Three Purgatory Poems

Though our modern understanding of the medieval doctrine of Purgatory is generally shaped by its presentation by Dante in the Divine Comedy, there is a lengthy history of speculation about the nature of such a place of purgation. Through these fourteenth-century Middle English poems, readers can experience something of the controversies that surfaced and resurfaced even after Aquinas had articulated his doctrine of the Communion of Saints. The Gast of Gy, as Foster notes, puts a human face on the doctrine of Purgatory, not only in the amiable, logical, and patient person of the Gast of Gy himself, . . . but also in the careful and cautious dialogue between the Gast and the Pryor who questions him. Sir Owain and The Vision of Tundale present two accounts of the purgatorial journeys of living individuals who are offered a chance to see the torments they have brought upon themselves by their less-than-perfect lives along with the opportunity to return and amend those lives. All three poems were quite popular, as was the doctrine of Purgatory itself. And why not? As Foster notes in his general introduction, it the doctrine of Purgatory had everything: adventure and adversity, suffering and excitement, and, most importantly, a profound theological warning wrapped in the joyful solace of communion with the departed and hope for our own sinful selves.

The Year's Work in Medievalism, volume XXV, is based upon but not restricted to the 2010 proceedings of the annual International Conference on Medievalism, organized by the Director of Conferences for the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, Gwendolyn Morgan, and, for 2009, Dr. Pam Clements. The Year's Work in Medievalism also publishes bibliographies, book reviews, and announcements for conferences and other events. Richard Utz, Pi(o)us Medievalism vs. Catholic Modernism: The Case Of George Tyrell Martha Oberle, The Legacy of the Medieval Mendicant Orders Chelsea Gunter, Mysticism and Messianism in the Poetry of Paul Celan William Calin, Postcolonialism and Medievalism: How French Regional Cultures/Literatures Reshape Their Past and Present Jana K. Schulman, Retelling Old Tales: Germanic Myth and Language in Christopher Paolini's Eragon Arthur Russell, From English Stage to American Page: The Transatlantic Dissemination of Leonard MacNally's Robin Hood; or, Sherwood Forest Gwendolyn Morgan, The Battle of Maldon in Imitative Translation Edward L. Risden, The Battle of Maldon: A One-act Play for Readers' Theater T.S. Miller, A Look at Some New Lays of Beowulf: The Misunderstood Monsters of Contemporary Popular Music Aspen Hougen, Debilitating Dracula: Vampire as Illness Metaphor from the Middle Ages to the Present Day Peter Johnsson, Purged by Fire: The Influence of Medieval Visionary Literature on Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Gerald Nachtwey, Unburied Corpses: The Violence of the Past in William Morris's Froissartian Poems Karl Fugelso, Dante as Surfer Medievalism: Sandow Birk's Commedia Illustrations

Translation and facing text of an important female-authored work from the late middle ages.

A new translation by Anthony Esolen Illustrations by Gustave Doré Written in the fourteenth century by Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy is arguably the greatest epic poem of all time—presenting Dante’s brilliant vision of the three realms of Christian afterlife: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. In this second and perhaps most imaginative part of his masterwork, Dante struggles up the terraces of Mount Purgatory, still guided by Virgil, in a continuation of his difficult ascent to purity. Anthony Esolen’s acclaimed translation of Inferno, Princeton professor James Richardson said, “follows Dante through all his spectacular range, commanding where he is commanding, wrestling, as he does, with the density and darkness in language and in the soul. It is living writing.” This edition of Purgatory includes an appendix of key sources and extensive endnotes—an invaluable guide for both general readers and students.

In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city’s literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London’s literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Dante's Purgatorio has been described as the most 'human' of the three parts of his Comedy, and it can also be seen as a 'singing school' for poets. This new complete translation by sixteen contemporary poets enters into dialogue with Dante's text by rendering it in a variety of different Anglophone voices - American, Australian, British, Irish, Jamaican, Scottish and Singaporean. The poets in this Purgatorio adopt a range of forms, from blank verse to terza rima, and their translations are accompanied by explanatory notes, a 'prelude' of poems about Purgatory, and a 'postscript' of newly-translated medieval Italian lyrics relating to Dante and his poem.

This book explores the anxious and unstable relationship between court poetry and various forms of authority, political and cultural, in England and Scotland at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Through poems by Skelton, Dunbar, Douglas, Hawes, Lyndsay and Barclay, it examines the paths by which court poetry and its narrators seek multiple forms of legitimation: from royal and institutional sources, but also in the media of script and print. The book is the first for some time to treat English and Scottish material of its period together, and responds to European literary contexts, the dialogue between vernacular and Latin matter, and current critical theory. In so doing it claims that public and occasional writing evokes a counter-discourse in the secrecies and subversions of medieval love-fictions. The result is a poetry that queries and at times cancels the very authority to speak that it so proudly promotes.