Chaucer and the Death of the Political Animal


Book Description

Drawing from classical myth, the history of philosophy, literature, film, music, and painting, Workman connects the artistic claims of Chaucer and tests them against similar gestures in the history of philosophy and literature. What results is a radical retake on Chaucer as a philosopher and poet, upending any preconceived views.







Chaucer and Italian Culture


Book Description

Chaucerian scholarship has long been intrigued by the nature and consequences of Chaucer’s exposure to Italian culture during his professional visits to Italy in the 1370s. In this volume, leading scholars take a new and more holistic view of Chaucer’s engagement with Italian cultural practice, moving beyond the traditional ‘sources and analogues’ approach to reveal the varied strands of Italian literature, art, politics and intellectual life that permeate Chaucer’s work. Each chapter examines from different angles links between Chaucerian texts and Italian intellectual models, including poetics, chorography, visual art, classicism, diplomacy and prophecy. Echoes of Petrarch, Dante and Boccaccio reverberate throughout the book, across a rich and diverse landscape of Italian cultural legacies. Together, the chapters cover a wide range of theory and reference, while sharing a united understanding of the rich impact of Italian culture on Chaucer’s narrative art.




Saint Vincent Ferrer, His World and Life


Book Description

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of tumultuous change in medieval Europe; they witnessed the Black Death, the Great Papal Schism, heightened fears of the apocalypse, and the elimination of Spain's non-Christian population. Few figures were as widely and as intimately involved in late medieval Europe's struggles as Saint Vincent Ferrer. Perhaps the foremost preacher of his day, Ferrer spent the final two decades of his life traversing Europe, preparing the world for its imminent destruction. Saint Vincent Ferrer (d. 1419), His World and Life reassesses the controversial preacher's motives, methods, and impact, tracing Ferrer's journey from obscure logician to angel of the apocalypse, as he came to be known. At the same time, the book offers new insights into the depth and breadth of late medieval apocalyptic anticipation, and into the processes that ultimately led to the expulsions of Spain's Jews and Muslims.




The Circulation of Power in Medieval Biblical Drama


Book Description

A literary reading informed by the recent temporal turn in Queer Theory, this book analyzes medieval Biblical drama for themes representing modes of power such as the body, politics, and law. Revitalizing the discussions on medieval drama, Sturges asserts that these dramas were often intended not to teach morality but to resist Christian authority.




Representing Difference in the Medieval and Modern Orientalist Romance


Book Description

This book, the first full-length cross-period comparison of medieval and modern literature, offers cutting edge research into the textual and cultural legacy of the Middle Ages: a significant and growing area of scholarship. At the juncture of literary, cultural and gender studies, and capitalizing on a renewed interest in popular western representations of the Islamic east, this book proffers innovative case studies on representations of cross-religious and cross-cultural romantic relationships in a selection of late medieval and twenty-first century Orientalist popular romances. Comparing the tropes, characterization and settings of these literary phenomena, and focusing on gender, religion, and ethnicity, the study exposes the historical roots of current romance representations of the east, advancing research in Orientalism, (neo)medievalism and medieval cultural studies. Fundamentally, Representing Difference invites a closer look at medieval and modern popular attitudes towards the east, as represented in romance, and the kinds of solutions proposed for its apparent problems.




Spaces for Reading in Later Medieval England


Book Description

We are living in an age in which the relationship between reading and space is evolving swiftly. Cutting-edge technologies and developments in the publication and consumption of literature continue to uncover new physical, electronic, and virtual contexts in which reading can take place. In comparison with the accessibility that has accompanied these developments, the medieval reading experience may initially seem limited and restrictive, available only to a literate few or to their listeners; yet attention to the spaces in which medieval reading habits can be traced reveals a far more vibrant picture in which different kinds of spaces provided opportunities for a wide range of interactions with and contributions to the texts being read. Drawing on a rich variety of material, this collection of essays demonstrates that the spaces in which reading took place (or in which reading could take place) in later medieval England directly influenced how and why reading happened.




The Fellowship of the Beatific Vision


Book Description

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer asks a basic human question: How do we overcome tyranny? His answer goes to the heart of a revolutionary way of thinking about the very end of human existence and the nature of created being. His answer, declared performatively over the course of a symbolic pilgrimage, urges the view that humanity has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself. In portraying this outlook, Chaucer contributes to what has been called the "palaeo-Christian" understanding of creaturely freedom. Paradoxically, genuine freedom grows out of the dependency of all things upon God. In imaginatively inhabiting this view of reality, Chaucer aligns himself with that other great poet-theologian of the Middle Ages, Dante. Both are true Christian humanists. They recognize in art a fragile opportunity: not to reduce reality to a set of dogmatic propositions but to participate in an ever-deepening mystery. Chaucer effectively calls all would-be members of the pilgrim fellowship that is the church to behave as artists, interpretively responding to God in the finitude of their existence together.




Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama


Book Description

The earliest complete morality play in English, The Castle of Perseverance depicts the culture of medieval East Anglia, a region once known for its production of artistic objects. Discussing the spectator experience of this famed play, Young argues that vision is the organizing principle that informs this play's staging, structure, and narrative.




Joan de Valence


Book Description

Heir to an earldom, and wife and widow of William de Valence (half-brother of King Henry III), Joan de Valence was an important actor in the volatile political world of thirteenth-century England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Yet, astonishingly, her story of survival, perseverance, and influence has never been told until now. Joan de Valence: The Life and Influence of a Thirteenth-Century Noblewoman draws on archival research, as well as tools of historical analysis and gender studies, to peel back the layers of this remarkable noblewoman's life. From her survival of the wars between king and baronage at mid-century to her life as a widow and magnate of the realm, the story of Joan de Valance, as Mitchell argues, exemplifies the range of experiences of noblewomen during the middle ages.