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Essays studying the relationship between literariness and form in
medieval texts. The twenty-first century has witnessed the
re-emergence of various kinds of literary formalism, and one
project that characterizes most of these diverse formalisms is the
effort to distinguish what is precisely literary about their
objects of study. The presumed relation between form and the
literary that this project presupposes, however, raises questions
that still need to be addressed. What is it about form that
produces the category of the literary? What precisely is literary
about literary form? Can the literary be defined beyond form? This
volume explores these questions in the historical and geographical
frame of late medieval Britain, across vaunted literary works such
as the Franklin's Tale, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the
Towneley Shepherds' Plays, and presumed "non-literary" texts, such
as books of hours. By studying texts from a period long priorto
literary formalism - indeed, before any fully articulated theory of
the literary - the essays gathered here aim to rethink the
relationship between form and the literary. Robert J. Meyer-Lee is
Margaret W. PepperdeneDistinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Agnes
Scott College; Catherine Sanok is an Associate Professor of English
and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. Contributors:
Anke Bernau, Jessica Brantley, Seeta Chaganti, Shannon Gayk,
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Andrew Klein, Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Ingrid
Nelson, Maura Nolan, Sarah Elliott Novacich, Catherine Sanok, Emily
Steiner, Claire M. Waters.
Essays on a variety of topics in late medieval literature, linked
by an engagement with form. The insight that "the implications of
textuality as such" can and must underlie our interpretations of
literary works remains one of A.C. Spearing's greatest
contributions to medieval studies. It is a tribute to the breadth
and significance of his scholarship that the twelve essays gathered
in his honour move beyond his own methods and interests to engage
variously with "textuality as such," presenting a substantial and
expansive view of current thinking on form in late medieval
literary studies. Covering a range of topics, including the meaning
of words, "experientiality", poetic form and its cultural contexts,
revisions, rereadings, subjectivity, formalism and historicism,
failures of form, the dit, problems of editing lyrics, and
collective subjectivity in lyric, they offer a spectrum of the best
sort of work blossoming forth from close reading of the kind
Spearing was such an early advocate for,continues to press, and
which is now so central to medieval studies. Authors and works
addressed include Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and
Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, "Adam Scriveyn", "To
Rosemounde", "TheComplaint Unto Pity"), Langland (Piers Plowman),
the Gawain-poet (Cleanness), Charles d'Orleans, Gower (Confessio
Amantis), and anonymous lyrics. Cristina Maria Cervone teaches
English literature and medieval studies at the University of
Memphis; D. Vance Smith is Professor of English at Princeton
University. Contributors: Derek Pearsall, Elizabeth Fowler, Claire
M. Waters, Kevin Gustafson, Michael Calabrese, David Aers,
Nicolette Zeeman, Jill Mann, D. Vance Smith, J.A. Burrow, Ardis
Butterfield, Cristina Maria Cervone, Peter Baker.
Composed in French in twelfth-century England, these twelve brief
verse narratives center on the joys, sorrows, and complications of
love affairs in a context that blends the courtly culture of
tournaments and hunting and otherworldly elements such as
self-steering boats, shape-shifting lovers, and talking animals.
Popular with readers across countries and languages since their
composition, the Lais have made their author, Marie, one of the
most famous women writers of the Middle Ages, renowned for her
brilliant use of language and cultural allusion as well as her keen
eye for human behavior. This new edition provides a complete
facing-page edition with the original text alongside a new modern
English translation.
The Saints' Life was one of the most popular forms of literature in
medieval England. This volume offers crucial information for an
understanding of the genre. The saints were the superheroes and the
celebrities of medieval England, bridging the gap between heaven
and earth, the living and the dead. A vast body of literature
evolved during the middle ages to ensure that everyone, from kings
to peasants, knew the stories of the lives, deaths and afterlives
of the saints. However, despite its popularity and ubiquity, the
genre of the Saint's Life has until recently been little studied.
This collection introduces the canon of Middle English hagiography;
places it in the context of the cults of saints; analyses key
themes within hagiographic narrative, including gender, power,
violence and history; and, finally, shows how hagiographic
themessurvived the Reformation. Overall it offers both information
for those coming to the genre for the first time, and points
forward to new trends in research. Dr SARAH SALIH is Senior
Lecturer in English, King's College London. Contributors: SAMANTHA
RICHES, MARY BETH LONG, CLAIRE M. WATERS, ROBERT MILLS, ANKE
BERNAU, KATHERINE J. LEWIS, MATTHEW WOODCOCK
Angels and Earthly Creatures Preaching, Performance, and Gender in
the Later Middle Ages Claire M. Waters "Waters's book is remarkable
in the range of sources employed and the attention paid to each
genre and work in its cultural context. . . . Her book makes a
significant new contribution to the growing field of sermon studies
and should also be taken seriously by students of intellectual
history who seek to understand the complex roles preachers and
preaching played in the later Middle Ages."--"Journal of Religion"
Texts by, for, and about preachers from the twelfth to the
fourteenth centuries reveal an intense interest in the preacher's
human nature and its intersection with his "angelic" role. Far from
simply denigrating embodiment or excluding it from consideration,
these works recognize its centrality to the office of preacher and
the ways in which preachers, like Christ, needed humanness to make
their performance of doctrine effective for their audiences. At the
same time, the texts warned of the preacher's susceptibility to the
fleshly failings of lust, vainglory, deception, and greed.
Preaching's problematic juxtaposition of the earthly and the
spiritual made images of women preachers, real and fictional, key
to understanding and exploiting the power, as well as the dangers,
of the feminized flesh. Addressing the underexamined bodies of the
clergy in light of both medieval and modern discussions of female
authority and the body of Christ in medieval culture, "Angels and
Earthly Creatures" reinserts women into the history of preaching
and brings together discourses that would have been intertwined in
the Middle Ages but are often treated separately by scholars. The
examination of handbooks for preachers as literary texts also
demonstrates their extensive interaction with secular literary
traditions, explored here with particular reference to Chaucer's
"Canterbury Tales." Through a close and insightful reading of a
wide variety of texts and figures, including Hildegard of Bingen,
Birgitta of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, Waters offers an
original examination of the preacher's unique role as an
intermediary--standing between heaven and earth, between God and
people, participating in and responsible to both sides of that
divide. Claire M. Waters teaches English at the University of
California, Davis. The Middle Ages Series 2003 296 pages 6 x 9 ISBN
978-0-8122-3753-5 Cloth $69.95s 45.50 ISBN 978-0-8122-0403-2 Ebook
$69.95s 45.50 World Rights Literature, Religion, Women's/Gender
Studies Short copy: Claire M. Waters offers an original examination
of the preacher's unique role as an intermediary--standing between
heaven and earth, between God and people, participating in and
responsible to both sides of that divide.
In Translating "Clergie", Claire Waters explores texts in French
verse and prose from England and the Continent that respond to the
educational imperative implicit in the Fourth Lateran Council's
mandate that individuals be responsible for their own salvation.
These texts return repeatedly to the moment of death and individual
judgment to emphasize the importance of the process of teaching and
to remind teacher and learner of their common fate. The texts'
focus on death was not solely a means of terrifying an audience but
enabled lay learners to envision confrontations or conversations
with dead friends, saints, or even God. Such dialogues at the point
of death reinforced the importance of the dialogue between teacher
and learner in life and are represented in such varied works as
doctrinal handbooks, miracles of the Virgin Mary, retellings of the
Harrowing of Hell, and even fabliaux-tales of wit and reversal-in
which it is possible to argue one's way into Heaven. Lively stories
that featured minstrels dicing with saints, friends returning from
the dead, and thieves teaching the prophets offered a model for
laypeople considering how to put their Christian learning into
practice and perhaps to teach others. Rather than being seen as a
challenge to ecclesiastical authority, lay learning in these texts
is depicted as hopeful, comic, and affectionate. By examining
informal works of Christian instruction used outside institutional
teaching contexts to convey the learning of the schools to the
parishes, Waters shows how lay learners could assume the role of
disciple or student in a way previously available only to monks or
university scholars.
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