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The questions of fame and reputation are central to Chaucer's
writings; the essays here discuss their various treatments and
manifestations. Fama, or fame, is a central concern of late
medieval literature: where fame came from, who deserved it, whether
it was desirable and how it was acquired and kept. An interest in
fame was not new but was renewed and rethought within the
vernacular revolutions of the later Middle Ages. The work of
Geoffrey Chaucer collates received ideas on the subject of fama,
both from the classical world and from the work of his
contemporaries. Chaucer's place in these intertextual negotiations
was readily recognized in his aftermath, as later writers adopted
and reworked postures which Chaucer had struck, in their own bids
for literary authority. This volume tracks debates onfama which
were past, present and future to Chaucer, using his work as a
centre point to investigate canon formation in European literature
from the late Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period. Isabel
Davis is Senior Lecturer in Medieval Literature at Birkbeck,
University of London; Catherine Nall is Senior Lecturer in Medieval
Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Contributors:
Joanna Bellis, Alcuin Blamires, Julia Boffey, Isabel Davis,
Stephanie Downes, A.S.G. Edwards, Jamie C. Fumo, Andrew Galloway,
Nick Havely, Thomas A. Prendergast, Mike Rodman Jones, William T.
Rossiter, Elizaveta Strakhov.
Essays shedding fresh and significant light on Gower's poetry,
major and minor, as it was received, read, and re-produced in
England and in Iberia from the fourteenth to the twentieth
centuries. John Gower's great poem, the Confessio Amantis, was the
first work of English literature translated into any European
language. Occasioned by the existence in Spain of fifteenth-century
Portuguese and Spanish manuscripts ofthe Confessio, the nineteen
essays brought together here represent new and original approaches
to Gower's role in Anglo-Iberian literary relations. They include
major studies of the palaeography of the Iberian manuscripts;of the
ownership history of the Portuguese Confessio manuscript; of the
glosses of Gowerian manuscripts; and of the manuscript of the Yale
Confessio Amantis. Other essays situate the translations amidst
Anglo-Spanish relations generally in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries; examine possible Spanish influences on Gower's writing;
and speculate on possible providers of the Confessio to Philippa,
daughter of John of Gaunt and queenof Portugal. Further chapters
broaden the scope of the volume. Amongst other topics, they look at
Gower's use of Virgilian/Dantean models; classical gestures in the
Castilian translation; Gower's conscious contrasting of epic ideals
and courtly romance; nuances of material goods and the idea of "the
good" in the Confessio; Marxian aesthetics, Balzac, and Gowerian
narrative in late medieval trading culture between England and
Iberia; reading the Confessio through the lens of gift exchange;
literary form in Gower's later Latin poems; Gower and Alain
Chartier as international initiators of a new "public poetry"; and
the modern sales history of manuscript and earlyprinted copies of
the Confessio, and what it reveals about literary trends. Ana Saez
Hidalgo is Associate Professor at the University of Valladolid,
Spain; R.F. Yeager is Professor of English and World Languagesand
chair of the department at the University of West Florida.
Contributors: Maria Bullon-Fernandez, David R. Carlson, Sian
Echard, A.S.G. Edwards, Robert R. Edwards, Tiago Viula de Faria,
Andrew Galloway, Fernando Galvan, Marta Maria Gutierrez Rodriguez,
Mauricio Herrero Jimenez, Ethan Knapp, Roger A. Ladd, Alberto
Lazaro, Maria Luisa Lopez-Vidriero Abello, Matthew McCabe, Alastair
J. Minnis, Clara Pascual-Argente, Tamara Para A. Shailor, Winthrop
Wetherbee
New essays demonstrate Gower's mastery of the three languages of
medieval England, and provide a thorough exploration of the voices
he used and the discourses in which he participated. John Gower
wrote in three languages - Latin, French, and English - and their
considerable and sometimes competing significance in
fourteenth-century England underlies his trilingualism. The essays
collected in this volume start from Gower as trilingual poet,
exploring Gower's negotiations between them - his adaptation of
French sources into his Latin poetry, for example - as well as the
work of medieval translators who made Gower's French poetry
availablein English. "Translation" is also considered more broadly,
as a "carrying over" (its etymological sense) between genres,
registers, and contexts, with essays exploring Gower's acts of
translation between the idioms of varied literary and non-literary
forms; and further essays investigate Gower's writings from
literary, historical, linguistic, and codicological perspectives.
