A Lancastrian Mirror for Princes

A Lancastrian Mirror for Princes PDF

Author: Rosemarie McGerr

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2011-11-15

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0253001986

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This seminal study addresses one of the most beautifully decorated 15th-century copies of the New Statutes of England, uncovering how the manuscript's unique interweaving of legal, religious, and literary discourses frames the reader's perception of the work. Taking internal and external evidence into account, Rosemarie McGerr suggests that the manuscript was made for Prince Edward of Lancaster, transforming a legal reference work into a book of instruction in kingship, as well as a means of celebrating the Lancastrians' rightful claim to the English throne during the Wars of the Roses. A Lancastrian Mirror for Princes also explores the role played by the manuscript as a commentary on royal justice and grace for its later owners and offers modern readers a fascinating example of the long-lasting influence of medieval manuscripts on subsequent readers.

John Gower

John Gower PDF

Author: Russell A. Peck

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1843844745

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New essays on aspects of Gower's poetry, viewed through the lens of the self and beyond.

Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance

Portraying the Prince in the Renaissance PDF

Author: Patrick Baker

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2016-06-20

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 3110473372

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The portrayal of princes plays a central role in the historical literature of the European Renaissance. The sixteen contributions collected in this volume examine such portrayals in a broad variety of historiographical, biographical, and poetic texts. It emerges clearly that historical portrayals were not essentially bound by generic constraints but instead took the form of res gestae or historiae, discrete or collective biographies, panegyric, mirrors for princes, epic poetry, orations, even commonplace books – whatever the occasion called for. Beyond questions of genre, the chapters focus on narrative strategies and the transformation of ancient, medieval, and contemporary authors, as well as on the influence of political, cultural, intellectual, and social contexts. Four broad thematic foci inform the structure of this book: the virtues ascribed to the prince, the cultural and political pretensions inscribed in literary portraits, the historical and literary models on which these portraits were based, and the method that underlay them. The volume is rounded out by a critical summary that considers the portrayal of princes in humanist historiogrpahy from the point of view of transformation theory.

Constitutions and the Classics

Constitutions and the Classics PDF

Author: Denis James Galligan

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 019871498X

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Focusing on major political and legal theorists whose work on constitutional theory had a significant impact, this book unearths an untold story of the development of constitutional thought in the context of the broader political environment.

Medieval Women and Their Objects

Medieval Women and Their Objects PDF

Author: Jennifer Adams

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0472902563

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The essays gathered in this volume present multifaceted considerations of the intersection of objects and gender within the cultural contexts of late medieval France and England. Some take a material view of objects, showing buildings, books, and pictures as sites of gender negotiation and resistance and as extensions of women’s bodies. Others reconsider the concept of objectification in the lives of fictional and historical medieval women by looking closely at their relation to gendered material objects, taken literally as women’s possessions and as figurative manifestations of their desires. The opening section looks at how medieval authors imagined fictional and legendary women using particular objects in ways that reinforce or challenge gender roles. These women bring objects into the orbit of gender identity, employing and relating to them in a literal sense, while also taking advantage of their symbolic meanings. The second section focuses on the use of texts both as objects in their own right and as mechanisms by which other objects are defined. The possessors of objects in these essays lived in the world, their lives documented by historical records, yet like their fictional and legendary counterparts, they too used objects for instrumental ends and with symbolic resonances. The final section considers the objectification of medieval women’s bodies as well as its limits. While this at times seems to allow for a trade in women, authorial attempts to give definitive shapes and boundaries to women’s bodies either complicate the gender boundaries they try to contain or reduce gender to an ideological abstraction. This volume contributes to the ongoing effort to calibrate female agency in the late Middle Ages, honoring the groundbreaking work of Carolyn P. Collette.

Diversity

Diversity PDF

Author: Paul Maurice Clogan

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780847680993

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Volume 22, Diversity, is a special volume in the new series of Medievalia et Humanistica, focusing on the diversity of voices in medieval and early Renaissance literature. Six original articles explore themes of law, art, and piety at all levels of medieval and early Renaissance society, from the common audience of Malory's England to the aristocratic courts of Germany. . In addition to these six original articles, this volume offers two review articles and 28 review notices on 49 recent publications. Scholars, teachers, and students will find this volume presents a sampling of the variety and abundance of medieval and early Renaissance studies today.

The Art of Allusion

The Art of Allusion PDF

Author: Sonja Drimmer

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2018-10-16

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0812250494

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At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture. The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority. Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.

Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England

Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and early Stuart England PDF

Author: Paul Cavill

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2018-07-14

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1526115913

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This volume of essays explores the rise of parliament in the historical imagination of early modern England. The enduring controversy about the nature of parliament informs nearly all debates about the momentous religious, political and governmental changes of the period – most significantly, the character of the Reformation and the causes of the Revolution. Meanwhile, scholars of ideas have emphasised the historicist turn that shaped political culture. Religious and intellectual imperatives from the sixteenth century onwards evoked a new interest in the evolution of parliament, framing the ways that contemporaries interpreted, legitimised and contested Church, state and political hierarchies. Parliamentary ‘history’ is explored through the analysis of chronicles, more overtly ‘literary’ texts, antiquarian scholarship, religious polemic, political pamphlets, and of the intricate processes that forge memory and tradition.