Browse

This book is about one of the most famous and least understood authors of the Latin Middle Ages. We know him by the pseudonym of Archpoet. Setting his world and his works in their historical contexts, the book argues that they provide insight into a brilliant counter-culture of medieval Germany. Its subtlest exponent did not indulge in literary play but refashioned the political, social, and religious roles available to a twelfth-century thinker in order to create, for himself and his patron, an identity alternative to the norms of clerical conformity prevalent elsewhere in Europe. At a time when Germans were being decried as backward barbarians, he produced a manifesto of intellectual heterodoxy which wittily challenged the truth-claims made by humourless moralists. The Archpoet and Medieval Culture reconsiders the categories in which the literature of the Middle Ages is interpreted and suggests a less literal mode of reading the sources to historians.

The Arts of Disruption offers a series of new readings of the allegorical poem Piers Plowman: but it is also a book about allegory. It argues not just that there are distinctively disruptive ‘arts’ that occur in allegory, but that allegory, because it is interested in the difficulty of making meaning, is itself a disruptive art. The book approaches this topic via the study of five medieval allegorical narrative structures that exploit diegetic conflict and disruption. Although very different, they all bring together contrasting descriptions of spiritual process, in order to develop new understanding and excite moral or devotional change. These five structures are: the paradiastolic ‘hypocritical figure’ (such as vices masked by being made to look like ‘adjacent’ virtues), personification debate, violent language and gestures of apophasis, narratives of bodily decline, and grail romance. Each appears in a range of texts, which the book explores, along with other connected materials in medieval rhetoric, logic, grammar, spiritual thought, ethics, medicine, and romance iconography. These allegorical narrative structures appear radically transformed in Piers Plowman, where the poem makes further meaning out of the friction between them. Much of the allegorical work of the poem occurs at the points of their intersection, and within the conceptual gaps that open up between them. Ranging across a wide variety of medieval allegorical texts, the book shows from many perspectives allegory’s juxtaposition of the heterogeneous and its questioning of supposed continuities.

This book argues for the importance of synoptically examining the whole range of same‐sex relations in the Anglo‐Saxon period, revisiting well‐known texts and issues (as well as material often considered marginal) from a radically different perspective. The introductory chapters first lay out the premises underlying the book and its critical context, then emphasise the need to avoid modern cultural assumptions about both male‐female and male‐male relationships, and underline the paramount place of homosocial bonds in Old English literature. Part II then investigates the construction of and attitudes to same‐sex acts and identities in ethnographic, penitential, and theological texts, ranging widely throughout the Old English corpus and drawing on Classical, Medieval Latin, and Old Norse material. Part III expands the focus to homosocial bonds in Old English literature in order to explore the range of associations for same‐sex intimacy and their representation in literary texts such as Genesis A, Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, The Dream of the Rood, The Phoenix, and Ælfric's Lives of Saints. During the course of the book's argument, it uncovers several under‐researched issues and suggests fruitful approaches for their investigation. It concludes that, in omitting to ask certain questions of Anglo‐Saxon material, in being too willing to accept the status quo indicated by the extant corpus, in uncritically importing invisible (because normative) heterosexist assumptions in our reading, we risk misrepresenting the diversity and complexity that a more nuanced approach to issues of gender and sexuality suggests may be more genuinely characteristic of the period.

Animals and ‘wild men’ are everywhere in medieval culture, but their role in illuminating medieval constructions of humanity has never been properly explored. This book gathers together a large number of themes and subjects, including the Bestiary, heraldry, and hunting, and examines them as part of a unified discourse about the body and its creative transformations. ‘Human’ and ‘animal’ are terms traditionally opposed to one another, but their relationship must always be characterized by a dynamic instability. Humans scout into the animal zone, manipulating and reshaping ‘animal’ bodies in accordance with their own social imaginings — yet these forays are risky since they lead to questions about what humanity consists in, and whether it can ever be forfeited. Studies of birds, foxes, ‘game’ animals, the wild man, and shape-shifting women fill out the argument of this book, which examines works by Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain-poet, and Henryson, as well as showing that many less familiar texts have rewards that an informed reading can reveal.

This book breaks important new ground in the study of Chaucer's various engagements with Italian literary culture, taking a more dynamic approach to Chaucer's Italian sources than has previously been available. Most treatments of such influences do not take sufficient account of the material contexts in which these sources were available to Chaucer and his contemporaries. Manuscripts of the major works of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch circulated in a variety of formats, and often the margins of their texts were loci for extensive commentary and glossing. These traditions of glossing and commentary represent one of the most striking features of fourteenth-century Italian literary culture. Not only that, but the authors themselves were responsible for some of this commentary material, from Dante's own prosimetra Vita nova and Convivio, to the extensive commentary accompanying Boccaccio's Teseida. The startling example of Francesco d'Amaretto Mannelli's glosses in his copy of the Decameron, copied in 1384, is discussed in detail for the first time. His refiguring of Griselda offers an important perspective on the reception of this story that is exactly contemporary with Chaucer. This book offers a new perspective on Chaucer and Italy by highlighting the materiality of his sources, reconstructing his textual, codicological horizon of expectation. It provides new ways of thinking about Chaucer's access to, and use of, these Italian sources, stimulating, in turn, new ways of reading his work. This attention to the materiality of Chaucer's sources is further explored and developed by reading the Tales through their early fourteenth-century manuscripts, taking account not just of the text but also of the numerous marginal glosses. Within this context, then, the question of Chaucer's authorship of some of these glosses is considered.

