Sheila Delany – författare

With Impolitic Bodies Delany breaks important ground in fifteenth century scholarship, a critical site of cultural study. Delany examines the work of English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, never before written on at length, and fully explores the relations of history and literature in the particularly turbulent period in English history, beginning with "The Wars of the Roses" and during the "Hundred Years War." Delany examines the first collection of all female saints' lives in any language: Legends of Holy Women composed by Bokenham between 1443 and 1447. The book is organized around the image of the body --- a medieval procedure becoming popular once again in current attention to the social construction of the body. One emphasis is Bokenham's relation to the body of English literature, particularly Chaucer, the symbolic head of the fifteenth century. Another emphasis is a focus on the genre of saints' lives, particularly female saints' lives, with their striking use of the body of the saint to generate meaning. Finally, the image of the body politic, the controlling image of medieval political thought is here, and Bokenham's means to examine the political and dynastic crises of fifteenth-century England. Delany uses these three major concerns to explain the literary innovation of Bokenham's Legend, and the larger and political importance of that innovation.

In Impolitic Bodies Delany breaks important ground in fiteenth-century scholarship, a critical site of cultural study. Delany examines the work of English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, never before written on at length, and fully explores the relations of history and literature in the particularly turbulent period in English history, beginning with "The Wars of the Roses" and during the "Hundred Years War." Delany examines the first collection of all female saints' lives in any language: Legends of Holy Women composed by Bokenham between 1443 and 1447. The book is organized around the image of the body --- a medieval procedure becoming popular once again in current attention to the social construction of the body. One emphasis is Bokenham's relation to the body of English literature, particularly Chaucer, the symbolic head of the fifteenth century. Another emphasis is a focus on the genre of saints' lives, particularly female saints' lives, with their striking use of the body of the saint to generate meaning. Finally, the image of the body politic, the controlling image of medieval political thought is here, and Bokenham's means to examine the political and dynastic crises of fifteenth-century England. Delany uses these three major concerns to explain the literary innovation of Bokenham's Legend, and the larger and political importance of that innovation.

This pioneering book explores the work of English Augustinian friar Osbern Bokenham, an ardent Yorkist on the eve of the "Wars of the Roses" and a gifted poet. Sheila Delany focuses on a manuscript written in 1447, the "Legend of Holy Women." Narrating the lives and ordeals of thirteen heroic and powerful saints, this was the first all-female legendary in English, much of it commissioned by wealthy women patrons in the vicinity of Clare Priory, Suffolk, where Bokenham lived. Delany structures her book around the image of the human body. First is the corpus of textual traditions within which Bokenham wrote: above all, the work of his two competing masters, St. Augustine and Geoffrey Chaucer. Next comes the female body and its parts as represented in hagiography, with Bokenham''s distinctive treatment of the body and the corporeal semiotic of his own legendary. Finally, the image of the body politic allows Delany to examine the relation of Bokenham''s work to contemporary political life. She analyzes both the legendary and the friar''s translation of a panegyric by the late-classical poet Claudian. The poetry is richly historized by Delany''s reading of it in the context of succession crises, war, and the connection of women to political power during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Sheila Delany's spirited translation of Osbern Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen (1443–1447) makes available in modern English the first all-female hagiography. Closely translated from elaborate, Latinate Middle English verse into fluent prose, A Legend of Holy Women contains the Augustinian friar's version of the stories of 13 women saints from gospel, apocrypha, martyrology, and high-medieval history. As Delany writes in her comprehensive introduction, "Bokenham gives us not only an all-female hagiography—an authorial decision significant in its own right—but a gallery of powerful, articulate women who are indubitably worthy to do God's work. Some of them are well-educated, some give sound political advice to a monarch, some preach, converting hundreds and thousands to Christianity, some walk on water or perform resurrection. Nor are they pacifists; on the contrary, they call for divinely inflicted vengeance and approve violence in their cause." Delany argues that Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women provided a principle of selection and of arrangement for Bokenham's array of saints. She suggests further that the friar's choice of all-female hagiography, and his poetic representation of holy women, are closely linked to patronage and politics in fifteenth-century England. The translation is accompanied by full notes which, along with the introduction, make the book accessible to a wide audience. It will appeal to all readers interested in the representation of women in late-medieval culture as well as to scholars and students in medieval, renaissance, religious, and women's studies.

Sheila Delany's spirited translation of Osbern Bokenham's Legendys of Hooly Wummen (1443–1447) makes available in modern English the first all-female hagiography. Closely translated from elaborate, Latinate Middle English verse into fluent prose, A Legend of Holy Women contains the Augustinian friar's version of the stories of 13 women saints from gospel, apocrypha, martyrology, and high-medieval history. As Delany writes in her comprehensive introduction, "Bokenham gives us not only an all-female hagiography—an authorial decision significant in its own right—but a gallery of powerful, articulate women who are indubitably worthy to do God's work. Some of them are well-educated, some give sound political advice to a monarch, some preach, converting hundreds and thousands to Christianity, some walk on water or perform resurrection. Nor are they pacifists; on the contrary, they call for divinely inflicted vengeance and approve violence in their cause." Delany argues that Geoffrey Chaucer's Legend of Good Women provided a principle of selection and of arrangement for Bokenham's array of saints. She suggests further that the friar's choice of all-female hagiography, and his poetic representation of holy women, are closely linked to patronage and politics in fifteenth-century England. The translation is accompanied by full notes which, along with the introduction, make the book accessible to a wide audience. It will appeal to all readers interested in the representation of women in late-medieval culture as well as to scholars and students in medieval, renaissance, religious, and women's studies.

