Edwin D. Craun – Författare

Silence, like speech, is a mode of communication that can be used strategically. In Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature, Edwin D. Craun investigates the silences in public life that punctuate talk in late Middle English literature.Centering his study on readings of canonical texts, including the works of Thomas Hoccleve, the anonymous Mum and the Sothsegger, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, John Lydgate’s translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pelerinage de vie humaine, The Testimony of William Thorpe, a selection of the York cycle of passion plays, and The Book of Margery Kempes, Craun recovers the widespread moral discourse on silence developed by late medieval secular and clerical writers, who compiled materials from Roman popular morality and Stoic texts as well as Jewish wisdom books and Christian texts. These texts model how silence could play a role in effective government, respond to violent and angry antagonists, or in some cases to entirely obviate a good outcome. Through this nuanced exploration of the ethics of communication in medieval moral, narrative, and dramatic literature, Craun shows us that public silences, then as now, have strategies and consequences, dimensions that medieval imaginative writers explore subtly yet analytically in order to provoke ethical reflection and pragmatic action. Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature offers original thematical and rhetorical insights into the written history of silence. It will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in Middle English literature, history, and political thought.

Silence, like speech, is a mode of communication that can be used strategically. In Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature, Edwin D. Craun investigates the silences in public life that punctuate talk in late Middle English literature.Centering his study on readings of canonical texts, including the works of Thomas Hoccleve, the anonymous Mum and the Sothsegger, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, John Lydgate’s translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pelerinage de vie humaine, The Testimony of William Thorpe, a selection of the York cycle of passion plays, and The Book of Margery Kempes, Craun recovers the widespread moral discourse on silence developed by late medieval secular and clerical writers, who compiled materials from Roman popular morality and Stoic texts as well as Jewish wisdom books and Christian texts. These texts model how silence could play a role in effective government, respond to violent and angry antagonists, or in some cases to entirely obviate a good outcome. Through this nuanced exploration of the ethics of communication in medieval moral, narrative, and dramatic literature, Craun shows us that public silences, then as now, have strategies and consequences, dimensions that medieval imaginative writers explore subtly yet analytically in order to provoke ethical reflection and pragmatic action. Strategies of the Silent in Medieval English Literature offers original thematical and rhetorical insights into the written history of silence. It will appeal to scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates interested in Middle English literature, history, and political thought.

The late medieval Church obliged all Christians to rebuke the sins of others, especially those who had power to discipline in Church and State: priests, confessors, bishops, judges, the Pope. This practice, in which the injured party had to confront the wrong-doer directly and privately, was known as fraternal correction. Edwin Craun examines how pastoral writing instructed Christians to make this corrective process effective by avoiding slander, insult, and hypocrisy. He explores how John Wyclif and his followers expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against mendicants and clerical wealth. Finally, he traces how major English reformist writing - Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Book of Margery Kempe - expanded the practice to justify their protests, to protect themselves from repressive elements in the late Ricardian and Lancastrian Church and State, and to urge their readers to mount effective protests against religious, social, and political abuses.

The late medieval Church obliged all Christians to rebuke the sins of others, especially those who had power to discipline in Church and State: priests, confessors, bishops, judges, the Pope. This practice, in which the injured party had to confront the wrong-doer directly and privately, was known as fraternal correction. Edwin Craun examines how pastoral writing instructed Christians to make this corrective process effective by avoiding slander, insult, and hypocrisy. He explores how John Wyclif and his followers expanded this established practice to authorize their own polemics against mendicants and clerical wealth. Finally, he traces how major English reformist writing - Piers Plowman, Mum and the Sothsegger, and The Book of Margery Kempe - expanded the practice to justify their protests, to protect themselves from repressive elements in the late Ricardian and Lancastrian Church and State, and to urge their readers to mount effective protests against religious, social, and political abuses.