Translations Of Authority In Medieval English Literature

Minnis presents the fruits of a long-term engagement with the ways in which crucial ideological issues were deployed in vernacular texts. He addresses the crisis for vernacular translation precipitated by the Lollard heresy, Langland's views on indulgences, Chaucer's tales of suspicious saints and risible relics, and more.

David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as public interiorities) without effacing their history or future. The approach yields important insights into the voice work of late medieval poets, especially Langland and Chaucer, and also their fifteenth-century successors, who treat their work as they have treated their precursors. It also helps illuminate vernacular religious writing and its aspirations, and it addresses literary and cultural change, such as the effect of censorship and increasing political instability in and beyond the fifteenth century. Lawton also proposes his emphasis on voice as a literary tool of broad application, and his book has a bold and comparative sweep that encompasses the Pauline letters, Augustine's Confessions, the classical precedents of Virgil and Ovid, medieval contemporaries like Machaut and Petrarch, extra-literary artists like Monteverdi, later poets such as Wordsworth, Heaney, and Paul Valery, and moderns such as Jarry and Proust. What justifies such parallels, the author claims, is that late medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. The book's energy is therefore devoted to the transformative reading of later medieval texts, in order to show their original and ongoing importance as voice work.

Anne Schuurman makes the striking argument that medieval literature engenders the spirit of capitalism by defining the sinner as debtor.

A new history of the origins of the English Bible, revealing the complex continuities between Latin commentaries and English translations.

Helaine Newstead, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was one of the foremost medievalists of our times. She influenced and guided the careers of many medieval scholars and, since her death in 1981, has been sorely missed by her colleagues and students alike. It is the students of her last years who have come together to honor her memory in this volume. To accommodate the broad scope of Professor Newstead's interests, the rhetorical device of translatio was selected as the unifying topic of this collection. It includes studies in translation, influence, folk motif, and other questions as well as the trope itself. Among the contributors: Allen Mandelbaum, David Greetham, Frederick Goldin, JoAnne Kraus, Diane Marks, Barry Bissell, and Johanna C. Prins.

An examination of French to English translation in medieval England, through the genre of the prologue.