Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature


Book Description

A study of medieval attitudes towards the ventriloquism of God's and Christ's voices through human media, which reveals a progression from an orthodox view of divine vocal power to an anxiety over the authority of the priest's voice to a subversive take on the divine voice that foreshadows Protestant devotion.




Divine Ventriloquism in Medieval English Literature


Book Description

A study of medieval attitudes towards the ventriloquism of God's and Christ's voices through human media, which reveals a progression from an orthodox view of divine vocal power to an anxiety over the authority of the priest's voice to a subversive take on the divine voice that foreshadows Protestant devotion.




The Gnostic Paradigm


Book Description

No study has been carried out examining the gnostic undercurrents in medieval England. For the first time, Natanela Elias investigates the existence of these gnostic traces, using prominent late medieval English literary works such as Piers Plowman and Confessio Amantis and ultimately shedding light on a previously overlooked religious dimension.




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.




Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots


Book Description

Margaret, saint and 11th-century Queen of the Scots, remains an often-cited yet little-understood historical figure. Keene's analysis of sources in terms of both time and place – including her Life of Saint Margaret , translated for the first time – allows for an informed understanding of the forces that shaped this captivating woman.




The Genre of Medieval Patience Literature


Book Description

This book examines evolution of medieval patience literature from a focus on male and female sufferers to a focus on female suffers in particular. Using feminist revisions of genre-theory, Waugh analyses the concept of counterfeit consciousness in the works of Margery Kempe and Chaucer among others.




Medieval literary voices


Book Description

Voice is a fleeting physical phenomenon that leaves behind traces of its existence. Medieval literary voices offers a wide-reaching approach to the concept of literary voices, both the vanished authorial ones and the implicit textual ones. Its impressive lineup deepens our understanding of how literary voices evoke the elusive voices lurking beyond the text, capturing the absent authorial voice, the traces of scribal voices and the soundscape of the uttered text. It explores multiple dimensions of medieval voice and vocalisations, and the interactions between literary voices and their authorial, scribal and socio-political settings. It contends that through the theorizing of literary voices we can begin to understand the ways in which medieval voices mediate or proclaim an embodied selfhood or material presence, how they dictate or contest moral conventions, and how they create and sustain narrative soundscapes.




Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts


Book Description

Exploring the relation between sexuality and cosmology in a variety of literary texts from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, the essays reveal that medieval authors, whether lay or religious, Christian or Jewish, were grappling with the same sets of questions about sexuality as people are today.




Borges the Unacknowledged Medievalist


Book Description

The Argentinian writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was many things during his life, but what has gone largely unnoticed is that he was a medievalist, and his interest in Germanic medievalism was pervasive throughout his work. This study will consider the medieval elements in Borges creative work and shed new light on his poetry.




Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition


Book Description

Capitalising on developments in the field over the past decade, Riddles at work provides an up-to-date microcosm of research on the early medieval riddle tradition. The book presents a wide range of traditional and experimental methodologies. The contributors treat the riddles both as individual poems and as parts of a tradition, but, most importantly, they address Latin and Old English riddles side-by-side, bringing together texts that originally developed in conversation with each other but have often been separated by scholarship. Together, the chapters reveal that there is no single, right way to read these texts but rather a multitude of productive paths. This book will appeal to students and scholars of early medieval studies. It contains new as well as established voices, including Jonathan Wilcox, Mercedes Salvador-Bello and Jennifer Neville.