Allegorical Quests From Deguileville To Spenser

An examination of sixteenth-century quest narratives, focussing on their conscious use of a medieval tradition to hold a mirror up to contemporary culture. Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblemof shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals. Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's Faerie Queene but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's Travayled Pylgrime and William Goodyear's Voyage of the Wandering Knight, the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal Pèlerinage de la vie humaine was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed overthe next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maître Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Université de Lausanne

"Offers the first full study of the allegorical knightly quest tradition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Richly satisfying, as impressive in the detail of its scholarship as in the elegance of its critical formulations. It seamlessly moves between different literary traditions and across conventional period boundaries. In Dr Nievergelt's treatment of this theme, the successive retellings of the tale of the knight's quest come to stand as an emblem of shifting values and norms, both religious and worldly; and of our repeated failures to realise those ideals." Dr Alex Davis, Department of English, University of St Andrews. The literary motif of the "allegorical knightly quest" appears repeatedly in the literature of the late medieval/early modern period, notably in Spenser, but has hitherto been little examined. Here, in his examination of a number of sixteenth-century English allegorical-chivalric quest narratives, focussing on Spenser's 'Faerie Queene' but including important, lesser-known works such as Stephen Bateman's 'Travayled Pylgrime' and William Goodyear's 'Voyage of the Wandering Knight', the author argues that the tradition begins with the French writer Guillaume de Deguileville. His seminal 'Pèlerinage de la vie humaine' was composed c.1331-1355; it was widely adapted, translated, rewritten and printed over the next centuries. Dr Nievergelt goes on to demonstrate how this essentially "medieval" literary form could be adapted to articulate reflections on changing patterns of identity, society and religion during the early modern period; and how it becomes a vehicle of self-exploration and self-fashioning during a period of profound cultural crisis. Dr Marco Nievergelt is Lecturer (Maître Assitant) and SNF (Swiss National Science Foundation) Research Fellow in the English Department at the Université de Lausanne.

New essays on the unjustly neglected Pèlerinage works by de Guileville, showing in particular its huge contemporary influence. The fourteenth-century French pilgrimage allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville (or "Digulleville") shaped late medieval and early modern European culture. Portions of the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, Pèlerinage de l'Ame and Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist survive in more than eighty medieval manuscripts and translations into English, German, Dutch, Castilian and Latin appeared by the early sixteenth century, along with adaptations into Frenchprose and dramatic forms and numerous early printed editions. This volume furnishes a better understanding of the allegories' circulation, creation and importance from the 1330s into the 1560s, via trans-national, multilingual and interdisciplinary perspectives. The collection's first section, on "Tradition", identifies the patterns that developed as Deguileville's corpus captured the attentions of adaptors, annotators and illustrators. The second section, on "Authority", addresses the cultural context of Deguileville himself, his approach to poetic craft and the status of his French and Latin poetry. The third section, on "Influence", closely examines selected connections between the Pèlerinages and the literary productions of later authors, translators and reading communities, including the French verse of Philippe de Mézières, Castilian print adaptation, and the early modern Croatian novel.Overall, the collection provides a variety of approaches to examining literary reception, attending not only to texts but also to evidence of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions; it offers new insights into a rich and complex allegorical corpus and its impact on European literary history. Marco Nievergelt is a Maître-Assistant in Early English Literature in the English department of the University of Lausanne.Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath studies English and French medieval literature, with a particular interest in allegory, translation studies, and the history of the material text. Contributors: Flor Maria Bango de la Campa, Robert L.A. Clark, Graham Robert Edwards, Dolores Grmaca, Andreas Kablitz, John Moreau, Ursula Peters, Fabienne Pomel, Pamela Sheingorn, Sara V. Torres, Géraldine Veysseyre

