The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature in English

by Treharne, Elaine; Walker, Greg

• ISBN13: 9780198798088
• ISBN10: 0198798083
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2017-11-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

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 AElfric to Geoffrey Chaucer, Langland, and the Gawain Poet.

Author Biography

Elaine Treharne, Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities Professor of English, and, by Courtesy, of German Studies, Stanford,Greg Walker, Masson Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, The University of Edinburgh

Greg Walker is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Prior to that he was Professor of early-modern literature and culture at the University of Leicester. He has written extensively on the drama, poetry, and prose, and the political and religious history of the late medieval period and the sixteenth century in England and Scotland. He has edited the Oxford Anthology of Tudor Drama and is co-editor with Thomas Betteridge of The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama.

Elaine Treharne is Roberta Bowman Denning Professor of Humanities and Professor of English, and, by Courtesy, of German Studies at Stanford University. Elaine was previously Professor of Early English at Florida State University and Visiting Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published extensively on Old and Middle English literature and particularly religious prose, and she works on medieval manuscripts and their contents, focusing recently on the architextuality of early books.

Table of Contents

Prologue
Speaking of the Medieval, Elaine Treharne
Literary Production
1. Books and Manuscripts, A.S.G. Edwards
2. Textual Copying and Transmission, Orietta Da Rold
3. Professionalization of Writing, Simon Horobin
4. Writing, Authority, and Bureaucracy, Nicholas Perkins
5. The Impact of Print: The Perceived Worth of the Printed Book in England, 1476-1575, Elizabeth Evenden
Literary Consumption
6. Literature and the Cultural Elites, Ralph Hanna
7. The Verse of Heroes, Jayne Carroll
8. Insular Romance, Sian Echard
9. A York Primer and its Alphabet: Reading Women in a Lay Household, Nicola McDonald
10. Performing Communities: Civic Religious Drama, John McGavin
Literature, Clerical, and Lay
11. Change and Continuity: The English Sermon before 1250, Bella Millett
12. Authorizing Female Piety, Diane Watt
13. Visions and Visionaries, Andy Galloway
14. Writing, Heresy, and the Anticlerical Muse, Mishtooni Bose
15. Acquiring Wisdom: Teaching Texts and the Lore of the People, Dan Anlezark
Literary Realities
16. The Yorkshire Partisans and the Literature of Popular Discontent, Andrew Prescott
17. Gothic Turn and the Twelfth-Century Chronicle, Tom Bredehoft
18. Antisocial Reform: Writing Rebellion, Stephen Kelly
19. Secular Drama, Elizabeth Dutton
20. Metaphorical and Real Flowers in Medieval Verse, Gillian Rudd
Complex Identities
21. Authority, Constraint, and the Writing of the Medieval Self, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
22. Complex Identities: Selves & Others, Kathy Lavezzo
23. The Chosen People: Spiritual Identities, Samantha Zacher
24. Individuality, Alcuin Blamires
25. Emergent Englishness, Jacqueline Stodnick
Literary Place, Space, and Time
26. Regions and Communities, Helen Fulton
27. The City and the Text: London Literature, Alison Wiggins
28. Provincial Reading Communities, Wendy Scase
29. Scottish Writing, Elizabeth Elliott
30. Places of the Imagination: The Gawain-Poet, Thorlac Turville-Petre
Literary Journeys
31. Pilgrimages, Travel Writing, and the Medieval Exotic, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
32. 'Britain': Originary Myths and the Stories of Peoples, Anke Bernau
33. Maps and Margins: Other Lands, Other Peoples, Alfred Hiatt
34. Monsters and the Medieval Exotic in Medieval England, Asa Simon Mittman and Susan Kim
35. Spiritual Quest and Social Space: Texts of Hard Travel for God on Earth and in the Heart, Mary Baine Campbell
Epilogue
When did 'The Medieval End?' Retrospection, Foresight and The End(s) of the English Middle Ages, Greg Walker
Index of Manuscripts
General Index