Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England

Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Tommy and Mary Barham Endowed Professor of English Will Rogers
Publisher: ARC Humanities Press
ISBN: 9781641892544
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The old speaker in Middle English literature often claims to be impaired because of age. This stunning admission is very often followed by actions and narration which directly contradict it, as speakers, such as the Reeve in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Amans in Gower's Confessio Amantis, proceed to perform even as they protest and claim impairments and debility. More than simply the modesty topos, this claim and contradiction exists, "Staves and Stanzas" argues, as prosthesis: old age brings with it debility and inability but discussing those age-related impairments both augments the old, impaired body, simultaneously undercutting and emphasizing the existence of bodily impairments. This language of prosthesis becomes a fitting metaphor for the old works these old speakers use to fashion narrative, which exist as incomplete yet powerful sources.

Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England

Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Tommy and Mary Barham Endowed Professor of English Will Rogers
Publisher: ARC Humanities Press
ISBN: 9781641892544
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book

Book Description
The old speaker in Middle English literature often claims to be impaired because of age. This stunning admission is very often followed by actions and narration which directly contradict it, as speakers, such as the Reeve in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Amans in Gower's Confessio Amantis, proceed to perform even as they protest and claim impairments and debility. More than simply the modesty topos, this claim and contradiction exists, "Staves and Stanzas" argues, as prosthesis: old age brings with it debility and inability but discussing those age-related impairments both augments the old, impaired body, simultaneously undercutting and emphasizing the existence of bodily impairments. This language of prosthesis becomes a fitting metaphor for the old works these old speakers use to fashion narrative, which exist as incomplete yet powerful sources.

Old Age in Late Medieval England

Old Age in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Joel T. Rosenthal
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812233551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This view of a society composed of the aged as well as of the young and the middle aged is reinforced by an examination of peers, bishops, and members of parliament and urban office holders, for whom demographic and career-length information exists. Many individuals had active careers until near the end of their lives; the aged were neither rarities nor outcasts within their world.

Medieval Disability Sourcebook

Medieval Disability Sourcebook PDF Author: Cameron Hunt McNabb
Publisher: punctum books
ISBN: 1950192733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
The field of disability studies significantly contributes to contemporary discussions of the marginalization of and social justice for individuals with disabilities. However, what of disability in the past? The Medieval Disability Sourcebook: Western Europe explores what medieval texts have to say about disability, both in their own time and for the present. This interdisciplinary volume on medieval Europe combines historical records, medical texts, and religious accounts of saints' lives and miracles, as well as poetry, prose, drama, and manuscript images to demonstrate the varied and complicated attitudes medieval societies had about disability. Far from recording any monolithic understanding of disability in the Middle Ages, these contributions present a striking range of voices-to, from, and about those with disabilities-and such diversity only confirms how disability permeated (and permeates) every aspect of life. The Medieval Disability Sourcebook is designed for use inside the undergraduate or graduate classroom or by scholars interested in learning more about medieval Europe as it intersects with the field of disability studies. Most texts are presented in modern English, though some are preserved in Middle English and many are given in side-by-side translations for greater study. Each entry is prefaced with an academic introduction to disability within the text as well as a bibliography for further study. This sourcebook is the first in a proposed series focusing on disability in a wide range of premodern cultures, histories, and geographies.

Medieval Futurity

Medieval Futurity PDF Author: Will Rogers
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501513702
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This collection of essays asks contributors to take the capaciousness of the word "queer" to heart in order to think about what medieval queers would have looked like and how they may have existed on the margins and borders of dominant, normative sexuality and desire. The contributors work with recent trends in queer medieval studies, blending together modern concepts of sexuality and desire with the queer configurations of eroticism, desire, and materiality as they might have existed for medieval audiences.

Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England

Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England PDF Author: Helen Barr
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191540862
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England bridges the disciplines of literature and history by examining various kinds of literary language as examples of social practice. Readings of both English and Latin texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are grounded in close textual study which reveals the social positioning of these works and the kinds of ideological work they can be seen to perform. Distinctive new readings of texts emerge which challenge received interpretations of literary history and late medieval culture. Canonical authors and texts such as Chaucer, Gower, and Pearl are discussed alongside the less familiar: Clanvowe, anonymous alliterative verse, and Wycliffite prose tracts.

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages PDF Author: Karen A. Winstead
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192550926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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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.

Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English

Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English PDF Author: Irma Taavitsainen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521110419
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The late Middle Ages in England saw a flowering of scientific writing in the vernacular that moved English discourse in new directions and established new textual genres. This book examines the sociolinguistic causes and effects of that process, based on the empirical evidence from manuscripts and computerized files. Topics covered include scriptorial "house-styles", code-switching, translation strategies, and transmission processes. The book offers important new insights into vernacularization phenomena, and will be welcomed by historical linguists and medievalists alike.

Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France

Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France PDF Author: Glenn D. Burger
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526144239
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This collection investigates how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on work on the noble and bourgeois medieval household, it considers bourgeois, gentry and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. The book argues that there is a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between domestic experience and its forms of cultural expression. Contributors address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, estates-management literature, medical writing, household music and drama and manuscript anthologies. Their studies provide a fresh illustration of the late-medieval household's imaginative scope, its extensive internal and external connections and its fundamental centrality to late-medieval cultural production.

A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages

A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages PDF Author: Irina Metzler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136778233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
What was it like to be disabled in the Middle Ages? How did people become disabled? Did welfare support exist? This book discusses social and cultural factors affecting the lives of medieval crippled, deaf, mute and blind people, those nowadays collectively called "disabled." Although the word did not exist then, many of the experiences disabled people might have today can already be traced back to medieval social institutions and cultural attitudes. This volume informs our knowledge of the topic by investigating the impact medieval laws had on the social position of disabled people, and conversely, how people might become disabled through judicial actions; ideas of work and how work could both cause disability through industrial accidents but also provide continued ability to earn a living through occupational support networks; the disabling effects of old age and associated physical deteriorations; and the changing nature of attitudes towards welfare provision for the disabled and the ambivalent role of medieval institutions and charity in the support and care of disabled people.

Last Words

Last Words PDF Author: Sebastian Sobecki
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198790775
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Reassess medieval literature and the relationship between writers and power in England by arguing that major works commissioned by or written for a succession of Lancastrians--Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Prince Edward--reveal that John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, and John Fortescue were not propagandists.