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This essential Middle English textbook, now in its third edition, introduces students to the wide range of literature written in England between 1150 and 1400. New, thoroughly revised edition of this essential Middle English textbook. Introduces the language of the time, giving guidance on pronunciation, spelling, grammar, metre, vocabulary and regional dialects. Now includes extracts from 'Pearl' and Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde'. Bibliographic references have been updated throughout. Each text is accompanied by detailed notes.
This book provides a boldly original account of Middle English literature from the Norman Conquest to the beginning of the sixteenth century. It argues that these centuries are, in fundamental ways, the momentous period in our literary history, for they are the long moment in which the category of literature itself emerged as English writing began to insist, for the first time, that it floated free of any social reality or function. This book also charts the complex mechanisms by which English writing acquired this power in a series of linked close readings of both canonical and more obscure texts. It encloses those readings in five compelling accounts of much broader cultural areas, describing, in particular, the productive relationship of Middle English writing to medieval technology, insurgency, statecraft and cultural place, concluding with an in depth account of the particular arguments, emphases and techniques English writers used to claim a wholly new jurisdiction for their work. Both this history and its readings are everywhere informed by the most exciting developments in recent Middle English scholarship as well as literary and cultural theory. It serves as an introduction to all these areas as well as a contribution, in its own right, to each of them.
A wide-ranging survey of the most important medieval authors and genres, designed for students of English.
A fully updated second edition of J. A. Burrow's hugely successful introduction to medieval English literature.
Originally published in 1951 Middle English Literature applies methods of literary evaluation to certain Middle English works. Arguing that previous literary criticism has largely focused on the commentary of their historical, social, philological and religious content, the book suggests that it has led to a thinking that Middle English literature is without artistic value and therefore cannot be compared effectively with later works of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. While traditional analysis has been beneficial to scientific and historical findings, this text seeks to look deeper into the artistic merits of the works and the authors that wrote them, arguing that the authors of these Middle English texts, wrote with the same motivations and experiences of these later authors which in turn informed the artistic basis of these Middle English works. The book looks at Middle English texts through three main areas: the Metrical Romances, the Religious Lyrics and Piers Plowman.
This collection of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century documents is designed for students of Chaucer and Middle English literature. It makes readily available accounts of key historical events and descriptions of pertinent cultural phenomena. Brings together in one volume fourteenth- and fifteenth-century historical and cultural texts. Documents shed light on the themes and styles that appear in Chaucer and other Middle English literature. Contains twelve important images from the period. Concise introductions and bibliographies accompany all documents.
Fresh and provocative approaches to the literature of the middle ages, offering close readings of texts from Chaucer to Henryson, and beast fable to devotional works. Jill Mann's writing, teaching, and scholarship have transformed our understanding of two distinct fields, medieval Latin and Middle English literature, as well as their intersection. Essays in this volume seek to honour this achievement by looking at entirely new aspects of these fields (the relationship of song to affect, the political valence of classical allusion, the Latin background of Middle English devotional texts). Others look again at the literary kinds and ideas most important in Mann's own work (beast fable, the nature of allegory, the nature of "nature", the relationship of economic thought and literature, satire, language as a subject for poetry) in the poets she hasbeen most drawn to (Chaucer, Langland, Henryson). All of the essays involve close readings of the most careful kind, taking as their primary method Professor Mann's repeated injunction to attend, above all, to the"words on the page". Christopher Cannon is Professor of English, New York University; Maura Nolan is Associate Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley. Contributors: Siobhain Bly Calkin, Christopher Cannon, Rebecca Davis, Peter Dronke, A.S.G. Edwards, Elizabeth B. Edwards, Maura Nolan, Paul J. Patterson, Derek Pearsall, Ad Putter, Paul Gerhard Schmidt, James Simpson, Barry Windeatt, Nicolette Zeeman
Middle English literature is intimately concerned with sleep and the spaces in which it takes place. In the medieval English imagination, sleep is an embodied and culturally determined act. It is both performed and interpreted by characters and contemporaries, subject to a particular habitus and understood through particular hermeneutic lenses. While illuminating the intersecting medical and moral discourses by which it is shaped, sleep also sheds light on subjects in favour of which it has hitherto been overlooked: what sleep can enable (dreams and dream poetry) or what it can stand in for or supersede (desire and sex). This book argues that sleep mediates thematic concerns and questions in ways that have ethical, affective and oneiric implications. At the same time, it offers important contributions to understanding different Middle English genres: romance, dream vision, drama and fabliau.
Readings in Medieval Texts offers a thorough and accessible introduction to the interpretation and criticism of a broad range of Old and Middle English canonical texts from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. The volume brings together 24 newly commissioned chapters by a leading international team of medieval scholars. An introductory chapter highlights the overarching trends in the composition of English Literature in the Medieval periods, and provides an overview of the textual continuities and innovations. Individual chapters give detailed information about context, authorship, date, and critical views on texts, before providing fascinating and thought-provoking examinations of crucial excerpts and themes. This book will be invaluable for undergraduate and graduate students on all courses in Medieval Studies, particularly those focusing on understanding literature and its role in society.
This was the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the Norman conquest and the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The volume has five sections: 'After the Norman Conquest'; 'Writing in the British Isles'; 'Institutional Productions'; 'After the Black Death' and 'Before the Reformation'. It provides information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception, which will serve both specialists and general readers, and also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers an extensive and vibrant account of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will thus prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, and for historians as well as literary specialists.