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Looking Westward
A study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the perspective of the poetry, landscape, and politics of late thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Wales and the Welsh March.
The Manor, the Plowman, and the Shepherd
By the early sixteenth century, the agrarian landscape changed to more pastoral land, more enclosures, and a decrease in (or a rearrangement of) manorial lands. Increased population and an abundance of labor created economic tensions that caused moralizers to cry out for reform, but there is no evidence pastoral lands decreased even by the end of the century. In literature, the plowman tradition continued to exist in such forms as the remarkable sermon by Bishop Latimer, but more often than not it was viewed nostalgically as part of the past, and used to address the problems brought about by the pastoral economy of the sixteenth century. The plowman can be identified even as late as Spenser's Faerie Queene where he assumes the moral associations of the fourteenth-century type, and in Sidney where the plowman becomes the unsympathetic buffoon.
Transforming Work
Pastoral poetry has long been considered a signature Renaissance mode: originating in late sixteenth-century England via a rediscovery of classical texts, it is concerned with self-fashioning and celebrating the court. But, as Katherine C. Little demonstrates in Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Medieval Poetry, the pastoral mode is in fact indebted to medieval representations of rural labor. Little offers a new literary history for the pastoral, arguing that the authors of the first English pastorals used rural laborers familiar from medieval texts—plowmen and shepherds—to reflect on the social, economic, and religious disruptions of the sixteenth century. In medieval writing...
Reimagining the Past in the Borderlands of Medieval England and Wales
Challenging the standard view that England emerged as a dominant power and Wales faded into obscurity after Edward I's conquest in 1282, this book considers how Welsh (and British) history became an enduringly potent instrument of political power in the late Middle Ages. Brought into the broader stream of political consciousness by major baronial families from the March (the borderlands between England and Wales), this inventive history generated a new brand of literature interested in succession, land rights, and the origins of imperial power, as imagined by Geoffrey of Monmouth. These marcher families leveraged their ancestral, political, and ideological ties to Wales in order to strengthen their political power, both regionally and nationally, through the patronage of historical and genealogical texts that reimagined the Welsh past on their terms. In doing so, they brought ideas of Welsh history to a wider audience than previously recognized and came to have a profound effect on late medieval thought about empire, monarchy, and succession.
Middle English Biblical Poetry
A new analysis of the neglected genre of medieval Biblical poetry.Medieval England had a thriving culture of rewriting the Bible in art, drama, and literature in Latin, French and English. Middle English biblical poetry was central to this culture, and although these poems have suffered from critical neglect, sometimes dismissed as mere "paraphrase", they are rich, innovative and politically engaged. Read in the same gentry and noble households as secular romance, biblical poems borrow and adapt romance plots and motifs, present romance-inflected exotic settings, and share similar concerns: reputation, order, family and marriage. This book explores six poems from the thirteenth and fourteent...
Civil War Settlers
The first thorough analysis of Scandinavian Americans, examining citizenship, settler colonialism and whiteness in the Civil War era.
Medieval English Theatre 44
Newest research into drama and performance of the Middle Ages and Tudor period. Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic religious plays , and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. The papers in this volume explore richly interlocking topics. Themes of royalty and play continue from Volume 43. We have the first in-depth examination of the empl...
Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age
Older research on the premodern world limited its focus on the Church, the court, and, more recently, on urban space. The present volume invites readers to consider the meaning of rural space, both in light of ecocritical readings and social-historical approaches. While previous scholars examined the figure of the peasant in the premodern world, the current volume combines a large number of specialized studies that investigate how the natural environment and the appearance of members of the rural population interacted with the world of the court and of the city. The experience in rural space was important already for writers and artists in the premodern era, as the large variety of scholarly...
Thomas Wright's Political Songs of England
A collection of political verses, venality satires and songs of social protest from medieval England, with a wide-ranging introduction.
Seeing the Gawain-Poet
Offers the full-length study of the descriptive art found in four medieval poems: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Purity, and Patience.
