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The medieval poem Cursor Mundi is a biblical verse account of the history of the world, offering a chronological overview of salvation history from Creation to Doomsday. Originating in northern England around the year 1300, the poem was frequently copied in the north before appearing in a southern version in substantially altered form. Although it is a storehouse of popular medieval biblical lore and a fascinating study in the eclectic use of more than a dozen sources, the poem has until now attracted little scholarly attention. This five-part collaborative edition presents the Arundel version of the poem with variants from three others. In addition, it provides a discussion of sources and analogues, detailed explanatory notes, and a bibliography. Published in English.
As a traditional site of historical criticism, medieval studies is particularly well placed to benefit from the recent reemergence of historicism in literary studies. But this new "critical historicism" differes from the traditional criticism in both method an interests, differences that are well illustrated by this collection. A concern with politics, a reliance on the materials of economic and social history, a conception of writing as a form of social practices, a focus upon the forces of change in medieval culture, and unwillingness to observe the usual distinction between literary and historical texts, and a historicization of their own activity--these characteristics make these essays ...
In Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception, readers discover the roles of Moses from the Exodus to the Renaissance--law-giver, prophet, writer--and their impact on Jewish and Christian cultures as seen in the Hebrew Bible, Patristic writings, Catholic liturgy, Jewish philosophy and midrashim, Anglo-Saxon literature, Scholastics and Thomas Aquinas, Middle English literature, and the Renaissance. Contributors are Jane Beal, Robert D. Miller II, Tawny Holm, Christopher A. Hall, Luciana Cuppo-Csaki, Haim Kreisel, Rachel S. Mikva, Devorah Schoenfeld, Gernot Wieland, Deborah Goodwin, Franklin T. Harkins, Gail Ivy Berlin, and Brett Foster.
“This book discusses the strategies and rhetorical means by which four authors of Middle English verse historiography seek to authorise their works and themselves. Paying careful attention to the texts, it traces the ways in which authors inscribe their fictional selves and seek to give authority to their constructions of history. It further investigates how the authors position themselves in relation to their task of writing history, their sources and their audiences. This study provides new insights into the processes of the appropriation of history around 1300 by social groups whose lack of the relevant languages, before this ‘anglicising’ of the dominant Latin and French history constructions, prevented their access to the history of the British isles.” —Wilhelm Busse University of Düsseldorf
Focusing on the famous Medieval commentator Nicolas of Lyra and the anonymous Middle English biblical adaptation of the Gospel of John, the Cursor Mundi, this book examines the development of the analytical tools of biblical literary criticism showing how late Medieval commentators negotiated the paradoxical interdependence of the literal and spiritual senses, as transmitted by traditional and inherited vocabularies, through a focus on narrative structure. Mark Hazard combines an enlightening account of the actual practice of professional commentators, the history of Gospel interpretation and cultural history to reveal that remarkable shift in the treatment of the Bible that modern scholars would regard as having laid the groundwork for the historical-critical methods in biblical research. As such this book sheds light not only on the 14th century practice of biblical interpretation, but will also be of value to those currenlty engaged in reading and writing about the bible.
New approaches to religious texts from the Middle Ages, highlighting their diversity and sophistication.
What do we mean when we talk about the text of Piers Plowman? What is the concept of a literary text when that construct exists in so many variant and feral forms, as is the case for the multiple modern editorial reconstructions and the more than fifty surviving manuscripts and early print editions of Piers Plowman? How do the anonymous roles of author, scribe, and reader intersect to create the experience of the text? How can we judge a pre-modern text’s reception history if we do not know exactly what it was that the early reader was responding to? This book takes a daring and innovative approach to answering such questions as these. It is a micro-study of one particular historic version...
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...
Introduction : creating paradise -- ch. 1. The body in Eden. Creating bodies ; Bodily functions ; The pleasures of paradise ; Being fruitful and multiplying ; The children of Eden ; What Adam knew ; Creating souls ; Eden as human habitat -- ch. 2. Power in paradise. Dominion over the animals ; Domestic dominion : the origins of economics ; Power and gender ; Unequal men : the origins of politics ; Power and possession : the origins of ownership ; The insubordinate fall -- ch. 3. Death and the paradise beyond. The death of the animal ; The body returns ; Representing paradise : from Eden to the patria ; Perfecting children's bodies ; Rewarding inequality ; Negotiating the material ; Resurrecting the senses ; Somewhere over the rainbow -- Coda : between paradises.
This new edition presents three odes to saints in alliterative and stanzaic form, composed in the north and east Midlands around 1400. The hymns address St. Katherine of Alexandria (from Bodley Rolls 22), St. John the Evangelist (Lincoln Cathedral Library MS91), and St. John the Baptist (British Library, MS Additional 39574). The edition contains a full account of extensive recent scholarship on the Middle English alliterative verse tradition, as well as the hymns' hagiographical and historical context.