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Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre explores women's contributions to letter writing in Western Europe from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. The essays represent the first attempt to chart medieval women's achievements in epistolarity, and the contributors to this volume situate the women writers in a solidly historical context and employ a variety of feminist approaches. Both religious and secular writers are discussed, including Radegund, Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise, Catherine of Siena, the women of the Paston family, Christine de Pizan, and Maria de Hout.
Examination of key texts - Chaucer to Wyclif - sheds new light on medieval spirituality. The relationship between versions of the late medieval Church, faith, ethics and the lay powers, as explored in a range of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century texts written in England, is the subject of this book. It argues that they disclose strikingly diverse models of Christian discipleship, and examines the sources and consequences of such differences. Issues investigated include whether the Church could shape modern communities and individualidentities, and how it could combine its status as a major landlord and trader without being assimilated by the various networks of earthly power and p...
When down from the moon stepped the goddess of the night, she bid Minerva/Athene come to her. "Minerva/Athene," she said, "you sprang fully formed from the head of your father. Now all the daughters of mankind think they, too, are as rootless as you. Tonight I bid you dance, join the circle round 1 that tree glistening with the clarity of wisdom. Mother Natura and Lady Philosophia, hands together, already have begun the promenade of myth and allegory. " Still in the garb of gold and white stone, Minerva/ Athene did as she was bid and danced till dawn. Then in new light, she found herself suddenly a budding flower on a tall branch, and even more swiftly a crystalline fruit, rivaling the morni...
The computer revolution is upon us. The future of books and of reading are debated. Will there be books in the next millennium? Will we still be reading? As uncertain as the answers to these questions might be, as clear is the message about the value of the book expressed by medieval writers. The contributors to the volume The Book and the Magic of Reading in the Middle Ages explore the significance of the written document as the key icon of a whole era. Both philosophers and artists, both poets and clerics wholeheartedly subscribed to the notion that reading and writing represented essential epistemological tools for spiritual, political, religious, and philosophical quests. To gain a deeper understanding of the cultural significance of the medieval book, the contributors to this volume examine pertinent statements by medieval philosophers and French, German, English, Spanish, and Italian poets.
In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer asks a basic human question: How do we overcome tyranny? His answer goes to the heart of a revolutionary way of thinking about the very end of human existence and the nature of created being. His answer, declared performatively over the course of a symbolic pilgrimage, urges the view that humanity has an intrinsic need of grace in order to be itself. In portraying this outlook, Chaucer contributes to what has been called the "palaeo-Christian" understanding of creaturely freedom. Paradoxically, genuine freedom grows out of the dependency of all things upon God. In imaginatively inhabiting this view of reality, Chaucer aligns himself with that other great poet-theologian of the Middle Ages, Dante. Both are true Christian humanists. They recognize in art a fragile opportunity: not to reduce reality to a set of dogmatic propositions but to participate in an ever-deepening mystery. Chaucer effectively calls all would-be members of the pilgrim fellowship that is the church to behave as artists, interpretively responding to God in the finitude of their existence together.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated literary work of medieval England, portrays the culture of the late Middle Ages as a deeply commercial environment, replete with commodities and dominated by market relationships. However, the market is not the only mode of exchange in Chaucer’s world or in his poem. Chaucer’s Gifts reveals the gift economy at work in the tales. Applying important recent advances in anthropological gift theory, it illuminates and explains this network of exchanges and obligations. Chaucer’s Gifts argues that the world of the Canterbury Tales harbours deep commitments to reciprocity and obligation which are at odds with a purely commercial culture, and demonstrates how the market and commercial relations are not natural, eternal, or inevitable – an essential lesson if we are to understand Chaucer’s world or our own.
Frontcover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: Words and Other Fragments -- 1 Speaking Up and Shutting Up: Expression and Suppression in the Old English Mary of Egypt and Ancrene Wisse -- 2 What Comes Unnaturally: Unspeakable Acts -- 3 Crying Wolf: Gender and Exile in Bisclavret and Wulf and Eadwacer -- 4 Taking the Words Out of Her Mouth: Glossing Glossectomy in Tales of Philomela -- Conclusion: After Words -- Bibliography -- Index
The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature offers a new, inclusive, and comprehensive context to the study of medieval literature written in the English language from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Middle Ages. Utilising a Trans-European context, this volume includes essays from leading academics in the field across linguistic and geographic divides. Extending beyond the traditional scholarly discussions of insularity in relation to Middle English literature and ‘isolationism’, this volume: Oversees a variety of genres and topics, including cultural identity, insular borders, linguistic interactions, literary gateways, Middle English texts and traditions, and modern in...