Author: Alice Spencer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144384537X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
This is the first book-length study to consider the works of Osbern Bokenham in the light of the discovery of his long-lost magnum opus, the so-called Abbotsford Legenda Aurea, in 2004. Bokenham is an author who, throughout his oeuvre, never tires of stressing his own marginality, historically (as the belated, inferior son of greater poets) and geographically (as an Englishman writing in the vernacular). Notwithstanding this, he negotiates with the very spatial and temporal perspectives which would seem to isolate him in such a way as to lay claim to an authentic and broad-reaching auctoritas for his own poetic voice. Throughout his oeuvre, Bokenham counters the patriarchal hegemonies of literary and political history by asserting an alternative, spiritually pristine matrilineage, which also serves to legitimise his own feminised vernacular tongue and national identity. He deploys the motifs of language, lineage and location in such a way that historical, geographical and gender marginality ultimately become grounds for exaltation, due to their deep-rooted spiritual integrity. Yet, beyond this, spatial and historical hierarchies and distinctions are ultimately dissolved through Bokenham’s increasingly daring vision of the inclusiveness of the communio sanctorum – of the continuously and universally binding force of exemplarity.
Author: Karen A. Winstead
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192550926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages explores the richness and variety of life-writing from late Antiquity to the threshold of the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages, writers from Bede to Chaucer were thinking about life and experimenting with ways to translate lives, their own and others', into literature. Their subjects included career religious, saints, celebrities, visionaries, pilgrims, princes, philosophers, poets, and even a few 'ordinary people.' They relay life stories not only in chronological narratives, but also in debates, dialogues, visions, and letters. Many medieval biographers relied on the reader's trust in their authority, but some espoused standards of evidence that seem distinctly modern, drawing on reliable written sources, interviewing eyewitnesses, and cross-checking their facts wherever possible. Others still professed allegiance to evidence but nonetheless freely embellished and invented not only events and dialogue but the sources to support them. The first book devoted to life-writing in medieval England, The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages covers major life stories in Old and Middle English, Latin, and French, along with such Continental classics as the letters of Abelard and Heloise and the autobiographical Vision of Christine de Pizan. In addition to the life stories of historical figures, it treats accounts of fictional heroes, from Beowulf to King Arthur to Queen Katherine of Alexandria, which show medieval authors experimenting with, adapting, and expanding the conventions of life writing. Though Medieval life writings can be challenging to read, we encounter in them the antecedents of many of our own diverse biographical forms-tabloid lives, literary lives, brief lives, revisionist lives; lives of political figures, memoirs, fictional lives, and psychologically-oriented accounts that register the inner lives of their subjects.
Author: Julia Boffey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198839685
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 593
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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 explores the developing range of English verse in the century after the death of Chaucer in 1400, years that saw both change and consolidation in traditions of poetic writing in English in the regions of Britain. Chaucer himself was an important shaping presence in the poetry of this period, providing a stimulus to imitation and to creative expansion of the modes he had favoured. In addition to assessing his role, this volume considers a range of literary factors significant to the poetry of the century, including verse forms, literary language, translation, and the idea of the author. It also signals features of the century's history that were important for the production of English verse: responses to wars at home and abroad, dynastic uncertainty, and movements towards religious reform, as well as technological innovations such as the introduction of printing, which brought influential changes to the transmission and reception of verse writing. The volume is shaped to include chapters on the contexts and forms of poetry in English, on the important genres of verse produced in the period, on some of the fifteenth-century's major writers (Lydgate, Hoccleve, Dunbar, and Henryson), and a consideration of the influence of the verse of this century on what was to follow.
Author: Juliette Vuille
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 184384589X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
First comprehensive investigation of the major significance of female sinners turned saints in medieval literature.
Author: Karen Anne Winstead
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198707037
Category : Autobiografische Literatur
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
The Oxford History of Life-Writing consolidates recent academic research and debate to provide a multi-volume history of life-writing. Each volume provides a selective survey of the range of life-writing in a given period with particular focus on the most important or influential authors and works within the genre. VOLUME 1: The Middle Ages' explores the richness and variety of life writing in the Middle Ages, ranging from Anglo-Latin lives of missionaries, prelates, and princes to high medieval lives of scholars and visionaries to late medieval lives of authors and laypeople. VOLUME 2: Early modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing.
