The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form

At its best, this volume shows us what is happening in the work among some of the most professionally creative and ambitious medievalists today. If it lacks the overarching focus of earlier collections on historicism, it offers a welcome testimony to the fact that medieval literary study may be more varied, more open, and (at times) even more wacky than it used to be. And to me, anyway, that is a good thing. * JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY * Excellent contribution. * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW * In exploring the ways medieval literary writing challenges our modern, primarily Kantian understanding of beauty, these collected essays promise to make us more sensitive readers of medieval aesthetic forms. * STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER * The volume oers a deliberate expansion of formalist approaches to literature, and indeed an opening up of 'literature' itself, through applied focus on medieval form, highlighting the significance of the 'form' to the 'message'. * PARERGON * Strikingly diverse in subject matter and adventurous in method, [the essays] all reconsider form in medieval literature in ways that offer new possibilities for conceiving the category of the literary. This is a singularly valuable and enlightening collection. * SPECULUM *

KATHRYN KERBY-FULTON is Professor Emerita, University of Notre Dame.

Introduction: The Literary through - or beyond? - Form - Catherine Sanok and Robert J Meyer-Lee What's the Use? Marian Miracles and the Workings of the Literary - Claire M. Waters Form's Practice: Lyrics, Grammars, and the Medieval Idea of the Literary - Ingrid Nelson Forms of the Hours in Late Medieval England - Jessica Brantley Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise en page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity - Andrew Klein Rhymed Alliterative Verse in Mise en page Transition: Two Case Studies in English Poetic Hybridity - Kathryn Kerby-Fulton Idiot Psalms: Sound, Style, and the Performance of the Literary in the Towneley Shepherds' Plays - Shannon Gayk Inaudible Music - Sarah Elliott Novacich Translating Form with Patience - Anke Bernau Terpsichorean Form: Geoffrey Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty - Seeta Chaganti Illusion and Aspect in the Construction of the Face: Chaucerian Individuals, Chaucerian Types - Maura Nolan Collecting, Violence, Literature: Richard of Bury's Philobiblon and the Forms of Literary History - Emily Steiner