From Lawmen to Plowmen

From Lawmen to Plowmen PDF Author: Stephen Yeager
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442643471
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description

From Lawmen to Plowmen

From Lawmen to Plowmen PDF Author: Stephen Yeager
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442643471
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description


Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages

Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages PDF Author: Arvind Thomas
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487515391
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poet’s words and the lawyer’s world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal "makyngs" in England’s great Middle English poem by William Langland. Focusing on Piers Plowman’s preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions’ representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explores how the "literary" informs and transforms the "legal" until they finally cannot be separated. Thomas shows how the poem’s narrative voice, metaphor, syntax and style not only reflect but also act upon properties of canon law, such as penitential procedures and authoritative maxims. Langland’s mobilization of juridical concepts, Thomas insists, not only engenders a poetics informed by canonist thought but also expresses an alternative vision of canon law from that proposed by medieval jurists and today’s medievalists.

Remembering the Medieval Present: Generative Uses of England’s Pre-Conquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries

Remembering the Medieval Present: Generative Uses of England’s Pre-Conquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004408339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
By tapping into the vast reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, the collected studies explore how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

From Lawmen to Plowmen

From Lawmen to Plowmen PDF Author: Stephen M. Yeager
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alliteration
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description


Sensory Reflections

Sensory Reflections PDF Author: Fiona Griffiths
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110562863
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields: medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences—most prominently emotion—has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.

The Oxford History of Poetry in English

The Oxford History of Poetry in English PDF Author: Helen Cooper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192886738
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
The Oxford History of Poetry in English is designed to offer a fresh, multi-voiced, and comprehensive analysis of 'poetry': from Anglo-Saxon culture through contemporary British, Irish, American, and Global culture, including English, Scottish, and Welsh poetry, Anglo-American colonial and post-colonial poetry, and poetry in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean, India, Africa, Asia, and other international locales. The series both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge research, employing a global team of expert contributors for each of the fourteen volumes. This volume occupies both a foundational and a revolutionary place. Its opening date—1100—marks the re-emergence of a vernacular poetic record in English after the political and cultural disruption of the Norman Conquest. By its end date—1400—English poetry had become an established, if still evolving, literary tradition. The period between these dates sees major innovations and developments in language, topics, poetic forms, and means of expression. Middle English poetry reflects the influence of multiple contexts—history, social institutions, manuscript production, old and new models of versification, medieval poetic theory, and the other literary languages of England. It thus emphasizes the aesthetic, imaginative treatment of new and received materials by medieval writers and the formal craft required for their verse. Individual chapters treat the representation of national history and mythology, contemporary issues, and the shared doctrine and learning provided by sacred and secular sources, including the Bible. Throughout the period, lyric and romance figure prominently as genres and poetic modes, while some works hover enticingly on the boundary of genre and discursive forms. The volume ends with chapters on the major writers of the late fourteenth-century (Langland, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Gower) and with a look forward to the reception of something like a national literary tradition in fifteenth-century literary culture.

The French of Medieval England

The French of Medieval England PDF Author: Thelma S. Fenster
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844591
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Essays on the complexity of multilingualism in medieval England.

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse

Reconstructing Alliterative Verse PDF Author: Ian Cornelius
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108211089
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
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.

English Alliterative Verse

English Alliterative Verse PDF Author: Eric Weiskott
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107169658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
A revisionary account of the 900-year-long history of a major poetic tradition, explored through metrics and literary history.

The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature

The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature PDF Author: Elise Wang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192698249
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature explores the literary inheritance of criminal procedure in thirteenth to fifteenth century English law, focusing on felony, the gravest common law offense. Most scholarship in medieval law and literature has focused on statute and theory, drawing from the instantiating texts of English law: acts of Parliament, judicial treatises, the Magna Carta. But those whose job it was to write about the law rarely wrote about felony. Its definition was left to its practice--from investigation to conviction--and that procedure fell to local communities who were generally untrained in the law. Left with many practical and ethical questions and few legal answers, they turned to cultural ones, archived in sermons they had heard, plays they had seen, and poetry they knew. This book reads the documents of criminal procedure--coroners' reports, plea rolls, and gaol delivery records--alongside literary scenes of investigation, interrogation, and witnessing to tell a new intellectual history of criminal procedure's beginnings. The chapters of The Making of Felony Procedure guide the reader through the steps of a felony prosecution, from act to conviction, examining the questions local communities faced at each step. What evidence should be prioritized in a death investigation? Should the accused consider narrative satisfaction when building his plea? What are the dangers of a witnessing system that depends so heavily on a few "oathworthy" men? What can a jury do if the accused's guilt seems partial or complex? And what if the defendant-for whatever reason--refuses to participate in this new, still--delicate system of justice? The book argues that answers they found, and the sources that informed them, created the system that became modern criminal procedure. The epilogue offers some thoughts about the resilience and incoherence of the concept of felony, from the start of the jury trial to the present day.