Against All England

Against All England

Author: Robert W. Barrett

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13:

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This book examines poems, plays, and chronicles produced in Cheshire from the 1190s to the 1650s that collectively argue for the localization of British literary history.


Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages

Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages

Author: Joseph Taylor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-22

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1009192280

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Writing the North of England in the Middle Ages offers a literary history of the North-South divide, examining the complexities of the relationship – imaginative, material, and political – between North and South in a wide range of texts. Through sustained analysis of the North-South divide as it emerges in the literature of medieval England, this study illustrates the convoluted dynamic of desire and derision of the North by the rest of country. Joseph Taylor dissects England's problematic sense of nationhood as one which must be negotiated and renegotiated from within, rather than beyond, national borders. Providing fresh readings of texts such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads and the Towneley plays, this book argues for the North's vital contribution to processes of imagining nation in the Middle Ages and shows that that regionalism is both contained within and constitutive of its apparent opposite, nationalism.


Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales

Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales

Author: Georgia Henley

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-05-08

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0192670271

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Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.


Pre-Conquest History and Its Medieval Reception

Pre-Conquest History and Its Medieval Reception

Author: Dr Matthew Firth

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2025-01-14

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1914049195

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Offers insights into the political, social and cultural interests that informed the shaping of England's pre-Conquest history. The Norman Conquest brought about great change in England: new customs, a new language, and new political and ecclesiastical hierarchies. It also saw the emergence of an Anglo-Norman intellectual culture, with an innate curiosity in the past. For the pre-eminent twelfth-century English historians - such as Eadmer of Canterbury, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon - the pre-Conquest past was of abiding interest. While they recognised the disruptions of the Conquest, this was accompanied by an awareness that it was but one part of a longer story, stretching back to sub-Roman Britain. This concept of a continuum of English history that traversed the events of 1066 would prove enduring, being transmitted into and by the works of successive generations of medieval English historians. This collection sheds new light on the perceptions and uses of the pre-Conquest past in post-Conquest historiography, drawing on a variety of approaches, from historical and literary studies, to codicology, historiography, memory theory and life writing. Its essays are arranged around two main interlinked themes: post-Conquest historiographical practice and how identities - institutional, regional and personal - could be constructed in reference to this past. Alongside their analyses of the works of Eadmer, William and Henry, contributors offer engaging studies of the works of such authors as Aelred of Rievaulx, Orderic Vitalis, Gervase of Canterbury, John of Worcester, Richard of Devizes, and Walter Map, as well as numerous anonymous hagiographies and histories.


Local Place and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400-1700

Local Place and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400-1700

Author: Mary Bateman

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2023-11-21

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1843846586

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The first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales. Places have the power to suspend disbelief, even concerning unbelievable subjects. The many locations associated with King Arthur show this to be true, from Tintagel in Cornwall to Caerleon in Wales. But how and why did Arthurian sites come to proliferate across the English and Welsh landscape? What role did the medieval custodians of Arthurian abbeys, churches, cathedrals, and castles play in "placing" Arthur? How did visitors experience Arthur in situ, and how did their experiences permeate into wider Arthurian tradition? And why, in history and even today, have particular places proven so powerful in defending the impression of Arthur's reality? This book, the first in-depth study of Arthurian places in late medieval and early modern England and Wales, provides an answer to these questions. Beginning with an examination of on-site experiences of Arthur, at locations including Glastonbury, York, Dover, and Cirencester, it traces the impact that they had on visitors, among them John Hardyng, John Leland, William Camden, who subsequently used them as justification for the existence of Arthur in their writings. It shows how the local Arthur was manifested through textual and material culture: in chronicles, notebooks, and antiquarian works; in stained glass windows, earthworks, and display tablets. Via a careful piecing together of the evidence, the volume argues that a new history of Arthur begins to emerge: a local history.


Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts

Animal Soundscapes in Anglo-Norman Texts

Author: Liam Lewis

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1843846225

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A redefinition of the animal's relationship to sound and language in French texts from medieval England. The barks, hoots and howls of animals and birds pierce through the experience of medieval texts. In captivating episodes of communication between species, a mandrake shrieks when uprooted from the ground, a saint preaches to the animals, and a cuckoo causes turmoil at the parliament of birds with his familiar call. This book considers a range of such episodes in Old French verse texts, including bestiaries, treatises on language, the Life of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Fables by Marie de France, aiming to reconceptualize and reinterpret animal soundscapes. It argues that they draw on sound to produce competing perspectives, forms of life, and linguistic subjectivities, suggesting that humans owe more to animal sounds than we are disposed to believe. Texts inviting readers to listen and learn animal noises, to seek spiritual consolation in the jargon of birds, or to identify with the speaking wolf, create the conditions for an assertion of human exceptionalism even as they simultaneously invite readers to question such forms of control. By asking what it means for an animal to cry, make noise, or speak in French, this book provides an important resource for theorizing sound and animality in multilingual medieval contexts, and for understanding the animal's role in the interpretation of the natural world.


Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England

Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England

Author: Rosanne P. Gasse

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-07-04

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 3031314654

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Hybridity in the Literature of Medieval England offers a wide-ranging exploration of hybridity in medieval English literature. Anxiety about hybridity surfaces in characters of mixed ethnic identity in the romances. But anxiety is found also in the intersection of the natural and the supernatural and its site can be located inside the human body’s unstable physical frame, living and dead, as much as in the cultural and social forces at work upon the human body politic at large. Hybridity is unlike other constructs of difference in that, while it is grounded in difference, hybridity points toward sameness. The four types of hybridity studied in medieval English literature show that hybridity can resolve the problems caused by difference. Understanding medieval hybridity can help us to deal with our own contemporary struggles with the mixtures of our own lives and societies.


Medievalia et Humanistica, No. 36

Medievalia et Humanistica, No. 36

Author: Paul Maurice Clogan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2011-01-16

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1442208139

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Since its founding in 1943, Medievalia et Humanistica has won worldwide recognition as the first scholarly publication in America to devote itself entirely to medieval and Renaissance studies. Since 1970, a new series, sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America and edited by an international board of distinguished scholars and critics, has published interdisciplinary articles. In yearly hardcover volumes, the new series publishes significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews treating all facets of medieval and Renaissance culture: history, art, literature, music, science, law, economics, and philosophy. Volume 36—Reviews—emphasizes new research in the field, with a particular focus on work from emerging scholars. Thus, this volume includes twenty-four reviews and three review articles of recent scholarly publications, along with five original articles. The first article “The Ultimate Transgression of the Courtly World” by Albrecht Classen analyzes German texts and melodies to reveal the social strife between the lower and upper classes. John Garrison’s essay “One Mind, One Heart, One Purse,” referencing the text Troilus and Criseyde, suggests that a medieval treatise on friendship is appropriate and engaging. Offering a solution to one of history’s most vexing problems is John Bugbee’s essay “Solving Dorigen Trilemma” by examining the tension between oath and law in the Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales. Karen Green’s essay “What Were the Ladies in the City Reading? The Libraries of Christine de Pizaan’s Contemporaries” provides a clearer insight into the intellect of Christine and her colleagues. Along with these articles, twenty-four reviews, from the United States and all over the world, are included, truly making Medievalia et Humanistica an international publication. To reflect the submissions and audience for Medievalia et Humanistica, the editorial and review boards have been expended to include ten members from the United States and ten international