Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–1400

by Katharine Breen

• ISBN13: 9780521199223
• ISBN10: 0521199220
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-07
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This original study explores the importance of the concept of habitus - that is, the set of acquired patterns of thought, behaviour and taste that result from internalising culture or objective social structures - in the medieval imagination. Beginning by examining medieval theories of habitus in a general sense, Katharine Breen goes on to investigate the relationships between habitus, language, and Christian virtue. While most medieval pedagogical theorists regarded the habitus of Latin grammar as the gateway to a generalized habitus of virtue, reformers increasingly experimented with vernacular languages that could fulfill the same function. These new vernacular habits, Breen argues, laid the conceptual foundations for an English reading public. Ranging across texts in Latin and several vernaculars, and including a case study of Piers Plowman, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to readers interested in medieval literature, religion and art history, in addition to those interested in the sociological concept of habitus.

Author Biography

KATHARINE BREEN is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. viii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
The fourteenth-century crisis of habit	p. 16
Medieval theories of habitus	p. 43
The grammatical paradigm	p. 80
A Crusading habitus	p. 122
Piers Plowman and the formation of an English literary habitus	p. 172
Epilogue: the King's English	p. 222
Notes	p. 229
Bibliography	p. 261
Index	p. 282
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