Andrew Galloway - Böcker

The cultural life of England over the long period from the Norman Conquest to the Reformation was rich and varied, in ways that scholars are only now beginning to understand in detail. This Companion introduces a wide range of materials that constitute the culture, or cultures, of medieval England, across fields including political and legal history, archaeology, social history, art history, religion and the history of education. Above all it looks at the literature of medieval England in Latin, French and English, plus post-medieval perspectives on the 'Middle Ages'. In a linked series of essays experts in these areas show the complex relationships between them, building up a broad account of rich patterns of life and literature in this period. The essays are supplemented by a chronology and guide to further reading, helping students build on the unique access this volume provides to what can seem a very foreign culture.

The cultural life of England over the long period from the Norman Conquest to the Reformation was rich and varied, in ways that scholars are only now beginning to understand in detail. This Companion introduces a wide range of materials that constitute the culture, or cultures, of medieval England, across fields including political and legal history, archaeology, social history, art history, religion and the history of education. Above all it looks at the literature of medieval England in Latin, French and English, plus post-medieval perspectives on the 'Middle Ages'. In a linked series of essays experts in these areas show the complex relationships between them, building up a broad account of rich patterns of life and literature in this period. The essays are supplemented by a chronology and guide to further reading, helping students build on the unique access this volume provides to what can seem a very foreign culture.

As students and scholars of Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Dante know, late medieval writers were influenced greatly by the work of peers that crossed historical, national, cultural, linguistic boundaries. Through a Classical Eye contains first-rate essays that demonstrate a range of strategies for undertaking transcultural and transhistorical studies of the late medieval period, and examines medieval literature and culture where English, Italian, and Latin materials overlap.Written in honour of the groundbreaking contributions that Winthrop Wetherbee made to this growing area of study, the volume's contributors advance his legacy and add to the burgeoning interest in setting medieval literary studies into wide intellectual and historical horizons. Divided into three illuminating sections on Medieval Latin authorship, Italy and the world, and England and beyond, and including a personal reminiscence of Wetherbee by the noted novelist Robert Morgan, Through a Classical Eye is an outstanding collection that provides key insights into medieval literature and culture.

"A work of enormous importance. Of all the poems of the English Middle Ages, Piers Plowman is the one that most deserves and needs annotation of the fullest and best possible kind, both because it is a text of unrivaled literary quality and interest, and because it is characteristically knotty and deploys a language of unusual richness, density, and allusiveness. Much of this allusiveness is to areas of learning that are not at every modern reader's fingertips. A particular difficulty is the existence of the poem in three authorial versions of almost desperate complexity. It will be an immense triumph to have a commentary which elucidates their relationships as a matter of policy and not simply as the result of conflating annotation on the different versions."-Derek PearsallThe first full commentary on Piers Plowman since the late nineteenth century is inaugurated with the publication of the first two of its five projected volumes.The detailed and wide-ranging Penn Commentary places the allegorical dream-vision of Piers Plowman within the literary, historical, social, and intellectual contexts of late medieval England, and within the long history of critical interpretation of the poem, assessing past scholarship while offering original materials and insights throughout. The authors' line-by-line, section by section, and passus by passus commentary on all three versions of the poem and on the stages of its multiple revisions reveals new aspects of the poem's meaning while assessing and summarizing a complex and often divisive scholarly tradition. The volumes offer an up-to-date, original, and open-ended guide to a poem whose engagement in its social world is unrivaled in English literature, and whose literary, religious, and intellectual accomplishments are uniquely powerful.The Penn Commentary is designed to be equally useful to readers of the A, B, or C texts of the poem. It is geared to readers eager to have detailed experience of Piers Plowman and other medieval literature, possessing some basic knowledge of Middle English language and literature, and interested in pondering further the particularly difficult relationships to both that this poem possesses. Others, with interest in poetry of all periods, will find the extended and detailed commentary useful precisely because it does not seek to avoid the poem's challenges but seeks instead to provoke thought about its intricacy and poetic achievements.Andrew Galloway's Volume 1 treats the poem's first vision, from the Prologue through Passus 4, in all three versions, accepting the C text as the poet's final word but excavating downward through the earlier B and A texts. Stephen Barney's volume completes the framework for the commentary, dealing with the final three passÛs of the poem, extant only in the B and C versions. Subsequent volumes will be the work of Ralph Hanna, Traugott Lawler, and Anne Middleton.Overall, The Penn Commentary on Piers Plowman marks a new stage of concentrated yet wide-ranging attention to a text whose repeated revisions and literary and intellectual complexity make it both an elusive object of inquiry and a literary work whose richness has long deserved the capacious and minutely detailed treatment that only a full commentary can allow. Perhaps no poem in English appeals more than Piers Plowman to those readers who understand Yeats's "fascination with things difficult," yet The Penn Commentary will enable generations of readers to share in the pleasures and challenges of experiencing, engaging with, and trying to elucidate the difficulties of one of the towering achievements of English literature.Andrew Galloway is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Cornell University.

