Artisans And Narrative Craft In Late Medieval England

The first book-length study to articulate the vital presence of artisans and craft labor in medieval English literature from c.1000-1483.

Jessica Rosenfeld provides a history of the ethics of medieval vernacular love poetry by tracing its engagement with the late medieval reception of Aristotle. Beginning with a history of the idea of enjoyment from Plato to Peter Abelard and the troubadours, the book then presents a literary and philosophical history of the medieval ethics of love, centered on the legacy of the Roman de la Rose. The chapters reveal that 'courtly love' was scarcely confined to what is often characterized as an ethic of sacrifice and deferral, but also engaged with Aristotelian ideas about pleasure and earthly happiness. Readings of Machaut, Froissart, Chaucer, Dante, Deguileville and Langland show that poets were often markedly aware of the overlapping ethical languages of philosophy and erotic poetry. The study's conclusion places medieval poetry and philosophy in the context of psychoanalytic ethics, and argues for a re-evaluation of Lacan's ideas about courtly love.

Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England offers a new history of Middle English romance, the most popular genre of secular literature in the English Middle Ages. Michael Johnston argues that many of the romances composed in England from 1350-1500 arose in response to the specific socio-economic concerns of the gentry, the class of English landowners who lacked titles of nobility and hence occupied the lower rungs of the aristocracy. The end of the fourteenth century in England witnessed power devolving to the gentry, who became one of the dominant political and economic forces in provincial society. As Johnston demonstrates, this social change also affected England's literary culture, particularly the composition and readership of romance. Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England identifies a series of new topoi in Middle English that responded to the gentry's economic interests. But beyond social history and literary criticism, it also speaks to manuscript studies, showing that most of the codices of the "gentry romances" were produced by those in the immediate employ of the gentry. By bringing together literary criticism and manuscript studies, this book speaks to two scholarly communities often insulated from one another: it invites manuscript scholars to pay closer attention to the cultural resonances of the texts within medieval codices; simultaneously, it encourages literary scholars to be more attentive to the cultural resonances of surviving medieval codices.

Daniel Wakelin introduces and reinterprets the misunderstood and overlooked craft practices, cultural conventions and literary attitudes involved in making some of the most important manuscripts in late medieval English literature. In doing so he overturns how we view the role of scribes, showing how they ignored or concealed irregular and damaged parchment; ruled pages from habit and convention more than necessity; decorated the division of the text into pages or worried that it would harm reading; abandoned annotations to poetry, focusing on the poem itself; and copied English poems meticulously, in reverence for an abstract idea of the text. Scribes' interest in immaterial ideas and texts suggests their subtle thinking as craftspeople, in ways that contrast and extend current interpretations of late medieval literary culture, 'material texts' and the power of materials. For students, researchers and librarians, this book offers revelatory perspectives on the activities of late medieval scribes.

Anne Schuurman makes the striking argument that medieval literature engenders the spirit of capitalism by defining the sinner as debtor.

An authoritative account of what manuscripts and their corrections reveal about medieval attitudes to books, language and literature.

This book examines the ways in which traditions of philosophy and logic are reflected in major works of medieval literature.