Author: Rahel Orgis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319921266
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339
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Book Description
This book explores how literary texts envision England and respond to discourses and conceptions of Englishness and the English nation, especially in relation to gender and language. The essays discuss texts from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and bear witness to changing views of England and the English, highlighting the importance of religion, economy, landscape, the spectre of the “other” and language in this discourse. The volume pays attention to women writers’ reflection on the nation and the roles female figures play in male writers’ visions of nationhood. It brings into conversation less well-known voices like those of Osbern Bokenham, Thomas Deloney, Eleanor Davies and Jacquetta Hawkes with canonical authors—William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf—and opens a space for exploring the interplay of dominant and variant voices in the fashioning of England.
Author: Kathleen Ashley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000396789
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
Bringing together artifacts, texts, and practices within an interpretive framework that stresses the cultural work performed by saints, Kathleen Ashley presents a comparative study of the cults of the medieval Sainte Foy at a number of the sites where she was especially venerated. This book analyzes how each cult site produced the saint it needed, appropriating or creating whatever was required to that end. Ashley’s approach is thoroughly interdisciplinary, incorporating visual, religious, medieval, and women’s and gender studies as well as literary studies and social history. She uses the theoretical framework of "cultural work" to analyze how the cult of Sainte Foy was sponsored and received by specific groups in different locales in Europe. The book is comprehensive in terms of historical as well as geographical range, tracing the history of the cult from the early Middle Ages into the present day. It also includes historiographical analysis, examining the way the cults of Sainte Foy have been represented in various historical accounts. Ashley’s narrative challenges the boundary between "elite" and "popular" culture and complicates the traditional vernacular vs. Latin language binary. A chief aim of the study is to show how "art" objects always operated in conjunction with other cultural texts to construct a saint’s cult. The volume is heavily illustrated, showing artifacts such as stained-glass windows and wall paintings which are not readily available from any other source. This book will be of special interest to scholars in art history, medieval history, gender studies, and religion.
Author: Karen A. Winstead
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268108552
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
In Fifteenth-Century Lives, Karen A. Winstead identifies and explores a major shift in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives. As she demonstrates, starting in the 1410s and ’20s, hagiography became more character-oriented, more morally complex, more deeply embedded in history, and more politically and socially engaged. Further, it became more self-consciously literary and began to feature women more prominently—and not only traditional virgin martyrs but also matrons and contemporary holy women. Winstead shows that this literature placed a premium on scholarship and teaching. Hagiography celebrated educators and scholars to a greater extent than ever before and became a vehicle for educating readers about Christian dogma. Focusing both on authors well known, such as John Lydgate and Margery Kempe, and on others less known, such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Winstead argues that the values promoted by fifteenth-century hagiography helped to shape the reformist impulses that eventually produced the Reformation. Moreover, these values continued to influence post-Reformation hagiography, both Protestant and Catholic, well into the seventeenth century. In exploring these trends in fifteenth-century hagiography, identifying the factors that contributed to their emergence, and tracing their influence in later periods, Fifteenth-Century Lives marks an important contribution to revisionary scholarship on fifteenth-century literature. It will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval English literature and late medieval religion.
Author: David Burnley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317883403
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 441
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Book Description
This second edition of The History of the English Language- A Sourcebook provides a comprehensive and accessible guide to the origins and development of the English language. First published in 1992, the book contains over fifty illustrative passages, drawn from the oldest English to the twentieth century. The passages are contextualised by individual introductions and grouped into the traditional periods of Old English, Early Middle English, Later Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. These periods are connected by brief essays explaining the major linguistic developments associated with each period, to produce a continuous outline history. For this new edition Professor Burnley has expanded the outline of linguistic features at each of the main chronological divisions and included more selections and illustrations. A new section has also been included to illustrate the language of advertising from the 18th century to the present. The book will be of general interest to all those interested in the origins and development of the English language, and in particular to students and teachers of the history of the English language at A-level and university.
Author: Nicholas Brownlees
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443822027
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
This volume examines a fundamental concept of language within a historical perspective. The concept is that of public and private communication, the historical period ranges from the late middle ages to the late modern, and the language is English. In short, what are the linguistic traits, discursive practices, communicative settings and intentions which identify and contrast public from private communication, supposing it is possible to make such a fine distinction? The volume contains contributions from top international scholars working in the fields of, for example, historical correspondence, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century print news, sixteenth-century liturgy and political discourse, the language of quack doctors, late modern travel writing, personal notebooks, and even the eighteenth-century public discourse of shopping. As this ground-breaking volume is not just about key concepts in the history of the English language, but also examines at a more general level the concept of private and public communication, the various chapters will interest scholars working in language and communication generally as well as English historical discourse.
