Pilgrims’ Texts

This chapter explores reading and writing on the move, through the transnational medium of pilgrims’ books. It considers literary writing about pilgrimage by the likes of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer; a printed indulgence sold to pilgrims the shrine of St Cornelius in St Margaret’s Church at Westminster; and the routes taken, books read, and texts produced by particular medieval pilgrims, including Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV of England. The chapter examines the ways in which pilgrimage was a stimulus to writing as well as to reading, and was a process that put the material facets of textual production into a variety of dynamic and often surprising relations with communities of readers and writers.

World of Echo

Between late antiquity and the fifteenth century, theologians, philosophers, and poets struggled to articulate the correct relationship between sound and sense, creating taxonomies of sounds based on their capacity to carry meaning. This book traces how medieval thinkers adopted the concept of noise as a mode of lay understanding grounded in the body and the senses. With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, the book examines a range of literary genres to highlight the poetic and social effects of this vibrant discourse, offering close readings of works by Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, as well as the mystics Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe. Each of these writers embraced an embodied experience of language resistant to clear articulation, even as their work reflects inherited anxieties about the appeal of such sensations. A preoccupation with the sound of language emerged in the form of poetic soundplay at the same time that mysticism and other forms of lay piety began to flower in England. As the book shows, the presence of such emphatic aural texture amplified the cognitive importance of feeling in conjunction with reason and was a means for the laity — including lay women — to cultivate embodied forms of knowledge on their own terms, in precarious relation to existing clerical models of instruction. The book offers a deep history of the cultural and social hierarchies that coalesce around aesthetic experience and gives voice to alternate ways of knowing.

ON LITERATURE AND GRAMMAR: A Selection of Annotated Medieval and Renaissance English Texts for (Spanish) University Students

On Literature and Grammar gives students and instructors a carefully thought experience to combine their learning of Middle and Early Modern English and Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. The selection of texts, which include the most commonly taught works in university curricula, allows readers to understand and enjoy the evolution of the English language and the main writers and works of these periods, from William Langland to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and from Christopher Marlowe to William Shakespeare. Fully annotated and written to answer the real needs of current Spanish university students, these teachable texts include word-by-word translations into Present Day English and precise introductions to their linguistic and literary contexts.

‘A Very Perfect Forme of a Will’

In the late medieval and early modern periods, the last will and testament was not just a legal document; it was also a kind of literature. A range of poems and prose that engaged with the conventions of the legal last will became a feature of writing in English from the fourteenth century onwards. Sometimes fictional testaments exist as free-standing pieces of writing; often they are found embedded within larger literary texts. They focus on a range of imaginary testators, ranging from figures from myth and history, through notorious contemporaries, and animals, to the devil himself. Bequests were similarly various, including curses, farts, abstract qualities such as peace, and even the body of the testator. This chapter discusses fictional testaments by (amongst others) Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Robert Henryson, George Gascoigne, and Isabella Whitney.

‘Ther are bokes ynowe’: texts and the ambiguities of knowledge in Piers Plowman1

This chapter, by Kath Stevenson, explains that traditions of Christian knowledge are an abiding preoccupation for William Langland in Piers Plowman, with Langland exploring fundamental questions about the pre-eminence or otherwise of abstract learning, textually mediated and transmitted (‘clergie’), over experiential knowledge (‘kynde knowynge’) and about the role of learning in Christian salvation. What good is knowledge? In an age of abstruse academic discourse, in which Langland himself was deeply versed, Langland’s protagonist Will searches urgently for the knowledge that is truly valuable, that is, the knowledge that will enable him to save his soul. Stevenson locates Langland’s ambivalence concerning the efficacy of textually mediated learning within the wider contexts of vernacular theology in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and in particular shows Langland’s treatment of the Passion in the central passus of his poem to be informed by the developing traditions of affective piety. For Langland the Passion can function as a site in which textual and experiential knowledge are united, with abstract intellectual knowledge becoming transfigured as it is fused with ‘kynde knowynge’