Linne R. Mooney - Böcker

Prison poems, texts written in conditions of physical captivity or on the subject of imprisonment, flourished in the fifteenth century. This edition compiles five such poems, all of which draw on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, the sixth-century philosophical treatise that preached against fickle Fortune and for the constancy of God. James I of Scotland and Charles D’Orleans—both royalty captured by political rivals—follow a Boethian trajectory in their poems (the Older Scots Kingis Quair and Middle English Fortunes Stabilnes, respectively), though they situate themselves as prisoners to love. George Ashby, a government clerk imprisoned for an unknown reason, pleads in his Complaint of a Prisoner in the Fleet 1463 for patience and purification of the soul against the vicissitudes of Fortune. Taken together, these poems consider prison not only as a physical condition but also as a literary trope that allows for both complaint and empowerment, providing avenues for escape through the pursuit of love, religious faith, or intellectual contemplation.

Index of manuscripts in Middle English prose contained in the library of Trinity CollegeThe library of Trinity College, Cambridge, contains the largest collection of medieval manuscripts of any college in Great Britain, and one of the most important in the world. The subjects contained therein cover the whole range of topics usual to medieval manuscripts, although the majority were produced in Britain. Particularly noteworthy are Wycliffite translations of the Bible, sermons, and Wycliffite tracts, major collections of devotional texts and unique Middle English translations of classical and early medieval texts. Trinity is also rich in medieval scientific manuscripts, many of which came through Roger Gale's interest in this field. The collection also contains major compilations of alchemical tracts, and historical and legal material.

Winner of the 2022 John Hurt Fisher Award from the John Gower SocietyFirst comprehensive catalogue of the manuscripts of one of the most important medieval works, with full descriptions of their features.The Confessio Amantis is John Gower's major work in English, written around the time that his acquaintance Geoffrey Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales. Extant manuscripts are numerous. At the end of the nineteenth century G. C. Macaulay had described the forty manuscripts then known to survive in the introduction to his edition, but some of these descriptions were very brief, and of course the other nine of whose existence he was then unaware were not included. This descriptive catalogue of all of the surviving manuscripts containing the Confessio is the first work to bring together extensive detailed descriptions of its forty-nine complete manuscripts and numerous fragments and excerpts; it will enable scholars of Middle English literature and manuscript studies to compare features across the corpus of surviving manuscripts or read detailed descriptions of individual manuscripts. Each description in this catalogue covers the manuscript's contents, artwork, physical qualities such as size, material, collation, foliation, etc., as well as additions by later users and provenance. There is also a lengthy introduction giving an overview of the corpus, and appendices for reference to the current whereabouts of the manuscripts, fragments and excerpts, and listing Gower's Latin and French works that appear in some of the manuscripts. Eight colour illustrations provide context for discussions of the miniatures and illuminated borders of some manuscripts.

New essays on late medieval manuscripts highlight the complicated network of their production and dissemination.One of the most important developments in medieval English literary studies since the 1980s has been the growth of manuscript studies. Long regarded as mere textual repositories, and treated superficially by editors, manuscripts are now acknowledged as centrally important in the study of later medieval texts. The essays collected here discuss aspects of the design and distribution of manuscripts in late medieval England, with a particular focus on vernacular manuscripts of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Those in the first half consider material evidence for scribal decisions about design: these range from analysis of individual codices to broader discussions of particular types of manuscripts, both religious and secular. Later essays look at the evidence for the production and distribution of manuscripts of specific English texts or types of text. These include the major Middle English poems The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, as well as key religious works such as Love's Mirror, Hilton's Scale of Perfection, the Speculum Vitae and The Pricke of Conscience, all of which survive in significant numbers of manuscripts. The comparison of secular and devotional texts illuminates shared networks of production and dissemination, and increases our knowledge of regional and metropolitan book production in the period before printing.Contributors: DANIEL W. MOSSER, JACOB THAISEN, TAKAKO KATO, SHERRY L. REAMES, AMELIA GROUNDS, ALEXANDRA BARRATT, JULIAN M. LUXFORD, LINNE R. MOONEY, MICHAEL G. SARGENT, JOHNJ. THOMPSON, MARGARET CONNOLLY, RALPH HANNA, GEORGE R. KEISER.

