Product Description: A mostly theoretical and philosophical examination of the concept of beginnings in medieval literature, notably in Piers Plowman , as well as grammar, rhetoric, physics, theology and genealogy. Smith focuses on the ways in which texts begin and how the initiative of beginning, heralded as a call for action, is maintained...read more

Product Description: The Charters of Christ seek to prove human salvation by closely imitating the form and language of feudal grants of land. Their use of Latin, Middle English, and pictorial elements makes them accessible to a variety of audiences. In Piers Plowman, on the other hand, charters may appear to grant pardon or salvation, but in the end they fail to provide real assurance...read more

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Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award The Middle English lyric occupies a place of considerable importance in the history of English literature. Here, for the first time in English, are found many features of formal and thematic importance: they include rhyme scheme, stanzaic form, the carol genre, love poetry in the manner of the troubadour poets, and devotional poems focusing on the love, suffering and compassion of Christ and the Virgin Mary. The essays in this volume aim to provide both background information on and new assessments of the lyric. By treating Middle English lyrics chapter by chapter according to their kinds - poems dealing with love, with religious devotion, with moral, political and popular themes, and those associated with preaching - it provides the awareness of their characteristic cultural contexts and literary modalities necessary for an informed critical reading. Full account is taken of the scholarship upon which our knowledge of these lyrics rests, especially the outstanding contributions of the last few decades and such recent insights as those of gender criticism. Also included are detailed discussions of the valuable information afforded by the widely varying manuscript contexts in which Middle English lyrics survive and of the diverse issues involved in editing these texts. Separate chapters are devoted to the carol, which came to prominence in the fifteenth century, and to Middle Scots lyrics which, at the end of the Middle English lyric tradition, present some sophisticated productions of an entirely new order.BR> Contributors: Julia Boffey, Thomas G. Duncan, John Scattergood, Vincent Gillespie, Christiania Whitehead, Douglas Gray, Karl Reichl, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Alan J. Fletcher, Bernard O'Donoghue, Sarah Stanbury and Alasdair A. MacDonald.

Product Description: Purgatory has been the focus of much literary and historical attention since Jacques Le Goff's important Naissance du Purgatoire(1981), but this is the first book-length study to trace its development, reception and influence in Middle English literature...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This study charts and analyzes the stylistic, ideological, and human signifiers of a general crisis of rhetoric and discourse: shifting genres and resolutions; parataxis; contradiction, recycling, and repetition. The style, structure and dialogic pattern of meanings of William Langland's Piers Plowman are the starting points of an inquiry into the contradictions of cultures and societies in transition...read more

Product Description: A Game of Heuene is a stylistic study of word play in the B-version of the Middle English narrative poem, Piers Plowman. In a close reading of Passus I, IX, XI, and XVIII, Davlin shows the frequency of word play and its effectiveness in multiplying meaning, developing themes, and suggesting relationships...read more

Product Description: William Langland was, in an entirely different way, as great a poet as his contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer. Langland's Piers Plowman, his life's work, most often sounds like an odd mixture of dream-vision, satire, sermon, and allegory, as if its purpose were aggressively didactic...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. 1st Edition. x, 256 p. Very good clean tight sound square, no bookplate, inscriptions or marks of any kind. In pictorial paperback with one light crease to spine, marvellous Jonah and the Whale illustration from 13th century bible to upper...read more