Forms Of Devotion In Early English Poetry
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Forms of Devotion in Early English Poetry
Author: Jennifer A. Lorden
language: en
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Release Date: 2023-11-02
Jennifer Lorden reveals the importance of deeply-felt religious devotion centuries before it is commonly said to arise. Her ground-breaking study establishes the hybrid poetics that embodied its form for medieval readers, while obscuring it from modern scholars. Working across the divide between Old and Middle English, she shows how conventions of earlier English poetry recombine with new literary conventions after the Norman Conquest. These new conventions—for example, love lyric repurposed as devotional song—created hybrid aesthetics more familiar to modern scholars. She argues that this aesthetic, as much as changing devotional practice, rendered later affective piety recognizable in a way that earlier affective devotional conventions were not. Forms of Devotion reconsiders the roots and branches of poetic topoi, revising commonplaces of literary and religious history. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
The Hermeneutics of Distraction in Early Medieval England
Author: Erica Weaver
language: en
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Release Date: 2025-02-12
Distraction is now too easily and often considered a metonym for modern consciousness, but it was also a medieval concern, which posed a particular threat to religious life. Distraction opened the door to all other temptations, and—most disturbingly of all for the monastic communities at the heart of this book—it invalidated central devotional acts like reading, praying, and reciting the Psalms. Far from an innocuous sensation, distraction posed a significant spiritual danger. It also generated powerful countervailing responses in literature, pedagogy, and religious observance, profoundly shaping literary interpretation in the process. The Hermeneutics of Distraction in Early Medieval England writes this cultural and intellectual history. It comes at the topic of distraction through the study of the affective practices of a particular community of writers and readers: the influential circle of Æthelwold (Bishop of Winchester, 963-984). It also explores the implications of this focused study both for a larger historical context (Western monasticism from the fifth century to the twelfth) and for the history of a unifying concept (the experience of distraction). In doing so, this book reveals that the pervasive threat of distraction precipitated the development of several different tactics for reorienting attention, especially in the tenth-century monastic correction movement traditionally known as the Benedictine Reform, which reshaped monastic life across Europe. From the development of the 'hermeneutic style' to new textual and theatrical modes, these correctional projects make visible an enduring problem, present from the beginnings of monasticism and persisting throughout its long history.
New Medieval Literatures 24
This volume continues the series' engagement with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages, showcasing the best new work in this field. New Medieval Literatures is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces the range of European cultures, capaciously defined. Texts analysed here range in date from the late ninth or early tenth centuries to the fifteenth century, and in provenance from the eastern part of the Hungarian kingdom to the British Isles. European understandings of the world are explored in several essays, including historiographical perspectives on the Mongol Empire and "world-building" in the romances of the Round Table. In their consideration of translation - of English diplomatic texts into French, of the Latin Boethius into Old English, of Old Turkic and Mongolian into Latin - several contributors reveal complex medieval multilingual societies, while translatio is shown to be weaponised in international scholarly rivalries. Bibliophilia, book collection, and book production inform identity-formation, shaping both nationalisms and the many-layered identities of fifteenth-century merchants. Several essays engage revealingly with economic humanities. Account books provide traces of book production capacity in the unlikely location of Calais; credit finance provides metaphors for human relations with the divine in the Book of mystic Margery Kempe; and women broker credit in real-world scenarios too. Other essays engage with sensory studies: sight and optics are shown to inform ethnography, while smell and taste - often considered beyond the reach of language - emerge as surprisingly central in some religious and philosophical writings.