The Psalms and Medieval English Literature

The Psalms and Medieval English Literature PDF Author: Tamara Atkin
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1843844354
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
An examination of how The Book of Psalms shaped medieval thought and helped develop the medieval English literary canon. The Book of Psalms had a profound impact on English literature from the Anglo-Saxon to the late medieval period. This collection examines the various ways in which they shaped medieval English thought and contributed to the emergence of an English literary canon. It brings into dialogue experts on both Old and Middle English literature, thus breaking down the traditional disciplinary binaries of both pre- and post-Conquest English and late medieval and Early Modern, as well as emphasizing the complex and fascinating relationship between Latin and the vernacular languages of England. Its three main themes, translation, adaptation and voice, enable a rich variety of perspectives on the Psalms and medieval English literature to emerge. TAMARA ATKIN is Senior Lecturer in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature at Queen Mary University of London; FRANCIS LENEGHAN is Associate Professor of OldEnglish at The University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford Contributors: Daniel Anlezark, Mark Faulkner, Vincent Gillespie, Michael P. Kuczynski, David Lawton, Francis Leneghan, Jane Roberts, Mike Rodman Jones, Elizabeth Solopova, Lynn Staley, Annie Sutherland, Jane Toswell, Katherine Zieman.

Miserere Mei

Miserere Mei PDF Author: Clare Costley King'oo
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268084610
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
In Miserere Mei, Clare Costley King'oo examines the critical importance of the Penitential Psalms in England between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. During this period, the Penitential Psalms inspired an enormous amount of creative and intellectual work: in addition to being copied and illustrated in Books of Hours and other prayer books, they were expounded in commentaries, imitated in vernacular translations and paraphrases, rendered into lyric poetry, and even modified for singing. Miserere Mei explores these numerous transformations in materiality and genre. Combining the resources of close literary analysis with those of the history of the book, it reveals not only that the Penitential Psalms lay at the heart of Reformation-age debates over the nature of repentance, but also, and more significantly, that they constituted a site of theological, political, artistic, and poetic engagement across the many polarities that are often said to separate late medieval from early modern culture. Miserere Mei features twenty-five illustrations and provides new analyses of works based on the Penitential Psalms by several key writers of the time, including Richard Maidstone, Thomas Brampton, John Fisher, Martin Luther, Sir Thomas Wyatt, George Gascoigne, Sir John Harington, and Richard Verstegan. It will be of value to anyone interested in the interpretation, adaptation, and appropriation of biblical literature; the development of religious plurality in the West; the emergence of modernity; and the periodization of Western culture. Students and scholars in the fields of literature, religion, history, art history, and the history of material texts will find Miserere Mei particularly instructive and compelling.

Old English Psalms

Old English Psalms PDF Author: Patrick P. O’Neill
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674504755
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 744

Book Description
The Latin psalms—translated into Old English—figured prominently in the lives of Anglo-Saxons, whether sung by clerics, studied as a textbook for language learning, or recited in private devotion by lay people. The complete text of all 150 prose and verse psalms is available here in contemporary English for the first time.

Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature

Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Hannibal Hamlin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521832700
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature examines the powerful influence of the biblical Psalms on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. It explores the imaginative, beautiful, ingenious and sometimes ludicrous and improbable ways in which the Psalms were 'translated' from ancient Israel to Renaissance and Reformation England. No biblical book was more often or more diversely translated than the Psalms during the period. In church psalters, sophisticated metrical paraphrases, poetic adaptations, meditations, sermons, commentaries, and through biblical allusions in secular poems, plays, and prose fiction, English men and women interpreted the Psalms, refashioning them according to their own personal, religious, political, or aesthetic agendas. The book focuses on literature from major writers like Shakespeare and Milton to less prominent ones like George Gascoigne, Mary Sidney Herbert and George Wither, but it also explores the adaptations of the Psalms in musical settings, emblems, works of theology and political polemic.

Reflections on the Psalms

Reflections on the Psalms PDF Author: C. S. Lewis
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006256546X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
A repackaged edition of the revered author’s moving theological work in which he considers the most poetic portions from Scripture and what they tell us about God, the Bible, and faith. In this wise and enlightening book, C. S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—examines the Psalms. As Lewis divines the meaning behind these timeless poetic verses, he makes clear their significance in our daily lives, and reminds us of their power to illuminate moments of grace.

