Richard Morris S Prick Of Conscience

Annual volume on medieval textual cultures, engaging with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Essays in this volume engage with widely varied themes: law and literature; manuscript production, patronage, and aesthetics; real and imagined geographies; gender and its connections to narrative theory and to psychoanalysis. Investigations range from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, from England to the eastern Mediterranean. New arguments are put forward about the dating, context, and occasion of Geoffrey Chaucer's Boece, while the narrative dynamics of Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Tale of Melibee are examined from new perspectives. The topography of the Holy Lands appears both as a set of emotional sites, depicted in the Prick of Conscience in its account of the end of the world, and as co-ordinates in the cultural imaginary of medieval the wine-trade. Grendel's mother emerges as the invisible and unavowable centre of male heroic culture in Beowulf, and the fourteenth-century St Erkenwald is brought into contact with the community-building project of the medieval death investigation. Finally, the late medieval Speculum Christiani is revealed to be a work with deep aesthetic investments when read through the framework of how its medieval scribes encountered and shaped that work.

Essays bringing out the richness and vibrancy of pre-modern textual culture in all its variety.

In 1879, the late medieval poem now known as The Lay Folks' Mass Book - a guide to the Mass -- was edited for the Early English Text Society by Canon Thomas Frederick Simmons. It remains the standard edition of what, to modern tastes, can seem a simple work of conventional Middle English devotion. Yet, as this book shows, the poem had a remarkable afterlife. The authors demonstrate how Simmons' interest in and presentation of the text was related profoundly to contemporary concerns and heated debates about worship in the Church of England, at a time when Anglian clergymen could be imprisoned for their ritual practices. Simmons, educated at Oxford during the height of the Oxford Movement, was recognised by contemporaries as a leading authority on liturgy, a topic that troubled prime ministers as well as archbishops, and the authors bring out the ways in which Simmons himself used his medievalist researches as the basis for what was to be the most important attempt at Prayer Book revision between the Reformation and the twentieth century.

This study examines expectations of imminent judgment that energized reform movements in Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. It probes the apocalyptic vision of the Lollards, followers of the Oxford professor John Wycliff (1384). The Lollards repudiated the medieval church and established conventicles despite officially sanctioned prosecution. While exploring the full spectrum of late medieval apocalypticism, this work focuses on the diverse range of Wycliffite literature, political and religious treatises, sermons, biblical commentaries, including trial records, to reveal a dynamic strain of apocalyptic discourse. It shows that sixteenth-century English apocalypticism was fed by vibrant, indigenous Wycliffite well springs. The rhetoric of Lollard apocalypticism is analyzed and its effect on carriers and audiences is investigated, illuminating the rise of evil in church and society as perceived by the Lollards and their radical reform program.

Religion plays a central role in nearly every aspect in people's life of most pre-modern cultures. Especially the interconnection between religion and politics is a common fact but the details of this relation and interacting processes behind this are not substantially studied. Therefore, this volume does not aim to confirm the linkage of religion and politics in general but to investigate its functionalities in political processes. A focus is placed on the political role of religious personnel beyond their religious and cultic tasks and their influence in pre-modern societies from a cross-cultural perspective. Specialists from various disciplines present their research based on case studies. Thereby this interdisciplinary volume covers a wide geographical and chronological range from ancient Egypt in the Bronze Age until medieval England. These papers are organised according to core functions questioning the instrumentalisation of religious personnel.

We are living in an age in which the relationship between reading and space is evolving swiftly. Cutting-edge technologies and developments in the publication and consumption of literature continue to uncover new physical, electronic, and virtual contexts in which reading can take place. In comparison with the accessibility that has accompanied these developments, the medieval reading experience may initially seem limited and restrictive, available only to a literate few or to their listeners; yet attention to the spaces in which medieval reading habits can be traced reveals a far more vibrant picture in which different kinds of spaces provided opportunities for a wide range of interactions with and contributions to the texts being read. Drawing on a rich variety of material, this collection of essays demonstrates that the spaces in which reading took place (or in which reading could take place) in later medieval England directly influenced how and why reading happened.

Essays examining the compiler and contents of two of the most important and significant extant late medieval manuscript collections.

Middle English devotional compilations – consisting of a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute new and unified devotional texts – have often been approached as complex collections of source texts that need to be linked with their originals. This book argues that the study of compilations should move beyond the disentanglement of their sources. It approaches compiling as a literary activity and an active way of shaping the medieval text, with the aim to nuance scholarly discussion about compiling by putting greater emphasis on the literary instead of the technical aspects of compiling activity. In addition to describing the additions, omissions and other types of adaptations that compilers made to their source texts, Middle English Devotional Compilations highlights the nature and function of compiling activity in late medieval England, and examines three major but understudied Middle English devotional compilations in depth: The Pore Caitif, The Tretyse of Love and A Talkyng of the Love of God.