Moral Love Songs and Laments

Moral Love Songs and Laments
Author: Susanna Greer Fein
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Total Pages: 413
Release: 1998-02-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1580444733

In this volume, Fein presents highly emotional Middle English lyrics to a new audience of students and teachers of the Middle Ages. These Middle English poems, drawn widely from two hundred years of literary tradition, lead readers in devotion to God by invoking an emotional response to God's love. In this meditative tradition, readers would be brought closer to intellectually understanding God through their affective responses. With its copious footnotes, introductions, and glosses, this volume is ideal for classes on medieval spirituality and English lyrical poetry alike.

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse
Author: Ian Cornelius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108211089

The poetry we call 'alliterative' is recorded in English from the seventh century until the sixteenth, and includes Caedmon's 'Hymn', Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman. These are some of the most admired works of medieval English literature, and also among the most enigmatic. The formal practice of alliterative poets exceeded the conceptual grasp of medieval literary theory; theorists are still playing catch-up today. This book explains the distinctive nature of alliterative meter, explores its differences from subsequent accentual-syllabic forms, and advances a reformed understanding of medieval English literary history. The startling formal variety of Piers Plowman and other Middle English alliterative poems comes into sharper focus when viewed in diachronic perspective: the meter was in transition; to understand it, we need to know where it came from and where it was headed at the moment it died out.

Through a Glass Darkly

Through a Glass Darkly
Author: Holly Faith Nelson
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2011-01-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1554582067

Suffering, the sacred, and the sublime are concepts that often surface in humanities research in an attempt to come to terms with what is challenging, troubling or impossible to represent. These intersecting concepts are used to mediate the gap between the spoken and the unspeakable, between experience and language, between body and spirit, between the immanent and the transcendent, and between the human and the divine. The twenty-five essays in Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred, and the Sublime in Literature and Theory, written by international scholars working in the fields of literary criticism, philosophy, and history, address the ways in which literature and theory have engaged with these three concepts and related concerns. The contributors analyze literary and theoretical texts from the medieval period to the postmodern age, from the works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Herbert to those of Endô Shûsaku, Alice Munro, Annie Dillard, Emmanuel Levinas, and Slavoj Žižek. This book will be of particular interest to scholars of religion and literature, philosophy and literature, aesthetic theory, and trauma studies.

Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature

Approaches to emotion in Middle English literature
Author: Carolyne Larrington
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2024-04-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526176122

Over the last twenty-five years, the ‘history of emotion’ field has become one of the most dynamic and productive areas for humanities research. This designation, and the marked leadership of historians in the field, has had the unlooked-for consequence of sidelining literature — in particular secular literature — as evidence-source and object of emotion study. Secular literature, whether fable, novel, fantasy or romance, has been understood as prone to exaggeration, hyperbole, and thus as an unreliable indicator of the emotions of the past. The aim of this book is to decentre history of emotion research and asks new questions, ones that can be answered by literary scholars, using literary texts as sources: how do literary texts understand and depict emotion and, crucially, how do they generate emotion in their audiences — those who read them or hear them read or performed?

Travelling Texts – Texts Travelling

Travelling Texts – Texts Travelling
Author: Renate Bauer
Publisher: utzverlag GmbH
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2023-11-08
Genre:
ISBN: 3831649960

This Gedenkschrift celebrates the memory of Professor Hans Sauer and his passion for travelling. The contributions in this volume explore different kinds of textual and temporal travels from various linguistic, literary, and philological perspectives.

New Medieval Literatures 23

New Medieval Literatures 23
Author: Philip Knox
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2023-03-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1843846462

Annual volume on medieval textual cultures, engaging with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with widely varied themes: law and literature; manuscript production, patronage, and aesthetics; real and imagined geographies; gender and its connections to narrative theory and to psychoanalysis. Investigations range from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, from England to the eastern Mediterranean. New arguments are put forward about the dating, context, and occasion of Geoffrey Chaucer's Boece, while the narrative dynamics of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Tale of Melibee are examined from new perspectives. The topography of the Holy Lands appears both as a set of emotional sites, depicted in the Prick of Conscience in its account of the end of the world, and as co-ordinates in the cultural imaginary of medieval the wine-trade. Grendel's mother emerges as the invisible and unavowable centre of male heroic culture in Beowulf, and the fourteenth-century St Erkenwald is brought into contact with the community-building project of the medieval death investigation. Finally, the late medieval Speculum Christiani is revealed to be a work with deep aesthetic investments when read through the framework of how its medieval scribes encountered and shaped that work.

Grief, Gender, and Identity in the Middle Ages

Grief, Gender, and Identity in the Middle Ages
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2021-12-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004499695

Examines depictions of grief in the Middle Ages by exploring how grief relates to gender and identity, as well as how men and women perform grief within the various constructions of both gender and grief established by medieval culture.

Play time

Play time
Author: Daisy Black
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1526146851

This book presents an important re-theorisation of gender and anti-Semitism in medieval biblical drama. It charts conflicts staged between dramatic personae in plays that represent theological transitions, including the Incarnation, Flood, Nativity and Bethlehem slaughter. Interrogating the Christian preoccupation with what it asserted was a superseded Jewish past, it asks how models of supersession and typology are subverted when placed in dramatic dialogue with characters who experience time differently. The book employs theories of gender, performance, anti-Semitism, queer theory and periodisation to complicate readings of early theatre’s biblical matriarchs and patriarchs. Dealing with frequently taught plays as well as less familiar material, the book is essential reading for specialist, undergraduate and postgraduate researchers working on medieval performance, gender and queer studies, Jewish-Christian studies and time.

Robert Thornton and His Books

Robert Thornton and His Books
Author: Susanna Fein
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2014
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1903153514

Essays examining the compiler and contents of two of the most important and significant extant late medieval manuscript collections.