Rolle and the Pattern of Tracts in ‘The Pore Caitif’

Traditio ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
pp. 456-465 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Teresa Brady
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Special Group ◽  
Richard Rolle

The anonymous compiler of the fourteenth-century Middle English treatise known as The Pore Caitif made extensive use of three works of Richard Rolle. His borrowings are from Emendatio vitae, The Form of Living, and The Commentary on the Canticles, and appear in eight tracts of a special group of ten pieces he calls ‘summe short sentencis exciting men to heuenli desiir’ (fol. 1v). Passages from Rolle's Form of Living were used in PC, ‘Desiir of Ihesu,’ ‘Of Mekenes,’ and ‘Of Actif Liif and Comtemplatif Liif.’ Sections from Emendatio vitae appear in PC, ‘Of Vertuous Pacience,’ ‘ϸe Councel of Christ,’ ‘Of Temptacioun,’ and ‘Desiir of Ihesu.’ A brief section of Rolle's Commentary on the Canticles is the source of the entire PC tract ‘ϸe Name of Ihesu,’ as Hope Emily Allen suggested in her monumental study of Rolle. A portion of this same source served for the first half of PC, ‘Of Mannes Wille,’ as Michael G. Sargent recently pointed out. The purpose of the present article is to suggest that the compiler of The Pore Caitif was indebted to Rolle not only for specific passages, but for the very schema and arrangement of his ten tracts of short sentences. It is my belief that Rolle's Emendatio vitae and The Form of Living, the two works of which the PC compiler made the most substantive use, were the governing influence on the order and arrangement of the ten short sentences.

Reconstructing ‘John Lelamour’s’ Herbal: The Linguistic Evidence

2017 ◽  
Vol 135 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-699
Author(s):  
David Moreno Olalla
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
Linguistic Variation ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Ample Evidence ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
Linguistic Approach

AbstractTwenty years ago, George R. Keiser showed that the mutilated last quire of Lincoln Cathedral, Dean and Chapter Library, MS 91 had once contained a herbal written in Middle English. He discovered moreover that passages parallel to those reconstructable for the Lincoln manuscript appear in other texts, including an important work called John Lelamour’s Herbal after a name mentioned in its explicit, and concluded that Lelamour, an otherwise unknown fourteenth-century schoolmaster from Hereford, was the author of the original treatise that Thornton and other scribes used for the composition of their own herbals. The present article will present ample evidence which will demonstrate that Keiser’s hypothesis on a Herefordian pedigree for this textual family cannot be sustained any longer, and that the origins of this textual family should in fact be sought not too far from Scotland. A linguistic approach based on a collection of scribal modifications, both unconscious and conscious ones (i. e. copy mistakes and changes made on purpose by the several copyists), will be used for the task. This will reveal how linguistic variation between the several manuscripts can be profitably used to reconstruct the dialect of the original translation, which will here consequently be named Northern Middle English Translation of Macer Floridus’s De Viribus Herbarum (or Northern Macer for short).

Hitherto Unprinted Manuscripts of the Middle English Ipotis

PMLA ◽  
1916 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-160
Author(s):  
Josephine D. Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Poem ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
First Time ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship of the manuscripts of the Middle-English poem Ipotis has been studied in detail by Dr. Hugo Gruber on the basis of the nine mss. known to him. In addition to these there are five others, four of which are printed for the first time below. One of these, unfortunately a fragment, is of the greatest importance, since it carries back the date of the poem at least fifty years. On the basis of the earliest manuscript known to him—ms. Vernon, written about 1385—Gruber assigned the Ipotis to the second half of the fourteenth century. But in the light of the new evidence, the composition of the poem is pushed back to the very beginning of the century.

