Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England

by Edited by Gordon McMullan , David Matthews

• ISBN13: 9780521117401
• ISBN10: 0521117402
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-07-30
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In English literary and historical studies the border between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, and hence between 'medieval' and 'early modern' studies, has in recent years become increasingly permeable. Written by an international group of medievalists and early modernists, the essays in this volume examine the ways in which medieval culture was read and reconstructed by writers, editors and scholars in early modern England. It also addresses the reciprocal process: the way in which early modern England, while apparently suppressing the medieval past, was in fact shaped and constructed by it, albeit in ways that early modern thinkers had an interest in suppressing. The book deals with this process as it is played out not only in literature but also in visual culture - for example in mapping - and in material culture - as in the physical destruction of the medieval past in the early modern English landscape.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Notes on contributors

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction: reading the medieval in early modern England

Period

Diachronic history and the shortcomings of Medieval Studies

Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and the rhetoric of temporality

Text

Langland, apocalypse and the early modern editor

Public ambition, private desire and the last Tudor Chaucer

Nation

The vulgar history of the Order of the Garter

Myths of origin and the struggle over nationhood in medieval and early modern England

The colonisation of early Britain on the Jacobean stage

Geography

Tamburlaine, sacred space and the heritage of medieval cartography

Leland's Itinerary and the remains of the medieval past

Reformation

John Bale and reconfiguring the 'medieval' in Reformation England

Medieval penance, Reformation repentance and Measure for Measure

Medieval poetics and Protestant Magdalenes

Afterword

Notes

Select bibliography

Index

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