Eamon Duffy

Peter Biller

Alastair J. Minnis

Customer Alastair J Alastair J Minnis

Senior Lecturer in History Peter Biller

GB). Centre for Medieval Studies. Conference (1995 : York) University of York (York

An introductory essay by Peter Biller on medieval and contemporary concerns with the body is followed by Alcuin Blamire's examination of the paradoxes inherent in the metaphor of man as head, woman as body, in authors ranging from St Augustine to Christine de Pizan. Peter Abelard, a writer who 'dislocated' this image, is the principal figure of the next two papers. David Luscombe's study looks successively at Abelard's view of the role of senses in relation to thought and mind, the problem of body in resurrected beings, and dualities in his correspondence with Heloise. W.G.

Medieval Theology and the Natural Body

Responses and Reassessments

Gower's Confessio Amantis

University of York. Centre for Medieval Studies

Penance and confession were an integral part of medieval religious life; essays explore literary evidence.

Confession in the Middle Ages

Handling Sin

Tim William Machan

Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae was among the most persistent and extensive influences on Chaucer’s writing. Its ideas appear in various works, including the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, while the so-called Boethian balades offer poetic renditions of small sections of the Consolation. Around 1380 Chaucer translated the whole of the Consolation into English, drawing not only on the Latin Vulgate Consolatio but also on Jean de Meun’s French translation (Li Livres de confort de philosophie) and on Nicholas Trevet’s Latin commentary on the Consolatio. Sources of the Boece will be particularly valuable for Chaucer studies, for it makes available for the first time copies of all Chaucer’s sources for his translation: newly edited, complete, facing-page texts of the Vulgate Consolatio and Meun’s translation, along with relevant extracts from the commentaries of Nicholas Trevet and Remigius of Auxerre and collations from the larger Latin and French traditions. The edition thus enables detailed, comparative studies of Chaucer’s use of his sources and provides additional material for assessing his understanding of Boethius’s ideas and how they figure in his other compositions. More generally, the very format of the edition will facilitate the study of translation in the Middle Ages, when writers worked not from standardized editions like the ones modern scholars consult but from variable and sometimes conflicting traditions. Chaucer’s procedures provide insights into medieval notions of textuality and vernacular authorship, issues that are perennial scholarly concerns.

Sources of the Boece

The Roman de la Rose was a major bestseller - largely due to its robust treatment of 'natural' sexuality. This study concentrates on the ways in which Jean de Meun, in imitation of Ovid, assumed the mock-magisterium (or mastership) of love. From Latin texts and literary theory Jean derived many hermeneutic rationales and generic categorizations, without allowing any one to dominate. Alastair J. Minnis considers allegorical versus literalistic expression in the poem, its competing discourses of allegorical covering and satiric stripping, Jean's provocative use of plain and sometimes obscene language in a widely accessible French work, the challenge of its homosocial and perhaps even homoerotic constructions, the subversive effects of coital comedy within a text characterized by intermittent aspirations to moral and scientific truth, and - placing the Rose's reception within the European history of vernacular hermeneutics - the problematic translation of literary authority from Latin into the vulgar tongue.

Magister Amoris: The Roman de la Rose and Vernacular Hermeneutics

John Anthony Burrow

Thorlac Turville-Petre

Charlotte C. Morse

Professor and Head Department of English and Related Literature A J Minnis

Essays on Ricardian Literature develops issues and themes first broached in John Burrow's ground-breaking book Ricardian Poetry and incorporates a bibliography of his published writings, which have revolutionized critical appreciation of medieval literature. The contributors to this volume, all leading scholars in the field, explore such areas as the status of Anglo-Latin and the influence of French culture on the Ricardian court, offer radicalre-readings of some more familiar works, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Patience, and demonstrate how closely the literature of the period is bound up with political and social conditions.

