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Britain of the fifteenth century was rife with social change, religious dissent, and political upheaval. Amid this ferment lived John Capgrave—Austin friar, doctor of theology, leading figure in East Anglian society, and noted author. Nowhere are the tensions and anxieties of this critical period, spanning the close of the medieval and the dawn of early modern eras, more eloquently conveyed than in Capgrave's works. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century is the first book to explore the major themes of Capgrave's writings and to relate those themes to fifteenth-century political and cultural debates. Focusing on Capgrave's later works, especially those in English and addressed to lay audiences, it teases out thematic threads that are closely interwoven in Capgrave's Middle English oeuvre: piety, intellectualism, gender, and social responsibility. It refutes the still-prevalent view of Capgrave as a religious and political reactionary and shows, rather, that he used traditional genres to promote his own independent viewpoint on some of the most pressing controversies of his day, including debates over vernacular theology, orthodoxy and dissent, lay (and particularly female) spirituality, and the state of the kingdom under Henry VI. The book situates Capgrave as a figure both in the vibrant literary culture of East Anglia and in European intellectual history. John Capgrave's Fifteenth Century offers a fresh view of orthodoxy and dissent in late medieval England and will interest students of hagiography, religious and cultural history, and Lancastrian politics and society.
The author explores what is known about the medieval publishing process by close study of the work of John Capgrave (1393-1464), a prolific author and one of the most learned Englishmen of his day. In the Middle Ages, before the age of printing, the author was often his own scribe and almost invariably his own editor and publisher. Lucas shows how works newly composed by an author were prepared. Capgrave's linguistic and scribal usages are set in the socio-historical context of the 15th century.
The scene is Rome in the fifteenth century, Golden Rome, a magnet drawing pilgrims by its architectural attractions and the magnitude of its religious importance as the mother of faith. The Austin friar John Capgrave attended Rome for the Jubilee in 1450, including the Lenten stations, and his Solace of Pilgrimes, intended as a guide for subsequent pilgrims, was written up following the author's own pilgrimage. In three parts it covers the ancient monuments, the seven principal churches and the Lenten stations, and other churches of note, especially those dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The work has been described as the most ambitious description of Rome in Middle English. The present edition offers a new Text based on a transcription of the author's holograph manuscript. Parallel with the Text there is a modern English Translation. The illustrations, mostly from a period slightly later than the 1450 Jubilee, aim to give some visual clue as to what Capgrave saw. There is a full account of the multiple sources that he used, most of which is the product of new research. Following the Text there is a Commentary that aims to provide some background information about the buildings and monuments that Capgrave focuses on, and to explain and illuminate any difficulties or points of interest in the Text. Capgrave is an omni-present guide leading us towards what he considered an appropriate interpretation of the classical past as a foundation for the Christian present, which built on it and surpassed it.
In Fifteenth-Century Lives, Karen A. Winstead identifies and explores a major shift in the writing of Middle English saints’ lives. As she demonstrates, starting in the 1410s and ’20s, hagiography became more character-oriented, more morally complex, more deeply embedded in history, and more politically and socially engaged. Further, it became more self-consciously literary and began to feature women more prominently—and not only traditional virgin martyrs but also matrons and contemporary holy women. Winstead shows that this literature placed a premium on scholarship and teaching. Hagiography celebrated educators and scholars to a greater extent than ever before and became a vehicle for educating readers about Christian dogma. Focusing both on authors well known, such as John Lydgate and Margery Kempe, and on others less known, such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Winstead argues that the values promoted by fifteenth-century hagiography helped to shape the reformist impulses that eventually produced the Reformation. Moreover, these values continued to influence post-Reformation hagiography, both Protestant and Catholic, well into the seventeenth century. In exploring these trends in fifteenth-century hagiography, identifying the factors that contributed to their emergence, and tracing their influence in later periods, Fifteenth-Century Lives marks an important contribution to revisionary scholarship on fifteenth-century literature. It will appeal to students and scholars of late medieval English literature and late medieval religion.
This bold literary experiment transforms the genre of the saint's life by infusing it with techniques more often associated with chronicles, mystery plays, and romances.
This volume is an analysis of the development of cultural politics in Lancastrian England. It focusses on Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, brother of Henry V and Protector of England during Henry VI's minority. Humphrey's intellectual activity conformed itself to the Duke's own position in the kingdom: the book explores Humphrey's commission of biographies, translations of Latin texts, political pamphlets and poems, as well as his collection of manuscripts acquired both in England and from Italian humanists. Particular attention is dedicated to Humphrey's donations to the University of Oxford and to his relations with English poets and translators, such as John Lydgate and Thomas Hoccleve, highlighting his contribution towards the making of the nation's cultural autonomy.