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Historians on John Gower
Stephen Rigby; As told to Sian Echard; Contributions by Stephen Rigby, Sian Echard, Martha Carlin, …
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John Gower's poetry offers an important and immediate response to
the turbulent events of his day. The essays here examine his life
and his works from an historical angle, bringing out fresh new
insights. The late fourteenth century was the age of the Black
Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Hundred Years War, the deposition
of Richard II, the papal schism and the emergence of the heretical
doctrines of John Wyclif and the Lollards. These social, political
and religious crises and conflicts were addressed not only by
preachers and by those involved in public affairs but also by
poets, including Chaucer and Langland. Above all, though, it is in
the verse of John Gower that we find the most direct engagement
with contemporary events. Yet, surprisingly, few historians have
examined Gower's responses to these events or have studied the
broader moral and philosophical outlook which he used to make sense
of them. Here, a number of eminent medievalists seek to demonstrate
what historians can add to our understanding of Gower's poetry and
his ideas about society (the nobility and chivalry, the peasants
and the 1381 revolt, urban life and the law), the Church (the
clergy, papacy, Lollardy, monasticism, and the friars) gender
(masculinity and women and power), politics (political theory and
the deposition of Richard II) and science and astronomy. The book
also offers an important reassessment of Gower's biography based on
newly-discovered primary sources. STEPHEN RIGBY is Emeritus
Professor of Medieval Social and Economic History at the University
of Manchester; SIAN ECHARD is Professor of English, University of
British Columbia. Contributors: Mark Bailey, Michael Bennett,
Martha Carlin, James Davis, Seb Falk, Christopher Fletcher, David
Green, David Lepine, Martin Heale, Katherine Lewis, Anthony Musson,
Stephen Rigby, Jens Röhrkasten.
Everyday life in early thirteenth-century England is revealed in
vivid detail in this riveting collection of correspondence of
people from all classes, from peasants and shopkeepers to bishops
and earls. The documents presented here include letters between
masters and servants, husbands and wives, neighbors and enemies,
and cover a wide range of topics: politics and war, going to fairs
and going to law, attending tournaments and stocking a game park,
borrowing cash and doing favors for friends, investigating adultery
and building a windmill. While letters by celebrated people have
long been known, the correspondence of ordinary people has not
survived and has generally been assumed never to have existed in
the first place. Martha Carlin and David Crouch, however, have
discovered numerous examples of such correspondence hiding in plain
sight. The letters can be found in manuscripts called
formularies-the collections of form letters and other model
documents that for centuries were used to teach the arts of
letter-writing and keeping accounts. The writing-masters and their
students who produced these books compiled examples of all the
kinds of correspondence that people of means, members of the
clergy, and those who handled their affairs might expect to
encounter in their business and personal lives. Tucked among the
sample letters from popes to bishops and from kings to sheriffs are
examples of a much more casual, ephemeral kind of correspondence.
These are the low-level letters that evidently were widely
exchanged, but were often discarded because they were not
considered to be of lasting importance. Two manuscripts, one in the
British Library and the other in the Bodleian Library, are
especially rich in such documents, and it is from these collections
that Carlin and Crouch have drawn the documents in this volume.
They are presented here in their first printed edition, both in the
original Latin and in English translation, each document splendidly
contextualized in an accompanying essay.
Eating and drinking are essential to life and therefore of great
interest to the historian. As well as having a real fascination in
their own right, both activities are an integral part of the both
social and economic history. Yet food and drink, especially in the
middle ages, have received less than their proper share of
attention. The essays in this volume approach their subject from a
variety of angles: from the reality of starvation and the reliance
on 'fast food' of those without cooking facilities, to the
consumption of an English lady's household and the career of a cook
in the French royal household.
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