Glossing the Psalms

Glossing the Psalms PDF Author: Alderik H. Blom
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110501864
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
This study proposes a new view of glossing as a universal phenomenon. Starting from the Psalter, a centrepiece of devotion and education in early medieval Europe, it combines historical sociolinguistics, comparative philology, manuscript studies and cultural history in order to assess and compare the interface of Latin with Old Irish, Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old High German within the context of its multilingual and textual culture. The close study of thirteen glossed manuscripts, such as the Anglo-Saxon Vespasian Psalter and the Old Irish Milan Glosses, reveals when and why scribes switched from Latin into the vernacular, how the vernacular was used in studying Latin, how glosses interact with construe marks and punctuation, and how such manuscripts were intended to be read in a period covering the seventh to the twelfth centuries and in an area stretching from Ireland to Central Europe. The book is an essential textbook for specialists in the growing field of glossing, and also reaches out to scholars of early medieval liturgy, education, palaeography and Christian literature.

Medieval Autographies

Medieval Autographies PDF Author: A. C. Spearing
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 026809280X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
In Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the roles and functions of the “I” as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it "autography.” He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in and commentaries on third-person narratives, and descendants of the dit, a genre of French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, and a concern with writing and textuality. Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, Winner and Waster, the book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue as a textual performance, and devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes prologue, his Complaint and Dialogue, and the witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham’s legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of the concept of autography, including discussion of the intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in Troilus and Criseyde and Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine.

England in Europe

England in Europe PDF Author: Elizabeth Muir Tyler
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487513380
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
In England in Europe, Elizabeth Tyler focuses on two histories: the Encomium Emmae Reginae, written for Emma the wife of the Æthelred II and Cnut, and The Life of King Edward, written for Edith the wife of Edward the Confessor. Tyler offers a bold literary and historical analysis of both texts and reveals how the two queens actively engaged in the patronage of history-writing and poetry to exercise their royal authority. Tyler’s innovative combination of attention to intertextuality and regard for social networks emphasizes the role of women at the centre of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman court literature. In doing so, she argues that both Emma and Edith’s negotiation of conquests and factionalism created powerful models of queenly patronage that were subsequently adopted by individuals such as Queen Margaret of Scotland, Countess Adela of Blois, Queen Edith/Matilda, and Queen Adeliza. England in Europe sheds new lighton the connections between English, French, and Flemish history-writing and poetry and illustrates the key role Anglo-Saxon literary culture played in European literature long after 1066.

Voice in Later Medieval English Literature

Voice in Later Medieval English Literature PDF Author: David Lawton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198792409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
David Lawton approaches later medieval English vernacular culture in terms of voice. As texts and discourses shift in translation and in use from one language to another, antecedent texts are revoiced in ways that recreate them (as "public interiorities") without effacing their history or future. The approach yields important insights into the voice work of late medieval poets, especially Langland and Chaucer, and also their fifteenth-century successors, who treat their work as they have treated their precursors. It also helps illuminate vernacular religious writing and its aspirations, and it addresses literary and cultural change, such as the effect of censorship and increasing political instability in and beyond the fifteenth century. Lawton also proposes his emphasis on voice as a literary tool of broad application, and his book has a bold and comparative sweep that encompasses the Pauline letters, Augustine's Confessions, the classical precedents of Virgil and Ovid, medieval contemporaries like Machaut and Petrarch, extra-literary artists like Monteverdi, later poets such as Wordsworth, Heaney, and Paul Valery, and moderns such as Jarry and Proust. What justifies such parallels, the author claims, is that late medieval texts constitute the foundation of a literary history of voice that extends to modernity. The book's energy is therefore devoted to the transformative reading of later medieval texts, in order to show their original and ongoing importance as voice work.

Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature

Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature PDF Author: Jane Tolmie
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN: 9782503528588
Category : Bereavement in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This is a collection of essays on the subject of lament in the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on parental grief. The analysis of texts about pain and grief is an increasingly important area in medieval studies, offering as it does a mean of exploring the ways in which cultural meanings arise from loss and processes of mourning. Scholars from Canada, the USA, New Zealand, the UK, and elsewhere, have come together to produce a volume with a coherent thematic focus and a primary investment in Northern European medieval texts.