The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive
account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back
for a millennium and more. Each of these thirteen groundbreaking
volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the
authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and ideas that shaped
the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and
inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in
English Literature, but all serious readers. This book describes
and seeks to explain the vast cultural, literary, social, and
political transformations which characterized the period 1000-1350.
Change can be perceived everywhere at this time. Theology saw the
focus shift from God the Father to the suffering Christ, while
religious experience became ever more highly charged with emotional
affectivity and physical devotion. A new philosophy of interiority
turned attention inward, to the exploration of self, and the
practice of confession expressed that interior reality with
unprecedented importance. The old understanding of penitence as a
whole and unrepeatable event, a second baptism, was replaced by a
new allowance for repeated repentance and penance, and the
possibility of continued purgation of sins after death. The concept
of love moved centre stage: in Christ's love as a new explanation
for the Passion; in the love of God as the only means of governing
the self; and in the appearance of narrative fiction, where
heterosexual love was suddenly represented as the goal of secular
life. In this mode of writing further emerged the figure of the
individual, a unique protagonist bound in social and ethical
relation with others; from this came a profound recalibration of
moral agency, with reference not only to God but to society. More
generally, the social and ethical status of secular lives was
drastically elevated by the creation and celebration of courtly and
chivalric ideals. In England the ideal of kingship was forged and
reforged over these centuries, in intimate relation with native
ideals of counsel and consent, bound by the law. In the aftermath
of Magna Carta, and as parliament grew in reach and importance, a
politics of the public sphere emerged, with a literature to match.
These vast transformations have long been observed and documented
in their separate fields. The Oxford English Literary History:
Volume 1: 1000-1350: Conquest and Transformation offers an account
of these changes by which they are all connected, and explicable in
terms of one another.
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