Groundbreaking surveys of the complex interrelationship between the languages of English and French in medieval Britain.With co-editors: CAROLYN COLLETTE, MARYANNE KOWALESKI, LINNE MOONEY, AD PUTTER, and DAVID TROTTEREngland was more widely and enduringly francophone in the middle ages than many standard accounts of its history, culture and language allow. The development of French in England, whether known as "Anglo-Norman" or "Anglo-French", is deeply interwoven both with medieval English and with the spectrum of Frenches, insular and continental, used withinand outside the realm. As the language of nearly a thousand literary texts, of much administration, and of many professions and occupations, the French of England needs more attention than it has so far received. The essaysin this volume form a new cultural history focussed round, but not confined to, the presence and interactions of French speakers, writers, readers, texts and documents in England from the eleventh to the later fifteenth century.Taking the French of England into account does not simply add new material to our existing narratives of medieval English culture, but changes them, restoring a multi-vocal, multi-cultural medieval England in all its complexity, and opening up fresh agendas for study and exploration.Contributors: HENRY BAINTON, MICHAEL BENNETT, JULIA BOFFEY, RICHARD BRITNELL, CAROLYN COLLETTE, GODFRIED CROENEN, HELEN DEEMING, STEPHANIE DOWNES, MARTHA DRIVER, MONICA H. GREEN, RICHARD INGHAM, REBECCA JUNE, MARYANNE KOWALESKI, PIERRE KUNSTMANN, FRANCOISE H. M. LE SAUX, SERGE LUSIGNAN, TIM WILLIAM MACHAN, JULIA MARVIN, BRIAN MERRILEES, RUTH NISSE, MARILYN OLIVA, W. MARK ORMROD, HEATHER PAGAN, LAURIE POSTLEWATE, JEAN-PASCAL POUZET, AD PUTTER, GEOFF RECTOR, DELBERT RUSSELL, THEA SUMMERFIELD, ANDREW TAYLOR, DAVID TROTTER, ELIZABETH M. TYLER, NICHOLAS WATSON, JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE, ROBERT F. YEAGER

Scribes played a crucial part in the flourishing and availability of literature in English during the time of Chaucer. This book reveals for the first time who they were, where and how they worked, and the crucial role they playedin bringing this literature to a wider public.A sensational book... will permanently affect and change the way we see the history of the book in England. Professor Derek Pearsall, Harvard University.Geoffrey Chaucer is called the Father of English Literature notbecause he was the first author to write in English - he wasn't - but because his works were among those of his generation produced in sufficient numbers to reach a wider audience. He and his contemporaries wrote before the age of print, so the dissemination of his writings in such quantity depended upon scribes, who would manually copy works like The Canterbury Tales in manuscripts.This book is the first to identify the scribes responsible for the copying of the earliest manuscripts (including Chaucer's famous scribe, Adam). The authors reveal these revolutionary copyists as clerks holding major bureaucratic offices at the London Guildhall, working for the mayor andaldermen, officiating in their courts, and recording London business in their day jobs - while copying medieval English literature as a sideline. In particular, they contributed to the new culture of English as the language of notonly literature, but government and business as well. LINNE R. MOONEY is Professor of Medieval English Palaeography in the Department of English and Related Literature, and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studiesat the University of York; ESTELLE STUBBS is a researcher in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics based at the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield.

Groundbreaking surveys of the complex interrelationship between the languages of English and French in medieval Britain.With co-editors: CAROLYN COLLETTE, MARYANNE KOWALESKI, LINNE MOONEY, AD PUTTER, and DAVID TROTTEREngland was more widely and enduringly francophone in the Middle Ages than our now standard accounts of its history, culture and language allow. The French of England (also known as Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French) is the language of nearly a thousand literary texts, of much administration, and of many professions and occupations. English literary, linguistic and documentary history is deeply interwoven both with a continually evolving spectrum of Frenches used within and outside the realm, and cannot be fully grasped in isolation.The essays in this volume open up andbegin writing a new cultural history focussed on, but not confined to, the presence and interactions of francophone speakers, writers, readers, texts and documents in England from the eleventh to the later fifteenth centuries. They return us to a newly-alive, multi-vocal, complexly multi-cultural medieval England, in which the use of French and its interrelations with English and other languages involve many diverse groups of people. The volume's size testifies to the significance of England's francophone culture, while its chronological range shows the need for revision across the whole span of our existing narratives about medieval English linguistic and cultural history..Contributors: HENRY BAINTON, MICHAEL BENNETT, JULIA BOFFEY, RICHARD BRITNELL, CAROLYN COLLETTE, GODFRIED CROENEN, HELEN DEEMING, STEPHANIE DOWNES, MARTHA DRIVER, MONICA H. GREEN, RICHARD INGHAM, REBECCA JUNE, MARYANNE KOWALESKI, PIERRE KUNSTMANN, FRANCOISE H. M. LE SAUX, SERGE LUSIGNAN, TIM WILLIAM MACHAN, JULIA MARVIN, BRIAN MERRILEES, RUTH NISSE, MARILYN OLIVA, W. MARK ORMROD, HEATHER PAGAN, LAURIE POSTLEWATE, JEAN-PASCAL POUZET, AD PUTTER, GEOFFRECTOR, DELBERT RUSSELL, THEA SUMMERFIELD, ANDREW TAYLOR, DAVID TROTTER, ELIZABETH M. TYLER, NICHOLAS WATSON, JOCELYN WOGAN-BROWNE, ROBERT F. YEAGER