Piers the Ploughman

Piers the Ploughman PDF Author: William Langland
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141960922
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by a fourteenth-century cleric, this spiritual allegory explores man in relation to his ultimate destiny against the background of teeming, colorful medieval life.

William Langland's "Piers Plowman"

William Langland's Author: William Langland
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812215618
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
"A gifted poet has given us an astute, adroit, vigorous, inviting, eminently readable translation. . . . The challenging gamut of Langland's language . . . has here been rendered with blessed energy and precision. Economou has indeed Done-Best."—Allen Mandelbaum

Piers the Ploughman

Piers the Ploughman PDF Author: William Langland
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141960922
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by a fourteenth-century cleric, this spiritual allegory explores man in relation to his ultimate destiny against the background of teeming, colorful medieval life.

Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550–1660

Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550–1660 PDF Author: L.E. Semler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351871064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Get Book Here

Book Description
The essays in Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660, consider diverse historical contexts for writing about 'strangeness'. They draw on current practices of reading to present contrasts and analogies within and between various social understandings. In so doing they reveal an interplay of thematic and stylistic modes that tells us a great deal about how, and why, certain aspects of life and thinking were 'estranged' in sixteenth and seventeenth century thinking. The collection's unique strength is that it makes specific bridges between contemporary perspectives and early modern connotations of strangeness and inhibition. The subjects of these essays are 'strange' to our ways of thinking because of their obvious distance from us in time and culture. And yet, curiously, far from being entirely alien to these texts, some of the most modern thinking-about paradigms, texts, concepts-connects with the early modern in unexpected ways. Milton meets the contemporary 'competent reader', Wittgenstein meets Robert Cawdrey, Shakespeare embraces the teenager, and Marvell matches wits with French mathematician René Thom. Additionally, the early modern texts posit their own 'others', or sites of estrangement-Moorishness, Persian art, even the human body-with which they perform their own astonishing maneuvers of estrangement and alignment. In reading Renaissance works from our own time and inviting them to reflect upon our own time, Word and Self Estranged in English Texts, 1550-1660 offers a vital reinterpretation of early modern texts.

The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor

The Lost History of Sextus Aurelius Victor PDF Author: Justin Stover
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474492878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 553

Get Book Here

Book Description
A radical rewriting of the history of fourth-century Latin literature This book rediscovers a lost history of the Roman Empire, written by Sextus Aurelius Victor (ca. 320-390) and demonstrates for the first time both the contemporary and lasting influence of his historical work. Though little regarded today, Victor is the best-attested historian of the later Roman Empire, read by Jerome and Ammianus, honoured with a statue by the pagan Emperor Julian and appointed to a prestigious prefecture by the Christian Theodosius. Through careful analysis of the ancient evidence, including newly discovered material, this book re-examines the two short imperial histories attributed to Victor in the manuscripts, known today as the Caesares and the Epitome de Caesaribus, and discusses a wide range of both canonical and neglected authors and texts, from Sallust and Tacitus to Eunapius and the Historia Augusta. By providing a new account of the original scope and scale of Victor’s Historia, this book revolutionises our understanding of the writing of history in late antiquity. Not only does it have profound implications for the transmission of Classical texts in the Middle Ages and the history of Classical scholarship, but it also solves some of the enduring mysteries of later Latin literature.

The Visible Text

The Visible Text PDF Author: Thomas A. Bredehoft
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191002453
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. Covering materials ranging from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and inscribed objects to contemporary comics, The Visible Text rewrites the history of textual media and technologies. Arguing that media are not defined by technologies alone, but by a combination of technologies and the ideas that people hold about those technologies, Bredehoft identifies four distinct periods or domains in the history of English literature that correspond to four ways in which media ideologies interacted with the two basic defining technologies of manuscripts and printed books. Examining two complementary ways of defining texts (as subject to a reproductive medium, on the one hand, and as surrounded and defined by paratexts, on the other), The Visible Text points out how Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and contemporary comics share a remarkable similarity in being structured as productions rather than reproductions. Contrastingly, the late-medieval and print-era periods share a cultural investment in textual reproduction, but they differ both in their characteristic technologies and in how they conceptualize the object of reproduction itself. A final epilogue, briefly considering the nature of electronically-mediated textuality, highlights the importance of understanding the history addressed here, as electonic text both parallels and departs from typographic print in ways that earlier reproductive domains clarify and complicate. Filled with concrete examples of both books and texts, The Visible Text will be of interest to readers in the fields of literature, book history, literary theory, media studies, and visual culture.

