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Geoffrey Chaucer : unveiling the merry bard
A new critical biography of medieval England's most famous poet. For over six centuries, Chaucer has epitomized poetic greatness, though more recent treatments of The Canterbury Tales'lively and often risqu style have made his name more synonymous with bawdy humor. But beyond his poetic achievements, Chaucer assumed various roles including those of royal attendant, soldier, customs official, justice of the peace, and more. In this book, Mary Flannery chronicles Chaucer's life during one of the most turbulent periods of English history, illuminating how he came to be known not only as the father of English poetry but also as England's \"merry bard.\"
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Animal Encounters
Traces of the living animal run across the entire corpus of medieval writing and reveal how pervasively animals mattered in medieval thought and practice. In fascinating scenes of cross-species encounters, a raven offers St. Cuthbert a lump of lard that waterproofs his visitors' boots for a whole year, a scholar finds inspiration for his studies in his cat's perfect focus on killing mice, and a dispossessed knight wins back his heritage only to give it up again in order to save the life of his warhorse. Readers have often taken such encounters to be merely figurative or fanciful, but Susan Crane discovers that these scenes of interaction are firmly grounded in the intimate cohabitation with animals that characterized every medieval milieu from palace to village. The animal encounters of medieval literature reveal their full meaning only when we recover the living animal's place within the written animal.The grip of a certain humanism was strong in medieval Britain, as it is today: the humanism that conceives animals in diametrical opposition to humankind. Yet medieval writing was far from univocal in this regard. Latin and vernacular works abound in other ways of thinking about animals that invite the saint, the scholar, and the knight to explore how bodies and minds interpenetrate across species lines. Crane brings these other ways of thinking to light in her readings of the beast fable, the hunting treatise, the saint's life, the bestiary, and other genres. Her substantial contribution to the field of animal studies investigates how animals and people interact in culture making, how conceiving the animal is integral to conceiving the human, and how cross-species encounters transform both their animal and their human participants.
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Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540
Taking as her focus a body of writings in poetic, didactic, and legal modes that circulated in England's capital between the 1380sjust a generation after the Black Deathand the first decade of the English reformation in the 1530s, Amy Appleford offers the first full-length study of the Middle English \"art of dying\" (ars moriendi). An educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of medieval civic culture, she contends, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, the building of institutions, and the good government of the city itself.
In fifteenth-century London in particular, where an increasingly laicized reformist religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal, cultivating a sophisticated attitude toward death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense. The virtuous ordering of self, household, and city rested on a proper attitude toward mortality on the part both of the ruled and of their secular and religious rulers. The intricacies of keeping death constantly in mind informed not only the religious prose of the period, but also literary and visual arts. In London's version of the famous image-text known as the Dance of Death, Thomas Hoccleve's poetic collectionThe Series, and the early sixteenth-century prose treatises of Tudor writers Richard Whitford, Thomas Lupset, and Thomas More, death is understood as an explicitly generative force, one capable (if properly managed) of providing vital personal, social, and literary opportunities.
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The English romance in time : transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare
This book is a study of romance motifs and conventions, or ‘memes’: ideas that behave like genes or organisms in their ability to replicate, adapt, and survive in different forms and cultures. First developed in French and Anglo-Norman romances of the 12th century, they were transmitted into English in the 13th-15th centuries, acquired a new and vibrant popularity when prints of medieval romances became the pulp fiction of the Tudor age, and underwent remarkable metamorphoses in the works of the great Elizabethan writers. Although the motifs themselves remain the same, sometimes even down to verbal detail, the usage and understanding of them changes over time, rather as a word may change meaning: the book offers in effect a historical semantics of the language of romance conventions. Differences in cultural usage and interpretation emerge not just in the reuse of traditional elements in new stories but even in successive recopyings of a single text. These differences become more marked as stories and motifs move across authors, periods, readership groups, and changing linguistic and historical circumstances. The book concludes in the early 17th century, since the generation into which Spenser and Shakespeare were born was the last to be brought up on these stories in their original forms, and which therefore had access to the full range of meanings they could encode.
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Imagining Robin Hood
A.J. Pollard takes us back to the earliest surviving stories, tales and ballads of Robin Hood, and re-examines the story of this fascinating figure. Setting out the economic, social and political context of the time, Pollard illuminates the legend of this yeoman hero and champion of justice as never before.
Imagining Robin Hood questions:
what a 'yeoman' was, and what it meant to be a fifteenth-century Englishman
Was Robin Hood hunted as an outlaw, or respected as an officially appointed forest ranger?
Why do we ignore the fact that this celebrated hero led a life of crime?
Did he actually steal from the rich and give to the poor?
Answering these questions, the book looks at how Robin Hood was 'all things to all men' since he first appeared; speaking to the gentry, the peasants and all those in between. The story of the freedom-loving outlaw tells us much about the English nation, but tracing back to the first stories reveals even more about the society in which the legend arose.
An enthralling read for all historians and general readers of this fascinating subject.
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An introduction to Middle English
An Introduction to Middle English is designed to provide undergraduate students of English historical linguistics with a concise description of the language during the period 1100-1500. Middle English, the language of Chaucer, is discussed in relation to both earlier and later stages in the history of English, and in relation to other languages with which it came into contact. Features:* the historical and geographical contexts of Middle English* the evidence for Middle English* the principal features of Middle English spelling, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary* an introduction to Middle English textual studies* selected Middle English texts, both literary and non-literary* notes, glossaries and annotated bibliographies* questions for reviewMost other introductory books on Middle English focus on literary rather than linguistic matters; this book is designed to redress the balance, by providing students of English language with an up-to-date, authoritative survey which takes account of recent trends in historical linguistics.
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