Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England examines the censorship issues that propelled the major writers of the period toward their massive use of visionary genres. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton suggests that writers and translators as different as Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, "M.N.," and Margery Kempe positioned their work to take advantage of the tacit toleration that both religious and secular authorities extended to revelatory theology. The book examines controversial ideas as diverse as the early experimental humanism of Chaucer,...
Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England examines the censorship issues that propelled the major...
Using a dialogue format, contributors to this collection of essays outline key issues in the cultural history of medieval women. Many of the essays in this volume provide compelling evidence that women in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages achieved an accomplished form of literacy, and became actively involved in literary networks of textual production and exchange. These essays also present new research on questions of the literacy and authorship of historical women. In so doing they demonstrate that medieval women, like many medieval men, did not read and write in isolation, but were...
Using a dialogue format, contributors to this collection of essays outline key issues in the cultural history of medieval women. Many of the essays in...
This book addresses the need for scholarly attention to the field of alternative, non-Augustinian apocalypticism and its implications for the study of Piers Plowman. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton discusses the major prophets and visionaries of such alternative traditions, who are characterised by their denunciation of clerical abuses, the urging of religious reform, and an ultimate historical optimism. Her book offers a proposal for the importance of such traditions, particularly as represented in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, to the understanding of Langland's visionary mode and reformist...
This book addresses the need for scholarly attention to the field of alternative, non-Augustinian apocalypticism and its implications for the study of...
Critics of Piers Plowman have often behaved as if the great fourteenth-century English poem were written by committee, Written Work marks a major shift in orientation by focusing on William Langland instead of Piers Plowman. The five original historicist studies collected here are less concerned with searching for Langland's identity in medieval records than with examining the marks, even scars, left on him by the history he touched. Derek Pearsall studies what Langland knew about London--its geography, economics, and social life--and the way his focus on the city shifted...
Critics of Piers Plowman have often behaved as if the great fourteenth-century English poem were written by committee, Written Work mark...
This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex its textual and visual contents, physical...
This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intende...
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton John J. Thompson Sarah Baechle
This volume gathers the contributions of senior and junior scholars all indebted to the pathbreaking work of Derek Pearsall to showcase new research prompted by his rich and ongoing legacy as a literary critic, editor, and seminal founder of Middle English manuscript studies. The contributors aim both to honor Pearsall s work in the field he established and to introduce the complexities of interdisciplinary manuscript studies to students already familiar with medieval literature. The contributors explore a range of issues, from the study of medieval literary manuscripts to the history of...
This volume gathers the contributions of senior and junior scholars all indebted to the pathbreaking work of Derek Pearsall to showcase new research p...
The medieval reading process was unusually multi-faceted, and can surprise the modern reader by offering an alternative grid or map of a text we believe we know well -- one that cuts across or unsettles familiar stereotypes we all hold. These essays were collected together to offer practical, manuscript-based studies of medieval reading habits in use.
The medieval reading process was unusually multi-faceted, and can surprise the modern reader by offering an alternative grid or map of a text we belie...
