Author: Joyce Coleman Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521673518 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
This book demonstrates that received views on orality and literacy underestimate the importance of public reading in the late Middle Ages.
Author: Heather Blatt Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1526118017 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 323
Book Description
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book traces affinities between digital and medieval media, exploring how reading functioned as a nexus for concerns about increasing literacy, audiences’ agency, literary culture and media formats from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of texts, from well-known poems of Chaucer and Lydgate to wall texts, banqueting poems and devotional works written by and for women, Participatory reading argues that making readers work offered writers ways to shape their reputations and the futures of their productions. At the same time, the interactive reading practices they promoted enabled audiences to contribute to – and contest – writers’ burgeoning authority, making books and reading work for everyone.
Author: Glenn D. Burger Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1526144239 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
This collection investigates how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on work on the noble and bourgeois medieval household, it considers bourgeois, gentry and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. The book argues that there is a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between domestic experience and its forms of cultural expression. Contributors address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, estates-management literature, medical writing, household music and drama and manuscript anthologies. Their studies provide a fresh illustration of the late-medieval household's imaginative scope, its extensive internal and external connections and its fundamental centrality to late-medieval cultural production.
Author: Sabrina Corbellini Publisher: Brepols Publishers ISBN: Category : Books and reading Languages : en Pages : 324
Book Description
Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page. - St Jerome, 384 AD With these words, the Church Father Jerome exhorted the young Eustochium to find on the sacred page the spiritual nourishment that would give her the strength to live a life of chastity and to keep her monastic vows. His call to read does not stand alone. Books and reading have always played a pivotal role in early and medieval Christianity, often defined as 'a religion of the book'. A second important stage in the development of the 'religion of the book' can be attested in the late Middle Ages, when religious reading was no longer the exclusive right of men and women living in solitude and concentrating on prayer and meditation. Changes in the religious landscape and the birth of new religious movements transformed the medieval town into a privileged area of religious activity. Increasing literacy opened the door to a new and wider public of lay readers. This seminal transformation in the late medieval cultural horizon saw the growing importance of the vernacular, the cultural and religious emancipation of the laity, and the increasing participation of lay people in religious life and activities. This volume presents a new, interdisciplinary approach to religious reading and reading techniques in a lay environment within late medieval textual, social, and cultural transformations.
Author: Malcolm Richardson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 131732398X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
Richardson explores how a powerful culture of writing was created in late medieval London, even though initially few inhabitants could actually write themselves. Whilst previous studies have tended to focus on middle-class literary reading patterns, this study examines writing skills separately both from reading skills and from literature.
Author: Hollie L. S. Morgan Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1903153719 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
First full-length interdisciplinary study of the effect of these everyday surroundings on literature, culture and the collective consciousness of the late middle ages.
Author: Richard W. Kaeuper Publisher: OUP Oxford ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 472
Book Description
This is a study of two topics of central importance in late medieval history: the impact of war, and the control of disorder. Making war and making law were the twin goals of the state, and the author examines the effect of the evolution of royal government in England and France. Ranging broadly between 1000 and 1400, he focuses principally on the period c.1290 to c.1360, and compares developments in the two countries in four related areas: the economic and political costs of war; the development of royal justice; the crown's attempt to control private violence; and the relationship between public opinion and government action. He argues that as France suffered near breakdown under repeated English invasions, the authority of the crown became more acceptable to the internal warring factions; whereas the English monarchy, unable to meet the expectations for internal order which arose partly from its own ambitious claims to be 'keeper of the peace', had to devolve much of its judicial powers. In these linked problems of war, justice, and public order may lie the origins of English 'constitutionalism' and French 'absolutism'.
Author: Antony J. Hasler Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1139496727 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 269
Book Description
This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to treat English and Scottish material of its period together, and responds to European literary contexts, the dialogue between vernacular and Latin matter, and current critical theory. In so doing it claims that public and occasional writing evokes a counter-discourse in the secrecies and subversions of medieval love-fictions. The result is a poetry that queries and at times cancels the very authority to speak that it so proudly promotes.
Author: Erin A. McCarthy Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0192573578 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
When poetry was printed, poets and their publishers could no longer take for granted that readers would have the necessary knowledge and skill to read it well. By making poems available to anyone who either had the means to a buy a book or knew someone who did, print publication radically expanded the early modern reading public. These new readers, publishers feared, might not buy or like the books. Worse, their misreadings could put the authors, the publishers, or the readers themselves at risk. Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers' efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers' strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers' interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.
Author: Joyce Coleman
Author: Heather Blatt
Author: Mary C. Erler
Author: Glenn D. Burger
Author: Sabrina Corbellini
Author: Malcolm Richardson
Author: Hollie L. S. Morgan
Author: Richard W. Kaeuper
Author: Antony J. Hasler
Author: Erin A. McCarthy