Zhang Shen’s Comprehensive Explanations on Calligraphy (Fashu Tongshi): A calligraphy companion of the early ming dynasty

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 61-93
Author(s):  
Pietro de Laurentis
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Chinese Calligraphy ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Confucian Scholar

This paper presents an early Ming companion on Chinese calligraphy, the Comprehensive Explanations on Calligraphy (Fashu tongshi 法書通釋) as well as the life of its author Zhang Shen 張紳 (fl. half of the fourteenth century). By analysing the content and the quotations included therein, the present article traces the history and outlines the structure of Zhang’s compendium, while providing also a preliminary translation of the introductory sections of the ten chapters which constitute the entire work. Also, at the same time, through the analysis of biographical materials about the author, Zhang’s life, his official career, personality, and literary works are elucidated. It is concluded that Zhang Shen, an expert classicist as well as a Confucian scholar, whose purpose in his Explanations is to expose and clarify a series of fundamental questions related to the study and practice of calligraphy, which are pertinent to the analysis and interpretation of classical treatises of calligraphy.

scholarly journals Early English meter as a way of thinking

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-65
Author(s):  
Eric Weiskott
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Early English

The second half of the fourteenth century saw a large uptick in the production of literature in English. This essay frames metrical variety and literary experimentation in the late fourteenth century as an opportunity for intellectual history. Beginning from the assumption that verse form is never incidental to the thinking it performs, the essay seeks to test Simon Jarvis’s concept of “prosody as cognition”, formulated with reference to Pope and Wordsworth, against a different literary archive.The essay is organized into three case studies introducing three kinds of metrical practice: the half-line structure in Middle English alliterative meter, the interplay between Latin and English in Piers Plowman, and final -e in Chaucer’s pentameter. The protagonists of the three case studies are the three biggest names in Middle English literature: the Gawain poet, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Shaykh Bālī-Efendi on the ṣafavidsY

1957 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 437-450 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. Minorsky
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Main Subject ◽  
The North ◽  
Northern Side ◽  
North Western

The contents of the document which forms the main subject of the present article are somewhat slender and cannot be appreciated outside the context of the struggles between the Ottomans and the Safavids for the incorporation of the Turkman tribes settled in the territories separating their states. Many points of the situation await further investigation and our summary will be as brief as the complicated subject admits.The home of the Ottoman dynasty was in the north-western corner of Anatolia, but, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the Turks had crossed over to the northern side of the Straits and the Balkan territories became the nursery of the Ottoman empire.

Rolle's ‘Form of Living’ and ‘The Pore Caitif’

Traditio ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 426-435
Author(s):  
Mary Teresa Brady
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Religious Instruction

The compiler of the fourteenth-century Middle English manual of popular religious instruction known as The Pore Caitif was somewhat erratic in his acknowledgment of the sources from which he drew the various sections of his fourteen tracts. Although he excerpted passages from Rolle's Encomium nominis Jesu, Emendatio vitae, and Form of Living, he never mentioned Rolle by name or recorded the titles of the books. In one tract, only, ‘Of Vertuous Patience,’ did he state: ‘Al ϸis sentence seiϸ a seynt in his boke’ (fol. 85r). I have dealt elsewhere with the four Pore Caitif tracts which draw on Rolle's Emendatio vitae. In this paper, I will examine the nature and extent of the indebtedness to The Form of Living.

scholarly journals ‘The Lay Folks' Mass Book’ and Thomas Frederick Simmons: Medievalism and the Tractarians

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 785-804 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID JASPER ◽  
JEREMY SMITH
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
English Text ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Editorial Practice ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Medieval Text ◽  
Early English ◽  
The Church

Thomas Frederick Simmons (1815–84) combined his ecclesiastical duties and liturgical interests with editing the fourteenth-century Middle EnglishLay folks’ mass book(1879) for the Early English Text Society, with the aim of showing the continuity of the English Church from the medieval period through the Reformation. In the light of modern scholarship, this article recontextualises both medieval text and Simmons's own editorial practice, and shows how Simmons, as a second-generation Tractarian churchman, sought in this text – and others associated with it – evidence for the Church of England's Catholic underpinning in an imagined medieval English Church.

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