This book is about the place of pedagogy and the role of intellectuals in medieval dissent. Focusing on the medieval English heresy known as Lollardy, Rita Copeland shows how how radical teachers transformed inherited ideas about classrooms and pedagogy as they brought their teaching to adult learners. The pedagogical imperatives of Lollard dissent were also embodied in the work of certain public figures, intellectuals whose dissident careers transformed the social category of the medieval intellectual.

Drawing on manuscript sources, this book examines how the medieval clergy developed the authority and persuasive force to attempt to govern the day-to-day speech of Western Christians. It explores, for the first time, how Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the "Patience" poet presented and judged these attempts to label some political, social and private speech as deviant and destructive--as lying, slander, blasphemy and other Sins of the Tongue.

Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England investigates the relationship between the development of parliament and the practice of English poetry in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this period, the bureaucratic political culture of parliamentarians, clerks, and scribes overlapped with the artistic practice of major poets like Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, all of whom had strong ties to parliament. Matthew Giancarlo investigates these poets together in the specific context of parliamentary events and controversies, as well as in the broader environment of...

Examines the flourishing and subsequent decline of praise poetry as a genre from Antiquity to the present.

After the late fourteenth century, English literature was fundamentally shaped by the heresy of John Wyclif and his followers. This study demonstrates how Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Clanvowe, Margery Kempe, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, far from eschewing Wycliffism out of fear of censorship or partisan distaste, viewed Wycliffite ideas as a distinctly new intellectual resource. Andrew Cole offers a complete historical account of the first official condemnation of Wycliffism the Blackfriars council of 1382 - and the fullest study of 'lollardy' as a social and literary...

During the early medieval period, crusading brought about new ways of writing about the city of Jerusalem in Europe. By creating texts that embellished the historical relationship between the Holy City and England, English authors endowed their nation with a reputation of power and importance. In Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, Suzanne Yeager identifies the growth of medieval propaganda aimed at rousing interest in crusading, and analyzes how fourteenth-century writers refashioned their sources to create a substantive (if fictive) English role in the fight for Jerusalem. Centering on...

This book represents a major re-assessment of Dante's Inferno, and of the place which the Inferno occupies in the plan of the whole Commedia. On evidence drawn also from the Paradiso and Purgatorio, Dr Kirkpatrick argues that Dante's thinking and poetry are subject to far greater internal tension than is commonly supposed. He then proceeds to analyse each of the thirty-four cantos of the Inferno, and to relate each canto in turn to its thematic and narrative context. Throughout, Dr Kirkpatrick is particularly concerned with features of language and structure which scholars have tended to...

The Theatre of Medieval Europe brings together the work of thirteen internationally recognized scholars of early drama to give a comprehensive account of recent findings in the field. Whilst reflecting the large body of research on English drama, the book widens the focus of its survey to represent the continental theatre of the period, with a succession of essays covering England, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, central Europe and the Low Countries. In addition, it deals with Latin musical and liturgical drama, and addresses both the archival and stage-orientated aspects of theatre research....

Chretien de Troyes was one of the most important medieval writers of Arthurian narrative. A key figure in reshaping the 'once and future fictions' of Arthurian story, he was instrumental in the late twelfth-century shift from written and oral legendary traditions to a highly sophisticated literary cultivation of the Old French verse romance. While examining individually each of Chretien's five Arthurian romances, Donald Maddox looks at their coherence as a group, suggesting that their intertextual relations lend a harmony of meaning and design to the ensemble as a whole. Central to his...

The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual...