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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 5 of 5

The Early History of Greed
  • The Sin of Avarice in Early Medieval Thought and Literature
  • Richard Newhauser
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    20 April 2000
  • The history of avarice as the deadliest vice in western Europe has been said to begin in earnest only with the rise of capitalism or, earlier, the rise of a money economy. In this first full-length study of the early history of greed, Richard Newhauser shows that avaritia, the sin of greed for possessions, has a much longer history, and is more important for an understanding of the Middle Ages, than has previously been allowed. His examination of theological and literary texts composed between the first century CE and the tenth century reveals new significance in the portrayal of various kinds of greed, to the extent that by the early Middle Ages avarice was available to head the list of vices for authors engaged in the task of converting others from pagan materialism to Christian spirituality.

The Beginnings of Medieval Romance
  • Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220
  • D. H. Green
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    27 June 2002
  • Up to the twelfth century writing in the western vernaculars dealt almost exclusively with religious, historical and factual themes, all of which were held to convey the truth. The second half of the twelfth century saw the emergence of a new genre, the romance, which was consciously conceived as fictional and therefore allowed largely to break free from traditional presuppositions. Dennis Green explores how and why this happened, and examines this period of crucial importance for the birth of the romance and the genesis of medieval fiction in the vernacular. Although the crucial innovative role of writers in Germany is Green's main concern, he also takes literature in Latin, French and Anglo-Norman into account. This study offers a definition of medieval fictionality in its first formative period in the twelfth century, and underlines the difficulties encountered in finding a place for the fictional romance within earlier literary traditions.

Fictions of Identity in Medieval France
  • Donald Maddox
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    23 November 2000
  • In this study of vernacular French narrative from the twelfth century through the later Middle Ages, first published in 2000, Donald Maddox considers the construction of identity in a wide range of fictions. He focuses on crucial encounters, widespread in medieval literature, in which characters are informed about fundamental aspects of their own circumstances and selfhood. These always arresting and highly significant moments of 'specular' encounter are examined in numerous Old and Middle French romances, hagiographic texts, epics and brief narratives. Maddox discloses the key role of identity in an original reading of the Lais of Marie de France as a unified collection, as well as in Arthurian literature, fictions of the courtly tryst, genealogies and medieval family romance. The study offers many new perspectives on the poetic and cultural implications of identity as an imaginary construct during the long formative period of French literature.

The Poetry of Praise
  • J. A. Burrow
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 May 2008
  • One of the chief functions of poetry in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance was to praise gods, people and things. Heroes and kings were glorified in many varieties of praise, and the arts of encomium and panegyric were codified by classical rhetoricians and later by writers on poetry. J. A. Burrow's study spans over two thousand years, from Pindar to Christopher Logue, but its main concern is with the English poetry of the Middle Ages, a period when praise poetry flourished. He argues that the 'decline of praise' in English literature since the seventeenth century, which has meant that modern readers and critics find it hard to appreciate this kind of poetry. This erudite but accessible account by a leading scholar of medieval literature shows why the poetry of praise was once so popular, and why it is still worth reading today.

John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture
  • Maura Nolan
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    11 August 2005
  • Inspired by the example of his predecessors Chaucer and Gower, John Lydgate articulated in his poetry, prose and translations many of the most serious political questions of his day. In the fifteenth century Lydgate was the most famous poet in England, filling commissions for the court, the aristocracy, and the guilds. He wrote for an elite London readership that was historically very small, but that saw itself as dominating the cultural life of the nation. Thus the new literary forms and modes developed by Lydgate and his contemporaries helped shape the development of English public culture in the fifteenth century. Maura Nolan offers a major re-interpretation of Lydgate's work and of his central role in the developing literary culture of his time. Moreover, she provides a wholly new perspective on Lydgate's relationship to Chaucer, as he followed Chaucerian traditions while creating innovative new ways of addressing the public.

London Literature, 1300–1380
  • Ralph Hanna
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 June 2005
  • English literary culture in the fourteenth century was vibrant and expanding. Its focus, however, was still strongly local, not national. This study examines in detail the literary production from the capital before, during, and after the time of the Black Death. In this major contribution to the field, Ralph Hanna charts the development and the generic and linguistic features particular to London writing. He uncovers the interactions between texts and authors across a range of languages and genres: not just Middle English, but Anglo-Norman and Latin; not just romance, but also law, history, and biblical commentary. Hanna emphasises the uneasy boundaries legal thought and discourse shared with historical and 'romance' thinking, and shows how the technique of romance, Latin writing associated with administrative culture, and biblical interests underwrote the great pre-Chaucerian London poem, William Langland's Piers Plowman.

Philosophical Chaucer
  • Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales
  • Mark Miller
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    13 January 2005
  • Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender. Partly through fresh readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's position in relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality and reconstructs how medieval philosophers and literary writers approached psychological phenomena often thought of as distinctively modern. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire and their histories.

Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer
  • Andrew Cole
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    31 July 2008
  • After the late fourteenth century, English literature was fundamentally shaped by the heresy of John Wyclif and his followers. This study demonstrates how Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Clanvowe, Margery Kempe, Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate, far from eschewing Wycliffism out of fear of censorship or partisan distaste, viewed Wycliffite ideas as a distinctly new intellectual resource. Andrew Cole offers a complete historical account of the first official condemnation of Wycliffism – the Blackfriars council of 1382 - and the fullest study of 'lollardy' as a social and literary construct. Drawing on literary criticism, history, theology and law, he presents not only a fresh perspective on late medieval literature, but also an invaluable rethinking of the Wycliffite heresy. Literature and Heresy restores Wycliffism to its proper place as the most significant context for late medieval English writing, and thus for the origins of English literary history.

