Literary Practice And Social Change In Britain 1380 1530

As a traditional site of historical criticism, medieval studies is particularly well placed to benefit from the recent reemergence of historicism in literary studies. But this new "critical historicism" differes from the traditional criticism in both method an interests, differences that are well illustrated by this collection. A concern with politics, a reliance on the materials of economic and social history, a conception of writing as a form of social practices, a focus upon the forces of change in medieval culture, and unwillingness to observe the usual distinction between literary and historical texts, and a historicization of their own activity--these characteristics make these essays a significant contribution to medieval studies. Moreover, both in conception and execution the essays reject the barrier that the humanist account of history has erected between a Middle Ages stigmatized as distant and other and a Renaissance consecrated as the beginning of the modern world. Thus they invite the attention of nonmedievalists, especially Renaissance specialists, who wish to test their assumptions about medieval literature against some of the best recent work in the field. The authors consider a wide range of materials. Three of the essays explore Chaucer's career as a bureaucrat, a diplomat, and a poet. Other topics include Langland's self-constitution in Piers Plowman, the medieval production and modern reception of the mystery plays, Hoccleve's innovative strategies for offering political advice to his king, and the ideological and psychological interests that governed the idea of the city in sixteenth-century Scotland. All scholars and studies of the Middle Ages, comparative literature, and literature and language programs generally will appreciate this ground-breaking collection. Contributors:Anne MiddletonPaul StrohmLee PattersonDavid WallaceLarry ScanlonTheresa ColettiLouise Fradenburg This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1990.

Morte Darthur is investigated for its reflection of the contemporary political concerns Malory shared with the gentry class for whom he wrote.

Ralph Hanna charts the generic and linguistic features particular to London writing.

A lively microbiography of Chaucer that tells the story of the tumultuous year that led to the creation of The Canterbury Tales In 1386, Geoffrey Chaucer endured his worst year, but began his best poem. The father of English literature did not enjoy in his lifetime the literary celebrity that he has today—far from it. The middle-aged Chaucer was living in London, working as a midlevel bureaucrat and sometime poet, until a personal and professional crisis set him down the road leading to The Canterbury Tales. In the politically and economically fraught London of the late fourteenth century, Chaucer was swept up against his will in a series of disastrous events that would ultimately leave him jobless, homeless, separated from his wife, exiled from his city, and isolated in the countryside of Kent—with no more audience to hear the poetry he labored over. At the loneliest time of his life, Chaucer made the revolutionary decision to keep writing, and to write for a national audience, for posterity, and for fame. Brought expertly to life by Paul Strohm, this is the eye-opening story of the birth one of the most celebrated literary creations of the English language.

Crime is a matter of interpretation, and never was this truer than in the Middle Ages, when societies faced with new ideas and pressures were continually forced to rethink what a crime was -- and what was a crime. This collection undertakes a thorough exploration of shifting definitions of crime and changing attitudes toward social control in medieval Europe. These essays reveal how various forces in medieval society interacted and competed in interpreting and influencing mechanisms for social control. Drawing on a wide range of historical and literary sources -- legal treatises, court cases, statutes, poems, romances, and comic tales -- the contributors consider topics including fear of crime, rape and violence against women, revenge and condemnations of crime, learned dispute about crime and social control, and legal and political struggles over hunting rights.

"The paradox of the lie that might as well be true," writes Paul Strohm, "must interest anyone who seeks to understand texts in history or the historical influence of texts." In these seven essays, all recent and most published here for the first time, the author examines historical and literary texts from fourteenth-century England. He not only demonstrates the fictionality of narrative and documentary sources, but also argues that these fictions are themselves fully historical. Together the essays institute a dialogue between texts and events that restores historical documents and literary works to their larger environments. Strohm begins by inspecting legal records that accuse Hochon of Liverpool in 1384 of threatening to shoot an arrow at a political adversary urinating against a wall, and shows how the text embodies and interconnects language, social space, and historical interpretation itself. Throughout his analyses, which cover such topics as Chaucer's verses on the accession of Henry IV, Froissart's account of Queen Philippa interceding for the burghers of Calais, and Thomas Usk's accusations against John Northampton, Strohm alerts us to the distortions of textuality itself while challenging our notions of "invented" and "true." Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

An examination of how the Jews—real and imagined—so challenged the Christian majority in medieval Europe that it became a society that was religiously and culturally antisemitic in new ways In medieval Europe, Jews were not passive victims of the Christian community, as is often assumed, but rather were startlingly assertive, forming a Jewish civilization within Latin Christian society. Both Jews and Christians considered themselves to be God’s chosen people. These dueling claims fueled the rise of both cultures as they became rivals for supremacy. In How the West Became Antisemitic, Ivan Marcus shows how Christian and Jewish competition in medieval Europe laid the foundation for modern antisemitism. Marcus explains that Jews accepted Christians as misguided practitioners of their ancestral customs, but regarded Christianity as idolatry. Christians, on the other hand, looked at Jews themselves—not Judaism—as despised. They directed their hatred at a real and imagined Jew: theoretically subordinate, but sometimes assertive, an implacable “enemy within.” In their view, Jews were permanently and physically Jewish—impossible to convert to Christianity. Thus Christians came to hate Jews first for religious reasons, and eventually for racial ones. Even when Jews no longer lived among them, medieval Christians could not forget their former neighbors. Modern antisemitism, based on the imagined Jew as powerful and world dominating, is a transformation of this medieval hatred. A sweeping and well-documented history of the rivalry between Jewish and Christian civilizations during the making of Europe, How the West Became Antisemitic is an ambitious new interpretation of the medieval world and its impact on modernity.