Allegory is a vast subject, and its knotty history is daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory developed in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystical religion, and hermeneutics. Once the earliest histories and themes of the allegorical tradition have been presented, the volume turns to literary, intellectual, and cultural manifestations of allegory through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The essays in the last section address literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era, from reactions to allegory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reevaluations of its power in the thought of the twentieth century and beyond.

This book is about the place of pedagogy and the role of intellectuals in medieval dissent. Focusing on the medieval English heresy known as Lollardy, Rita Copeland shows how how radical teachers transformed inherited ideas about classrooms and pedagogy as they brought their teaching to adult learners. The pedagogical imperatives of Lollard dissent were also embodied in the work of certain public figures, intellectuals whose dissident careers transformed the social category of the medieval intellectual.

What were the boundaries between 'official' and 'subversive', 'orthodox' and 'dissenting' critical practices in the Middle Ages? Placing medieval critical and intellectual discourses within their cultural and ideological frameworks, Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages examines conflicts of gender, violence, academic freedom, hermeneutical authority, sacramentalism and heresy among so-called official as well as dissenting critical orders. Pedagogies, theories of grammar and rhetoric, poetics and hermeneutics, academic 'sciences', clerical professionalism, literacy, visual images, theology, and textual cultures of heresy are all considered. This 1996 collection of essays by major scholars examines medieval critical discourse, theories of textuality and interpretation, and representations of learning and knowledge - as contesting and contested institutional practices within and between Latin and vernacular cultures.

Allegory is a vast subject, and its knotty history is daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory developed in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystical religion, and hermeneutics. Once the earliest histories and themes of the allegorical tradition have been presented, the volume turns to literary, intellectual, and cultural manifestations of allegory through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The essays in the last section address literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era, from reactions to allegory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reevaluations of its power in the thought of the twentieth century and beyond.

What were the boundaries between 'official' and 'subversive', 'orthodox' and 'dissenting' critical practices in the Middle Ages? Placing medieval critical and intellectual discourses within their cultural and ideological frameworks, Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages examines conflicts of gender, violence, academic freedom, hermeneutical authority, sacramentalism and heresy among so-called official as well as dissenting critical orders. Pedagogies, theories of grammar and rhetoric, poetics and hermeneutics, academic 'sciences', clerical professionalism, literacy, visual images, theology, and textual cultures of heresy are all considered. This 1996 collection of essays by major scholars examines medieval critical discourse, theories of textuality and interpretation, and representations of learning and knowledge - as contesting and contested institutional practices within and between Latin and vernacular cultures.

This book is about the place of pedagogy and the role of intellectuals in medieval dissent. Focusing on the medieval English heresy known as Lollardy, Rita Copeland places heretical and orthodox attitudes to learning in a long historical perspective that reaches back to antiquity. She shows how educational ideologies of ancient lineage left their imprint on the most sharply politicized categories of late medieval culture, and how radical teachers transformed inherited ideas about classrooms and pedagogy as they brought their teaching to adult learners. The pedagogical imperatives of Lollard dissent were also embodied in the work of certain public figures, intellectuals whose dissident careers transformed the social category of the medieval intellectual. Looking closely at the prison narratives of two Lollard preachers, Copeland shows how their writings could serve as examples for their fellow dissidents and forge a new rapport between academic and non-academic communities.

This is the first book to consider the rise of translation as part of a broader history of critical discourses from classical Rome to the late Middle Ages, and sheds light on its crucial role in the development of vernacular European culture.

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West, from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages, represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring that rhetorical history between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle's rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 contributes to two fields, the history of the language arts and the history of literary theory. It brings together essential sources in the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric which were used to understand literary form and language and teach literary composition. Grammar and rhetoric, the language disciplines, formed the basis of any education from antiquity through the Middle Ages, no matter what future career a student would want to pursue. Because literature was also the subject matter of grammatical teaching, and because rhetorical teaching gave great attention to literary form, these were also the disciplines that would prepare students for an understanding of literary language and form. These arts constituted the abiding theoretical toolbox for anyone engaged in a life of letters.
The book brings together more than fifty primary texts from the medieval history of grammar and rhetoric, well over half of them never translated into English before. The volume establishes the ancient traditions on which the medieval arts are based, and gives substantial selections from the late antique source texts. All texts are presented in their historical and theoretical contexts, and carefully annotated in order to make them useful to readers, both specialists and non-specialists. For the first time, the long traditions of grammar and rhetoric are presented together in one historical survey, showing how they related to each other, and are placed in a coherent conceptual structure, their contributions to literary theory.

New Medieval Literatures is an annual containing the best new interdisciplinary work in medieval textual studies. Volume 6 includes innovative studies of medieval heresy, in Britain and in Europe, and of medieval cultures of performance, as well as essays on Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and Marie de France.

New Medieval Literatures Volume 7 spotlights methodologies and practices in medieval textual studies. Ten challenging new essays together explore contemporary medievalist practices in and beyond the academy; review and critique disciplinary cultures in medieval studies past and present; and experiment with new paradigms. As usual, the volume showcases work by leading scholars together with work by striking new voices. In this volume's analytical survey 'Actually existing Anglo-Saxon Studies', Clare Lees imagines alternatives to current disciplinary culture. Other essays are Wendy Scase, 'The Medievalist's Tale' (introduction); Stephanie Trigg, 'Walking through Cathedrals: Scholars, Pilgrims, and Medieval Tourists'; Steve Ellis, 'Framing the Father: Chaucer and Virginia Woolf'; Daniel Wakelin, 'William Worcester writes a History of his Reading'; Mishtooni Bose, 'Vernacular Philosophy and the Making of Orthodoxy in the Fifteenth Century'; Melissa Raine, '"Fals Flesch": Food and the Embodied Piety of Margery Kempe'; Lisa H. Cooper, 'Urban Utterances: Merchants, Artisans, and the Alphabet in Caxton's Dialogues in French and English'; Seeta Chaganti, '"A Form as Grecian Goldsmiths make": Enshrining Narrative in Chretien de Troyes's Cliges and the Stavelot Triptych'; and Christopher Cannon, 'Between the Old and the Middle of English'.

