Medieval

Mary Carruthers's classic study of the training and uses of memory for a variety of purposes in European cultures during the Middle Ages has fundamentally changed the way scholars understand medieval culture. This fully revised and updated second edition considers afresh all the material and conclusions of the first. While responding to new directions in research inspired by the original, this new edition devotes much more attention to the role of trained memory in composition, whether of literature, music, architecture, or manuscript books. The new edition will reignite the debate on memory in medieval studies and, like the first, will be essential reading for scholars of history, music, the arts and literature, as well as those interested in issues of orality and literacy (anthropology), in the working and design of memory (both neuropsychology and artificial memory), and in the disciplines of meditation (religion).

• ISBN13: 9780815631606
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Considered the most important figure in medieval French literature, Chrétien de Troyes is credited with inventing the modern novel. The roots of his influential Arthurian romance narratives remain the subject of investigation and great debate among medieval scholars. In From Plato to Lancelot, K. Sarah-Jane Murray makes a highly original and profoundly significant contribution to current scholarship by locating Chrétien's work at the intersection of two important traditions: one derived from Greco-Roman antiquity, the other from the Celtic world of the Atlantic seaboard.

Drawing on a broad range of sources, from Plato's Timaeus and Ovid's Metamorphoses to the anonymous Ovidian tales translated in the twelfth century and Marie de France's Lais, Murray demonstrates that Chrétien and his contemporaries learned the importance of translation from the Mediterranean-centered classical tradition. She then turns to the Celtic world, examining how Irish monastic scholarship, as demonstrated by the Voyage of St. Brendan and Celtic saints' lives, influenced the cultural identity of medieval Europe and paved the way for an interest in Celtic stories and legends.

With penetrating insight and lucid prose, Murray locates Chrétien's singular genius in his ability to look to the future and to lay the foundations for a thoroughly new, and French, tradition of vernacular storytelling.

From Jean de Meun in the late thirteenth century to Christine de Pizan in the early fifteenth, medieval French poets often aimed to impart theological, philosophical, or moral ideas. To unify their thought, and to make its outline visible to readers, the poets created vivid images of place, such as gardens, paths, idyllic landscapes, cities, trees, and fountains. For Sarah Kay, these spatial images are a prop of "monologism," helping to communicate (or impose) unity of meaning and interpretation by summoning readers to occupy the same "place" in their thinking as the authors. Because of this monologism, Kay contends, didactic poetry has been ill served by a critical tradition that favors difference, plurality, and dialogism. In The Place of Thought, she seeks radically to reassess this literature and reappraise the pleasure to be derived from reading it.

Kay argues that one meaning is not inherently simpler or less interesting than many meanings. Using specific works as examples, she demonstrates that this "one-ness" of thought in French didactic poems can be an excitingly complex and challenging notion, and that it strains the images in which it is placed to the point where they become difficult to visualize. Herein lies the poems' simultaneous intellectual and aesthetic appeal. Focusing on the Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, the Breviari d'amor by Matfre Ermengaud, the Ovide moralisé, Pèlerinage de vie humaine by Guillaume de Deguileville's, Le Jugement dou roy de Navarre by Guillaume de Machaut, Le Joli buisson de Jonece by Jean Froissart, and Le Livre du Chemin de long estude by Christine de Pizan, Kay traces the works' backgrounds in scholastic thinking, illuminating them when appropriate with modern reflections on the same ideas.

Up to the twelfth century, writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, all of which were understood to convey the truth. The second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre--the romance--which was consciously conceived as fictional and therefore allowed to break free from traditional presuppositions. Green examines this period of crucial importance for the romance genre and for the genesis of medieval fiction.

