1,720,977 research outputs found
Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England and France: The Transmission and Reception of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'Amours and Thomas Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid
No full textAuthor, Scribe, and Book in Late Medieval English Literature
No full textThomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, John Audelay, and Charles d'Orléans present themselves as the makers not only of their texts, but also of the books that transmitted their writing. This study argues that they elaborated a "self-publishing pose" with the aim of regaining their audiences' confidence in the face of the compromised social, physical, and material conditions they inhabited. I show that while the strategies of self-presentation that these authors develop draw on trends in contemporary literature and book history (such as the proliferation of the "go, litel bok" motif and the increasing popularity of the single-author codex), their approach to writing differs fundamentally from that pursued by their immediate predecessors, Chaucer and Gower, and by their most prominent peer, Lydgate. Rather, in their unusual insistence on their co-identity with their manuscripts, they demonstrate a new awareness of the socially instrumental potential of English writing
French Lessons in Late-Medieval England
No full textFrench Lessons in Late-Medieval England presents two fifteenth-century manuals designed to support facility in French among the English, the Liber donati and Commune parlance. These texts treat the grammar, lexis, and orthography of French as well as compiling a selection of entertaining dialogues that model the language in action. Together, they paint a vivid picture of the kinds of French that English learners might desire to wield and of the high levels of fluency that they could achieve. Critten's comprehensive introduction discusses his materials' relevance both for histories of language education and for recent reassessments of the longevity of French in medieval England. His pairing of first-time modern-English translations with facing-page original text makes these fascinating works newly available for a twenty-first-century audience
French Lessons in Late-Medieval England
No full textFrench teaching - medieval;French of medieval England;manières de langag
French Lessons in Late-Medieval England
No full textFrench Lessons in Late-Medieval England presents two fifteenth-century manuals designed to support facility in French among the English, the Liber donati and Commune parlance. These texts treat the grammar, lexis, and orthography of French as well as compiling a selection of entertaining dialogues that model the language in action. Together, they paint a vivid picture of the kinds of French that English learners might desire to wield and of the high levels of fluency that they could achieve. Critten's comprehensive introduction discusses his materials' relevance both for histories of language education and for recent reassessments of the longevity of French in medieval England. His pairing of first-time modern-English translations with facing-page original text makes these fascinating works newly available for a twenty-first-century audience
The Power of Words in Late Medieval Devotional and Mystical Writing: Essays in Honour of Denis Renevey
No full textThis volume offers a series of essays focusing on the power of words. Contributors address the centrality of language to devotional and mystical experience as well as the attitudes towards language fostered by devotional and mystical practices. The essays are arranged under four subheadings: (1) “Other Words: Figures and Metaphors,” treating the application of the languages of romantic love, medicine, and travel to descriptions of devotional and mystical experience; (2) “Iconic Words: Images and the Name of Jesus,” considering the deployment of words and the Word (Jesus) as powerful images in devotional practice; (3) “Testing Words: Syntax and Semantics,” exploring the ways in which medieval writers stretch the conventions of language to achieve fresh perspectives on devotional and mystical experiences; and (4) “Beyond Words: The Apophatic and The Senses,” offering novel perspectives on a group of texts that address the difficulty of expressing God and visionary experience with words.
The volume’s global purpose is to demonstrate the attractions of an explicitly philological approach for scholars studying the Christian tradition
French Didactics in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: Thinking Historically about Method
No full textRecent commentators on the history of French education in medieval and early modern England argue that translation played a major part in the instruction of the language across both periods. In contrast, this essay demonstrates that the prevalence of the technique in medieval French teaching is difficult to prove and that monolingual methods of instruction are equally likely to have been pursued, perhaps especially by those French teachers about whom we know the most, the Oxford dictatores. The argument highlights the sensitivity of both medieval and early modern teachers to the shifting material, linguistic, social, and geopolitical conditions that shaped the requirements of their students and defined the possibilities for instruction. As such, it illustrates the usefulness of a history of language learning and teaching that considers method as the product of a series of localized responses to particular teaching situations as well as of a teleological process of refinement and reform
A Queer Omission in Sir Orfeo
No full textSir Orfeo is a Middle English retelling of the Orpheus myth that allows the hero to keep his bride. This paper counters readings of the poem as a vindication of married love by focusing on its reception in the shadow of a significant omission: both Virgil and Ovid state that after losing Eurydice, Orpheus gave up loving women; Ovid adds that Orpheus loved boys. The significance of these missing conclusions is explored for readers of the poem from its scribes to their patrons and their patrons’ families. The paper shows the usefulness of a reception-oriented approach for queer readings of the text
The Exploitation of French-English Lexical Transfer in Early Middle English Poetry
No full textThis paper considers the different ways in which Early Middle English poetry deploys recent French loanwords. It argues that the associations attaching to these words change depending on the contexts in which they are situated. Focusing on four examples, two from the Auchinleck Manuscript and two from Harley 2253, it shows Middle English poems using French words in order to depict French identities; to elaborate political critique within England; to develop satirical portraits of characters beneath the ranks of the nobility and the gentry; and to stretch readers’ imaginations to the corners of the known world. Recent French loans are identified using the first dates of attestation recorded in the Middle English Dictionary; an ancillary aim of the paper is to show how historical dictionaries can be used to establish the lexical expectations of medieval audiences. The argument’s debts to historical linguistic scholarship are great but the paper claims that poetry deserves to be considered a text-type apart from the more pragmatic documents that historical linguists now normally treat
The Manières de Langage as Evidence for the Use of Spoken French Within Fifteenth-Century England
No full textThis article examines what a group of medieval conversation manuals designed to teach spoken French to the English – the manières de langage – can tell us about the use of spoken French within late medieval England. Beginning with the observation that several of the manières dialogues are set in England, it argues that the manières model the French required to interact with three groups of in-coming French-speakers on English soil: travellers, merchants and artisans, and agricultural labourers. The approach pursued complements previous studies of the manières, including my own, which have established their fitness for preparing English learners of French to use French on the Continent. At the same time as the argument addresses the topics of French pedagogy and French acquisition in late medieval England, it thus also contributes to developing understandings of late medieval English multilingualism and of intercultural contact within late medieval England
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