Sodomy, Masculinity and Law in Medieval Literature
  • France and England, 1050–1230
  • William E. Burgwinkle
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    08 July 2004
  • William Burgwinkle surveys poetry and letters, histories and literary fiction - including Grail romances - to offer a historical survey of attitudes towards same-sex love during the centuries that gave us the Plantagenet court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, courtly love, and Arthurian lore. Burgwinkle illustrates how 'sodomy' becomes a problematic feature of narratives of romance and knighthood. Most texts of the period denounce sodomy and use accusations of sodomitical practice as a way of maintaining a sacrificial climate in which masculine identity is set in opposition to the stigmatised other, for example the foreign, the feminine, and the heretical. What emerges from these readings, however, is that even the most homophobic, masculinist and normative texts of the period demonstrate an inability or unwillingness to separate the sodomitical from the orthodox. These blurred boundaries allow readers to glimpse alternative, even homoerotic, readings.

Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative
  • Suzanne M. Yeager
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    06 November 2008
  • During the early medieval period, crusading brought about new ways of writing about the city of Jerusalem in Europe. By creating texts that embellished the historical relationship between the Holy City and England, English authors endowed their nation with a reputation of power and importance. In Jerusalem in Medieval Narrative, Suzanne Yeager identifies the growth of medieval propaganda aimed at rousing interest in crusading, and analyses how fourteenth-century writers refashioned their sources to create a substantive (if fictive) English role in the fight for Jerusalem. Centring on medieval identity, this study offers assessments of some of the fourteenth century's most popular works, including English pilgrim itineraries, political treatises, the romances Richard, Coeur de Lion and The Siege of Jerusalem, and the prose Book of Sir John Mandeville. This study will be an essential resource for the study of medieval literary history, travel, crusade, and the place of Jerusalem.

Narrative, Authority and Power
  • The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition
  • Larry Scanlon
  • Published online:
    16 September 2009
    Print publication:
    11 August 1994
  • Little attention has been paid to the political and ideological significance of the exemplum, a brief narrative form used to illustrate a moral. Through a study of four major works in the Chaucerian tradition (The Canterbury Tales, John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Thomas Hoccleve's Regement of Princes, and Lydgate's Fall of Princes), Scanlon redefines the exemplum as a 'narrative enactment of cultural authority'. He traces its development through the two strands of the medieval Latin tradition which the Chaucerians appropriate: the sermon exemplum, and the public exemplum of the Mirrors of Princes. In so doing, he reveals how Chaucer and his successors used these two forms of exemplum to explore the differences between clerical authority and lay power, and to establish the moral and cultural authority of their emergent vernacular tradition.

Chaucer and the Tradition of the Roman Antique
  • Barbara Nolan
  • Published online:
    11 September 2009
    Print publication:
    19 November 1992
  • This is a detailed investigation of Chaucer's poetics in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight's Tale in relation to an important continental narrative tradition. It is the first such wide-ranging study since Charles Muscatine's seminal Chaucer and the French Tradition and the first book to argue in detail that Chaucer's poems, Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseida and the twelfth-century French romans antiques participate in a distinct formal tradition within the protean field of medieval romance. By close examination of the formal and ethical designs of each poem, Barbara Nolan explores both the compositional practices shared by all of the poets she discusses, and their calculated differences from each other. Her analysis culminates in a full examination of Chaucer's richly original response to the continental verse narratives from which he borrowed. No other study offers so full and careful a delineation of the compositional features that distinguish the roman antique from other forms of romance in the Middle Ages.

Dreaming in the Middle Ages
  • Steven F. Kruger
  • Published online:
    22 August 2009
    Print publication:
    18 June 1992
  • This wide-ranging study examines the role of the dream in medieval culture with reference to philosophical, legal and theological writings as well as literary and autobiographical works. Stephen Kruger studies the development of theories of dreaming, from the Neoplatonic and patristic writers to late medieval re-interpretations, and shows how these theories relate to autobiographical accounts and to more popular treatments of dreaming. He considers previously neglected material including one important dream vision by Nicole Oresme, and arrives at a new understanding of this literary genre, and of medieval attitudes to dreaming in general.

Editing Piers Plowman
  • The Evolution of the Text
  • Charlotte Brewer
  • Published online:
    20 August 2009
    Print publication:
    05 September 1996
  • The fifty-plus extant manuscripts of Piers Plowman have always posed a puzzle to editors and readers. This 1996 book is an account of the editions of the poem which have appeared since 1550, when it was first published by the protestant reformer Robert Crowley. It examines the circumstances in which the editions were produced, the lives and intellectual motivations of the editors, and the relationship between one edition and the next. Brewer places the work of W. W. Skeat at the centre of Piers Plowman editing, showing how he towered above his predecessors and determined the path subsequently taken by editors of the poem, and presents much new biographical information about this extraordinary man. She uses a wide range of published and previously unpublished material to explain the difficulties of editing and to shed light on attempts to crack one of the major editorial conundrums in medieval studies.

Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature
  • Nicole R. Rice
  • Published online:
    30 June 2009
    Print publication:
    08 January 2009
  • In late-fourteenth-century England, the persistent question of how to live the best life preoccupied many pious Christians. One answer was provided by a new genre of prose guides that adapted professional religious rules and routines for lay audiences. These texts engaged with many of the same cultural questions as poets like Langland and Chaucer; however, they have not received the critical attention they deserve until now. Nicole Rice analyses how the idea of religious discipline was translated into varied literary forms in an atmosphere of religious change and controversy. By considering the themes of spiritual discipline, religious identity, and orthodoxy in Langland and Chaucer, the study also brings fresh perspectives to bear on Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales. This juxtaposition of spiritual guidance and poetry will form an important contribution to our understanding of both authors and of late medieval religious practice and thought.

Page 5 of 5