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  3. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

This series of critical books seeks to cover the whole area of literature written in the major medieval languages - the main European vernaculars, and medieval Latin and Greek - during the period c.600–1500. Its chief aim is to publish and stimulate fresh scholarship and criticism on medieval literature, special emphasis being placed on understanding major works of poetry, prose, and drama in relation to the contemporary culture and learning which fostered them.

  • General Editors: Marisa Galvez, Stanford University, California, Daniel Wakelin, University of Oxford
  • Editorial Boards: Anthony Bale, Birkbeck, University of London, Zygmunt G. Barański, University of Cambridge, Christopher C. Baswell, Barnard College and Columbia University, New York, Mary Carruthers, New York University, Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania, Roberta Frank, Yale University, Connecticut, Alastair Minnis, Yale University, Connecticut, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Fordham University, New York

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95 results in Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature

Page 4 of 5

Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry
  • Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and John Gower's Confessio Amantis
  • James Simpson
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    20 April 1995
  • In this 1995 study James Simpson examines two great poems of the later medieval period, the Latin philosophical epic, Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus (1181–3), and John Gower's English poem, The Confessio Amantis (1390–3). Simpson locates these works in a cultural context dominated by two kinds of literary humanism: the absolutist, whose philosophical mentor is Plato, whose literary model is Virgil and whose concept of the self is centred in the intellect, and the constitutionalist, whose classical models are Aristotle and Ovid and whose concept of the self resides in the mediatory power of the imagination. Both poems are examples of the Bildungsroman, in which the self reaches its fullness only by traversing an educational cursus in the related sciences of ethics, politics and cosmology, but as this study shows, there are very different modes of thought behind their conceptions of selfhood and education.

Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England
  • Fiona Somerset
  • Published online:
    04 December 2009
    Print publication:
    05 November 1998
  • The translation of learned Latin materials into English between around 1370 and 1410 was a highly controversial activity. It was thought likely to make available to lay audiences the authoritative and intellectual information and methods of argument previously only accessible to an educated elite - and with that knowledge the power of information. Fiona Somerset's 1998 study examines what kinds of academic material were imported into English, what sorts of audience were projected for this kind of clerical discourse and how writers positioned themselves with respect to potential audience and opponents. The well-known concerns with clerical corruption and lay education of authors such as Langland, Trevisa, and Wyclif are linked to those of more obscure writers in both Latin and English, some only recently edited, or only extant in manuscript.

Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority
  • Nicholas Watson
  • Published online:
    04 December 2009
    Print publication:
    07 November 1991
  • This 1991 book is a literary study of the career of Richard Rolle (d.1349), a Yorkshire hermit and mystic who was one of the most widely read English writers of the late Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson proposes a chronology of Rolle's writings, and offers a literary analyses of a number of his works. He shows how Rolle's career, as a writer of passionate religious works in Latin and later in English, has as its principal focus the establishment of his own spiritual authority. The book also addresses wider issues, suggesting an alternative way of looking at mystical writing in general and challenging the prevailing view of the relationship between medieval and renaissance attitudes to authors and authority.

Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages
  • Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts
  • Rita Copeland
  • Published online:
    03 December 2009
    Print publication:
    22 February 1991
  • Translation played a crucial role in the emergence of vernacular literary culture in the Middle Ages. This is the first book to consider the rise of translation as part of a broader history of critical discourses from classical Rome to the late Middle Ages, and as such adds significantly to our understanding of the development of European culture.

Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500
  • Edited by Carol M. Meale
  • Published online:
    09 November 2009
    Print publication:
    15 April 1993
  • This collection of essays focuses on the questions of women's access to a written culture in medieval Britain and their representation within it. It explores women's engagement with Anglo-Norman, English and Welsh as well as Latin, and addresses issues including orality and literacy and women's exclusion from a written tradition. It considers the question of the levels of literacy attained by women, and contemporary attitudes to their acquisition of such skills, as well as the historical evidence for women's activity as writers, patrons and readers. It also examines the representation of women within different literary genres, both secular and religious - their possession or lack of power, and their roles as lovers, mothers and saints. This is the first such volume to focus on these issues within the specific framework of late medieval Britain, and as such constitutes a unique contribution to the study of women and medieval literary history.

