Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture

Essays in Honor of James M. Dean

Edited by Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen - Contributions by Mark Amsler; Craig E. Bertolet; John M. Ganim; Brian Gastle; Erick Kelemen; Scott Lightsey; Kathryn McKinley; Gabrielle Parkin; Karla Taylor; Joseph Turner; Lawrence Warner; R.F. Yeager and Christian Zacher

The essays in this volume consider the ways in which material and intellectual culture both shaped and were shaped by the literature of late medieval England. The first section, “Textual Material,” reflects on cultural and social issues generally referred to as the History of Ideas, and how those ideas manifest in later medieval English texts. Essays address, for example, affect in The Book of Margery Kempe, rhetoric in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anarchy in late medieval political texts, and temporality in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. The essays in the second section, “Material Texts,” examine physical objects – from pilgrim badges, to manuscripts, to money, to early printed editions – and the cultural behaviors associated with them, interpreting these objects and exploring their connections to the important literary and political texts of the age such as Piers Plowman, Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. All of the essays in this collection emerge from the relationships and connections between the issues that characterize Jim Dean’s work: the cultural, material, and aesthetic aspects of later medieval English literature. So too do they reflect a movement in medieval literary studies presaged by Dean’s career of scholarship and teaching, that critical approaches to literary texts are best undertaken with an understanding of the complex cultural and historical milieu that defines both the production of those texts and the production of our own work on those texts.

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 268 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61149-676-5 • Hardback • April 2018 • $140.00 • (£108.00)

978-1-61149-677-2 • eBook • April 2018 • $133.00 • (£102.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Medieval, Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture

Essays in Honor of James M. Dean

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The essays in this volume consider the ways in which material and intellectual culture both shaped and were shaped by the literature of late medieval England. The first section, “Textual Material,” reflects on cultural and social issues generally referred to as the History of Ideas, and how those ideas manifest in later medieval English texts. Essays address, for example, affect in The Book of Margery Kempe, rhetoric in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, anarchy in late medieval political texts, and temporality in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. The essays in the second section, “Material Texts,” examine physical objects – from pilgrim badges, to manuscripts, to money, to early printed editions – and the cultural behaviors associated with them, interpreting these objects and exploring their connections to the important literary and political texts of the age such as Piers Plowman, Lydgate’s Troy Book, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. All of the essays in this collection emerge from the relationships and connections between the issues that characterize Jim Dean’s work: the cultural, material, and aesthetic aspects of later medieval English literature. So too do they reflect a movement in medieval literary studies presaged by Dean’s career of scholarship and teaching, that critical approaches to literary texts are best undertaken with an understanding of the complex cultural and historical milieu that defines both the production of those texts and the production of our own work on those texts.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / University of Delaware Press

Pages: 268 • Trim: 6 x 9

978-1-61149-676-5 • Hardback • April 2018 • $140.00 • (£108.00)

978-1-61149-677-2 • eBook • April 2018 • $133.00 • (£102.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Medieval, Literary Criticism / Ancient & Classical, Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh

Author

Brian Gastle is professor of English at Western Carolina University.

Erick Kelemen taught at Wabash College, the University of Missouri, the University of Kentucky, and Fordham University.

Table of Contents

Dedication
List of Figures
Introduction
Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen
Part I. Textual Material
1. More Than Words Can Say?: Late Medieval Affective Vocabularies
Mark Amsler
2. The Motives of Reeds: The Wife of Bath’s Midas and Literary Tradition
Karla Taylor
3. A Taxonomy of Medieval English Travel Writings
Christian K. Zacher
4.Lady Bertilak and the Rhetoric of Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Joseph Turner
5. Anarchy in the UK: Chaos and Community in Late Medieval Political Writings
John M. Ganim
6. Amans the Memorious
R.F. Yeager
Part II. Material Texts
7. Ampullae and Badges: Pilgrim Paraphernalia in Late Medieval England
Kathryn McKinley
8. “Of crafty bildyng & werkyng most roial”: Lydgate’s Allusions to the Crafts
and the Role of Making in Medieval Civic Poetry
Scott Lightsey
9. Read with Your Hands and Not with Your Eyes: Touching Books of Hours
Gabrielle Parkin
10. The Tales of Two Transactions: The Franklin, the Shipman, Feudalism,
and the Medieval Atlantic Maritime World System
Craig E. Bertolet
11. Owen Rogers and Piers Plowman’s Crede, 1561: A Census of STC 19908
Lawrence Warner
Bibliography
Contributors