Criticism And Dissent In The Middle Ages

What were the boundaries between 'official' and 'subversive', 'orthodox' and 'dissenting' critical practices in the Middle Ages? Placing medieval critical and intellectual discourses within their cultural and ideological frameworks, Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages examines conflicts of gender, violence, academic freedom, hermeneutical authority, sacramentalism and heresy among so-called official as well as dissenting critical orders. Pedagogies, theories of grammar and rhetoric, poetics and hermeneutics, academic 'sciences', clerical professionalism, literacy, visual images, theology, and textual cultures of heresy are all considered. This 1996 collection of essays by major scholars examines medieval critical discourse, theories of textuality and interpretation, and representations of learning and knowledge - as contesting and contested institutional practices within and between Latin and vernacular cultures.

Whereas traditional scholarship assumed that William Shakespeare used the medieval past as a negative foil to legitimate the present, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and the Middle Ages offers a revisionist perspective, arguing that the playwright valorizes the Middle Ages in order to critique the oppressive nature of the Tudor-Stuart state. In examining Shakespeare’s Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, the text explores how Shakespeare repossessed the medieval past to articulate political and religious dissent. By comparing these and other plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries with their medieval analogues, Alfred Thomas argues that Shakespeare was an ecumenical writer concerned with promoting tolerance in a highly intolerant and partisan age.

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.

A lively study of the tavern in medieval life and thought

Analyses the rhetoric of dissidents, outsiders and truth-tellers to challenge preconceptions about free speech and political criticism in the early Middle Ages.

Guynn offers an innovative new approach to the ethical, cultural, and ideological analysis of medieval allegory. Working between poststructuralism and historical materialism, he considers both the playfulness of allegory and its disciplinary force.