Rory G. Critten – författare

This collection investigates how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made. Building on work on the noble and bourgeois medieval household, it considers bourgeois, gentry and collegiate households on both sides of the English Channel. The book argues that there is a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between domestic experience and its forms of cultural expression. Contributors address a range of cultural productions, including conduct texts, romances and comic writing, estates-management literature, medical writing, household music and drama and manuscript anthologies. Their studies provide a fresh illustration of the late-medieval household's imaginative scope, its extensive internal and external connections and its fundamental centrality to late-medieval cultural production.

The Middle English Seven Sages of Rome (c.1300) is a popular medieval framed narrative, translated from the French by an anonymous writer whom scholarship locates in London. It features a storytelling contest to save a prince from execution, with misogynistic tales of wicked women and wise counsellors, reflecting its Eastern origins and the medieval concept of a "mirror for princes".The text relates a tale-telling competition between parties arguing for and against the execution of Florentine, the emperor of Rome’s son. The emperor’s second wife wants Florentine dead because he threatens her position at court; she tells tales of usurping sons and untrustworthy counsellors. In response, the sages tell tales of perfidious wives and the dangers of haste. The emperor vacillates until his son speaks in his own favour and the contest is decided.The collection is one of the earliest Middle English examples of a set of "frame stories". The frame narrative of the Seven Sages originates in eighth-century Persia; it was well known during the Middle Ages, and was translated into all the vernaculars and Latin. This edition makes the Middle English poem newly available to students and researchers interested in topics including medieval misogyny, east-to-west cultural transfer, and the history of the exemplum and exemplary writing.

French Lessons in Late-Medieval England presents two fifteenth-century manuals designed to support facility in French among the English, the Liber donati and Commune parlance. These texts treat the grammar, lexis, and orthography of French as well as compiling a selection of entertaining dialogues that model the language in action. Together, they paint a vivid picture of the kinds of French that English learners might desire to wield and of the high levels of fluency that they could achieve. Critten's comprehensive introduction discusses his materials' relevance both for histories of language education and for recent reassessments of the longevity of French in medieval England. His pairing of first-time modern-English translations with facing-page original text makes these fascinating works newly available for a twenty-first-century audience.

French Lessons in Late-Medieval England presents two fifteenth-century manuals designed to support facility in French among the English, the Liber donati and Commune parlance. These texts treat the grammar, lexis, and orthography of French as well as compiling a selection of entertaining dialogues that model the language in action. Together, they paint a vivid picture of the kinds of French that English learners might desire to wield and of the high levels of fluency that they could achieve. Critten's comprehensive introduction discusses his materials' relevance both for histories of language education and for recent reassessments of the longevity of French in medieval England. His pairing of first-time modern-English translations with facing-page original text makes these fascinating works newly available for a twenty-first-century audience.

The works of four major fifteenth-century writers re-examined, showing their innovative reconceptualization of Middle English authorship and the manuscript book.Thomas Hoccleve, Margery Kempe, John Audelay and Charles d'Orléans present themselves as the makers not only of their texts, but also of the books that transmitted their writing. This new study argues that they elaborated a "self-publishing pose" with the aim of regaining their audiences' confidence in the face of the compromised social, physical and material conditions they inhabited. Dr Critten shows that while the strategies of self-presentation that these authors develop draw on trends in contemporary literature and book history (such as the proliferation of the "go, litel bok" motif and the increasing popularity of the single-author codex), their approach to writing differs fundamentally from that pursued by their immediate predecessors, Chaucer and Gower, and by their most prominent peer, Lydgate. Rather, in their unusual insistence on their co-identity with their manuscripts, they demonstrate a new awareness of the socially instrumental potential of Middle English writing.RORY G. CRITTEN is a Maître d'enseignement et de recherche (lecturer) in the English Department at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.