Representing Righteous Heathens In Late Medieval England

by Grady, Frank

• ISBN13: 9781403966995
• ISBN10: 1403966990
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-27
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The virtuous pagans who appear in medieval English texts have often been analyzed for their theological significance, but Representing Righteous Heathens argues that such figures also functioned as an innovative resource for framing and thinking about questions of history, difference, and the uses of antiquity, as well as a flexible formal device for structuring a diverse array of vernacular literary fictions. In travel writing, dream visions, hagiographic narrative, chronicle-romances, and sermons, English writers explored the boundaries that divided them from the non-Christian world by making pagan figures speak for themselves in experiments that often strikingly anticipate our own modern critical and pedagogical uses of the Middle Ages.

Author Biography

Frank Grady is Associate Professor of English, University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction The Rule of Exceptional Salvations	1	(16)
1. The Trouble with Trajan	17	(28)
2. Mandeville's "Gret Meruaylle"	45	(28)
3. The Middle English Alexander	73	(28)
4. The Rhetoric of the Righteous Heathen	101	(22)
Conclusion Virtuous Pagans and Virtual Jews	123	(10)
Notes	133	(56)
Bibliography	189	(18)
Index	207