Essays on Ricardian Literature in Honour of J.A. Burrow

While literary scholars have insisted on the need to understand works of medieval literature in their historical context, medieval historians themselves have rarely contributed to modern attempts to show how works of imaginative literature engaged with the conflicts and controversies of their own day. This volume brings together 25 experts in the history of fourteenth-century England and asks them to discuss one of the most famous works of Middle Englishliterature- -Geoffrey Chaucer's 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales--in relation to the economic change, social issues, and religious controversies of the period. Beginning with a survey of recentdebates about the social meaning of Chaucer's work, the volume then discusses each of the Canterbury pilgrims in turn. The book should be of interest to all scholars and students of medieval culture whether they are specialists in literature or history.

The 'General Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales

Historians on Chaucer

Rosalynn Voaden

Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition offers the first wide-ranging study of the remarkable women who contributed to the efflorescence of female piety and visionary experience in Europe between 1100 and 1500. This volume offers essays by prominent scholars in the field which extend the boundaries of our previous knowledge and understanding of medieval holy women. While some essays provide new perspectives on the familiar names of the unofficial canon of mulieres sanctae, many others bring into the spotlight women less familiar now, but influential in their own time and richly deserving of scholarly attention. The five general essays establish a context for understanding the issues affecting female religious witness in the later Middle Ages. The geographical arrangement of the volume allows the reader to develop an awareness of the particular cultural and religious forces in seven different regions and to recognize how these influenced the writing and reception of the holy women of that area. Seventeen major figures have essays devoted exclusively to each of them; in addition, the survey chapters on each region introduce the reader to many more. The extensive bibliographies which follow each chapter encourage further reading and study.

Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition C. 1100-c. 1500

David Wallace

A. Brian Scott

This anthology of texts in translation, here presented in a fully revised and updated form, covers the single most important branch of medieval literary theory and criticism, the commentary tradition, in one of the most significant periods of its development. The majority of the texts are heretranslated for the first time; most of the translations have been prepared specially for this edition. They offer discussion of such topics as fiction and fable (in classical poetry and in the Bible); the ethical effects and purpose of literature; authorship and authority; the function of biographyin literary interpretation; stylistic and didactic modes of writing; literary form and structure; allegory and literal-historical sense; symbolism; imagination and imagery; the semiotics of words and things, the moralization of classical texts; the status of poetry within the hierarchy of the humanarts and sciences; and the prestige and purpose of vernacular literature. The selections are fully annotated and provided with introductions which form a linked series of essays towards the history of medieval literary theory and criticism.

The Commentary-tradition

Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism C.1100 - C.1375

Louis Menand

A. Walton Litz

Glyn P. Norton

George Alexander Kennedy

Christa Knellwolf

Lawrence S. Rainey

Christopher Norris

Marshall Brown

Claude Julien Rawson

Maynard Mack Professor of English Claude Rawson

Jessica Osborn

Hugh Barr Nisbet

Ian Richard Johnson

Raman Selden

Rafey Habib

Christa Knellwolf King

This 1999 volume is the standard work of reference on early modern literary criticism in Europe.

The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 3, The Renaissance

Professor Minnis argues that the paganism in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Taleis not simply a backdrop but must be central to our understanding of the texts. Chaucer's two great pagan poems, l>Troilus and Criseyde/l> and l>The Knight's Tale/l>, belong to the literary genre known as the `romance of antiquity' (which first appeard in the mid 12th century), in which the ancient pagan world is shown on its own terms, without the blatant Christian bias against paganism characteristic of works like the l>Chanson de Roland/l>, where the writer is concerned with present-day rather than classical forms of paganism. Chaucer's attitudes to antiquity were influenced, but not determined, by those found in the compilations, commentaries, mythographies and history books which we know that he knew. These sources illuminate the manner in which he transformed Boccaccio. Much modern criticism has concentrated on the medieval veneer of manners and fashions which are ascribed to the heathen protagonists of l>Troilus/l> and l>The Knight's Tale/l>; Dr Minnis examines the other side of the coin, Chaucer's historical interest in cultures very different from his own. The paganism in these poems is not mere background and setting, but an essential part of their overall meaning.

Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity

Alastair J. Minnis

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