This edited collection explores the importance of the Jews in the English Christian imagination of the 14th and 15th centuries - long after their expulsion from Britain in 1290.

This edited collection explores the importance of the Jews in the English Christian imagination of the 14th and 15th centuries - long after their expulsion from Britain in 1290.

A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer’s House of Fame, Sheila Delany’s elegant and innovative study of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer’s most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory—semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially—making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies. Delany’s strikingly original readings of Chaucer’s Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer’s House of Fame, Sheila Delany’s elegant and innovative study of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer’s most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory—semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially—making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies. Delany’s strikingly original readings of Chaucer’s Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

A sequel to her seminal book on Chaucer’s House of Fame, Sheila Delany’s elegant and innovative study of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women explores what it meant to be a reader and a writer, and to be English and a courtier, in the late fourteenth century. The richness of late medieval art, philosophy, and history are powerfully brought to bear on one of Chaucer’s most controversial works. So too are the insights of modern critical theory—semiotics, historicism, and gender studies especially—making this a unique achievement in medieval and Chaucerian studies. Delany’s strikingly original readings of Chaucer’s Orientalism, his sexual wordplay, his theological attitudes, and his treatment of sex and gender have given us a Chaucer for our time.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Compiled by a radical journalist and poet in the early days of the French Revolution, these subversively satirical lives of women saints sought to win both women and men away from religion. Though based on authentic hagiography, Maréchal's "new" legendary introduces a skeptical, rationalist perspective that anticipates modern critical approaches. Along with Delany's thorough introduction and notes, Anti-Saints offers a new perspective on the cultural climate of the French Revolution and a strikingly modern contribution to our own public conversation on religion. A must for scholars and non-specialists alike, and lovers of audacious wit.

This edited collection explores the importance of the Jews in the English Christian imagination of the 14th and 15th centuries - long after their expulsion from Britain in 1290.

This edited collection explores the importance of the Jews in the English Christian imagination of the 14th and 15th centuries - long after their expulsion from Britain in 1290.

In this first translation of Sylvain Maréchal's Bible commentary, Sheila Delany offers an important document in the history of modern European secularization and rationalist Bible criticism. Editor of one of France's best-known radical journals, Révolutions de Paris, and author in many genres—drama, poetry, journalism, treatise—Maréchal (1750-1803) embraced the revolutionary egalitarian ideas of François-Noél "Gracchus" Babeuf. As an atheist, he witnessed with dismay the advent of Napoleon and the post-revolutionary return of Catholic fervor. For and Against the Bible was his protest, his reminder of what the nation had endured and of what, at the opening of the nineteenth century, it might still accomplish. Delany’s introduction and annotated English translation will be of importance to all interested in Jewish or Christian Bible studies, history of Bible criticism, eighteenth century European rationalism, French atheism, modern European secularism.

Originally published as a special issue of Exemplaria, these essays deserve a much wider audience. They deal with Jewish studies and the medieval historian, rabbinic ecclesiology and the synods of Nicaea and Yavneh, Jewish women martyrs, sexual politics and marriage, late-medieval Castile, nation and miscegenation, cultural hybridity, and Kabbalistic anthropology. The authors are widely published scholars and critics in various fields of Jewish studies. The volume will be valuable to many scholars, teachers, and students. The essays open up so many interesting avenues of inquiry that they will enlighten and challenge not only specialists in Jewish studies but also scholars, critics, students, and teachers of medieval literature and Jewish literature, medieval history and culture, women's studies, and religious studies.

In Writing Woman, Sheila Delany examines the artifact "e;woman"e; from a radical perspective. Each individual is seen by Delany as an "e;artifact"e;--made, not born --laboriously worked up, pieced together, written, and rewritten. Other qualities are added to this artifact through novels, poems, lyrics, ad copy, television scripts, nursery rhymes, and the English language itself. These layers of meaning result in the artifact--woman as topic. Sheila Delany traces her own development as a radical thinker in the opening chapter "e;Confessions of an Ex-handkerchief Head, or Why This Is Not a Feminist Book."e; She discusses bourgeois women in medieval life and letters; womanliness, marriage, and misogyny in Chaucer; sex and politics in Pope's The Rape of the Lock; the feminist utopias of Charlotte P. Gilman and Marge Piercy; and--in considering woman as writer--the scene, or place, of writing in Christine de Pisan and Virginia Woolf.

Revolutionary and writer: how do they fit together in one person's work? Using literary texts from French, German, Russian and American pro-revolutionary writers, Sheila Delany examines the synergy of politics and rhetoric, art and social commitment. The writers she considers gave voice to the hopes of their time. Some led the events in person as well as through their writing; others worked to build a movement. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Mao, Sylvain Marechal, Boris Lavrenov, Bertolt Brecht and others are here: consummate rhetoricians all, not necessarily on the same page politically but for the revolutions of their day.