Overall, the volume bears witness to Gower's merit and his
importance to English literary history, and increases our
understanding of French and Latin literature composed in England;
it also makes it possible to understand and to appreciate fully the
shape and significance of Gower's literary achievement and
influence, which have sometimes suffered in comparison to Chaucer.
ELISABETH DUTTON is Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.
Contributors: Elisabeth Dutton, Jean Pascal Pouzet, Ethan Knapp,
Carolyn P. Collette,Elliot Kendall, Robert R. Edwards, George
Shuffleton, Nigel Saul, David Carlson, Candace Barrington, Andreea
Boboc, Tamara F. O'Callaghan, Stephanie Batkie, Karla Taylor, Brian
Gastle, Matthew Irvin, Peter Nicholson, J.A. Burrow,Holly
Barbaccia, Kim Zarins, Richard F. Green, Cathy Hume, John Bowers,
Andrew Galloway, R.F. Yeager, Martha Driver
"A work of enormous importance. Of all the poems of the English
Middle Ages, Piers Plowman is the one that most deserves and needs
annotation of the fullest and best possible kind, both because it
is a text of unrivaled literary quality and interest, and because
it is characteristically knotty and deploys a language of unusual
richness, density, and allusiveness. Much of this allusiveness is
to areas of learning that are not at every modern reader's
fingertips. A particular difficulty is the existence of the poem in
three authorial versions of almost desperate complexity. It will be
an immense triumph to have a commentary which elucidates their
relationships as a matter of policy and not simply as the result of
conflating annotation on the different versions."-Derek Pearsall
The first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late
nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first
two of its five projected volumes. The detailed and wide-ranging
Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers
Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual
contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of
critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship
while offering original materials and insights throughout. The
authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus
commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of
its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning
while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive
scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and
open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is
unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and
intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful. The Penn
Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B,
or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have
detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature,
possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and
literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly
difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others,
with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and
detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to
avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought
about its intricacy and poetic achievements. Andrew Galloway's
Volume 1 treats the poem's first vision, from the Prologue through
Passus 4, in all three versions, accepting the C text as the poet's
final word but excavating downward through the earlier B and A
texts. Stephen Barney's volume completes the framework for the
commentary, dealing with the final three passus of the poem, extant
only in the B and C versions. Subsequent volumes will be the work
of Ralph Hanna, Traugott Lawler, and Anne Middleton. Overall, The
Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman marks a new stage of concentrated
yet wide-ranging attention to a text whose repeated revisions and
literary and intellectual complexity make it both an elusive object
of inquiry and a literary work whose richness has long deserved the
capacious and minutely detailed treatment that only a full
commentary can allow. Perhaps no poem in English appeals more than
Piers Plowman to those readers who understand Yeats's "fascination
with things difficult," yet The Penn Commentary will enable
generations of readers to share in the pleasures and challenges of
experiencing, engaging with, and trying to elucidate the
difficulties of one of the towering achievements of English
literature. Andrew Galloway is Professor of English and Medieval
Studies at Cornell University.
The complete text of John Gower's poem is a three-volume edition,
including all Latin components-with translations-of this bilingual
text and extensive glosses, bibliography and explanatory notes.
Volume 1 contains the Prologue and Books 1 and 8, in effect the
overall structure of Gower's poem.
New perspectives on one of the most important medieval poets. The
essays in this volume pay tribute to the distinguished career of
Professor R.F. Yeager. Appropriately for one who has done so much
to advance scholarship and critical debate on this poet, they focus
on John Gower. The approaches taken range widely, from poetics to
palaeography, from close critical interpretation to ecocriticism,
offering important new readings of Gower and his age. Particular
topics addressed include Gower's revisions to the Tale
ofRosiphilee; theological and philosophical positions within
Gower's work; the violence of manuscript images of Confessio
Amantis; and the views of a fellow poet on Gower - Edward Thomas.
Piers Plowman has long been considered one of the greatest poems of
medieval England. Current scholarship on this alliterative
masterpiece looks very different from that available even a decade
ago. New information about the manuscripts of the poem, new
historical discoveries, and new investigations of its literary,
cultural and theoretical scope have fundamentally altered the very
meaning of Langland's art. This Companion thus critically surveys
traditional scholarship, with the aim of recuperating its best
insights, and it ventures forth into newer areas of inquiry attuned
to questions of social setting, institutional context, intellectual
and literary history, theory, and the revitalized fields of
codicology and paleography. By proceeding through chapters that
offer cumulatively wider views as well as stand-alone analyses of
topics most crucial to understanding Piers Plowman, this Companion
gives serious students and seasoned scholars alike up-to-date
knowledge of this intricate and beautiful poem.
Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for
scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition
of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious,
and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late
medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an
annotated bibliography.
Continuum's "Introductions to British Literature and Culture"
series provide practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in
the series help to orientate students as they begin a new module or
area of study, providing concise information on the historical,
cultural, literary and critical context and acting as an initial
map of the knowledge needed to study the literature and culture of
a specific period. Each guide includes an overview of the
historical period, intellectual contexts, major genres, critical
approaches and a guide to original research and resource materials
in the area, enabling students to progress confidently to further
study. "The Guide to Medieval Literature and Culture" provides
students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context
from the 7th to 15th centuries, including: the historical, cultural
and intellectual background including religion and philosophy,
society and politics, art and culture; major works and genres
including religious literature, history writing, drama, Chaucer,
and Langland; concise explanations of key terms needed to
understand the literature and criticism; key critical approaches to
medieval literature from the Renaissance to the present; and a
chronology mapping historical events and literary works and further
reading including websites and electronic resources.
The cultural life of England over the long period from the Norman
Conquest to the Reformation was rich and varied, in ways that
scholars are only now beginning to understand in detail. This
Companion introduces a wide range of materials that constitute the
culture, or cultures, of medieval England, across fields including
political and legal history, archaeology, social history, art
history, religion and the history of education. Above all it looks
at the literature of medieval England in Latin, French and English,
plus post-medieval perspectives on the 'Middle Ages'. In a linked
series of essays experts in these areas show the complex
relationships between them, building up a broad account of rich
patterns of life and literature in this period. The essays are
supplemented by a chronology and guide to further reading, helping
students build on the unique access this volume provides to what
can seem a very foreign culture.
Piers Plowman has long been considered one of the greatest poems of
medieval England. Current scholarship on this alliterative
masterpiece looks very different from that available even a decade
ago. New information about the manuscripts of the poem, new
historical discoveries, and new investigations of its literary,
cultural and theoretical scope have fundamentally altered the very
meaning of Langland's art. This Companion thus critically surveys
traditional scholarship, with the aim of recuperating its best
insights, and it ventures forth into newer areas of inquiry attuned
to questions of social setting, institutional context, intellectual
and literary history, theory, and the revitalized fields of
codicology and paleography. By proceeding through chapters that
offer cumulatively wider views as well as stand-alone analyses of
topics most crucial to understanding Piers Plowman, this Companion
gives serious students and seasoned scholars alike up-to-date
knowledge of this intricate and beautiful poem.
The cultural life of England over the long period from the Norman
Conquest to the Reformation was rich and varied, in ways that
scholars are only now beginning to understand in detail. This
Companion introduces a wide range of materials that constitute the
culture, or cultures, of medieval England, across fields including
political and legal history, archaeology, social history, art
history, religion and the history of education. Above all it looks
at the literature of medieval England in Latin, French and English,
plus post-medieval perspectives on the 'Middle Ages'. In a linked
series of essays experts in these areas show the complex
relationships between them, building up a broad account of rich
patterns of life and literature in this period. The essays are
supplemented by a chronology and guide to further reading, helping
students build on the unique access this volume provides to what
can seem a very foreign culture.
Continuum's "Introductions to British Literature and Culture"
series provide practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in
the series help to orientate students as they begin a new module or
area of study, providing concise information on the historical,
cultural, literary and critical context and acting as an initial
map of the knowledge needed to study the literature and culture of
a specific period. Each guide includes an overview of the
historical period, intellectual contexts, major genres, critical
approaches and a guide to original research and resource materials
in the area, enabling students to progress confidently to further
study. "The Guide to Medieval Literature and Culture" provides
students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context
from the 7th to 15th centuries, including: the historical, cultural
and intellectual background including religion and philosophy,
society and politics, art and culture; major works and genres
including religious literature, history writing, drama, Chaucer,
and Langland; concise explanations of key terms needed to
understand the literature and criticism; key critical approaches to
medieval literature from the Renaissance to the present; and a
chronology mapping historical events and literary works and further
reading including websites and electronic resources.
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