This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 1280 and 1520 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the "mother tongue" during a period of revolutionary change for the English language. (...) The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the "courtly" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors. Besides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. _The Idea of the Vernacular_ will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory. (shrink)

The year 1400 is one of those loudly proclaimed milestones in English literary history in which the vagaries of human life and human chronological systems appear to come together with unusual appropriateness. The year not only of a new century's beginning but of the death of the old century's most important poet, 1400 has often been taken by Middle English scholars to mark one of those crucial transitions between an age of gold and one of brass: between the Age of (...) Chaucer and the glories of Ricardian literature, on the one hand, and that of what is persistently taken, on the other, as the dullness and all-too-proper humility of fifteenth-century writing—dedicated as so much of it seems to be to the sterile elevation and imitation of the beloved “father and master” Chaucer. So well naturalized has this model become, and so much has it consequently influenced the reading habits of Middle English scholars, that it is only now becoming possible to recognize the model as a construct inherited from the fifteenth century itself: a cultural formation, founded on half-truths, which deserves attention as an object, more than a tool, of critical analysis. Thus it has been only recently that serious reflection has begun both on the nature of the changes of which Chaucer's death has been taken as a symbol and on the ideological manipulations for which that year, as the sign of the end of an era, has been used as an only apparently natural substitute. (shrink)

Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love is an exploratory account of supernatural events she experienced in May 1373, when she was thirty years old. Lying ill in bed, apparently near death, she suddenly began to see, reflected in a crucifix being held before her face, a series of details from Christ's Passion: his blood, flowing down from under the crown of thorns ; his body, buffeted by unseen agencies ; the drying of his facial skin as he hung on the (...) cross ; and the “chawngynge of his chere” as, at the moment of death, he returned to joyous life. These “bodylye syght[s]” were gradually succeeded by other, less easily identifiable “gastelye syght[s],” and laconic “worde[s] formede in [her] vndyrstandynge” , spoken by Christ in explanation of elements of the vision, as this moved away from the Passion narrative into deeper theological waters, ending with a “gastelye syght” of Jesus sitting, God and human, in the city of Julian's soul . After first being doubtful of the validity of this experience, which was of great complexity and lasted for many hours , Julian came to view it as a single and theologically integrated revelation sent by God not only to her but to all Christians. (shrink)