Law and Religion in Chaucer's England PDF Download

Author: Henry Ansgar Kelly
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000948544
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
These essays, in a second collection by Professor Kelly, investigate legal and religious subjects touching on the age and places in which Geoffrey Chaucer lived and wrote, especially as reflected in the more contemporary sections of the Canterbury Tales. Topics include the canon law of incest (consanguinity, affinity, spiritual kinship), the prosecution of sexual offences and regulation of prostitution (especially in the Stews of Southwark), legal opinions about wife-beating, and the laws of nature concerning gender distinction (focusing on Chaucer's Pardoner) and the technicalities of castration. Sacramental and devotional practices are discussed, especially dealing with confession and penitence and the Mass. Chaucer's Prioress serves as the starting point for a treatment of regulations of nuns in medieval England and also for the presence, real and virtual, of Jews and Saracens (Muslims and pagans) in England and conversion efforts of the time, as well as sympathetic or antipathetic attitudes towards non-Christians. Included is a case study on the legend of St Cecilia in Chaucer and elsewhere, and as patron of music; and a discussion of canonistic opinion on the licit limits of medicinal magic (in connection with the ministrations of John the Carpenter in the Miller's Tale).

Author: Helen Phillips
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843842297
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Chaucer's writings (the 'Canterbury Tales', lyrics and dream poems and Troilus) are here freshly examined in relation to the religions, the religious traditions and the religious controversies of his era.

Author: Joseph Allen Hornsby
Publisher: Pilgrim Books (OK)
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Author: C. David Benson
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780859913027
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
These thirteen essays by distinguished Chaucerians deal with the most neglected genre of the 'Canterbury Tales', the religious tales. Although the prose works are also discussed, the primary focus of the volume is on Chaucer's four poems in rhyme royal: the 'Clerk's Tale', the 'Man of Law's Tale', the 'Second Nun's Tale' and the 'Prioress's Tale'. Almost all of Chaucer's tales are religious in some sense, but these four works deal specifically and deeply with faith and spiritual transcendence. They appeal to qualities, such as pathos, not now in critical fashion, but at the same time they seem extraordinarily contemporary in their special interest in women and feminist issues. The time is appropriate to recognise their importance in Chaucer's canon, for he is a religious poet as surely as he is a poet of comedy and secular love. These essays survey past criticism on the religious tales and offer new approaches.Contributors: C.DAVID BENSON, ELIZABETH ROBINSON, DEREK PEARSALL, BARBARA NOLAN, ROBERT WORTH FRANK, LINDA GEORGIANNA, CHARLOTTE C. MORSEA.S.G. EDWARDS, CAROLYN COLETTE, ELIZABETH D. KIRK, GEORGE R. KEISER, JANE COWGILL.

Author: Henry Ansgar Kelly
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812248341
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Translated shortly before 1400, the Bible became the most popular medieval book in English. Prevailing scholarly opinion calls it the Wycliffite Bible, attributing it to followers of the heretic John Wyclif, and claims it was banned in 1407. Henry Ansgar Kelly disagrees, arguing it was a nonpartisan effort and never the object of any prohibition.

Author: Susan Nakley
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472123041
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Nationalism, like medieval romance literature, recasts history as a mythologized and seamless image of reality. Living in the Future analyzes how the anachronistic nationalist fantasies in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales create a false sense of England’s historical continuity that in turn legitimized contemporary political ambitions. This book spells out the legacy of the Tales that still resonates throughout English literature, exploring the idea of England in the medieval literary imagination as well as critiquing more recent centuries’ conceptions of Chaucer’s nationalism. Chaucer uses two extant national ideals, sovereignty and domesticity, to introduce the concept of an English nation into the contemporary popular imagination and reinvent an idealized England as a hallowed homeland. For nationalist thinkers, sovereignty governs communities with linguistic, historical, cultural, and religious affinities. Chaucerian sovereignty appears primarily in romantic and household contexts that function as microcosms of the nation, reflecting a pseudo-familial love between sovereign and subjects and relying on a sense of shared ownership and judgment. This notion also has deep affinities with popular and political theories flourishing throughout Europe. Chaucer’s internationalism, matched with his artistic use of the vernacular and skillful distortions of both time and space, frames a discrete sovereign English nation within its diverse interconnected world. As it opens up significant new points of resonance between postcolonial theories and medieval ideas of nationhood, Living in the Future marks an important contribution to medieval literary studies. It will be essential for scholars of Middle English literature, literary history, literary political and postcolonial theory, and literary transnationalism.

