This volume of Fifteenth-Century Studies is derived from the 1995 Fifteenth-Century Symposium, held in Kaprun, Austria. As usual, it includes essays on numerous aspects of life during the time:interdisciplinary in approach, topics include Piers Plowman, Christine de Pizan, and Ovid in the Florentine renaissance. Examinations of the recent critical attention given to late-medieval drama and to Villon complete the volume.
This important new study of the English mystery plays has a twofold purpose. It is concerned to investigate the antecedents of the four extant cycles and to demonstrate the dramatic value of the plays themselves The opening and concluding chapters place the plays in their historical context by discussing on the one hand the emergence and achievements of genuine religious drama (as opposed to liturgical drama) in the twelfth century and on the other the changes in taste that threw the plays into disrepute in the sixteenth century. The man part of the book analyzes the plays in detail, considering the iconographic and theological traditions that guided the dramatists in their treatment of biblical subject-matter, and also looking at the Continental drama of the time to find out what other dramatic possibilities were open to writers in the Middle Ages. -- From publisher's description.
In this first comprehensive study of the Latin Passion play, Professor Sticca examines the medieval liturgical ceremonies commemorating the events in Christ's Passion and traces their gradual change in character from the contemplative to the dramatic. The author shows that while Christ's Passion became increasingly popular as one of the sacred mysteries beginning in the tenth century, new forces that allowed a more eloquent and humane visualization and description of Christ's anguish first appeared in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Professor Sticca analyzes the earliest extant Latin Passion play, the twelfth-century Montecassino codex, and compares it with other Latin and vernacular Passion plays. He refutes the traditional view that the Planctus Mariae is the germinal point of the Latin Passion play and then offers a new theory of its inception. As a literary form, the Latin Passion play appears to Professor Sticca as a creation of the Montecassino monastic circle which was inspired by the liturgical services of Good Friday and the Gospel accounts. Particularly influential also were three themes that developed in the eleventh century: in liturgy, a concentration on Christocentric piety; in art, a more humanistic treatment of Christ; and in literature, a consideration of the scenes of the Passion as dramatic and human episodes. In the course of this investigation, Professor Sticca also reappraises traditional views of the origin of the medieval liturgical drama, indicating that it should not be traced exclusively to the tropes from the schools of St. Gall and St. Martial of Limoges, but rather to a number of sources.
Pathos as Communicative Strategy in Late-Medieval Religious Drama and Art explores the strategies employed to trigger emotional responses in late-medieval dramatic texts from several Western European traditions, and juxtaposes these texts with artistic productions from the same areas, with an emphasis on Britain. The aim is to unravel the mechanisms through which pathos was produced and employed, mainly through the representation of pain and suffering, with mainly religious, but also political aims. The novelty of the book resides in its specific linguistic perspective, which highlights the recurrent use of words, structures and dialogic patterns in drama to reinforce messages on the salvific value of suffering, in synergy with visual messages produced in the same cultural milieu.
Every aspect of "courtly culture" comes to life in Joachim Bumke's extraordinarily rich and well-documented presentation. A renowned medievalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of original sources and a passion for history, Bumke overlooks no detail, from the material realities of aristocratic society -- the castles and clothing, weapons and transportation, food, drink, and table etiquette -- to the behavior prescribed and practiced at tournaments, knighting ceremonies, and great princely feasts. The courtly knight and courtly lady, and the transforming idea of courtly love, are seen through the literature that celebrated them, and we learn how literacy among an aristocratic laity spread from France through Germany and became the basis of a cultural revolution. At the same time, Bumke clearly challenges those who have comfortably confused the ideals of courtly culture with their expression in courtly society.
The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first two of its five projected volumes. The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful. The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements. Andrew Galloway's Volume 1 treats the poem's first vision, from the Prologue through Passus 4, in all three versions, accepting the C text as the poet's final word but excavating downward through the earlier B and A texts. Stephen Barney's volume completes the framework for the commentary, dealing with the final three passûs of the poem, extant only in the B and C versions. Subsequent volumes will be the work of Ralph Hanna, Traugott Lawler, and Anne Middleton. Overall, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman marks a new stage of concentrated yet wide-ranging attention to a text whose repeated revisions and literary and intellectual complexity make it both an elusive object of inquiry and a literary work whose richness has long deserved the capacious and minutely detailed treatment that only a full commentary can allow. Perhaps no poem in English appeals more than Piers Plowman to those readers who understand Yeats's "fascination with things difficult," yet The Penn Commentary will enable generations of readers to share in the pleasures and challenges of experiencing, engaging with, and trying to elucidate the difficulties of one of the towering achievements of English literature.
This groundbreaking book analyses premodern whiteness as operations of fragility, precarity and racialicity across bodily and nonsomatic figurations. It argues that while whiteness participates in the history of racialisation in the late medieval West, it does not denote skin tone alone. The ‘before’ of whiteness, presupposing essence and teleology, is less a retro-futuristic temporisation – one that simultaneously looks backward and faces forward – than a discursive figuration of how white becomes whiteness. Fragility delineates the limits of ruling ideologies in performances of mourning as self-defence against perceived threats to subjectivity and desire; precarity registers the ruptures within normative values by foregrounding the unmarked vulnerability of the body politic and the violence of cultural aestheticisation; and racialicity attends to the politics of recognition and the technologies of enfleshment at the systemic edge of life and nonlife.
