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Spicing erudition with wit, Professor Kelly takes a new look at medieval attitudes toward love, sexuality, and marriage, and he corrects a number of long-standing misconceptions embodied in the concept of courtly love. Through a close examination of canon law, the common practice of clandestine marriage, writings on mysticism, and medieval poetry - particularly Gower's 'Confessio amantis' and Chaucer's romances and their sources - he concludes that medieval lovers favored matrimony and did not consider sexual passion incompatible with virtue. His evidence contradicts the theory, closely associated with C.S. Lewis, that extramarital love was preferred in the Middle Ages, and that the sexual pleasures celebrated by poets were necessarily regarded as immoral by society at large. By placing religious and cultural conventions in their proper context, Professor Kelly shows that the hopes and fears of medieval lovers were much the same as those of lovers of all other ages.
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Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism honors the extraordinary academic career of H. A. Kelly, whose scholarship covers a wide variety of topics, including medieval and Renaissance literature and history, ecclesiastical history and theology, and philology. In recognition of his broad historical sweep, authors addressed in this volume range from Aristotle to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, though, in the interest of cohesion, the contributions focus primarily on English medieval literature and philology, and on closely related European and historical fields. Theoretically and methodologically, the essays fulfill the dual task of taking stock and taking on the challenges now facing medievalism. The reader will encounter a broad variety of «texts» here, as well as fresh perspectives on issues of current interest in medieval studies.
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What were Henry VIII's grounds for attempting to put aside his marriage to Catherine of Aragon? Were they no more than flimsy excuses to gratify his passion for Anne Boleyn? Or were there substantial reasons to lead him to believe that he had been living in sin for two decades? Making use of hitherto unknown or unexploited documentary evidence, the author sets out the intricacies of canon law regarding impediments to marriage and carefully explores the arguments and precedents Henry and his lawyers invoked in justifying his actions in public, in the ecclesiastical courts of England and Rome, and in the privacy of his own conscience. The effect of this reexamination forces substantial alterat...
In this fascinating study, Henry Ansgar Kelly examines the treatment of fifteenth-century English history - the period covered in Shakespeare's history plays, from Richard II to the accession of Henry VII - by contemporary chroniclers, by sixteenth-century historians, and by Elizabethan poets, notably Shakespeare. The author reveals the large role that political bias played in the contemporary accounts: favorite sons were endowed with divine support while cosmically base troubles were attributed to the opposition. He shows that instead of the 'Tudor myth' spoken of by present-day scholars there is a Lancaster myth, a York myth, and a somewhat different Tudor myth. Each is heralded by the par...
"Collection of incunabula and early medical prints in the library of the Surgeon-general's office, U.S. Army": Ser. 3, v. 10, p. 1415-1436.
In this study, Professor Kelly analyzes Dante's understanding of the meanings of tragedy and comedy in his undisputed works, especially the 'De vulgari eloquentia' and the 'Comedia'. He finds that Dante's criteria concerned subject-matter and style, not emotions like happiness and sorrow, or plot movement from one mood to another, or humor or the lack of it. He considered Vergil's 'Aeneid' and his own lyric poems to be tragedies because of their sublime subjects and their use of elevated style and vocabulary. He considered the 'Inferno', along with the 'Purgatorio' and the 'Paradiso', to be a comedy because of the range of subjects and styles. Dante's commentators, in contrast, tended to hav...