Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature PDF Author: Rebecca Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019108428X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature

Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature PDF Author: Rebecca Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019108428X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 341

Get Book Here

Book Description
Piers Plowman and the Books of Nature explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. These concerns converge in the poem's rich vocabulary of kynde, the familiar Middle English word for nature, broadly construed. But in a remarkable coinage, Langland also uses kynde to name nature's creator, who appears as a character in Piers Plowman. The stakes of this representation could not be greater: by depicting God as Kynde, that is, under the guise of creation itself, Langland explores the capacity of nature and of language to bear the plenitude of the divine. In doing so, he advances a daring claim for the spiritual value of literary art, including his own searching form of theological poetry. This claim challenges recent critical attention to the poem's discourses of disability and failure and reveals the poem's place in a long and diverse tradition of medieval humanism that originates in the twelfth century and, indeed, points forward to celebrations of nature and natural capacity in later periods. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, Rebecca Davis offers a new literary history for Piers Plowman that opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.

'Piers Plowman' and the Medieval Discourse of Desire

'Piers Plowman' and the Medieval Discourse of Desire PDF Author: Fellow of King's College Cambridge and Newton Trust Lecturer in English Nicolette Zeeman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521856108
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
This ambitious study links William Langland's great poem Piers Plowman to wider medieval enquiries into the nature of intellectual and spiritual desire. Zeeman's radical approach opens up a completely fresh reading of Piers Plowman and sheds light on the history of medieval psychology.

Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law

Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law PDF Author: Arvind Thomas
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 148750246X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
It is a medieval truism that the poet meddles with words, the lawyer with the world. But are the poet's words and the lawyer's world really so far apart? To what extent does the art of making poems share in the craft of making laws, and vice versa? Framed by such questions, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages examines the mutually productive interaction between literary and legal "makyngs" in England's great Middle English poem by William Langland. Focusing on Piers Plowman's preoccupation with wrongdoing in the B and C versions, Arvind Thomas examines the versions' representations of trials, confessions, restitutions, penalties, and pardons. Thomas explores how the "literary" informs and transforms the "legal" until they finally cannot be separated. Thomas shows how the poem's narrative voice, metaphor, syntax and style not only reflect but also act upon properties of canon law, such as penitential procedures and authoritative maxims. Langland's mobilization of juridical concepts, Thomas insists, not only engenders a poetics informed by canonist thought but also expresses an alternative vision of canon law from that proposed by medieval jurists and today's medievalists.

The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-century English Literature

The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-century English Literature PDF Author: Philip Knox
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192847171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This title provides a new account of the literary history of fourteenth-century England, arguing that many of this period's most distinctive literary experiments emerge through a productive dialogue with the 'Romance of the Rose', a jointly-authored medieval French poem.

 PDF Author:
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 4

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Book Description


The European Book in the Twelfth Century

The European Book in the Twelfth Century PDF Author: Erik Kwakkel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108637574
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 438

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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 Arts of Disruption

The Arts of Disruption PDF Author: Nicolette Zeeman
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198860242
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
This volume offers original readings of Piers Plowman and rethinks the genre of allegorical narrative in the Middle Ages. It presents five studies of allegorical narratives with implications for different aspects of medieval culture.

Apocalyptic Ecologies

Apocalyptic Ecologies PDF Author: Shannon Gayk
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226837629
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A meditative reflection on what medieval disaster writing can teach us about how to respond to the climate emergency. When a series of ecological disasters swept medieval England, writers turned to religious storytelling for precedents. Their depictions of biblical floods, fires, storms, droughts, and plagues reveal an unsettled relationship to the natural world, at once unchanging and bafflingly unpredictable. In Apocalyptic Ecologies, Shannon Gayk traces representations of environmental calamities through medieval plays, sermons, and poetry such as Cleanness and Piers Plowman. In premodern disaster writing, she recovers a vision of environmental flourishing that could inspire new forms of ecological care today: a truly apocalyptic sensibility capable of seeing in every ending, every emergency a new beginning waiting to emerge.

King’s Hall, Cambridge and the Fourteenth-Century Universities

King’s Hall, Cambridge and the Fourteenth-Century Universities PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004435050
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This collection looks at the disciplines and their context in the late thirteenth and fourteenth-century universities. Cambridge University, usually forgotten, is made the starting point, from which the essays look out to Oxford and Paris. 1317, when the King’s Scholars (later King’s Hall) were established in Cambridge is the focal date. To this new perspective is added another. Ideas, their formation, development and transformation are studied within their social and institutional context, but with expert attention to their content. Following an Introduction, making the case for the importance of Cambridge (Marenbon), and a study of King’s Hall (Courtenay), the contributions discuss Cambridge books (Thomson), Logic (Ebbesen), Aristotelian science (Costa), Theology (Fitzpatrick and Cross), Medicine (Jacquart), Law (Helmholz) and the universities and English vernacular culture (Knox). The contributors are Richard Cross, Iacopo Costa, William Courtenay, Sten Ebbesen, Antonia Fitzpatrick, R.H. Helmholz, Danielle Jacquart, Philip Knox, and Rodney Thomson.

Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150-1400

Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150-1400 PDF Author: Katharine Breen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521199220
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
Argues that the adaptation of habitus for a universal audience supported the development of a vernacular reading public.