Prophet Margins : The Medieval Vatic Impulse and Social Stability

by Risden, Edward L.; Moranski, Karen; Yandell, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9780820471075
• ISBN10: 0820471070
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-15
• Publisher: Peter Lang Pub Inc

Summary

While poets have traditionally inhabited cultural margins, prophets have brought poetic language to the center of cultural debate, not foretelling the future so much as diagnosing the present. This exciting collection of nine essays examines the range of social and political implications that inflects poetic discourse, from the Old English and Latin texts of the Anglo-Saxon world to the Scotland and England of the Renaissance. Whether saints' lives, Germanic heroic epics, chronicles, or satiric poems, the works discussed in this book retain their verbal power, if not their political influence, into our own time.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Prophecy as Political Discourse	1	(12)
EDWARD L. RISDEN, STEPHEN YANDELL, AND KAREN R. MORANSKI
2. Old English Heroic Poet-Prophets and Their (Un)stable Histories	13	(16)
EDWARD L. RISDEN
3. Prophecy and Community Leadership in Rudolph of Fulda's Vita Leobae	29	(14)
WILLIAM P. HYLAND
4. Wolfram 's Culturally Prophetic Parzival	43	(26)
HEINZ BAADER
5. Gawain 's Tempting Helen: Prophesying the Fall of Camelot	69	(10)
MICKEY SWEENEY
6. Prophetic Authority in Adam of Usk 's Chronicle	79	(22)
STEPHEN YANDELL
7. Performing Prophecy: The Advents of Christ in Medieval Latin Drama	101	(22)
WILLIAM F. HODAPP
8. Printing, Prophecy, and the Foundation of the Tudor Dynasty: Caxton 's Morte Darthur and Henry Tudor's Road to Bosworth	123	(26)
RUSSELL RUTTER
9. Poetry and Prophecy: a Skelton Key	149	(18)
THEODORE L. STEINBERG
10. The Son Who Rules "all Bretaine to the sey" The Whole Prophesie and the Union of Crowns	167	(18)
KAREN R. MORANSKI
Notes	185	(34)
Select Bibliography	219