Liturgy

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Holsinger
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
English Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early English ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Common Prayer

In medieval England, liturgy was a looming presence in so many aspects of English literary production. Yet many fundamental questions concerning the relationship between liturgy and vernacular literary production have remained unaddressed. This article explores the liturgical character of Middle English literature and how liturgy links the pre- and post-Conquest eras. In pursuing a liturgical history of early English writing, it outlines a detheologizing vision of liturgy and its objects. It also discusses the phenomenology of the modern theologized category of the “service book,” how previous theologizing habits of liturgical understanding have affected the Middle English religious lyric, and the writing and dissemination of the Book of Common Prayer.

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.

Feeling

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah McNamer
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Sir Gawain ◽  
History Of Emotion ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
A Site ◽  
Opening Up

The past few decades have witnessed a surge of interest in emotion as a subject of study across the disciplines. This has generated important interdisciplinary conversations, opening up new methodologies and new fields, including a field with special relevance to medievalists -- the history of emotion. How can specialists in Middle English literature contribute in more visible and fruitful ways to the history of emotion? This article gestures towards some ways of bridging the disciplinary divide between literature and the history of emotion. It advocates an approach that does not dismiss, but embraces, the "literariness" of literature as a site for the making of emotion in history. It invites Middle English scholars to consider literary texts as scripts for the production of feeling, and it explains how the concepts of performance and performativity can generate new ways of thinking about emotion historically. Finally, it illustrates a method for reading Middle English texts as scripts for the making of emotion in history by analyzing two texts, The Wooing of Our Lord and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in their historical contexts.

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 444-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Downes ◽  
Rebecca F. McNamara
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
History Of

Literature and Law in Medieval England

PMLA ◽  
1977 ◽  
Vol 92 (5) ◽  
pp. 941-951 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Alford
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Middle English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval Literature ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Literature And Law

The use of law in Middle English literature is not extraneous but grows naturally out of a profound faith in law as the tie that binds all things, in heaven and in earth: all law—divine, natural, and human—is, in essence, one law. Hence, Christ's victory over Satan is dramatized in the language of Westminster, the promise of salvation is seen in terms of the emerging law of contracts, and our place in heaven is treated as real estate. The process is seen most clearly in the Château d'Amour, Piers Plowman, Pearl, and “Quia Amore Langueo.” With the disintegration of the belief in a single, coherent law, however, the legal metaphor lost most of its force and economy. As heirs of that disintegration, we must be careful not to impose it unwittingly on Medieval literature and thus fragment a vision that was whole.

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