Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century

Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century PDF Author: Jesse M. Gellrich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400821665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
This wide-ranging study of language and cultural change in fourteenth-century England argues that the influence of oral tradition is much more important to the advance of literacy than previously supposed. In contrast to the view of orality and literacy as opposing forces, the book maintains that the power of language consists in displacement, the capacity of one channel of language to take the place of the other, to make the source disappear into the copy. Appreciating the interplay between oral and written language makes possible for the first time a way of understanding the high literate achievements of this century in relation to momentous developments in social and political life. Part I reasseses the "nominalism" of Ockham and the "realism" of Wyclif through discussions of their major treatises on language and government. Part II argues that the chronicle histories of this century are tied specifically to oral customs, and Part III shows how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Knight's Tale confront outright the displacement of language and dominion. Informed by recent discussions in critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, the book offers a new synoptic view of fourteenth-century culture. As a critique of the social context of medieval literacy, it speaks directly to postmodern debate about the politics of historicism today.

Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century

Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century PDF Author: Jesse M. Gellrich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400821665
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
This wide-ranging study of language and cultural change in fourteenth-century England argues that the influence of oral tradition is much more important to the advance of literacy than previously supposed. In contrast to the view of orality and literacy as opposing forces, the book maintains that the power of language consists in displacement, the capacity of one channel of language to take the place of the other, to make the source disappear into the copy. Appreciating the interplay between oral and written language makes possible for the first time a way of understanding the high literate achievements of this century in relation to momentous developments in social and political life. Part I reasseses the "nominalism" of Ockham and the "realism" of Wyclif through discussions of their major treatises on language and government. Part II argues that the chronicle histories of this century are tied specifically to oral customs, and Part III shows how Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Chaucer's Knight's Tale confront outright the displacement of language and dominion. Informed by recent discussions in critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology, the book offers a new synoptic view of fourteenth-century culture. As a critique of the social context of medieval literacy, it speaks directly to postmodern debate about the politics of historicism today.

Imagining a Medieval English Nation

Imagining a Medieval English Nation PDF Author: Kathy Lavezzo
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816637355
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
The first comprehensive analysis of English national identity in the late Middle Ages. During the late Middle Ages, the increasing expansion of administrative, legal, and military systems by a central government, together with the greater involvement of the commons in national life, brought England closer than ever to political nationhood. Examining a diverse array of texts--ranging from Latin and vernacular historiography to Lollard tracts, Ricardian poetry, and chivalric treatises--this volume reveals the variety of forms "England" assumed when it was imagined in the medieval West. These essays disrupt conventional thinking about the relationship between premodernity and modernity, challenge traditional preconceptions regarding the origins of the nation, and complicate theories about the workings of nationalism. Imagining a Medieval English Nation is not only a collection of new readings of major canonical works by leading medievalists, it is among the first book-length analyses on the subject and of critical interest.

Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature

Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature PDF Author: Laura C. Lambdin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136594256
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
This reference is a comprehensive guide to literature written 500 to 1500 A.D., a period that gave rise to some of the world's most enduring and influential works, such as Dante's Commedia, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and a large body of Arthurian lore and legend. While its emphasis is upon medieval English texts and society, this reference also covers Islamic, Hispanic, Celtic, Mongolian, Germanic, Italian, and Russian literature and Middle Age culture. Longer entries provide thorough coverage of major English authors such as Chaucer and Sir Thomas Malory, and of genre entries, such as drama, lyric, ballad, debate, saga, chronicle, and hagiography. Shorter entries examine particular literary works; significant kings, artists, explorers, and religious leaders; important themes, such as courtly love and chivalry; and major historical events, such as the Crusades. Each entry concludes with a brief biography. The volume closes with a list of the most valuable general works for further reading.

Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600--1750

Speech, Print and Decorum in Britain, 1600--1750 PDF Author: Elspeth Jajdelska
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317051335
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
Filling an important gap in the history of print and reading, Elspeth Jajdelska offers a new account of the changing relationship between speech, rank and writing from 1600 to 1750. Jajdelska draws on anthropological findings to shed light on the different ways that speech was understood to relate to writing across the period, bringing together status and speech, literary and verbal decorum, readership, the material text and performance. Jajdelska's ambitious array of sources includes letters, diaries, paratexts and genres from cookery books to philosophical discourses. She looks at authors ranging from John Donne to Jonathan Swift, alongside the writings of anonymous merchants, apothecaries and romance authors. Jajdelska argues that Renaissance readers were likely to approach written and printed documents less as utterances in their own right and more as representations of past speech or as scripts for future speech. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, some readers were treating books as proxies for the author's speech, rather than as representations of it. These adjustments in the way speech and print were understood had implications for changes in decorum as the inhibitions placed on lower-ranking authors in the Renaissance gave way to increasingly open social networks at the start of the eighteenth century. As a result, authors from the lower ranks could now publish on topics formerly reserved for the more privileged. While this apparently egalitarian development did not result in imagined communities that transcended class, readers of all ranks did encounter new models of reading and writing and were empowered to engage legitimately in the gentlemanly criticism that had once been the reserve of the cultural elites. Shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE) book prize 2018

The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature

The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Erin K. Wagner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501512188
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.

New Medieval Literatures

New Medieval Literatures PDF Author: Wendy Scase
Publisher: New Medieval Literatures
ISBN: 9780198187387
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
New Medieval Literatures is an annual containing the best new interdisciplinary work in medieval textual cultures.

A Companion to Chaucer

A Companion to Chaucer PDF Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 047069274X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
Designed as both a contribution to original research and as a stimulating and accessible text, this volume is a helpful, reliable, responsive and adaptable resource for students of Chaucer at all levels.

Annotated Chaucer bibliography

Annotated Chaucer bibliography PDF Author: Mark Allen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1784996459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 934

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Book Description
An extremely thorough, expertly compiled and crisply annotated comprehensive bibliography of Chaucer scholarship between 1997 and 2010

Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England

Biblical Commentary and Translation in Later Medieval England PDF Author: Andrew Kraebel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108486649
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
A new history of the origins of the English Bible, revealing the complex continuities between Latin commentaries and English translations.

Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature

Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Alastair Minnis
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521515947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Minnis presents the fruits of a long-term engagement with the ways in which crucial ideological issues were deployed in vernacular texts. He addresses the crisis for vernacular translation precipitated by the Lollard heresy, Langland's views on indulgences, Chaucer's tales of suspicious saints and risible relics, and more.