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"English literature Middle English, 1100-1500 History and criticism."
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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.
eBook
Medieval literature : a very short introduction
\"Provides a compelling account of the emergence of the earliest literature in Britain and Ireland, including English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Norman. Introducing the reader to some of the greatest poetry, prose and drama ever written, Elaine Treharne discusses the historical and intellectual background to these works, and considers the physical production of the manuscripts and the earliest beginnings of print culture. Covering both well-known texts, such as Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales and the Mabinogion, as well as texts that are much less familiar, such as sermons, saints' lives, lyrics and histories, Treharne discusses major themes such as sin and salvation, kingship and authority, myth and the monstrous, and provides a full, but brief, account of one of the major periods in literary history.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
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.
eBook
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.
eBook
Covert Operations
Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Book InCovert Operations, Karma Lochrie brings the categories and cultural meanings of secrecy in the Middle Ages out into the open. Isolating five broad areas-confession, women's gossip, medieval science and medicine, marriage and the law, and sodomitic discourse-Lochrie examines various types of secrecy and the literary texts in which they are played out. She reads texts as central to Middle English studies as the \"Parson's Tale,\" the \"Miller's Tale,\" theSecretum Secretorum, andSir Gawain and the Green Knightas well as a broad range of less familiar works, including a gynecological treatise and a little-known fifteenth-century parody in which gossip and confession become one. As she does so she reveals a great deal about the medieval past-and perhaps just as much about the early development of the concealments that shape the present day.
eBook
The Claims of Poverty
In The Claims of Poverty , Kate Crassons explores a
widespread ideological crisis concerning poverty that emerged in
the aftermath of the plague in late medieval England. She
identifies poverty as a central preoccupation in texts ranging from
Piers Plowman and Wycliffite writings to The Book of
Margery Kempe and the York cycle plays. Crassons shows that
these and other works form a complex body of writing in which
poets, dramatists, and preachers anxiously wrestled with the status
of poverty as a force that is at once a sacred imitation of Christ
and a social stigma; a voluntary form of life and an unwelcome
hardship; an economic reality and a spiritual disposition.
Crassons argues that literary texts significantly influenced the
cultural conversation about poverty, deepening our understanding of
its urgency as a social, economic, and religious issue. These texts
not only record debates about the nature of poverty as a form of
either vice or virtue, but explore epistemological and ethical
aspects of the debates. When faced with a claim of poverty, people
effectively become readers interpreting the signs of need in the
body and speech of their fellow human beings. The literary and
dramatic texts of late medieval England embodied the complexity of
such interaction with particular acuteness, revealing the ethical
stakes of interpretation as an act with direct material
consequences. As The Claims of Poverty demonstrates,
medieval literature shaped perceptions about who is defined as
\"poor,\" and in so doing it emerged as a powerful cultural force
that promoted competing models of community, sanctity, and
justice.
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