Participatory reading in late-medieval England

Participatory reading in late-medieval England PDF Author: Heather Blatt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526118017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book traces affinities between digital and medieval media, exploring how reading functioned as a nexus for concerns about increasing literacy, audiences’ agency, literary culture and media formats from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from well-known poems of Chaucer and Lydgate to wall texts, banqueting poems and devotional works written by and for women, Participatory reading argues that making readers work offered writers ways to shape their reputations and the futures of their productions. At the same time, the interactive reading practices they promoted enabled audiences to contribute to – and contest – writers’ burgeoning authority, making books and reading work for everyone.

Participatory reading in late-medieval England

Participatory reading in late-medieval England PDF Author: Heather Blatt
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526118017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book traces affinities between digital and medieval media, exploring how reading functioned as a nexus for concerns about increasing literacy, audiences’ agency, literary culture and media formats from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from well-known poems of Chaucer and Lydgate to wall texts, banqueting poems and devotional works written by and for women, Participatory reading argues that making readers work offered writers ways to shape their reputations and the futures of their productions. At the same time, the interactive reading practices they promoted enabled audiences to contribute to – and contest – writers’ burgeoning authority, making books and reading work for everyone.

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation

The Virgin Mary's Book at the Annunciation PDF Author: Laura Saetveit Miles
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845342
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
An overlooked aspect of the iconography of the Annunciation investigated - Mary's book.

Staging Contemplation

Staging Contemplation PDF Author: Eleanor Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022657217X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
What does it mean to contemplate? In the Middle Ages, more than merely thinking with intensity, it was a religious practice entailing utter receptiveness to the divine presence. Contemplation is widely considered by scholars today to have been the highest form of devotional prayer, a rarified means of experiencing God practiced only by the most devout of monks, nuns, and mystics. Yet, in this groundbreaking new book, Eleanor Johnson argues instead for the pervasiveness and accessibility of contemplative works to medieval audiences. By drawing together ostensibly diverse literary genres—devotional prose, allegorical poetry, cycle dramas, and morality plays—Staging Contemplation paints late Middle English contemplative writing as a broad genre that operated collectively and experientially as much as through radical individual disengagement from the world. Johnson further argues that the contemplative genre played a crucial role in the exploration of the English vernacular as a literary and theological language in the fifteenth century, tracing how these works engaged modes of disfluency—from strained syntax and aberrant grammar, to puns, slang, code-switching, and laughter—to explore the limits, norms, and potential of English as a devotional language. Full of virtuoso close readings, this book demonstrates a sustained interest in how poetic language can foster a participatory experience of likeness to God among lay and devotional audiences alike.

Medieval Women's Writing

Medieval Women's Writing PDF Author: Diane Watt
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745632556
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Medieval Women's Writing is a major new contribution to our understanding of women's writing in England, 1100-1500. The most comprehensive account to date, it includes writings in Latin and French as well as English, and works for as well as by women. Marie de France, Clemence of Barking, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and the Paston women are discussed alongside the Old English lives of women saints, The Life of Christina of Markyate, the St Albans Psalter, and the legends of women saints by Osbern Bokenham. Medieval Women's Writing addresses these key questions: Who were the first women authors in the English canon? What do we mean by women's writing in the Middle Ages? What do we mean by authorship? How can studying medieval writing contribute to our understanding of women's literary history? Diane Watt argues that female patrons, audiences, readers, and even subjects contributed to the production of texts and their meanings, whether written by men or women. Only an understanding of textual production as collaborative enables us to grasp fully women's engagement with literary culture. This radical rethinking of early womens literary history has major implications for all scholars working on medieval literature, on ideas of authorship, and on women's writing in later periods. The book will become standard reading for all students of these debates.

Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays

Practical Cues and Social Spectacle in the Chester Plays PDF Author: Matthew Sergi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670940X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Amid the crowded streets of Chester, guild players portraying biblical characters performed on colorful mobile stages hoping to draw the attention of fellow townspeople. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Chester plays employed flamboyant live performance to adapt biblical narratives. But the original format of these fascinating performances remains cloudy, as surviving records of these plays are sparse, and the manuscripts were only written down a generation after they stopped. Revealing a vibrant set of social practices encoded in the Chester plays, Matthew Sergi provides a new methodology for reading them and a transformative look at medieval English drama. Carefully combing through the plays, Sergi seeks out cues in the dialogues that reveal information about the original staging, design, and acting. These “practical cues,” as he calls them, have gone largely unnoticed by drama scholars, who have focused on the ideology and historical contexts of these plays, rather than the methods, mechanics, and structures of the actual performances. Drawing on his experience as an actor and director, he combines close readings of these texts with fragments of records, revealing a new way to understand how the Chester plays brought biblical narratives to spectators in the noisy streets. For Sergi, plays that once appeared only as dry religious dramas come to life as raucous participatory spectacles filled with humor, camp, and devotion.