Continuum's "Introductions to British Literature and Culture" series provide practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in the series help to orientate students as they begin a new module or area of study, providing concise information on the historical, cultural, literary and critical context and acting as an initial map of the knowledge needed to study the literature and culture of a specific period. Each guide includes an overview of the historical period, intellectual contexts, major genres, critical approaches and a guide to original research and resource materials in the area, enabling students to progress confidently to further study."The Guide to Medieval Literature and Culture" provides students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context from the 7th to 15th centuries, including: the historical, cultural and intellectual background including religion and philosophy, society and politics, art and culture; major works and genres including religious literature, history writing, drama, Chaucer, and Langland; concise explanations of key terms needed to understand the literature and criticism; key critical approaches to medieval literature from the Renaissance to the present; and a chronology mapping historical events and literary works and further reading including websites and electronic resources.

Continuum's "Introductions to British Literature and Culture" series provide practical guides to key literary periods. Guides in the series help to orientate students as they begin a new module or area of study, providing concise information on the historical, cultural, literary and critical context and acting as an initial map of the knowledge needed to study the literature and culture of a specific period. Each guide includes an overview of the historical period, intellectual contexts, major genres, critical approaches and a guide to original research and resource materials in the area, enabling students to progress confidently to further study."The Guide to Medieval Literature and Culture" provides students with the ideal introduction to literature and its context from the 7th to 15th centuries, including: the historical, cultural and intellectual background including religion and philosophy, society and politics, art and culture; major works and genres including religious literature, history writing, drama, Chaucer, and Langland; concise explanations of key terms needed to understand the literature and criticism; key critical approaches to medieval literature from the Renaissance to the present; and a chronology mapping historical events and literary works and further reading including websites and electronic resources.

Piers Plowman has long been considered one of the greatest poems of medieval England. Current scholarship on this alliterative masterpiece looks very different from that available even a decade ago. New information about the manuscripts of the poem, new historical discoveries, and new investigations of its literary, cultural and theoretical scope have fundamentally altered the very meaning of Langland's art. This Companion thus critically surveys traditional scholarship, with the aim of recuperating its best insights, and it ventures forth into newer areas of inquiry attuned to questions of social setting, institutional context, intellectual and literary history, theory, and the revitalized fields of codicology and paleography. By proceeding through chapters that offer cumulatively wider views as well as stand-alone analyses of topics most crucial to understanding Piers Plowman, this Companion gives serious students and seasoned scholars alike up-to-date knowledge of this intricate and beautiful poem.

Piers Plowman has long been considered one of the greatest poems of medieval England. Current scholarship on this alliterative masterpiece looks very different from that available even a decade ago. New information about the manuscripts of the poem, new historical discoveries, and new investigations of its literary, cultural and theoretical scope have fundamentally altered the very meaning of Langland's art. This Companion thus critically surveys traditional scholarship, with the aim of recuperating its best insights, and it ventures forth into newer areas of inquiry attuned to questions of social setting, institutional context, intellectual and literary history, theory, and the revitalized fields of codicology and paleography. By proceeding through chapters that offer cumulatively wider views as well as stand-alone analyses of topics most crucial to understanding Piers Plowman, this Companion gives serious students and seasoned scholars alike up-to-date knowledge of this intricate and beautiful poem.

Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

From 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse, and on the historical, religious and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.