In Medieval Allegory as Epistemology, Marco Nievergelt argues that late medieval dream-poetry was able to use the tools of allegorical fiction to explore a set of complex philosophical questions regarding the nature of human knowledge. The focus is on three of the most widely read and influential poems of the later Middle Ages: Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose; the Pélerinages trilogy of Guillaume de Deguileville; and William Langland's vision of Piers Plowman in its various versions. All three poets grapple with a collection of shared, closely related epistemological problems that emerged in Western Europe during the thirteenth century, in the wake of the reception of the complete body of Aristotle's works on logic and the natural sciences. This study therefore not only examines the intertextual and literary-historical relations linking the work of the three poets, but takes their shared interest in cognition and epistemology as a starting point to assess their wider cultural and intellectual significance in the context of broader developments in late medieval philosophy of mind, knowledge, and language. Vernacular literature more broadly played an extremely important role in lending an enlarged cultural resonance to philosophical ideas developed by scholastic thinkers, but it is also shown that allegorical narrative could prompt philosophical speculation on its own terms, deliberately interrogating the dominance and authority of scholastic discourses and institutions by using first-person fictional narrative as a tool for intellectual speculation.

What is modernity? Where are modernitys points of origin? Where are its boundaries? And what lies beyond those boundaries? Allegory and Enchantment explores these broad questions by considering the work of English writers at the threshold of modernity, and by considering,in particular, the cultural forms these writers want to leave behind. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, many English writers fashion themselves as engaged in breaking away from an array of old idols: magic, superstition, tradition, the sacramental, the medieval. Many of these writers persistently use metaphors of disenchantment, of awakening from a broken spell, to describe their self-consciously modern orientation toward a medieval past. And many of them associate that repudiated past with the dynamics and conventions of allegory. In the hands of the major English practitioners of allegorical narrativeWilliam Langland, John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, and John Bunyanallegory shows signs of strain and disintegration. The work of these writers seems to suggest a story of modern emergence in which medieval allegory, with its search for divine order in the material world, breaks down under the pressure of modern disenchantment. But these four early modern writers also make possible other understandings of modernity. Each of them turns to allegory as a central organizing principle for his most ambitious poetic projects. Each discovers in the ancient forms of allegory a vital, powerful instrument of disenchantment. Each of them, therefore, opens up surprising possibilities: that allegory and modernity are inescapably linked; that the story of modern emergence is much older than the early modern period; and that the things modernity has tried to repudiatethe old enchantmentsare not as alien, or as absent, as they seem.

An invigorating annual for those who are interested in medieval textual cultures and open to ways in which diverse post-modern methodologies may be applied to them. Alcuin Blamires, Review of English Studies

Spenser in the Moment collects specially commissioned essays critical of established readings, each of which in surveying the state of the art attempts radically to unsettle our conception of the poetry of Edmund Spenser (1552–1599). The editors were drawn together by a shared restlessness with the canonical Spenser, and a sense that attention especially to Spenser’s musical qualities, and the distinctiveness of his poetic style compared with that of his contemporaries, could display exciting new paths forward. Scholars from three continents contribute bracing reviews of Spenser’s relationship with his classical sources, with religious history, and the history of the book. Two essays consider Spenser and music, both music in Spenser’s works, and Spenser’s works in the music of his time. Two working poets inaugurate the final group of essays on Spenser’s poetry, with original, irreverent poetry reflecting and riffing on Spenser. The essays argue for various versions of revolution: one mixing aesthetics and sex, another diagnosing widespread fallacies (“expressivist” and “dramatistic”) made in reading Spenser, and the last arguing for a Spenser not of enormous interlocking networks, but of the moment: that the primary Spenserian structure is that of a moment of stillness-in-motion. With so much change behind us already in this young century, another series of changes emerges from recent work, and a sense of expectation, as of held breath, seems to pervade the discipline—that is the moment that this volume attempts to capture and nourish.

Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives collects some of the most compelling current work in allegory studies, by an international team of researchers in a range of disciplines and specializations in the humanities and cognitive sciences. The volume tracks the subject across disciplinary, cultural, and period-based divides, from its shadowy origins to its uncertain future, and from the rich variety of its cultural and artistic manifestations to its deep cognitive roots. Allegory is everything we already know it to be: a mode of literary and artistic composition, and a religious as well as secular interpretive practice. As this volume attests, however, it is much more than that—much more than a sum of its parts. Collectively, the phenomena we now subsume under this term comprise a dynamic cultural force which has left a deep imprint on our history, whose full impact we are only beginning to comprehend, and which therefore demands precisely such dedicated cross-disciplinary examination as this book seeks to provide.