Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages

Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages PDF Author: Peter Godman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139477811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual analysis with close attention to style and form, it offers a major contribution to the history of the medieval conscience.

Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages

Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages PDF Author: Peter Godman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139477811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual analysis with close attention to style and form, it offers a major contribution to the history of the medieval conscience.

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert

The Afterlife of St Cuthbert PDF Author: Christiania Whitehead
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108490352
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book surveys the textual representation of Cuthbert, the premier northern English saint, from the seventh to fifteenth centuries.

The European Book in the Twelfth Century

The European Book in the Twelfth Century PDF Author: Erik Kwakkel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110862765X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 437

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Book Description
The 'long twelfth century' (1075–1225) was an era of seminal importance in the development of the book in medieval Europe and marked a high point in its construction and decoration. This comprehensive study takes the cultural changes that occurred during the 'twelfth-century Renaissance' as its point of departure to provide an overview of manuscript culture encompassing the whole of Western Europe. Written by senior scholars, chapters are divided into three sections: the technical aspects of making books; the processes and practices of reading and keeping books; and the transmission of texts in the disciplines that saw significant change in the period, including medicine, law, philosophy, liturgy, and theology. Richly illustrated, the volume provides the first in-depth account of book production as a European phenomenon.

The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain

The Linguistic Past in Twelfth-Century Britain PDF Author: Sara Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316851559
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
How was the complex history of Britain's languages understood by twelfth-century authors? This book argues that the social, political and linguistic upheavals that occurred in the wake of the Norman Conquest intensified later interest in the historicity of languages. An atmosphere of enquiry fostered vernacular literature's prestige and led to a newfound sense of how ancient languages could be used to convey historical claims. The vernacular hence became an important site for the construction and memorialisation of dynastic, institutional and ethnic identities. This study demonstrates the breadth of interest in the linguistic past across different social groups and the striking variety of genre used to depict it, including romance, legal translation, history, poetry and hagiography. Through a series of detailed case studies, Sara Harris shows how specific works represent key aspects of the period's imaginative engagement with English, Brittonic, Latin and French language development.

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft

Scribal Correction and Literary Craft PDF Author: Daniel Wakelin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316062120
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This extensive survey of scribal correction in English manuscripts explores what correcting reveals about attitudes to books, language and literature in late medieval England. Daniel Wakelin surveys a range of manuscripts and genres, but focuses especially on poems by Chaucer, Hoccleve and Lydgate, and on prose works such as chronicles, religious instruction and practical lore. His materials are the variants and corrections found in manuscripts, phenomena usually studied only by editors or palaeographers, but his method is the close reading and interpretation typical of literary criticism. From the corrections emerge often overlooked aspects of English literary thinking in the late Middle Ages: scribes, readers and authors seek, though often fail to achieve, invariant copying, orderly spelling, precise diction, regular verse and textual completeness. Correcting reveals their impressive attention to scribal and literary craft - its rigour, subtlety, formalism and imaginativeness - in an age with little other literary criticism in English.

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England

Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England PDF Author: Emily V. Thornbury
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139868136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Combining historical, literary and linguistic evidence from Old English and Latin, Becoming a Poet in Anglo-Saxon England creates a new, more complete picture of who and what pre-Conquest English poets really were. It includes a study of Anglo-Saxon words for 'poet' and the first list of named poets in Anglo-Saxon England. Its survey of known poets identifies four social roles that poets often held - teachers, scribes, musicians and courtiers - and explores the kinds of poetry created by these individuals. The book also offers a new model for understanding the role of social groups in poets' experience: it argues that the presence or absence of a poetic community affected the work of Anglo-Saxon poets at all levels, from minute technical detail to the portrayal of character. This focus on poetic communities provides a new way to understand the intersection of history and literature in the Middle Ages.

Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature

Boccaccio and Exemplary Literature PDF Author: Olivia Holmes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009224336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Olivia Holmes explores the Decameron's sceptical and sexually permissive contents against the backdrop of medieval religion and didacticism.

Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry

Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry PDF Author: Jessica Rosenfeld
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139495259
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.

Prostitution in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Prostitution in Medieval and Early Modern Literature PDF Author: Albrecht Classen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498585817
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Prostitution is known as the oldest profession in the history of humanity. While historians have already given due consideration to the profession’s social and cultural meanings across time periods, little has been written about literary representations of prostitution. Prostitution in Medieval and Early Modern Literature analyses the work of writers from an array of social positions, including courtly poets and even religious writers, dealing with the topic during the medieval and early modern periods. Its study shows that prostitutes and brothel owners were present on the literary stage far more often than we might have assumed. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach and incorporating relevant sources from across the entire European continent dating from the early Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, it examines the phenomenon of prostitution in a variety of contexts and highlights the extent to which the institution mattered for both the higher and the lower classes.

Landscape in Middle English Romance

Landscape in Middle English Romance PDF Author: Andrew M. Richmond
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108913091
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 542

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Book Description
Our current ecological crises compel us not only to understand how contemporary media shapes our conceptions of human relationships with the environment, but also to examine the historical genealogies of such perspectives. Written during the onset of the Little Ice Age in Britain, Middle English romances provide a fascinating window into the worldviews of popular vernacular literature (and its audiences) at the close of the Middle Ages. Andrew M. Richmond shows how literary conventions of romances shaped and were in turn influenced by contemporary perspectives on the natural world. These popular texts also reveal widespread concern regarding the damaging effects of human actions and climate change. The natural world was a constant presence in the writing, thoughts, and lives of the audiences and authors of medieval English romance – and these close readings reveal that our environmental concerns go back further in our history and culture than we think.