Women and Marriage in German Medieval Romance
  • D. H. Green
  • Published online:
    09 November 2009
    Print publication:
    02 April 2009
  • In contrast to the widespread view that the Middle Ages were a static, unchanging period in which attitudes to women were uniformly negative, D. H. Green argues that around 1200 the conventional relationship between men and women was subject to significant challenge through discussions in the vernacular literature of the period. Hitherto scholarly interest in gender relations in such literature has largely focused on French romance or on literature in English from a later period. By turning the focus on the rich material to be garnered from Germany - the romances Erec, Tristan and Parzival - Professor Green shows how some vernacular writers devised methods to debate and challenge the undoubted antifeminism of the day by presenting a Utopian model, supported by a revision of views by the Church, to contrast with contemporary practice.

Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature
  • Pastoral Rhetoric and the Deviant Speaker
  • Edwin David Craun
  • Published online:
    31 October 2009
    Print publication:
    16 June 1997
  • Drawing on manuscript sources, this book examines how the medieval clergy developed the authority and persuasive force to attempt to govern the day-to-day speech of Western Christians. It shows how attempts were made to portray some political, social and private speech as deviant and destructive, labelling it lying, slander, blasphemy and other Sins of the Tongue. It explores, for the first time, how Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the 'Patience' poet use the different strains of this pastoral discourse not only to expose the destructive power of speech in political and social life but also to judge clerical claims to authority and efficacy in formulating and applying codes of speech.

The Creation of Lancastrian Kingship
  • Literature, Language and Politics in Late Medieval England
  • Jenni Nuttall
  • Published online:
    27 October 2009
    Print publication:
    18 October 2007
  • The arguments used to justify the deposition of Richard II in 1399 created new forms of political discussion which developed alongside new expectations of kingship itself and which shaped political action and debate for centuries to come. This interdisciplinary study analyses the political language and literature of the early Lancastrian period, particularly the reigns of Henry IV (1399–1413) and Henry V (1413–22). Lancastrian authors such as Thomas Hoccleve and the authors of the anonymous works Richard the Redeless, Mum and the Sothsegger and Crowned King made creative use of languages and idioms which were in the process of escaping from the control of their royal masters. In a study that has far-reaching implications for both literary and political history, Jenni Nuttall presents a fresh understanding of how political language functions in the late medieval period.

Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt
  • Robert J. Meyer-Lee
  • Published online:
    27 October 2009
    Print publication:
    18 January 2007
  • In the early fifteenth century, English poets responded to a changed climate of patronage, instituted by Henry IV and successor monarchs, by inventing a new tradition of public and elite poetry. Following Chaucer and others, Hoccleve and Lydgate brought to English verse a style and subject matter writing about their King, nation, and themselves, and their innovations influenced a continuous line of poets running through and beyond Wyatt. A crucial aspect of this tradition is its development of ideas and practices associated with the role of poet laureate. Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the nature and significance of this tradition as it developed from the fourteenth century to Tudor times, tracing its evolution from one author to the next. This study illuminates the relationships between poets and political power and makes plain the tremendous impact this verse has had on the shape of English literary culture.

Chaucer's Legendary Good Women
  • Florence Percival
  • Published online:
    22 October 2009
    Print publication:
    19 November 1998
  • Chaucer's Legend of Good Women is a testament to the disparate views of women prevalent in the Middle Ages. Dr Percival contends that the complex medieval notion of Woman informs the structure of the poem: in the Prologue Chaucer praises conventional ideas of female virtue, while in the Legends he demonstrates a humorous scepticism, apparently influenced by a contemporary antifeminist tradition. The debate Chaucer thus promotes could be relied on to entertain many medieval readers, at the same time that it demonstrates the power of the vernacular translator/poet to handle language wittily and to do just as he pleases with the august texts of the past. This is a comprehensive account of the Legend's interpretative puzzles, which does not ignore the element of political writing, and adds to a close and nuanced reading of the text an examination of literary, historical, and social contexts.

Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman
  • Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
  • Published online:
    15 October 2009
    Print publication:
    21 June 1990
  • This book addresses the need for scholarly attention to the field of alternative, non-Augustinian apocalypticism and its implications for the study of Piers Plowman. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton discusses the major prophets and visionaries of such alternative traditions, who are characterised by their denunciation of clerical abuses, the urging of religious reform, and an ultimate historical optimism. Her book offers a proposal for the importance of such traditions, particularly as represented in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, to the understanding of Langland's visionary mode and reformist ideology. Dr Kerby-Fulton also explores the relevance of the prophetic mentality fostered by Joachite thought, and the reactionary response which it triggered in antimendicant eschatology. Above all, this book provides a stimulating challenge to assumptions that Langland's views of the course and end of history are wholly conventional, or easily explained by Augustinian eschatology. The outcome of this study of contexts for Piers Plowman suggests that Langland's position in relation to different apocalyptic traditions was at once more sophisticated and more original than scholars have hitherto realised.

Old Icelandic Literature and Society
  • Edited by Margaret Clunies Ross
  • Published online:
    15 October 2009
    Print publication:
    21 September 2000
  • From the period of settlement (870–930) to the end of the fourteenth century, Icelanders produced one of the most varied and original literatures of medieval Europe. This is the first book to provide a comprehensive account of Old Icelandic literature within its social setting and across a range of genres. An international team of specialists examines the ways in which the unique social experiment in Iceland, a kingless society without an established authority structure, inspired a wealth of innovative writing composed in the Icelandic vernacular. Icelanders explored their uniqueness through poetry, mythologies, metrical treatises, religious writing, and through saga, a new literary genre which textualised their history and incorporated oral traditions in a written form. The book shows that Icelanders often used their textual abilities to gain themselves political and intellectual advantage, not least in the period when the state's freedom came to an end.

Medieval Dutch Literature in its European Context
  • Edited by Erik Kooper
  • Published online:
    13 October 2009
    Print publication:
    08 September 1994
  • This 1994 book offers insights into the rich and varied Dutch literature of the Middle Ages. Sixteen essays written by top scholars consider this literature in the context of the social, historical and cultural developments of the period in which it took shape. The collection includes studies of the most representative authors, genres, works and current fields of research interest, ranging from the court and the city, the world of chivalry, the literature of love, religious literature, drama and the artes texts. The essays draw on the idea of a common tradition in medieval literature, originating in France and shared by other literatures of western Europe. To facilitate the reader's understanding of the European context in which Dutch literature developed, a comparative chronological survey provides an overview of the main cultural, historical and literary events between 1150 and 1500. The bibliography includes details of published English translations of medieval Dutch texts discussed.

Paradoxes of Conscience in the High Middle Ages
  • Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet
  • Peter Godman
  • Published online:
    30 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 June 2009
  • The autobiographical and confessional writings of Abelard, Heloise and the Archpoet were concerned with religious authenticity, spiritual sincerity and their opposite - fictio, a composite of hypocrisy and dissimulation, lying and irony. How and why moral identity could be feigned or falsified were seen as issues of primary importance, and Peter Godman here restores them to the prominence they once occupied in twelfth-century thought. This book is an account of the relationship between ethics and literature in the work of the most famous authors of the Latin Middle Ages. Combining conceptual analysis with close attention to style and form, it offers a major contribution to the history of the medieval conscience.

Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages
  • Henry Ansgar Kelly
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 May 1993
  • 'Tragedy' has been understood in a variety of conflicting ways over the centuries, and the term has been applied to a wide range of literary works. In this book, H. A. Kelly explores the various meanings given to tragedy, from Aristotle's most basic notion (any serious story, even with a happy ending), via Roman ideas and practices, to the middle ages, when Averroes considered tragedy to be the praise of virtue but Albert the Great thought of it as the recitation of the foul deeds of degenerate men. Professor Kelly demonstrates the importance of finding out what writers like Horace, Ovid, Dante and Chaucer meant by the term, and how they used it as a tool of interpretation and composition. Referring to a wealth of texts, he shows that many modern analyses of ancient and medieval concepts and works are oversimplified and often result in serious misinterpretations. The book ends with surveys of works designated as tragedies in England, France, Italy and Spain.

Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative
  • J. A. Burrow
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 August 2002
  • In medieval society, gestures and speaking looks played an even more important part in public and private exchanges than they do today. Gestures meant more than words, for example, in ceremonies of homage and fealty. In this, the first study of its kind in English, John Burrow examines the role of non-verbal communication in a wide range of narrative texts, including Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Malory's Morte D'arthur, the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the Prose Lancelot, Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, and Dante's Commedia. Burrow argues that since non-verbal signs are in general less subject to change than words, many of the behaviours recorded in these texts, such as pointing and amorous gazing, are familiar in themselves; yet many prove easy to misread, either because they are no longer common, like bowing, or because their use has changed, like winking.

The Wycliffite Heresy
  • Authority and the Interpretation of Texts
  • Kantik Ghosh
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 October 2001
  • Kantik Ghosh argues that one of the main reasons for Lollardy's sensational resonance for its times, and for its immediate posterity, was its exposure of fundamental problems in late medieval academic engagement with the Bible, its authority and its polemical uses. Examining Latin and English sources, Ghosh shows how the same debates over biblical hermeneutics and associated methodologies were from the 1380s onwards conducted both within and outside the traditional university framework, and how by eliding boundaries between Latinate biblical speculation and vernacular religiosity Lollardy changed the cultural and political positioning of both. Covering a wide range of texts - scholastic and extramural, in Latin and in English, written over half a century from Wyclif to Thomas Netter - Ghosh concludes that by the first decades of the fifteenth century Lollardy had partly won the day. Whatever its fate as a religious movement, it had successfully changed the intellectual landscape of England.

Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages
  • Lollardy and Ideas of Learning
  • Rita Copeland
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    26 July 2001
  • This book is about the place of pedagogy and the role of intellectuals in medieval dissent. Focusing on the medieval English heresy known as Lollardy, Rita Copeland places heretical and orthodox attitudes to learning in a long historical perspective that reaches back to antiquity. She shows how educational ideologies of ancient lineage left their imprint on the most sharply politicized categories of late medieval culture, and how radical teachers transformed inherited ideas about classrooms and pedagogy as they brought their teaching to adult learners. The pedagogical imperatives of Lollard dissent were also embodied in the work of certain public figures, intellectuals whose dissident careers transformed the social category of the medieval intellectual. Looking closely at the prison narratives of two Lollard preachers, Copeland shows how their writings could serve as examples for their fellow dissidents and forge a new rapport between academic and non-academic communities.

Latin Sermon Collections from Later Medieval England
  • Orthodox Preaching in the Age of Wyclif
  • Siegfried Wenzel
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    17 February 2005
  • Until the Reformation, almost all sermons were written down in Latin. This is the first scholarly study systematically to describe and analyse the collections of Latin sermons from the golden age of medieval preaching in England, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Basing his studies on the extant manuscripts, Siegfried Wenzel analyses these sermons and the occasions when they were given. Larger issues of preaching in the later Middle Ages such as the pastoral concern about preaching, originality in sermon making, and the attitudes of orthodox preachers to Lollardy, receive detailed attention. The surviving sermons and their collections are listed for the first time in full inventories, which supplement the critical and contextual material Wenzel presents. This book is an important contribution to the study of medieval preaching, and will be essential for scholars of late medieval literature, history and religious thought.

Medieval Reading
  • Grammar, Rhetoric and the Classical Text
  • Suzanne Reynolds
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    22 August 1996
  • This book argues for a radically new approach to the history of reading and literacy in the Middle Ages. It investigates the use of complex literary texts as the basis of elementary instruction in the Latin language and, using medieval teachers' notes (glosses) on a classical text (Horace's Satires) and a selection of other unpublished manuscript materials, it demonstrates that the reading of classical literature was profoundly shaped by the demands of acquiring Latin literacy through the arts of grammar and rhetoric. The resolutely literal readings of Latin texts found in these educational and institutional contexts call for a reassessment of the relationship of Latin and vernacular discourses in medieval culture, and of some central notions in medieval hermeneutics, notably allegory and authorial intention.

Page 4 of 5