This is the first book-length study of the influential cultural and religious exchanges which took place between England and Bohemia following Richard II's marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. The ensuing growth in communication between the two kingdoms initially enabled new ideas of religion to flourish in both countries but eventually led the English authorities to suppress heresy. This exciting project has been made possible by the discovery of new manuscripts after the opening up of Czech archives over the past twenty years. It is the only study to analyze the Lollard-Hussite exchange with an eye to the new opportunities for international travel and correspondence to which the Great Schism gave rise, and examines how the use of propaganda and The Council of Constance brought an end to this communication by securing the condemnation of heretics such as John Wyclif.
This is the first literary study of the career of Richard Rolle (d. 1349), a Yorkshire hermit and mystic who was one of the most widely-read English writers of the late Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson p
For a long time scholars have generally shared the belief that late medieval authors - particularly in England and especially Chaucer - wrote for private readers. This book challenges that view and cu
This 1991 book is a literary study of the career of Richard Rolle (d.1349), a Yorkshire hermit and mystic who was one of the most widely read English writers of the late Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson proposes a chronology of Rolle's writings, and offers a literary analyses of a number of his works. He shows how Rolle's career, as a writer of passionate religious works in Latin and later in English, has as its principal focus the establishment of his own spiritual authority. The book also addresses wider issues, suggesting an alternative way of looking at mystical writing in general and challenging the prevailing view of the relationship between medieval and renaissance attitudes to authors and authority.
Arthurian literature is a popular field, but most of the published work focuses on the vernacular tradition. This book, uniquely, looks at Latin Arthurian works. Geoffrey of Monmouth is treated at length and this is the first book to put him in a context which includes other Latin histories, monastic chronicles, saints' lives and other Latin prose Arthurian narratives. Like Geoffrey's works, most can be associated with the Angevin court of Henry II and by placing these works against the court background, this book both introduces a new set of texts into the Arthurian canon and suggests a way to understand their place in that tradition. The unfamiliar works are summarized for the reader, and there are extensive quotations, with translations, throughout. The result is a thorough exploration of Latin Arthurian narrative in the foundational period for the Arthurian tradition.
Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century analyses key twelfth-century Latin and vernacular texts which articulate a subjective, often autobiographical, stance. The contention is that the self forged in medieval literature could not have come into existence without both the gap between Latinity and the vernacular and a shift in perspective towards a visual and spatial orientation. This results in a self which is not an agent that will act on the outside world like the Renaissance self, but, rather, one which inhabits a potential, middle ground, or 'space of agency', explained here partly in terms of object-relations theory.
This 1998 collection of studies examines the use of the written word in Celtic-speaking regions of Europe between c. 400 and c. 1500. Building on previous work as well as presenting the fruits of much new research, the book seeks to highlight the interest and importance of Celtic uses of literacy for the study of both medieval literacy generally and of the history and cultures of the Celtic countries in the Middle Ages. Among the topics discussed are the uses and significance of charter-writing, the interplay of oral and literate modes in the composition and transmission of medieval Irish and Welsh genealogies, prose narratives and poetry, the survival of Celtic culture in Brittany and of Gaelic literacy in eastern Scotland in the twelfth century, and pragmatic uses of literacy in later medieval Wales.
This 1998 study serves as a contribution to both reception history, examining the medieval response to Chrétien's poetry, and genre history, suveying the evolution of Arthurian verse romance in French. It describes the evolutionary changes taking place between Chrétien's Eric et Enide and Froissart's Meliador, the first and last examples of the genre, and is unique in placing Chrétien's work, not as the unequalled masterpieces of the whole of Arthurian literature, but as the starting point for the history of the genre, which can subsequently be traced over a period of two centuries in the French-speaking world. Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's study was first published in German in 1985, but her radical argument that we need urgently to redraw the lines on the literary and linguistic map of medieval Britain and France is only now being made available in English.
In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, first published in 2000, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood. These always arresting and highly significant moments of 'specular' encounter are examined in numerous Old and Middle French romances, hagiographic texts, epics and brief narratives. Maddox discloses the key role of identity in an original reading of the Lais of Marie de France as a unified collection, as well as in Arthurian literature, fictions of the courtly tryst, genealogies and medieval family romance. The study offers many new perspectives on the poetic and cultural implications of identity as an imaginary construct during the long formative period of French literature.
The first edition of this book appeared in German in 1985, and set an agenda for the study of medieval literary theory. Rather than seeing vernacular writers' reflections on their art, as found in prologues, epilogues and interpolations in literary texts, as merely deriving from established Latin traditions, Walter Haug shows that they marked the gradual emancipation of an independent vernacular poetics that went hand in hand with changing narrative forms. While focusing primarily on medieval German writers, Haug also takes into account French literature of the same period, and the principles underlying his argument are equally relevant to medieval literature in English or any other European language.