This book, mainly concentrating on the Canterbury Tales, reassesses the moral dimension in Chaucer’s writings. For the Middle Ages, the study of human behaviour was quintessentially moral. It was not gender neutral: certain virtues and certain failings were explicitly or implicitly gender-specific. The book demonstrates how crucial Chaucer’s engagement is with the composite moral/ethical traditions available to him. By recourse to commonplace primary sources of the period, it is shown that Stoic ideals that had been somewhat uncomfortably absorbed within medieval Christian moral codes are invoked to complicate the poet’s representations of how women and men aspire to behave in matters of friendship and anger, sexuality and chastity, protest and sufferance, generosity and greed, and credulity and foresight. Focus on such concepts and on the networks of thought in which they are embedded yields insights both into specific interpretative issues in individual Tales, and into the concept that informs the work as a whole. Topics covered included the ethical implications of the flood-forecast and the ethical status of the heroine in the Miller’s Tale; the collision of emotion with equanimity in the Franklin’s Tale; the surprisingly positive connotations of the Wife of Bath’s allegiance to liberality, which explain the continuity between her Prologue and her Tale; and the questioning of what ought to be ‘enough’ for humanity, which suffuses the Shipman’s Tale and several others. As for the whole poem, a nuanced appraisal of ideals of fellowship and friendship is shown to be fundamental to its structure.

This book explores the textual environment of London in the 1380s and 1390s, revealing a language of betrayal, surveillance, slander, treason, rebellion, flawed idealism, and corrupted compaignyes. Taking a strongly interdisciplinary approach, it examines how discourses about social antagonism work across different kinds of texts written at this time, including Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and Canterbury Tales, and other literary texts such as St. Erkenwald, John Gower's Vox clamantis, Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, and Richard Maidstone's Concordia. Many non-literary texts are also discussed, including the Mercers' Petition, Usk's Appeal, the guild returns, judicial letters, Philippe de Mézières's Letter to Richard II, and chronicle accounts. These were tumultuous decades in London: some of the conflicts and problems discussed include the Peasants' Revolt, the mayoral rivalries of the 1380s, the Merciless Parliament, slander legislation, and contemporary suspicion of urban associations. While contemporary texts try to hold out hope for the future, or imagine an earlier Golden Age, Chaucer's texts foreground social conflict and antagonism. Though most critics have promoted an idea of Chaucer's texts as essentially socially optimistic and congenial, this book argues that Chaucer presents a vision of a society that is inevitably divided and destructive.

This book examines all four verse continuations that follow Chrétien's unfinished Grail story, a powerful site of rewriting from the late 12th through the 15th centuries. By focusing on the dialogue between Chrétien and the verse continuators, this study demonstrates how the patterns and puzzles inscribed in the first author's romance continue to guide his successors, whose additions and reinventions throw new light back on the problems medieval readers and writers found in the mother text: questions about society and the individual; love, gender relations, and family ties; chivalry, violence, and religion; issues of collective authorship and doubled heroes, interpretation, rewriting, and canon formation. However far the continuations appear to wander from the master text, the manuscript tradition supports an implicit claim of oneness extending across the multiplicity of discordant voices combined in a dozen different manuscript compilations, the varying ensembles in which most medieval readers encountered Chrétien's Conte. Indeed, considered as a group the continuators show remarkable fidelity in integrating his romance's key elements, as they respond sympathetically to the dynamic incongruities and paradoxical structure of their model, its desire for and deferral of ending, its non-Aristotelian logic of ‘and/both’ in which contiguity forces interpretation and further narrative elaboration. Unlike their prose competitors, the verse continuators remain faithful to the dialectical movement inscribed across the interlace of two heroes' intertwined stories, the contradictory yet complementary spirit that propels Chrétien's decentered Conte du Graal. Chrétien de Troyes's unfinished Grail story generated numerous rewritings in verse and prose from the late 12th through the 15th centuries. Cycles and sequels invariably raise questions about how stories are joined and how they end, what makes a whole, and what changes in meaning emerge across their continuities and discontinuities. In the context of medieval invention and manuscript culture, what is the nature of collective authorship? The central argument of this study addresses these questions to demonstrate how the patterns and puzzles inscribed in Chrétien's Conte du Graal continue to guide his four continuators in verse. However much they seem to stray from the originating text, close examination reveals how faithfully they use the distinctive narrative techniques of their common model and ask the questions about love, chivalry, religion, and violence that entered Arthurian romance so problematically in the first ‘Story of the Grail’.