The Middle English Book

The Middle English Book PDF Author: Michael Johnston
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192699814
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
The monograph series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture showcases the plurilingual and multicultural quality of medieval literature and actively seeks to promote research that not only focuses on the array of subjects medievalists now pursue—in literature, theology, and philosophy, in social, political, jurisprudential, and intellectual history, the history of art, and the history of science—but also that combines these subjects productively. It offers innovative studies on topics that may include, but are not limited to, manuscript and book history; languages and literatures of the global Middle Ages; race and the post-colonial; the digital humanities, media and performance; music; medicine; the history of affect and the emotions; the literature and practices of devotion; the theory and history of gender and sexuality, ecocriticism and the environment; theories of aesthetics; medievalism. The Middle English Book addresses a series of questions about the copying and circulation of literature in late medieval England: How do we make sense of the variety of manuscripts surviving from this period? Who copied and disseminated these diverse manuscripts? Who read the literary texts that they transmit? And what was the relationship between those copying literature and those reading it? To answer these questions, this book examines 202 literary manuscripts from the period 1350 to 1500. First, this study suggests that most surviving manuscripts fall into four categories, depending on the proximity and relationship of that manuscript's scribes and readers. But beyond proposing these new categories, this book also looks at the history of writing practices, and demonstrates the ubiquity of bureaucracies within late medieval England. As a result, The Middle English Book argues that literary production was a decentered affair, one that took place within these numerous, modest, yet complex, bureaucracies. But this book also argues that, because literary production arose in such scattered bureaucracies, manuscripts were local products, produced within the cultural and economic milieu of their users. Manuscripts thus form a fundamentally different sort of cultural artefact than the printed books with which we are familiar—a form of centralized, urbanized, and commercialized textual production that was just over the historical horizon in late medieval England.

Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages

Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages PDF Author: Katharine W. Jager
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030183343
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures. This collection of essays considers the extra-literary and extra-textual methods by which vernacular forms and genres were obtained and examines the roles that performance and orality play in the reception and dissemination of those genres, arguing that late medieval vernacular forms can be used to delineate the interests and perspectives of the subaltern. Via an interdisciplinary approach, contributors use theories of multimodality, translation, manuscript studies, sound studies, gender studies, and activist New Formalism to address how and for whom popular, vernacular medieval forms were made.

Chaucer's Scribes

Chaucer's Scribes PDF Author: Lawrence Warner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108426271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Important intervention in Middle English studies that challenges widely accepted narratives on the identities of Chaucer's scribes.

The Gnostic Paradigm

The Gnostic Paradigm PDF Author: N. Elias
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137465387
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Get Book Here

Book Description
No study has been carried out examining the gnostic undercurrents in medieval England. For the first time, Natanela Elias investigates the existence of these gnostic traces, using prominent late medieval English literary works such as Piers Plowman and Confessio Amantis and ultimately shedding light on a previously overlooked religious dimension.

Public Piers Plowman

Public Piers Plowman PDF Author: C. David Benson
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046204
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Public Piers Plowman is divided into two parts. The first is an extended essay on what Benson calls the "Langland myth." He traces the evolution of Piers scholarship and demonstrates the limitations of treating Piers as a direct expression of the poet's experience and intellectual views." "In the second part Benson offers an alternative history for the poem. Benson approaches it from a broader public context, using representative examples from vernacular writing, parish art, and civic practices. He argues that Piers reached a wide contemporary audience because, far from being an account only of the author's own life and opinions, it was securely rooted in the common culture of its time and place."--Jacket.