Poets And Princepleasers

Six essays explore the making of human identities and agency in English communities between the Great Plague and about 1600. They also focus attention on the processes of understanding past cultures and their texts. Among the topics are court politics, sacred and secular drama, and women. Paper edition (2416-9), $15.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book analyses the relation between politics and the production of culture in Lancastrian England, focussing on the intellectual activity of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, reconstructing his library and analysing his commissions of translations, biographies and political poems.

This volume brings together a selection of lectures and essays in which J.A. Burrow discusses the work of English poets of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and Hoccleve, as well as the anonymous authors of Pearl, Saint Erkenwald, and a pair of metrical romances. Six of the pieces address general issues, with some reference to French and Italian writings ('Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages', for example, or 'The Poet and the Book'); but most of them concentrate on particular English poems, such as Chaucer's Envoy to Scogan, Gower's Confessio Amantis, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Hoccleve's Series. Although some of the essays take account of the poet's life and times ('Chaucer as Petitioner', 'Hoccleve and the 'Court''), most are mainly concerned with the meaning and structure of the poems. What, for example, does the hero of Ipomadon hope to achieve by fighting, as he always does, incognito? Why do the stories in Piers Plowman all peter out so inconclusively? And how can it be that the narrator in Chaucer's Book of the Duchess so persistently fails to understand what he is told?

A comprehensive account of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women.

The poems in this volume were prized and preserved because of their association with Chaucer's name and have been, paradoxically, almost entirely ignored by modern readers for the same reason. Many of these pieces are worthy of study, not only in the context of Chaucerian reception, but also as specimens of the kinds of vernacular poetry that circulated in late medieval manuscripts and which remained in print, largely by the accidental virtue of their association with Chaucer, throughout the Renaissance and well into the nineteenth century. The various genres represented in this sampler (the dream vision, good counsel, female panegyric, mass parody, proverbial wisdom, lover's dialogue, prochecy, advice to princes, elegiac complaint, courtly parody, and anti-feminist satire) attest to the diversity of late medieval literary tastes and to the flexibility of the courtly idiom. In the sixteenth century both Chaucer's poetry and the diverse works with which it circulated appear to have continued to have been valued for their perceived courtly qualities. Chaucer's early scribal and print editors also appear to have prized his sphere of influence (attested to by imitation, continuation, and emendation) and his adaptability to contemporary social and political needs.

Presents an examination of the life and works of Geoffrey Chaucer along with a description of medieval society and how his works are depicted in film and television.

In the early fifteenth century, English poets responded to a changed climate of patronage, instituted by Henry IV and successor monarchs, by inventing a new tradition of public and elite poetry. Following Chaucer and others, Hoccleve and Lydgate brought to English verse a style and subject matter writing about their King, nation, and themselves, and their innovations influenced a continuous line of poets running through and beyond Wyatt. A crucial aspect of this tradition is its development of ideas and practices associated with the role of poet laureate. Robert J. Meyer-Lee examines the nature and significance of this tradition as it developed from the fourteenth century to Tudor times, tracing its evolution from one author to the next. This study illuminates the relationships between poets and political power and makes plain the tremendous impact this verse has had on the shape of English literary culture.