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A new annotated translation of the early thirteenth century guide for women religious recluses, designed to accompany the recent and definitive Middle English text published by the Early English Text Society. The introduction sets the work in its context, asking why, when and where it was produced, as well as what the institutional background of its male author may have been. It emphasises the radical nature of the work with its vision of pastoral reform, its dismissive tone in relation to conventional monasticism, and its promotion of a vernacular spirituality.
New essays on the burgeoning of pastoral and devotional literature in medieval England.
Bibliography of prose works offering unique evidence for the nature of women's religious experience in medieval England, with scholarly introduction.
The Ancrene Wisse, a guide for female recluses written in the West Midlands in the early thirteenth century, and the closely related religious works of the `Katherine Group', offer a vivid insight into the religious life of the time, and their rich and varied prose style blends Latin and native English stylistic traditions with remarkable skill and assurance. The difficulty of their language, however, has made them largely inaccessible except to experts in Middle English, and this edition is designed to introduce them to a wider audience, including undergraduates with limited experience of Middle English and specialists in other disciplines, particularly history, theology, and women's studies. It provides a representative selection (the last two parts of Ancrene Wisse, and three complete works from the Katherine Group, Hali Meithhad, Sawles Warde, and Seinte Margarete) in new and readable critical texts, with a general introduction, notes, a select glossary, and interleavedtranslations.
•Detailed close analysis of early Middle English homiletic, hagiographic, guidance, and lyrical-meditative texts: provides readers with an insight into the affective literary strategies of a body of neglected material. •Contextualization of English material in Latin and Anglo-Norman: provides readers with a deeper knowledge of the multilingual culture of medieval England in the post-Conquest centuries. •Substantial commentary on church wall paintings: provides readers with a nuanced understanding of the ways in which the affective strategies of visual resources can be mapped onto texts.
Misogyny is of course not the whole story of medieval discourse on women: medieval culture also envisaged a case for women. But hitherto studies of profeminine attitudes in that periods culture have tended to concentrate on courtly literature or on female visionary writings or on attempts to transcend misogyny by major authors such as Christine de Pizan and Chaucer. This book sets out to demonstrate something different: that there existed from early in the Middle Ages a corpus of substantial traditions in defence of women, on which the more familiar authors drew, and that this corpus itself consolidated strands of profeminine thought that had been present as far back as the patristic literat...
This volume explores medieval anchoritism (the life of a solitary religious recluse) from a variety of perspectives. The individual essays conceive anchoritism in broadly interpretive categories: challenging perceived notions of the very concept of anchoritic ‘rule’ and guidance; studying the interaction between language and linguistic forms; addressing the connection between anchoritism and other forms of solitude (particularly in European tales of sanctity); and exploring the influence of anchoritic literature on lay devotion. As a whole, the volume illuminates the richness and fluidity of anchoritic texts and contexts and shows how anchoritism pervaded the spirituality of the Middle Ages, for lay and religious alike. It moves through both space and time, ranging from the third century to the sixteenth, from England to the Continent and back.
Ancrene Wisse introduced through a variety of cultural and critical approaches which establish the originality and interest of the treatise.
The book offers a new perspective on late medieval compiling activity. Additionally, it offers a more nuanced perspective on late medieval religious culture in England. Lastly, it examines three major, but understudied Middle English texts in depth: the Pore Caitif, The Tretyse of Love and A Talkyng of the Love of God.
Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343&–ca. 1416), a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Wyclif, is the earliest woman writer of English we know about. Although she described herself as &“a simple creature unlettered,&” Julian is now widely recognized as one of the great speculative theologians of the Middle Ages, whose thinking about God as love has made a permanent contribution to the tradition of Christian belief. Despite her recent popularity, however, Julian is usually read only in translation and often in extracts rather than as a whole. This book presents a much-needed new edition of Julian&’s writings in Middle English, one that makes possible the serious readin...