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages

Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Eleanor Johnson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022601584X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Literary scholars often avoid the category of the aesthetic in discussions of ethics, believing that purely aesthetic judgments can vitiate analyses of a literary work’s sociopolitical heft and meaning. In Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Eleanor Johnson reveals that aesthetics—the formal aspects of literary language that make it sense-perceptible—are indeed inextricable from ethics in the writing of medieval literature. Johnson brings a keen formalist eye to bear on the prosimetric form: the mixing of prose with lyrical poetry. This form descends from the writings of the sixth-century Christian philosopher Boethius—specifically his famous prison text, Consolation of Philosophy—to the late medieval English tradition. Johnson argues that Boethius’s text had a broad influence not simply on the thematic and philosophical content of subsequent literary writing, but also on the specific aesthetic construction of several vernacular traditions. She demonstrates the underlying prosimetric structures in a variety of Middle English texts—including Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and portions of the Canterbury Tales, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, John Gower’s Confessio amantis, and Thomas Hoccleve’s autobiographical poetry—and asks how particular formal choices work, how they resonate with medieval literary-theoretical ideas, and how particular poems and prose works mediate the tricky business of modeling ethical transformation for a readership.

Tropologies

Tropologies PDF Author: Ryan McDermott
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780268035402
Category : LITERARY CRITICISM
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Tropologies studies the medieval and early modern theory of morality in scripture, arguing that tropology is both a way to interpret the Bible and a theory of literary invention.

Heavenly Participation

Heavenly Participation PDF Author: Hans Boersma
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467434426
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Surveying the barriers that contemporary thinking has erected between the natural and the supernatural, between earth and heaven, Hans Boersma issues a wake-up call for Western Christianity. Both Catholics and evangelicals, he says, have moved too far away from a sacramental mindset, focusing more on the "here-and-now" than on the "then-and-there." Yet, as Boersma points out, the teaching of Jesus, Paul, and St. Augustine -- indeed, of most of Scripture and the church fathers -- is profoundly otherworldly, much more concerned with heavenly participation than with earthly enjoyment. In Heavenly Participation Boersma draws on the wisdom of great Christian minds ancient and modern -- Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, C. S. Lewis, Henri de Lubac, John Milbank, and many others. He urges Catholics and evangelicals alike to retrieve a sacramental worldview, to cultivate a greater awareness of eternal mysteries, to partake eagerly of the divine life that transcends and transforms all earthly realities.

Soul Travel

Soul Travel PDF Author: Jennifer Hillman
Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781788745673
Category : Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume is an edited collection of original essays on spiritual travel in medieval and early modern Europe. Pilgrimage was a central feature of medieval and early modern Christianity. But holy travel was not only a physical act, it was also an interior disposition and a spiritual process. From at least the late Antique period, the life of a Christian was understood allegorically as a journey towards heaven. Also, many people could not travel: enclosed orders of monks and nuns, men and women with responsibilities tying them to localities, the sick and frail. Virtual travel was instead their recourse to the sacred sites. Thus spiritual pilgrimage, instead of or alongside physical pilgrimage, became prominent in medieval Europe and survived the Reformation in both Protestant and Catholic traditions. These essays show that this experience took many forms: a lively imagining of a journey with holy people or to holy places; an «out-of-body» experience such as the revelations of St Bridget of Sweden; guided journeys; meditations upon holy places such as Jerusalem; and travel in reconstructed landscapes, from the Monti Sacri reconstitutions to convent churches. The volume includes an historiographical introduction by the editors and nine case studies of spiritual journeys, drawn from across the late medieval and early modern periods and from different regions of Europe.

Frontiers of the Caribbean

Frontiers of the Caribbean PDF Author: Philip Nanton
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526113759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book argues that the Caribbean frontier, usually assumed to have been eclipsed after colonial conquest, remains a powerful but unrecognised element of Caribbean island culture. Combining analytical and creative genres of writing, it explores historical and contemporary patterns of frontier change through a case study of the little-known Eastern Caribbean multi-island state of St Vincent and the Grenadines. Modern frontier traits are located in the wandering woodcutter, the squatter on government land and the mountainside ganja grower. But the frontier is also identified as part of global production that has shaped island tourism, the financial sector and patterns of migration.