Selections from English Wycliffite Writings

Selections from English Wycliffite Writings
Author: Medieval Academy of America
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1997-01-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780802080455

The text is in Middle English with extensive supplemental notes that help to fully explain the context of each work. This new MART edition comes with a revised and updated bibliography by the editor.

The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture

The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture
Author: Laura Varnam
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2018-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1526121824

This book presents an exciting new approach to the medieval church by examining the role of literary texts, visual decorations, ritual performance and lived experience in the production of sanctity. The meaning of the church was intensely debated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This book explores what was at stake not only for the church’s sanctity but for the identity of the parish community as a result. Focusing on pastoral material used to teach the laity, it shows how the church’s status as a sacred space at the heart of the congregation was dangerously – but profitably – dependent on lay practice. The sacred and profane were inextricably linked and, paradoxically, the church is shown to thrive on the sacrilegious challenge of lay misbehaviour and sin.

Women's Writing in Middle English

Women's Writing in Middle English
Author: Alexandra Barratt
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2013-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317863267

Women's writing in any period remains of critical concern, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Alexandra Barratt's edition offers a wide range of texts from the period 1300-1500, including: Original texts written by women in the Middle Ages Texts translated by women in the Middle Ages Prayers, meditations, scriptural comment, and accounts of religious experiences Educational writings Romance, poetry Each poem is given a headnote, giving details of composition, manuscript and sources. Full on-page annotation is provided giving details of allusions to contemporary religious, historical and social issues. A general introduction gives context to all the pieces and provides a penetrating account of the role of women in a burgeoning society of literary and cultural transmission.

Medieval Texts in Context

Medieval Texts in Context
Author: Graham D. Caie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2008-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134238460

This collection of essays by leading experts in manuscript studies sheds new light on ways to approach medieval texts in their manuscript context. Each contribution provides groundbreaking insight into the field of medieval textual culture, demonstrating the various interconnections between medieval material and literary traditions. The contributors’ work aids reconstruction of the period’s writing practices, as contextual factors surrounding the texts provide clues to the ‘manuscript experience’. Topics such as scribal practice and textual providence, glosses, rubrics, page lay-out, and even page ruling, are addressed in a manner illustrative and suggestive of textual practice of the time, while the volume further considers the interface between the manuscript and early textual communities. Looking at medieval inventories of books no longer extant, and addressing questions such as ownership, reading practices and textual production, Medieval Texts in Context addresses the fundamental interpretative issue of how scribe-editors worked with an eye to their intended audience. An understanding of the world inhabited by the scribal community is made use of to illuminate the rationale behind the manufacture of devotional texts. The combination of approaches to the medieval vernacular manuscript presented in this volume is unique, marking a major, innovative contribution to manuscript studies.

Luther in English

Luther in English
Author: Michael S. Whiting
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498271863

Recent studies have increasingly downplayed, and in a few cases even wholly denied, the influence of Martin Luther's theology of Law and Gospel on early English evangelicals such as William Tyndale. The impact of a late medieval Augustinian renaissance, Erasmian Humanism, the Reformed tradition, and Lollardy have all but eclipsed the more central role once attributed to Luther. Whiting reexamines these claims with a thorough reevaluation of Luther's theology of Law and Gospel in its historical context spanning twenty-five years, something entirely lacking in all previous studies. Based on extensive research in the primary sources, with acute attention to the larger historical narrative and in dialogue with secondary scholarship, Whiting argues that scholars have often oversimplified Luther's theology of Law and Gospel and have thus wrongly diminished his very significant, even principal, influence upon first-generation evangelicals William Tyndale, John Frith, and Robert Barnes during the English Reformation of the 1520s and 30s.

Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature

Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature
Author: Emily Steiner
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2003-05-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521824842

Emily Steiner describes the rich intersections between legal documents and English literature in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She argues that documentary culture (including charters, testaments, patents and seals) enabled writers to think in new ways about the conditions of textual production in late medieval England.

Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library, Including Those Formerly in Sion College Library

Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library, Including Those Formerly in Sion College Library
Author: Oliver S. Pickering
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1999
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780859915472

Handlist to manuscripts in one of Britain's major medieval repositories. Lambeth Palace Library, which dates from a bequest by Archbishop Bancroft in 1610, is one of England's major repositories of medieval manuscripts. More than half of the ninety-six manuscripts and documents containing items of Middle English prose were already present when the library was temporarily transferred to Cambridge in 1647. In the succeeding centuries further manuscript materials have continually been added, and within the last few years the library has become home to the older part of Sion College Library, an event that has added a further seven manuscripts to the present handlist. The collection at Lambeth is large enough to be fully representative of the corpus of Middle English prose: the Brut, the Wycliffite Bible, and Love's Mirror, for example, are all present, in some cases in multiple copies, as are writings by Hilton and Rolle. There are sermon cycles (including an almost complete set of Wycliffite sermons), medical recipes, historical works, and anthologies of religious treatises. Altogether the current handlist indexes almost 800 separate items, ranging from the veterinary to the liturgical. O.S. PICKERINGis Senior Assistant Librarian and Associate Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds; V.M. O'MARAis Lecturer in English at the University of Hull.

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English

The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English
Author: Elaine Treharne
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 792
Release: 2010-04-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191572594

The study of medieval literature has experienced a revolution in the last two decades, which has reinvigorated many parts of the discipline and changed the shape of the subject in relation to the scholarship of the previous generation. 'New' texts (laws and penitentials, women's writing, drama records), innovative fields and objects of study (the history of the book, the study of space and the body, medieval masculinities), and original ways of studying them (the Sociology of the Text, performance studies) have emerged. This has brought fresh vigour and impetus to medieval studies, and impacted significantly on cognate periods and areas. The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English brings together the insights of these new fields and approaches with those of more familiar texts and methods of study, to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of medieval literature today. It also returns to first principles in posing fundamental questions about the nature, scope, and significance of the discipline, and the directions that it might take in the next decade. The Handbook contains 44 newly commissioned essays from both world-leading scholars and exciting new scholarly voices. Topics covered range from the canonical genres of Saints' lives, sermons, romance, lyric poetry, and heroic poetry; major themes including monstrosity and marginality, patronage and literary politics, manuscript studies and vernacularity are investigated; and there are close readings of key texts, such as Beowulf, Wulf and Eadwacer, and Ancrene Wisse and key authors from Ælfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.

Heresy and the English Reformation

Heresy and the English Reformation
Author: Georgi Vasilev
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2014-08-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0786486678

Medieval Europe was a hotbed of revolt against religious dogma. Particularly offensive to the established church were the views of the Cathars, whose dualist beliefs Rome condemned as heretical. Through a variety of literary works, this book explores the dualist religious movement which developed as a culture of the masses and took place in Europe between the 12th and 17th centuries. It examines the strong parallels between the Bogomils and Cathars and the religious practices of the British Lollards, extrapolating Lollardy's spread from eastern to western Europe. Providing numerous text comparisons, the work focuses on a number of authors including John Wycliffe, William Tynsdale, William Langland and John Milton, whose works exhibit the dualist philosophy.