Daniel Birkholz. Harley Manuscript Geographies: Literary History and the Medieval Miscellany. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture 35. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Pp. 344. $120.00 (cloth).

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 944-946
Author(s):  
Wendy Scase
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature

The Orchard of Syon: An Introduction

Traditio ◽  
1958 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 269-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sister Mary Denise
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Devotional Literature ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Spiritual Climate ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

By some inexplicable accident of literary history, The Orchard of Syon, in the nearly five hundred years of its existence, has not found its critical editor, nor is there any study of it available to readers. The first to rescue it from oblivion was Sir Richard Sutton, steward of Syon Monastery in the early sixteenth century, who, as Wynkyn de Worde informs us, found it ‘in a corner by it selfe’ and deemed it worthy of costly publication. Although it belongs to a body of medieval literature which has been in recent years the object of much critical research by medievalists, the work has, so far as modern readers are concerned, continued for over four centuries to lie ‘in a corner by it selfe.’ The energetic surge of vernacular devotional prose in the fourteenth century, not only in England, but in Italy, Germany, and Flanders — countries whose spiritual climate must have been especially favorable to mysticism — did not recede in the fifteenth century. Following upon the age of Chaucer, this century may seem to some present-day scholars literarily poor and unproductive, but it was a great age of English prose; an age, that is, when translations and experiments with original prose in the vernacular were building on the past, borrowing from other languages to meet the needs of the present, and shaping the prose of the future. The Orchard of Syon is an important specimen of this emerging prose, as well as of current devotional literature. Its connection with Syon Monastery, renowned in the history of England and of the Church, gives it added prestige.

Literary Histories

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Lerer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Literary History ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Heinrich Heine ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Literary Histories

Literary history has had a mixed history among the readers and the writers of the European traditions. For William Warburton, an eighteenth-century ecclesiast and critic, literary history was “the most agreeable subject in the world.” However, the early nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine describes literary history as a “morgue where each seeks out the friend he most loved.” The complex connotation of literary history stems in part from the modern European understanding of the place of literature in the formation of national identity. This article examines how the history of medieval literature was received during the Renaissance. It first looks at the regulations of late Henrician reading, particularly the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, before focusing on Miles Hogarde and his poetry. It then discusses Richard Tottel’sMiscellanyin the context of English literature and its past, along with the poetry of love and loss that follows Tottel.

scholarly journals Maidens, Magic, and Manipulation: The Female Presence in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur

2014 ◽  
pp. 89-93
Author(s):  
Karen Moloney
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Round Table ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
Morte Darthur ◽  
Female Presence ◽  
Primary Focus

The legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are preeminent in medieval lore, as literary history celebrates these valiant knights on their illustrious quests; these crusades, however, were very often affected, or even entirely motived, by love, lust, or a damsel in distress. What of those women whom these knights loved and lost, or feared and fought? A distinctly male presence remains the primary focus of medieval literature; my work aims to explore how the dynamic of these medieval texts is influenced and motivated by the consequences of female endeavours, in terms of an autonomous feminine presence in the narrative world, and the authority with which this is presented. My focus lies primarily with an exploration of this female form in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, a fifteenth-century text which presents the Arthurian world governed by the king and his renowned company of knights, based on ...

Vergil und das Epische Erzählen

2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-51
Author(s):  
Florian Kragl
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
True Time ◽  
The Middle Ages

The article discusses Jan-Dirk Müller’s concept of ›epic narration‹ with respect to the dominant Virgilian tradition during the Middle Ages. Müller’s ›epic narration‹ is defined as a quasi-autochthonous vernacular mode of medieval, (at least seemingly) archaic narration, strictly distinct from the, so-to-speak, Virgilian world of the litterati, and closely resembling everyday conversation: ›Epic narration‹ is narration in the presence of narrator and audience; it unfolds common narrative knowledge; the narrated past and the presence of narration are closely intertwined; what is told, is simply true; time and space are organized primitively via deictic markers; the themes are, even if Müller somewhat skips that point, martial and belligerent. The article argues that Virgil’s Aeneid is no counterpart to that mode of ›epic narration‹, but that it participates in this more or less universal concept, albeit as its most sublime refinement. Virgil overcomes primitive ›epic narration‹ artistically by means of an unrivalled poetic perfection. This particular observation on the Aeneid poses severe questions to literary history. Even the vernacular poems offer no ›pure‹ ›epic narration‹, and Virgil’s epic in particular (as well as the Latin tradition in general, including Servius, Statius, Ovid etc) was most likely known to (most of the) vernacular poets. Hence, the idea of vernacular autonomy appears highly problematic. To put it bluntly, is the ›epic narration‹ of medieval literature an autochthonous vernacular mode, or does it, like so many other things, sprout in the long shadow of the Aeneid? Reflecting Müller’s ›epic narration‹ from a Virgilian perspective inevitably provokes a profound revision of medieval literary history.

English alliterative verse: Poetic tradition and literary history Cambridge studies in medieval literature [Book Review]

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 151-152
Author(s):  
Jennifer Hekmeijer
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Alliterative Verse

Review(s) of: English alliterative verse: Poetic tradition and literary history Cambridge studies in medieval literature, by Weiskott, Eric, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) hardcover, xiv + 133 pages, RRP AUD 41.95; ISBN: 9781107169654.

scholarly journals The Vogue of Guy of Warwick from the Close of the Middle Ages to the Romantic Revival

PMLA ◽  
1915 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-194
Author(s):  
Ronald S. Crane
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Preliminary Treatment ◽  
Lives Of Saints ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Successive Generations ◽  
The Middle Ages

Among the questions which still await investigation in the literary history of sixteenth and seventeenth century England, not the least important is that of the survival of the vernacular writings of the Middle Ages. No one can have studied the records of publishing activities during the Tudor and Stuart periods without becoming aware that a considerable number of the romances, tales, poems, chronicles, lives of saints of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries still continued to circulate, and to find, though probably in ever smaller numbers, appreciative readers. Nor can anyone who has noted this persistence of medieval literature beyond the Middle Ages fail to draw from it inferences not a little damaging to our current conceptions of sixteenth and seventeenth century taste. As yet, however, no historian of literature has dealt with the problem in a systematic or detailed way—no one has tried to set clearly before us precisely which works, out of the total body of medieval writings, remained in vogue, how long the popularity of each of them lasted, how far they were modified in form or content to suit the taste of successive generations, by what sort of “public” they were read, and of what nature was the influence which they exercised upon the newer writers. Some day perhaps we shall have such a history of the survival of medieval literature in early modern England. In the meantime, as a preliminary treatment of a single phase of the subject, the present study of Guy of Warwick may not be without its interest. It proposes to trace from the days of the early printers to the close of the eighteenth century the fortunes of but one—though perhaps the most typical one—of the many romances whose popularity survived the Middle Ages.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document