Middle English Texts in Transition

Middle English Texts in Transition

Author: Simon Horobin

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1903153530

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Chaucer, Gower and Langland -- Lyrics and romances -- Devotional writings -- Owners and users of medieval books -- A tribute to Professor Takamiya


The Middle English Book

The Middle English Book

Author: Michael Johnston

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-08-24

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0192871773

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The Middle English Book analyzes 202 literary manuscripts from late medieval England (1350-1500) and argues that most readers looked to scribes in their immediate vicinity to acquire copies of literature. It examines various forms of writing practiced by scribes throughout the late medieval English countryside and shows that the production of documents underscored the wide availability of literary copying. As a result, when a reader acquired a manuscript,they were most often tapping into local networks of document production.


The Art of Allusion

The Art of Allusion

Author: Sonja Drimmer

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-09-21

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0812295382

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At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture. The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority. Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.


Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England

Immaterial Texts in Late Medieval England

Author: Daniel Wakelin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-06-09

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1009100580

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Daniel Wakelin introduces and reinterprets the misunderstood and overlooked craft practices, cultural conventions and literary attitudes involved in making some of the most important manuscripts in late medieval English literature. In doing so he overturns how we view the role of scribes, showing how they ignored or concealed irregular and damaged parchment; ruled pages from habit and convention more than necessity; decorated the division of the text into pages or worried that it would harm reading; abandoned annotations to poetry, focusing on the poem itself; and copied English poems meticulously, in reverence for an abstract idea of the text. Scribes' interest in immaterial ideas and texts suggests their subtle thinking as craftspeople, in ways that contrast and extend current interpretations of late medieval literary culture, 'material texts' and the power of materials. For students, researchers and librarians, this book offers revelatory perspectives on the activities of late medieval scribes.


The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

Author: Helen Cooper

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 668

ISBN-13: 0192886738

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The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume occupies both a foundational and a revolutionary place. Its opening date--1100--marks the re-emergence of a vernacular poetic record in English after the political and cultural disruption of the Norman Conquest. By its end date--1400--English poetry had become an established, if still evolving, literary tradition. The period between these dates sees major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression. Middle English poetry reflects the influence of multiple contexts--history, social institutions, manuscript production, old and new models of versification, medieval poetic theory, and the other literary languages of England. It thus emphasizes the aesthetic, imaginative treatment of new and received materials by medieval writers and the formal craft required for their verse. Individual chapters treat the representation of national history and mythology, contemporary issues, and the shared doctrine and learning provided by sacred and secular sources, including the Bible. Throughout the period, lyric and romance figure prominently as genres and poetic modes, while some works hover enticingly on the boundary of genre and discursive forms. The volume ends with chapters on the major writers of the late fourteenth-century (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Gower) and with a look forward to the reception of something like a national literary tradition in fifteenth-century literary culture.


The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Author: Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 689

ISBN-13: 0191649384

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As the 'father' of the English literary canon, one of a very few writers to appear in every 'great books' syllabus, Chaucer is seen as an author whose works are fundamentally timeless: an author who, like Shakespeare, exemplifies the almost magical power of poetry to appeal to each generation of readers. Every age remakes its own Chaucer, developing new understandings of how his poetry intersects with contemporary ways of seeing the world, and the place of the subject who lives in it. This Handbook comprises a series of essays by established scholars and emerging voices that address Chaucer's poetry in the context of several disciplines, including late medieval philosophy and science, Mediterranean Studies, comparative literature, vernacular theology, and popular devotion. The volume paints the field in broad strokes and sections include Biography and Circumstances of Daily Life; Chaucer in the European Frame; Philosophy and Science in the Universities; Christian Doctrine and Religious Heterodoxy; and the Chaucerian Afterlife. Taken as a whole, The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer offers a snapshot of the current state of the field, and a bold suggestion of the trajectories along which Chaucer studies are likely to develop in the future.


Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe

Spiritual Temporalities in Late-Medieval Europe

Author: Michael Foster

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2010-08-11

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1443824364

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Nowadays, many take for granted that time is quantifiable and measurable; did the people of medieval Europe feel the same way? How was their perception of time influenced by their religious faith? How did their faith change over time? This book collects various attempts to trace changes to perceptions of time throughout medieval Europe by examining both how time was a spiritual experience for medieval people and how spiritual experiences changed over time in the Middle Ages. The essays in this volume demonstrate from a variety of perspectives that Christian faith was extremely malleable in the late-medieval period, and that various artists, scribes, and writers negotiated with their spiritual tradition. These are the “spiritual temporalities” of the medieval world, and by studying them we gain an understanding of how medieval culture was a dynamic gathering of different voices, movements, and beliefs, which constantly influenced and changed one another.


Makers and Users of Medieval Books

Makers and Users of Medieval Books

Author: Carol M. Meale

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 1843843757

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Essays exploring different aspects of late medieval and early modern manuscript and book culture. Late medieval manuscripts and early modern print history form the focus of this volume. It includes new work on the compilation of some important medieval manuscript miscellanies and major studies of merchant patronage and of a newly revealed woman patron, alongside explorations of medieval texts and the post-medieval reception history of Langland, Chaucer and Nicholas Love. It thus pays a fitting tribute to the career of Professor A.S.G. Edwards, highlighting his scholarly interests and demonstrating the influence of his achievements. Carol M. Meale is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol; the late Derek Pearsall was Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and Honorary Research Professor at the University of York. Contributors: Nicolas Barker, J.A. Burrow, A.I. Doyle, Martha W. Driver, Susanna Fein, Jane Griffiths, Lotte Hellinga, Alfred Hiatt, Simon Horobin, Richard Linenthal, Carol M. Meale, Orietta Da Rold, John Scattergood, Kathleen L. Scott, Toshiyuki Takamiya, John J. Thompson.