medieval scribes to "write" books. He thus frames the composition, transmission, and reception--indeed, the authorship--of some medieval texts as scribal phenomena. History writing is an inherently intertextual genre: in order to write about the past, texts must draw upon other texts. Scribal Authorship demonstrates that medieval historiography relies upon quotation, translation, and adaptation in such a way that the very idea that there is some line that divides author from scribe is an unsustainable and modern critical imposition. Given the reality that a scribe's work was far more nuanced than the simplistic binary of error and accuracy would suggest, Fisher completely overturns many of our assumptions about the processes through which manuscripts were assembled and texts (both canonical literature and the less obviously literary) were composed.


Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature

Sincerity in Medieval English Language and Literature

Author: Graham Williams

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-05-17

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1137540699

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This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.


The Psalms and Medieval English Literature

The Psalms and Medieval English Literature

Author: Tamara Atkin

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1843844354

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An examination of how The Book of Psalms shaped medieval thought and helped develop the medieval English literary canon. The Book of Psalms had a profound impact on English literature from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval period. This collection examines the various ways in which they shaped medieval English thought and contributed to the emergence of an English literary canon. It brings into dialogue experts on both Old and Middle English literature, thus breaking down the traditional disciplinary binaries of both pre- and post-Conquest English and late medieval and Early Modern, as well as emphasizing the complex and fascinating relationship between Latin and the vernacular languages of England. Its three main themes, translation, adaptation and voice, enable a rich variety of perspectives on the Psalms and medieval English literature to emerge. TAMARA ATKIN is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London; FRANCIS LENEGHAN is Associate Professor of OldEnglish at The University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford Contributors: Daniel Anlezark, Mark Faulkner, Vincent Gillespie, Michael P. Kuczynski, David Lawton, Francis Leneghan, Jane Roberts, Mike Rodman Jones, Elizabeth Solopova, Lynn Staley, Annie Sutherland, Jane Toswell, Katherine Zieman.


Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms

Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms

Author: Jessica Brantley

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-11-22

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0812298454

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In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself. Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.


Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad

Author: Jane Gilbert

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-27

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0192568604

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The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. The field of medieval francophone literary culture outside France was for many years a minor and peripheral sub-field of medieval French literary studies (or, in the case of Anglo-Norman, of English studies). The past two decades, however, have seen a major reassessment of the use of French in England, in the Low Countries, in Italy, and in the eastern Mediterranean, and this impacts significantly upon the history of literature in French more generally. This book is the first to look at the question overall, rather than just at one region. It also takes a more sustained theorised approach than other studies, drawing particularly on Derrida and on Actor-Network Theory. It discusses a wide range of texts, some of which have hitherto been regarded as marginal to French literary history, and makes the case for this material being more central to the literary history of French than was allowed in more traditional approaches focused narrowly on 'France'. Many of the arguments in Medieval French Literary Culture Abroad are grounded in readings of texts in manuscript (rather than in modern critical editions), and sustained attention is paid throughout to manuscripts that were produced or travelled outside the kingdom of France.


The Medieval British Literature Handbook

The Medieval British Literature Handbook

Author: Daniel T. Kline

Publisher: Continuum

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13:

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One-stop resource for courses in medieval literature, providing students with a comprehensive guide to the historical and cultural context; major texts and movements; reading primary and critical texts; key critics, concepts and topics; major critical approaches and directions of new research.


Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

Poetic Style and Innovation in Old English, Old Norse, and Old Saxon

Author: Megan E. Hartman

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-10-26

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1501513559

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This book traces the development of hypermetric verse in Old English and compares it to the cognate traditions of Old Norse and Old Saxon. The study illustrates the inherent flexibility of the hypermetric line and shows how poets were able to manipulate this flexibility in different contexts for different practical and rhetorical purposes. This mode of analysis is therefore able to show what degree of control the poets had over the traditional alliterative line, what effects they were able to produce with various stylistic choices, and how attention to poetic style can aid in literary analysis.