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This collection responds to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya. Its contributors investigate how medieval poetic language reflects and shapes social, political, and religious worlds. In addition to new readings of canonical poetic texts, it includes readings of texts that have previously not held a central place in critical attention.
The Assembly of Ladies is a fifteenth-century secular love poem in Middle English that adheres closely to conventional poetic structures, but throws these conventions into relief as it presents the narrative from a woman’s point of view, a rare occurrence for poetry of this period. Who wrote it, for whom and why, are questions about which we can speculate, but never ultimately answer–the poem itself gives us few clues. Yet the poem has had a remarkable shelf-life; in subsequent centuries the poem has continued to be noticed, read, and debated, as a small but significant artefact from fifteenth-century England. This book examines how fifteenth-century English social conventions impact upon gender relations in The Assembly of Ladies. By drawing on contemporary (and clearly influential) texts from the fifteenth century as a comparison, Marshall shows how The Assembly of Ladies has integrated social conventions into its themes and structure, elevating for the reader the ways that social and literary conventions impact on women in the production and consumption of literature.
This is an interdisciplinary work that philosophically analyzes concepts such as heroism; practical wisdom; honor; Nietzsche’s notions of will to power, the overman, and the three metamorphoses; Plato’s understanding of love; creating meaning in life; the issue of morally dirty hands in political administration; the relationship between political means and ends; the proper role of positive duties in society; the aspirations of grand strivers; and the linkages between biological, biographical, and autobiographical lives, all in the context of explaining and evaluating the lives and works of fourteen historically significant Italian: Gaius Julius Caesar, Brunetto Latini, Dante Alighieri, C...
One of the most intriguing features of The Assembly of Ladies, an anonymous fifteenth-century Middle English poem, is that it has remained in print in anthologies for over 500 years. Why would a poem about courtly love remain so popular for so long? This book analyses the literary and historical publishing evidence about The Assembly of Ladies, to show that the poem has remained in print not for its literary merit, but because its anonymity has allowed it to be appropriated by editors for their own particular social and political causes. The book draws together textual, contextual, and intertextual evidence about all twenty editions of The Assembly of Ladies. By examining closely how and why a single text is or has been included in canonical traditions over time, this study not only reveals the material presence of the text in various traditions but also brings to the foreground the categories scholars continue to use while defining or imagining those traditions.
Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy is a reappraisal of the poem by an international team of thirty-four scholars. Each vertical reading analyses three same-numbered cantos from the three canticles: Inferno i, Purgatorio i and Paradiso i; Inferno ii, Purgatorio ii and Paradiso ii; etc. Although scholars have suggested before that there are correspondences between same-numbered cantos that beg to be explored, this is the first time that the approach has been pursued in a systematic fashion across the poem. This collection – to be issued in three volumes – offers an unprecedented repertoire of vertical readings for the whole poem. As the first volume exemplifies, vertical reading not only articulates unexamined connections between the three canticles but also unlocks engaging new ways to enter into core concerns of the poem. The three volumes thereby provide an indispensable resource for scholars, students and enthusiasts of Dante. The volume has its origin in a series of thirty-three public lectures held in Trinity College, the University of Cambridge (2012-2016) which can be accessed at the ‘Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy’ website.
Medieval literature can be daunting. This critical guide is designed to help readers to relax in the company of diverting and entertaining voices from that 'other country' that is the past.Medieval Literature 1300-1500 offers close readings of Middle English texts placed within the culture with which they interact. Famous works, like The Canterbury Tales, are discussed alongside lesser-known poems, prose, and plays, in five thematically-organised chapters, accompanied by helpful critical apparatus. Reflecting the proliferation of user-friendly editions, many available on-line, this book extends the range of Middle English writing for which there is accessible up-to-date critical support, enabling the student, the general reader, the course designer, and the aspirant specialist, to read widely and with enjoyment in the medieval period.
The author links Chaucer's writings with the medieval optical tradition in its various forms (scholastic texts, encyclopedias, exempla, vernacular poetry) both in general cultural terms and through the discussion of specific examples. He shows how the science of optics, or perspectiva, provides an account of spatial perception, including visual error, and demonstrates how these aspects of optical theory impact on Chaucer's poetry. He provides detailed and sustained analysis of the spatial content of narratives across the range of Chaucer's works, relating them to optical ideas and making use of Lefebvre's theory of the production of space. The texts discussed include the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, Knight's Tale, Miller's Tale, Reeve's Tale, Merchant's Tale, Squire's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.
This 2007 second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Dante is designed to provide an accessible introduction to Dante for students, teachers and general readers. The volume was fully updated and includes three new essays on Dante's works. The suggestions for further reading now include secondary works and translations as well as online resources. The essays cover Dante's early works and their relation to the Commedia, his literary antecedents, both vernacular and classical, biblical and theological influences, the historical and political dimensions of Dante's works, and their reception. In addition there are introductory essays to each of the three canticles of the Commedia that analyse their themes and style. This edition will ensure that the Companion continues to be the most useful single volume for new generations of students of Dante.
This volume is a collection of intertextual studies on medieval and early modern literature in honor of Robert Hollander by some of his former students. Writers are always also readers, responding to texts that have provoked their thought. The contributors to this volume all participate in its overarching theme: writers reading and responding to the work of other writers. As Hollander's work has focused especially on Dante and Boccaccio, many of the essays treat one of these writers, either as reading or as read by others. Other essays trace intertextual influences in Langland, Shakespeare, or post-Enlightenment writers faced with the loss of Dante's meaningful cosmos.
The role of poetry in the transmission and shaping of knowledge in late medieval France.