Absent Narratives Manuscript Textuality And Literary Structure In Late Medieval England

Absent Narratives is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period - Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain -poet and Malory - it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these absent narratives prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.

Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period--Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain-poet and Malory--it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these "absent narratives" prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.

This study conceives of Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes (1410-1413) as an essentially performative text, one that expresses its awareness of the manuscript culture in which it is so firmly rooted. The openness of manuscripts is a recurring subject in the Regement and is not only expressed through mere descriptions of, but through complex references to this manuscript context. Performances of manuscript culture manifest themselves in several aspects of the text. The first is the narrator persona, and especially the question of how persona and text are intertwined. The second is the constantly recurring interpretation of quotes from authoritative sources that pervades the Regement. This urge to interpret is expressed both in the tradition of adding marginal glosses and in the process of subjecting the text to an exegetical reading. The third aspect is the relation between text and images in the Regement’s manuscripts, which shows how mediality is performed and how the manuscript context is made the focus of this performance. In this monograph, all of these aspects are studied in a mindset that combines the concept of performativity with the postulations of Material Philology.

The Genpei War of 1180-1185 signaled a crucial shift in Japanese history because it gave birth to the shogunate, or government run by warriors. How was the emergence of this new polity following a contentious civil war explained in literary texts? This book argues that political authority is made visible in the variant texts of the Heike monogatari corpus through rituals that map the ideal social-cosmic order, overwriting untidy historical realities. Artifacts of material culture likewise provide the social and political codes to authenticate warrior power and manage its violence. Through its focus on ritual and material practices, this book offers a new perspective on how texts from fourteenth century Japan harnessed symbolic understandings of authority to evoke order and contain rupture. Equally significant is its analysis of the Genpei jōsuiki a Heike monogatari variant that played a critical role in the retrospection of medieval Japan through the early modern period.

In Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms, Jessica Brantley offers an innovative introduction to manuscript culture that uses the artifacts themselves to open some of the most vital theoretical questions in medieval literary studies. With nearly 200 illustrations, many of them in color, the book offers both a broad survey of the physical forms and cultural histories of manuscripts and a dozen case studies of particularly significant literary witnesses, including the Beowulf manuscript, the St. Albans Psalter, the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, and The Book of Margery Kempe. Practical discussions of parchment, scripts, decoration, illustration, and bindings mix with consideration of such conceptual categories as ownership, authorship, language, miscellaneity, geography, writing, editing, mediation, illustration, and performance—as well as of the status of the literary itself. Each case study includes an essay orienting the reader to particularly productive categories of analysis and a selected bibliography for further research. Because a high-quality digital surrogate exists for each of the selected manuscripts, fully and freely available online, readers can gain access to the artifacts in their entirety, enabling further individual exploration and facilitating the book’s classroom use. Medieval English Manuscripts and Literary Forms aims to inspire a broad group of readers with some of the excitement of literary manuscript studies in the twenty-first century. The interpretative frameworks surrounding each object will assist everyone in thinking through the implications of manuscript culture more generally, not only for the deeper study of the literature of the Middle Ages, but also for a better understanding of book cultures of any era, including our own.

This study explores the relationship between ideology and subjectivity in late medieval literature, documenting the trajectory of antimercantile ideology against major developments in economic theory and practice in the later Middle Ages.

We are living in an age in which the relationship between reading and space is evolving swiftly. Cutting-edge technologies and developments in the publication and consumption of literature continue to uncover new physical, electronic, and virtual contexts in which reading can take place. In comparison with the accessibility that has accompanied these developments, the medieval reading experience may initially seem limited and restrictive, available only to a literate few or to their listeners; yet attention to the spaces in which medieval reading habits can be traced reveals a far more vibrant picture in which different kinds of spaces provided opportunities for a wide range of interactions with and contributions to the texts being read. Drawing on a rich variety of material, this collection of essays demonstrates that the spaces in which reading took place (or in which reading could take place) in later medieval England directly influenced how and why reading happened.

This book surveys the appearances of righteous heathens or virtuous pagans in travel literature, chronicles, romances, and sermons, as well as in the work of Langland, Chaucer and Gower. Grady also illustrates the way these figures have been used to explore a variety of historical, cultural and formal literary issues.