This book provides a detailed account of one of the central personified figures in William Langland's Piers Plowman. Previous critical accounts of Conscience either focus on discussions of the faculty conscience in scholastic discourse, or eschew personification allegory as a useful category in order to argue for the figure's development or education as a character during the poem. But Conscience only appears to develop as he is re-presented in the course of Piers Plowman within a series of different literary modes. And he changes not only during the composition of the various episodes in different modes that make up the single version, but also during the composition of the poem as a series of three different versions. The versions of Piers Plowman form, this book argues, a single continuous narrative or argument, in which revisions to Conscience's role in one version are predicated upon his cumulative 'experiences' in the earlier versions. Drawing on a variety of materials in both Middle English and Latin, this book illustrates the wide range of contemporary discourses Langland employed as he composed Conscience in the three versions of the poem. By showing how Langland transformed Conscience as he composed the A, B, and C texts, the book offers a new approach to reading the serial versions of the poem. While the versions of Piers Plowman customarily have been presented and read in parallel-text formats, the book shows that Langland's revisions are newly comprehensible if the three versions are read as a single, coherent compositional sequence, from end to end.

This is the first account of Dante’s reception in English to address the full chronological span of that process. Responses by individual authors and in certain periods have been studied before, but Dante’s British Public takes a wider and longer view, using a selection of vivid and detailed case- studies to explore some of the conversations about and appropriations of Dante that developed in Britain across more than six centuries, as access to his work extended and diversified. Much of the evidence is drawn from previously unpublished material in (for example) letters, journals, annotations, and inventories and derives from archives in the UK and across the world, from Milan to Mumbai and from Berlin to Cape Town. Throughout, the role of Anglo-Italian cultural contacts and intermediaries in shaping the public understanding of Dante in Britain is given prominence. The book thus shows how, over the centuries, many classes of English and Italian readers and writers become involved in this process—from clerics and merchants around Chaucer’s time, through itinerant students, collectors, translators, and tourists in the early modern period, to the expatriates, scholars, artists, and popularizers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The final chapter brings the story up to the present, showing how the poet’s work has been seen (from the fourteenth century onwards) as accessible to ‘the many’, and demonstrating some of the means by which Dante has reached a yet wider British public over the past century.

This volume explores the concept of personhood in Dante’s Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. This study suggests that Dante presents a vision of ‘transhuman’ potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into copresence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, the author argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual’s person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead. Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante’s implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the ‘corporeal’ modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante’s journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.

Irish saga literature represents the largest collection of vernacular narrative in existence from the early Middle Ages, using the tools of Christian literacy to retell myths and legends about the pagan past. This unique corpus remains marginal to standard histories of Western literature: its tales are widely read, but their literary artistry remains a puzzle to many even within Celtic studies. This book, the first to offer a systematic literary analysis of any single native Irish tale, aims to show how one particularly celebrated saga ‘works’ as a story: the Middle Irish tale Togail Bruidne Da Derga (The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel), which James Carney called ‘the finest saga of the early period’. This epic tale tells how the legendary king Conaire was raised by a shadowy Otherworld to the kingship of Tara and, after a fatal error of judgement, was hounded by spectres to an untimely death at Da Derga’s Hostel at the hands of his own foster-brothers. By turns lyrical and laconic, and rich in native mythological imagery, the story is told with a dramatic intensity worthy of Greek tragedy, and the intricate symmetry of its narrative procedure recalls the visual patterning of illuminated manuscripts such as The Book of Kells. This book invites the reader to enjoy and understand this literary masterpiece, explaining its narrative artistry within its native, classical, and biblical literary contexts. Against a historical backdrop of shifting ideologies of Christian kingship, it interprets the saga’s possible significance for contemporary audiences as a questioning exploration of the challenges and paradoxes of kingship. The book does not require any previous knowledge of mediaeval Irish literature and contains a glossary of unfamiliar terms.

This book explores vernacular translations, adaptations, and paraphrases of the biblical psalms, c. 1300–450. Focusing on a varied body of texts, it examines translations of the complete Psalter as well as renditions of individual psalms and groups of psalms. Exploring who translated the psalms, and how and why they were translated, the book also considers who read these texts and how and why they were read. Grounded in exploration of contemporary wills and testaments, alongside extensive manuscript evidence, Chapter 1 examines the circulation of vernacular psalm versions. Chapter 2 considers the English psalms in the light of inherited and contemporary translation theory, suggesting that the practice of psalm translation was inflected by a range of theoretical positions. In Chapters 3 and 4, the texts themselves are again foregrounded; Chapter 3 explores practices of translation in all of the extant complete English Psalters, and Chapter 4 looks at abbreviated and paraphrased renditions. It considers in particular evidence supplied by the Middle English primers and what they suggest about the role of the vernacular psalms in prayer. In Chapter 5, attention focuses on both translators and readers. What do we know of how the English psalms were read and of the interpretative frameworks that were applied to them? Chapter 6 returns the vernacular psalms to their material context. Accompanied by illustrations, it focuses on the interplay of ‘liturgical’ Latin and ‘devotional’ vernacular on the manuscript page. How English, it asks, were the English psalms?