In the fourteenth century there was a great flourishing of religious writings in English, both orthodox and heretical. Many of these works focused on Christ's Passion and humanity, whereas The Cloud of Unknowing describes an abstract, transcendent God beyond human knowledge and human language. Drawing upon radically different traditions, it is a rich work full of intriguing contradictions that speaks to us with liveliness and wit even today. The unknown author, thought to be a priest and Carthusian monk, is also believed to have written the other three works in this volume: The...
In the fourteenth century there was a great flourishing of religious writings in English, both orthodox and heretical. Many of these works focused on ...
While love is private, and in medieval literature especially is seen as demanding secrecy, to tell stories about it is to make it public. Looking, often accompanied by listening, is the means by which love is brought into the public realm and by which legal evidence of adulterous love can be obtained. Medieval romances contain many scenes in which secret watchers and listeners play leading roles, and in which the problematic relation of sight to truth is a central theme. The effect of such scenes is to place the poem's audience as secret watchers and listeners; and in later medieval...
While love is private, and in medieval literature especially is seen as demanding secrecy, to tell stories about it is to make it public. Looking, oft...
This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval narratives and lyrics--not how they express the subjectivity of individuals, but how subjectivity, escaping the bounds of individuality, is incorporated in the linguistic fabric of their texts. Most of the poems discussed are in English, and the book includes analyses of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Man of Law's Tale, and Complaint Unto Pity, the works of the Pearl poet, Havelok the Dane, the lyric sequence attributed to Charles of Orleans (the earliest such sequence in English), and many...
This book investigates how subjectivity is encoded in the texts of a wide variety of medieval narratives and lyrics--not how they express the subjecti...
A 1976 study of the medieval English dream-poem, set against the background of classical and medieval visionary and religious writings and the theory of dreams from classical times down to Freud and Jung. In this first general treatment of one of the most popular kinds of literature in the Middle Ages, Mr Spearing examines many specific poems in some detail and explores the nature of the visionary tradition in which medieval dream-poets felt themselves to be writing: he develops a theory of the dream-poem as a type of work in which medieval poets focused their own consciousness of the...
A 1976 study of the medieval English dream-poem, set against the background of classical and medieval visionary and religious writings and the theory ...
In Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the roles and functions of the "I" as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it "autography." He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, embracing prologues, authorial...
In Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the rol...