New Medieval Literatures 5 features innovative articles from leading senior scholars. Subjects include the cultural significance of Virgil's Aeneid during the English Peasants' Revolt, images of the pagan past in fourteenth-century London, medieval stage accidents and modern corollaries, and a survey of recent research on medieval women's literacy. Other essays offer original studies of martyrdom and the aesthetics of pain, sainthood and power, and virginity and erotic desire.

New Medieval Literatures is an annual containing the best new interdisciplinary work in medieval textual cultures.

New Medieval Literatures is an annual containing the best new interdisciplinary work in medieval textual cultures. Volume 3 combines important work by established scholars with the results of the editors' quest for major new voices, including the prizewinning essay in their first competition for younger scholars. The themes of the volume are the production of knowledge and text, cultural change and exchange, from early medieval China to fifteenth-century England. There are also paired and contrasting essays on Dante and on Langland. The volume ends with Sarah Kay's important survey of modern medievalist scholarship, the New Philology.

New Medieval Literatures is a new annual of work on the textual cultures of medieval Europe and beyond. The focus of Volume 2 is on continental European literatures as well as Anglo-Norman and Anglo-Latin writings, in addition to exemplification of work on earlier periods. The essays in Volume 2 move from the streets of Paris, London, and English market towns to English monasteries, idealized pastoral spaces, Christian-Jewish-Muslim Spain, Rome, and fourteenth-century Oxford. The essays cohere around three important issues of cultural analysis: gender, space, and reading history.

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West, from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages, represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring that rhetorical history between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle's rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This first volume covers the years c.800-1558, and surveys the reception and transformation of classical literary culture in England from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the Henrician era. Chapters on the classics in the medieval curriculum, the trivium and quadrivium, medieval libraries, and medieval mythography provide context for medieval reception. The reception of specific classical authors and traditions is represented in chapters on Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, the matter of Troy, Boethius, moral philosophy, historiography, biblical epics, English learning in the twelfth century, and the role of antiquity in medieval alliterative poetry. The medieval section includes coverage of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, while the part of the volume dedicated to the later period explores early English humanism, humanist education, and libraries in the Henrician era, and includes chapters that focus on the classicism of Skelton, Douglas, Wyatt, and Surrey.

New Medieval Literatures is the first issue of a new annual of work on literature and culture in medieval Europe. As well as featuring exciting new essays that interpret medieval texts for a postmodern age, every volume will include a survey by a leading medievalist of recent work in an emerging field of study. The essays in NML 1 question the concept of the medieval text itself.

Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 contributes to two fields, the history of the language arts and the history of literary theory. It brings together essential sources in the disciplines of grammar and rhetoric which were used to understand literary form and language and teach literary composition. Grammar and rhetoric, the language disciplines, formed the basis of any education from antiquity through the Middle Ages, no matter what future career a student would want to pursue. Because literature was also the subject matter of grammatical teaching, and because rhetorical teaching gave great attention to literary form, these were also the disciplines that would prepare students for an understanding of literary language and form. These arts constituted the abiding theoretical toolbox for anyone engaged in a life of letters. The book brings together more than fifty primary texts from the medieval history of grammar and rhetoric, well over half of them never translated into English before. The volume establishes the ancient traditions on which the medieval arts are based, and gives substantial selections from the late antique source texts. All texts are presented in their historical and theoretical contexts, and carefully annotated in order to make them useful to readers, both specialists and non-specialists. For the first time, the long traditions of grammar and rhetoric are presented together in one historical survey, showing how they related to each other, and are placed in a coherent conceptual structure, their contributions to literary theory.

The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (OHCREL) is designed to offer a comprehensive investigation of the numerous and diverse ways in which literary texts of the classical world have stimulated responses and refashioning by English writers. Covering the full range of English literature from the early Middle Ages to the present day, OHCREL both synthesizes existing scholarship and presents cutting-edge new research, employing an international team of expert contributors for each of the five volumes. OHCREL endeavours to interrogate, rather than inertly reiterate, conventional assumptions about literary 'periods', the processes of canon-formation, and the relations between literary and non-literary discourse. It conceives of 'reception' as a complex process of dialogic exchange and, rather than offering large cultural generalizations, it engages in close critical analysis of literary texts. It explores in detail the ways in which English writers' engagement with classical literature casts as much light on the classical originals as it does on the English writers' own cultural context. This first volume, and fourth to appear in the series, covers the years c.800-1558, and surveys the reception and transformation of classical literary culture in England from the Anglo-Saxon period up to the Henrician era. Chapters on the classics in the medieval curriculum, the trivium and quadrivium, medieval libraries, and medieval mythography provide context for medieval reception. The reception of specific classical authors and traditions is represented in chapters on Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, the matter of Troy, Boethius, moral philosophy, historiography, biblical epics, English learning in the twelfth century, and the role of antiquity in medieval alliterative poetry. The medieval section includes coverage of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, while the part of the volume dedicated to the later period explores early English humanism, humanist education, and libraries in the Henrician era, and includes chapters that focus on the classicism of Skelton, Douglas, Wyatt, and Surrey.

This is the first book to consider the rise of translation as part of a broader history of critical discourses from classical Rome to the late Middle Ages, and sheds light on its crucial role in the development of vernacular European culture.