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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.
In The Medieval Presence in the Modernist Aesthetic: Unattended Moments, editors Simone Celine Marshall and Carole M. Cusack have brought together essays on literary Modernism that uncover medieval themes and tropes that have previously been “unattended”, that is, neglected or ignored. A historical span of a century is covered, from musical modernist Richard Wagner’s final opera Parsifal (1882) to Russell Hoban’s speculative fiction Riddley Walker (1980), and themes of Arthurian literature, scholastic philosophy, Irish legends, classical philology, dream theory, Orthodox theology and textual exegesis are brought into conversation with key Modernist writers, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust, W. B. Yeats, Evelyn Waugh and Eugene Ionesco. These scholarly investigations are original, illuminating, and often delightful.
showing that contrary to the commonly held view that romances are representative of the "popular culture" of their day, in fact such texts appealed primarily to the gentry, England's elite landowners who lacked titles of nobility.
This volume maps the phenomenon of medievalism in Aotearoa, initially as an import by the early white settler society, and as a form of nation building that would reinforce Britishness and ancestral belonging. This colonial narrative underpins the volume’s focus on the imperial relationship in chapters on the academic study of the Middle Ages, on medievalism in film and music, in manuscript and book collections, and colonial stained glass and architecture. Through the alternative 21st-century frameworks of a global Middle Ages and Aotearoa’s bicultural nationalism, the volume also introduces Maori understandings of the ancestral past that parallel the European epoch and, at the opposite ...
First full-length study of what the manuscript contexts can reveal about early reactions to Chaucer, and in particular his treatment of women.
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.
Includes music.
From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past is a collection of essays that both analyses the historical and cultural medieval and early modern past, and engages with the medievalism and early-modernism—a new term introduced in this collection—present in contemporary popular culture. By focusing on often overlooked uses of the past in contemporary culture—such as the allusions to John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623) in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and the impact of intertextual references and internet fandom on the BBC’s The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses—the contributors illustrate how cinematic, televisual, artistic, and literary depictions of the historical and cultural past not only re-purpose the past in varying ways, but also build on a history of adaptations that audiences have come to know and expect. From Medievalism to Early-Modernism: Adapting the English Past analyses the way that the medieval and early modern periods are used in modern adaptations, and how these adaptations both reflect contemporary concerns, and engage with a history of intertextuality and intervisuality.
Despite attempts to suppress early women's speech, this study demonstrates that women were still actively engaged in cultural practices and speech strategies that were both complicit with the patriarchal ideology whilst also undermining it.