Author: Henry Ansgar Kelly
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1843836297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
This book challenges the recently established consensus that the trial was a carefully prepared and executed judicial process in which the judges were amenable to reasonable arguments. Thomas More's treason trial in 1535 is one of history's most famous court cases, yet never before have all the major documents been collected, translated, and analyzed by a team of legal and Tudor scholars. This edition serves asan important sourcebook and concludes with a 'docudrama' reconstructing the course of the trial based on these documents. Legal experts H. A. Kelly and R. H. Helmholz take different approaches to the legalities of this trial, and four experienced judges [including Justice of the Queen's Bench Sir Michael Tugendhat] discuss the trial with some disagreements - notably on the meaning and requirement of 'malice' called for in the Parliamentary Act of Supremacy. More's own accounts of his interrogations in prison are analyzed, and the trial's procedures are compared to and contrasted with 16th-century concepts of natural law and also modern judicial practices and principles. The book is a 'must read' not only for students of law and Tudor history but also for all concerned with justice and due process. As a whole, the book challenges Duncan Derrett's conclusions that the trial was conducted in accord with contemporary legal norms and that More was convicted only on the single charge of denying Parliament the power to declare Henry VIII Supreme Head of the English Church [testified to by Richard Rich] - a position that has been uniformly accepted by historians since 1964. HENRY ANSGAR KELLY is past Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA. LOUIS W. KARLIN is an attorney with the California Court of Appeal and Fellow of the Center for Thomas More Studies, University of Dallas. GERARD B. WEGEMER is Director of the Center for Thomas More Studies.

Author: Margaret Toscano
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317122712
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The notion of an infernal place of punishment for 'undesired' elements in human culture and human nature has a long history both as religious idea and as cultural metaphor. This book brings together a wide array of scholars who examine hell as an idea within the Christian tradition and its 'afterlife' in historical and contemporary imagination. Leading scholars grapple with the construction and meaning of hell in the past and investigate its modern utility as a means to describe what is perceived as horrific or undesirable in modern culture. While the idea of an infernal region of punishment was largely developed in the context of early Jewish and Christian religious culture, it remains a central belief for some Christians in the modern world. Hell's reception (its 'afterlife') in the modern world has extended hell's meaning beyond the religious realm; hell has become a pervasive image and metaphor in political rhetoric, in popular culture, and in the media. Bringing together scholars from a variety of fields to contribute to a wider understanding of this fascinating and important cultural idea, this book will appeal to readers from historical, religious, literary and cultural perspectives.

Author: John Bugbee
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268104484
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 614

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Book Description
God’s Patients approaches some of Chaucer’s most challenging poems with two philosophical questions in mind: How does action relate to passion, to being-acted-on? And what does it mean to submit one’s will to a law? Responding to critics (Jill Mann, Mark Miller) who have pointed out the subtlety of Chaucer’s approach to such fundamentals of ethics, John Bugbee seeks the source of the subtlety and argues that much of it is ready to hand in a tradition of religious (and what we would today call “mystical”) writing that shaped the poet’s thought. Bugbee considers the Clerk’s, Man of Law’s, Knight’s, Franklin’s, Physician’s, and Second Nun’s Tales in juxtaposition with an excellent informant on a major stream of medieval religious culture, Bernard of Clairvaux, whose works lay out ethical ideas closely matching those detectable beneath the surface of the poems. While some of the positions that emerge—most spectacularly the notion that the highest states of human being are ones in which activity and passivity cannot be disentangled—are anathema to much modern ethical thought, God’s Patients provides evidence that they were relatively common in the Middle Ages. The book offers striking new readings of Chaucer’s poems; it proposes a nuanced hermeneutical approach that should prove fruitful in reading a number of other high- and late-medieval works; and, by showing how assumptions about its two fundamental questions have shifted since Chaucer’s time, it provides a powerful new way of thinking about the transition between the Middle Ages and modernity.

Author: Russell Sandberg
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1784714852
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Following 9/11, increased attention has been given to the place of religion in the public sphere. Across the world, Law and Religion has developed as a sub-discipline and scholars have grappled with the meaning and effect of legal texts upon religion. The questions they ask, however, cannot be answered by reference to Law alone therefore their work has increasingly drawn upon work from other disciplines. This Research Handbook assists by providing introductory but provocative essays from experts on a range of concepts, perspectives and theories from other disciplines, which can be used to further Law and Religion scholarship.