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 has been 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'. Contributors: Siobhain Bly Calkin, Christopher Cannon, Rebecca Davis, Peter Dronke, A.S.G. Edwards, Elizabeth B. Edwards, Maura Nolan, Paul J. Pattrson, Derek Pearsall, Ad Putter, Paul Gerhard Schmidt, James Simpson, Barry Windeatt, Nicolette Zeeman

This important new contribution to the history of the body analyzes the role of filth as the material counterpart of sin in medieval thought. Using a wide range of texts, including theology, historical documents, and literature from Augustine to Chaucer, the book shows how filth was regarded as fundamental to an understanding of human history. This theological significance explains the prominence of filth and dung in all genres of medieval writing: there is more dung in theology than there is in Chaucer. The author also demonstrates the ways in which the religious understanding of filth and sin influenced the secular world, from town planning to the execution of traitors. As part of this investigation the book looks at the symbolic order of the body and the ways in which the different aspects of the body were assigned moral meanings. The book also lays out the realities of medieval sanitation, providing the first comprehensive view of real-life attempts to cope with filth. This book will be essential reading for those interested in medieval religious thought, literature, amd social history. Filled with a wealth of entertaining examples, it will also appeal to those who simply want to glimpse the medieval world as it really was.

Introducing modern readers to the riches of preaching in later medieval England, distinguished scholar Siegfried Wenzel offers translations of twenty-five Latin sermons written between 1350 and 1450. These carefully selected and previously untranslated sermons demonstrate how preachers constructed them and shaped them to their own purposes. The sermons provide representative examples of preaching through the Church year from Advent to the Sundays after Easter; also included are sermons for saints and pieces preached on such special occasions as funerals, convocations, visitations, professions, and academic lectures.

Taken together, the sermons provide a view of the wide variety of styles and rhetorical appeals that were used by well-known medieval preachers, such as FitzRalph, Brinton, Wyclif, Repingdon, Felton, Mirk, Philip, and Dygon; a number of anonymous sermons are included as well. All but one (Mirk) have been preserved in Latin and are translated here for the first time into modern English.

The book also contains a general introduction and short historical notes on the individual selections. Besides attracting the attention of students of preaching and of Western Church history, the material will be of great interest to medieval historians and to students of Middle-English literature, especially of Chaucer, the Pearl-Poet, Langland, fifteenth-century drama, and the lyric.

The original essays in Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature mean to provoke rather than reassure, to challenge rather than codify. Instead of summarizing existing knowledge scholars working in the field aim at opening fresh discussion; instead of emphasizing settled consensus they direct their readers to areas of enlivened and unresolved debate.

The deepest periodic division in English literary history has been between the Medieval and the Early Modern, not least because the cultural investments in maintaining that division are exceptionally powerful. Narratives of national and religious identity and freedom; of individual liberties; of the history of education and scholarship; of reading or the history of the book; of the very possibility of persuasive historical consciousness itself: each of these narratives (and more) is motivated by positing a powerful break around 1500.

None of the claims for a profound historical and cultural break at the turn of the fifteenth into the sixteenth centuries is negligible. The very habit of working within those periodic bounds (either Medieval or Early Modern) tends, however, simultaneously to affirm and to ignore the rupture. It affirms the rupture by staying within standard periodic bounds, but it ignores it by never examining the rupture itself. The moment of profound change is either, for medievalists, just over an unexplored horizon; or, for Early Modernists, a zero point behind which more penetrating examination is unnecessary. That situation is now rapidly changing. Scholars are building bridges that link previously insular areas. Both periods are starting to look different in dialogue with each other.

The change underway has yet to find collected voices behind it. Cultural Reformations volume aims to provide those voices. It will give focus, authority, and drive to a new area.

Medieval literature contains many figures caught at the interface between life and death - the dead return to place demands on the living, while the living foresee, organize or desire their own deaths. Jane Gilbert's original study examines the ways in which certain medieval literary texts, both English and French, use these 'living dead' to think about existential, ethical and political issues. In doing so, she shows powerful connections between works otherwise seen as quite disparate, including Chaucer's Book of the Duchess and Legend of Good Women, the Chanson de Roland and the poems of Francois Villon. Written for researchers and advanced students of medieval French and English literature, this book provides original, provocative interpretations of canonical medieval texts in the light of influential modern theories, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, presented in an accessible and lively way.