Reimagining the Past in the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands PDF Download

Author: Assistant Professor of English Georgia Henley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780192856463
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This study demonstrates the emergence of a particular brand of Welsh marcher literature interested in succession, land rights, and the narrative scope of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which had an enduring impact on late medieval thought.

Author: Georgia Henley
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192670271
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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.

Author: Jane Gilbert
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1914049144
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Specialists in other languages offer perspectives on the widespread use of French in a range of contexts, from German courtly narratives to biblical exegesis in Hebrew. French came into contact with many other languages in the Middle Ages: not just English, Italian and Latin, but also Arabic, Dutch, German, Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Occitan, Sicilian, Spanish and Welsh. Its movement was impelled by trade, pilgrimage, crusade, migration, colonisation and conquest, and its contact zones included Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities, among others. Writers in these contact zones often expressed themselves and their worlds in French; but other languages and cultural settings could also challenge, reframe or even ignore French-users' prestige and self-understanding. The essays collected here offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on the use of French in the medieval world, moving away from canonical texts, well-known controversies and conventional framings. Whether considering theories of the vernacular in Outremer, Marco Polo and the global Middle Ages, or the literary patronage of aristocrats and urban patricians, their interlocutions throw new light on connected and contested literary cultures in Europe and beyond.

Author: Lindy Brady
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009275828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
This Element offers a comprehensive synthesis of the evidence from the pre-Norman period that situates Old English as one of several living languages that together formed the basis of a vibrant oral and written literary culture in early medieval Britain.

Author: Emily Dolmans
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843845687
Category : English literature
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
An examination of how regional identities are reflected in texts from medieval England.

Author: Max Lieberman
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 178683376X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
By 1300, a region often referred to as the March of Wales had been created between England and the Principality of Wales. This March consisted of some forty castle-centred lordships extending along the Anglo-Welsh border and also across southern Wales. It took shape over more than two centuries, between the Norman conquest of England (1066) and the English conquest of Wales (1283), and is mentioned in Magna Carta (1215). It was a highly distinctive part of the political geography of Britain for much of the Middle Ages, yet the medieval March has long vanished, and today expressions like 'the marches' are used rather vaguely to refer to the Welsh Borders.What was the medieval March of Wales? How and why was it created? The March of Wales, 1067-1300: A Borderland of Medieval Britain provides comprehensible and concise answers to such questions. With the aid of maps, a list of key dates and source material such as the writings of Gerald of Wales (c.1146-1223), this book also places the March in the context of current academic debates on the frontiers, peoples and countries of the medieval British Isles.

Author: Rebecca Ann Davis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198778406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Rebecca Davis explores the relationship of divine creativity, poetry, and ethics in William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision. By contextualizing Langland's poetics of kynde (or nature) within contemporary literary, philosophical, legal, and theological discourses, she opens up many of the poem's most perplexing interpretative problems.

Author: Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1786833441
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive authoritative survey of Arthurian literature and traditions in the Celtic languages of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. With contributions by leading and emerging specialists in the field, the volume traces the development of the legends that grew up around Arthur and have been constantly reworked and adapted from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It shows how the figure of Arthur evolved from the leader of a warband in early medieval north Britain to a king whose court becomes the starting-point for knightly adventures, and how characters and tales are reimagined, reshaped and reinterpreted according to local circumstances, traditions and preoccupations at different periods. From the celebrated early Welsh poetry and prose tales to less familiar modern Breton and Cornish fiction, from medieval Irish adaptations of the legend to the Gaelic ballads of Scotland, Arthur in the Celtic Languages provides an indispensable, up-to-date guide of a vast and complex body of Arthurian material, and to recent research and criticism.

Author: Sebastian Sobecki
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192508113
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticise them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of most important fifteenth-century texts and authors. Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life. Driven by archival research and literary inquiry, this book reveals where John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years, how John Lydgate wished to be remembered, and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best-known work, the Series. It includes documentary breakthroughs and archival discoveries, and introduces a new life record for Hoccleve, identifies the author of a significant political poem, and reveals the handwriting of John Gower and George Ashby. Through its investments in archival study, book history, and literary criticism, Last Words charts the extent to which medieval English literature was shaped by the social selves of their authors.

Author: Christian Raffensperger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674065468
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Main description: An overriding assumption has long directed scholarship in both European and Slavic history: that Kievan Rus' in the tenth through twelfth centuries was part of a Byzantine commonwealth separate from Europe. Christian Raffensperger refutes this conception and offers a new frame for two hundred years of history, one in which Rus' is understood as part of medieval Europe and East is not so neatly divided from West. With the aid of Latin sources, the author brings to light the considerable political, religious, marital, and economic ties among European kingdoms, including Rus', restoring a historical record rendered blank by Rusianmonastic chroniclers as well as modern scholars ideologically motivated to build barriers between East and West. Further, Raffensperger revises the concept of a Byzantine Commonwealth that stood in opposition to Europe-and under which Rus' was subsumed-toward that of a Byzantine Ideal esteemed and emulated by all the states of Europe. In this new context, appropriation of Byzantine customs, law, coinage, art, and architecture in both Rus' and Europe can be understood as an attempt to gain legitimacy and prestige by association with the surviving remnant of the Roman Empire. Reimagining Europe initiates an expansion of history that is sure to challenge ideas of Russian exceptionalism and influence the course of European medieval studies.