Lydgate Matters

Lydgate Matters PDF Author: L. Cooper
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This collection re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. Top scholars in the field unite here with critical newcomers to offer fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and in particular on the way that poetry speaks to the heightened relevance of material goods and possessions to the formation of late medieval identity and literary taste. Advancing in provocative ways the emerging fields of fifteenth-century literary and cultural study, the volume as a whole explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own.

Lydgate Matters

Lydgate Matters PDF Author: L. Cooper
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230610293
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
This collection re-evaluates the work of fifteenth-century poet John Lydgate in light of medieval material culture. Top scholars in the field unite here with critical newcomers to offer fresh perspectives on the function of poetry on the cusp of the modern age, and in particular on the way that poetry speaks to the heightened relevance of material goods and possessions to the formation of late medieval identity and literary taste. Advancing in provocative ways the emerging fields of fifteenth-century literary and cultural study, the volume as a whole explores the role of the aesthetic not only in late medieval society but also in our own.

Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England

Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Robyn Malo
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 144266326X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Relics and Writing in Late Medieval England uncovers a wide-ranging medieval discourse that had an expansive influence on English literary traditions. Drawing from Latin and vernacular hagiography, miracle stories, relic lists, and architectural history, this study demonstrates that, as the shrines of England’s major saints underwent dramatic changes from c. 1100 to c. 1538, relic discourse became important not only in constructing the meaning of objects that were often hidden, but also for canonical authors like Chaucer and Malory in exploring the function of metaphor and of dissembling language. Robyn Malo argues that relic discourse was employed in order to critique mainstream religious practice, explore the consequences of rhetorical dissimulation, and consider the effect on the socially disadvantaged of lavish expenditure on shrines. The work thus uses the literary study of relics to address issues of clerical and lay cultures, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and writing and reform.

Mummings and Entertainments

Mummings and Entertainments PDF Author: John Lydgate
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580444490
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
John Lydgate is known as the most distinguished poet of fifteenth-century England. This volume presents his brilliant and underappreciated dramatic texts written for both private and public entertainment, encompassing both religious and secular topics. This is the first time since 1934 that many of these poems have been reprinted or reedited. They are published here with an extensive gloss and notes, as well as a glossary and an introduction, making them accessible to a new generation of students of the Middle Ages. These works are indispensible to any study of medieval English drama.

Diverting Authorities

Diverting Authorities PDF Author: Jane Griffiths
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199654514
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Diverting Authorities examines literary experimentation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It looks at marginal annotations or 'glosses' provided by authors in a wide range of texts and argues that they provide important evidence for evolving ideas of authorship and literary authority.

Imago Mortis

Imago Mortis PDF Author: Ashby Kinch
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004245812
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture, Ashby Kinch argues for the affirmative quality of late medieval death art and literature, providing a new, interdisciplinary approach to a well-known body of material. He demonstrates the surprising and effective ways that late medieval artists appropriated images of death and dying as a means to affirm their artistic, social, and political identities. The book dedicates each of its three sections to a pairing of a visual convention (deathbed scenes, the Three Living and Three Dead, and the Dance of Death) and a Middle English literary text (Hoccleve’s Lerne for to die, Audelay’s Three Dead Kings, and Lydgate’s Dance of Death).

The Art of Allusion

The Art of Allusion PDF Author: Sonja Drimmer
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812295382
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture. The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority. Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.

The Matter of Virtue

The Matter of Virtue PDF Author: Holly A. Crocker
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251415
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
If material bodies have inherent, animating powers—or virtues, in the premodern sense—then those bodies typically and most insistently associated in the premodern period with matter—namely, women—cannot be inert and therefore incapable of ethical action, Holly Crocker contends. In The Matter of Virtue, Crocker argues that one idea of what it means to be human—a conception of humanity that includes vulnerability, endurance, and openness to others—emerges when we consider virtue in relation to modes of ethical action available to premodern women. While a misogynistic tradition of virtue ethics, from antiquity to the early modern period, largely cast a skeptical or dismissive eye on women, Crocker seeks to explore what happened when poets thought about the material body not as a tool of an empowered agent whose cultural supremacy was guaranteed by prevailing social structures but rather as something fragile and open, subject but also connected to others. After an introduction that analyzes Hamlet to establish a premodern tradition of material virtue, Part I investigates how retellings of the demise of the title female character in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Henryson's Testament of Cresseid, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida among other texts structure a poetic debate over the potential for women's ethical action in a world dominated by masculine violence. Part II turns to narratives of female sanctity and feminine perfection, including ones by Chaucer, Bokenham, and Capgrave, to investigate grace, beauty, and intelligence as sources of women's ethical action. In Part III, Crocker examines a tension between women's virtues and household structures, paying particular attention to English Griselda- and shrew-literatures, including Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. She concludes by looking at Chaucer's Legend of Good Women to consider alternative forms of virtuous behavior for women as well as men.

Lydgate's Fabula duorum mercatorum and Guy of Warwyk

Lydgate's Fabula duorum mercatorum and Guy of Warwyk PDF Author: Pamela Farvolden
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
ISBN: 1580442471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
The Fabula Duorum Mercatorum, a romance that in its Boethian sensibility and treatment of love and friendship bears comparison to Chaucer's great works Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale, is one of Lydgate's most accomplished works. In Guy of Warwick, Lydgate breaks with romance tradition, presenting the heroic English knight-pilgrim and his last great battle against the dread giant Colbrond from an historical point of view.

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's Verse

Imaginings of Time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's Verse PDF Author: Karen Elaine Smyth
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131711860X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Using empirical research to explore medieval writers' imaginings of time, this study presents a new morphology by which to study narratives of time in fifteenth-century literary culture, focusing on poems of John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve. Karen Smyth begins with an overview of medieval time-keeping devices and considers collective and individual attitudes and perceptions of time. She then examines a range of Middle English authors' appropriations and innovations in relation to such perceptions, identifying competitions of tradition and innovation, allowing for an interrogation of commonly accepted medieval theories of time. An empirically based morphology emerges and is used to examine narratives of time in Lydgate and Hoccleve's work. Through a series of close readings of selected short poems and Lydgate's Troy Book, Fall of Princes, and Siege of Thebes and of Hoccleve's Regiments of Princes and Series, Karen Smyth looks at expressions of time and examples of the authors' negotiation of time consciousness, illustrating how both poets manipulate a range of cultural narratives of time in order to create multiple and sometimes competing temporalities within a single poem. Smyth simultaneously draws attention to Lydgate's and Hoccleve's underestimated artistic skills and lays out a means to re-evaluate medieval cultural attitudes towards time.

Sanctity as literature in late medieval Britain

Sanctity as literature in late medieval Britain PDF Author: Anke Bernau
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 0719098165
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
This collection explores some of the many ways in which sanctity was closely intertwined with the development of literary strategies across a range of writings in late medieval Britain. Rather than looking for clues in religious practices in order to explain such changes, or reading literature for information about sanctity, these essays consider the ways in which sanctity - as concept and as theme - allowed writers to articulate and to develop further their 'craft' in specific ways. While scholars in recent years have turned once more to questions of literary form and technique, the kinds of writings considered in this collection - writings that were immensely popular in their own time - have not attracted the same amount of attention as more secular forms. The collection as a whole offers new insights for scholars interested in form, style, poetics, literary history and aesthetics, by considering sanctity first and foremost as literature