This 1994 book offers insights into the rich and varied Dutch literature of the Middle Ages. Sixteen essays written by top scholars consider this literature in the context of the social, historical and cultural developments of the period in which it took shape. The collection includes studies of the most representative authors, genres, works and current fields of research interest, ranging from the court and the city, the world of chivalry, the literature of love, religious literature, drama and the artes texts. The essays draw on the idea of a common tradition in medieval literature, originating in France and shared by other literatures of western Europe. To facilitate the reader's understanding of the European context in which Dutch literature developed, a comparative chronological survey provides an overview of the main cultural, historical and literary events between 1150 and 1500. The bibliography includes details of published English translations of medieval Dutch texts
A major study of the Divine Comedy, this book offers an interesting perspective on Dante's representation of the afterlife. Alison Morgan departs from the conventional critical emphasis on Dante's place in relation to learned traditions by undertaking a thorough examination of the poem in the context of popular beliefs. Her principal sources are thus not the highly literary texts (such as Virgil's Aeneid or Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae) which have become a familiar context for the poem, but rather visions of the Other World found in popular writings, painting and sculpture from the centuries leading up to its composition. The book will be of interest to non-specialists in addition to scholars of Dante, since it offers a clear preliminary account of the Other World tradition, a chronology of its principal representations and summaries of the major texts. Fully illustrated throughout, it integrates with the literary and theological aspects of Dante's heritage the important but
In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on cru
To what extent can imaginative events be situated in time and history? From the medieval to the early modern period, this question is intriguingly explored in the expansive literary genre of romance. This collective study, edited by Jon Whitman, is the first systematic investigation of that formative process during more than four hundred years. While concentrating on changing configurations of romance itself, the volume examines a number of important related reference points, from epic to chronicle to critical theory. Recalling but qualifying conventional approaches to the three 'matters' of Rome, Britain, and France, the far-reaching inquiry engages major works in a variety of idioms, including Latin, French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish. With contributions from a range of internationally distinguished scholars, this unique volume offers a carefully coordinated framework for enriching not only the reading of romance, but also the understanding of changing attitudes toward
Responding to the lively resurgence of literary formalism, this volume delivers a timely and fresh exploration of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Advancing 'new formalist' approaches, medieval scholars have begun to ask what happens when structure fails to yield meaning, probing the very limits of poetic organization. While Chaucer is acknowledged as a master of form, his work also foregrounds troubling questions about formal agency: the disparate forces of narrative and poetic practice, readerly reception, intertextuality, genre, scribal attention, patronage, and historical change. This definitive collection of essays offers diverse perspectives on Chaucer and a varied analysis of these problems, asking what happens when form is resisted by author or reader, when it fails by accident or by design, and how it can be misleading, errant, or even dangerous.
Ardis Butterfield examines the relationship between the poetry and music of medieval France. Beginning when French song was first set into writing in the early thirteenth century, Butterfield describe
While most Chaucer critics interested in gender and sexuality have used psychoanalytic theory to analyze Chaucer's poetry, Mark Miller re-examines the links between sexuality and the philosophical ana
In this fascinating study, Geoffrey Russom traces the evolution of the major English poetic traditions by reference to the evolution of the English language, and considers how verse forms are born, how they evolve, and why they die. Using a general theory of poetic form employing universal principles rooted in the human language faculty, Russom argues that certain kinds of poetry tend to arise spontaneously in languages with identifiable characteristics. Language changes may require modification of metrical rules and may eventually lead to extinction of a meter. Russom's theory is applied to explain the development of English meters from the earliest alliterative poems in Old and Middle English and the transition to iambic meter in the Modern English period. This thorough yet accessible study provides detailed analyses of form in key poems, including Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a glossary of technical terms.
Combining historical, literary and linguistic evidence from Old English and Latin, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England creates a new, more complete picture of who and what pre-Conquest English poets really were. It includes a study of Anglo-Saxon words for 'poet' and the first list of named poets in Anglo-Saxon England. Its survey of known poets identifies four social roles that poets often held - teachers, scribes, musicians and courtiers - and explores the kinds of poetry created by these individuals. The book also offers a new model for understanding the role of social groups in poets' experience: it argues that the presence or absence of a poetic community affected the work of Anglo-Saxon poets at all levels, from minute technical detail to the portrayal of character. This focus on poetic communities provides a new way to understand the intersection of history and literature in the Middle Ages.
