Chapter Ten. The Hidden Life Of The Friars: The Mendicant Orders In The Work Of Walter Hilton, William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, And Their Literary World

2011 ◽  
pp. 307-334
Keyword(s):  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Walter Hilton ◽  
Mendicant Orders

ON LITERATURE AND GRAMMAR: A Selection of Annotated Medieval and Renaissance English Texts for (Spanish) University Students

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gema Chocano Díaz ◽  
Noelia Hernando Real
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
University Students ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Language ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Christopher Marlowe ◽  
Sir Philip Sidney ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Sir Thomas Wyatt ◽  
Selection Of

On Literature and Grammar gives students and instructors a carefully thought experience to combine their learning of Middle and Early Modern English and Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. The selection of texts, which include the most commonly taught works in university curricula, allows readers to understand and enjoy the evolution of the English language and the main writers and works of these periods, from William Langland to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and from Christopher Marlowe to William Shakespeare. Fully annotated and written to answer the real needs of current Spanish university students, these teachable texts include word-by-word translations into Present Day English and precise introductions to their linguistic and literary contexts.

scholarly journals Early English meter as a way of thinking

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-65
Author(s):  
Eric Weiskott
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Early English

The second half of the fourteenth century saw a large uptick in the production of literature in English. This essay frames metrical variety and literary experimentation in the late fourteenth century as an opportunity for intellectual history. Beginning from the assumption that verse form is never incidental to the thinking it performs, the essay seeks to test Simon Jarvis’s concept of “prosody as cognition”, formulated with reference to Pope and Wordsworth, against a different literary archive.The essay is organized into three case studies introducing three kinds of metrical practice: the half-line structure in Middle English alliterative meter, the interplay between Latin and English in Piers Plowman, and final -e in Chaucer’s pentameter. The protagonists of the three case studies are the three biggest names in Middle English literature: the Gawain poet, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Monasticism

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
John Donne ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Religious Group ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Medieval Period ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Catholic Clergy ◽  
Late Medieval Period

As he faced his own dissolution, Henry VIII repeatedly invoked a religious group who had been absent from his kingdom for seven years: the monks. The 1570s saw an irrevocable change in the nature of English Catholicism as Catholic clergy trained in England died, retired, or conformed. During this period, the first waves of Englishmen trained in the new continental “seminaries” as Catholic secular priests swore allegiance to the universal Church and to the Pope as missionaries for Christ. Moreover, the new orders such as the Theatines, the Capuchins, and the Jesuits eclipsed traditional European and coenobitic monasticism. This article examines the cultural disappearance of monks, monasteries, and monasticism in England during the late medieval period. It also considers how authors such as William Shakespeare, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Thomas Walsingham, Barnabe Googe, John Donne, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer remember the monks in their works.

Introduction

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Strohm
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
John Gower ◽  
John Lydgate ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Intellectual Labor ◽  
Narrative Forms

This book examines Middle English literature and includes works by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and John Lydgate. Essays deal with topics ranging from romances to drama, chronicles, and other narrative forms, as well as gossip, orality and aurality, translation, and multilingualism. The book also looks at vernacular texts that harbor refined ideas about beauty, aesthetics, and literary genre; authorship, an unstable category lurking in the undiscovered space between manual and intellectual labor; and the presence of “literature” in apparently “nonliterary” environments.

Langland and Chaucer

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marenbon
Keyword(s):  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
Complex Form ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
The University

This chapter turns to another pair struggling with the Problem of Paganism: William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. For Langland, the Problem is an issue addressed directly, with the focus on the salvation of virtuous pagans. But, despite the explicit doctrinal discussion, Langland is not simply doing the same thing in vernacular verse as the university theologians: the complex form of his poem makes the positions he takes less clearly defined, but allows him to adumbrate daring ideas outside the range of the scholastic discussions. By contrast, Chaucer avoids the theological problems almost entirely; more perhaps than any other medieval writer, he explores the Problem of Paganism by imagining himself within a pagan world, whilst aware, as his readers too would be, that there is an external Christian perspective on it, which is only partly accessible from his viewpoint on the inside.

‘A Very Perfect Forme of a Will’

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-56
Author(s):  
Alex Davis
Keyword(s):  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
William Langland ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Free Standing ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Robert Henryson ◽  
Isabella Whitney ◽  
Legal Document ◽  
The Devil

In the late medieval and early modern periods, the last will and testament was not just a legal document; it was also a kind of literature. A range of poems and prose that engaged with the conventions of the legal last will became a feature of writing in English from the fourteenth century onwards. Sometimes fictional testaments exist as free-standing pieces of writing; often they are found embedded within larger literary texts. They focus on a range of imaginary testators, ranging from figures from myth and history, through notorious contemporaries, and animals, to the devil himself. Bequests were similarly various, including curses, farts, abstract qualities such as peace, and even the body of the testator. This chapter discusses fictional testaments by (amongst others) Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, Robert Henryson, George Gascoigne, and Isabella Whitney.

Conflict

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marion Turner
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
The Political ◽  
John Gower ◽  
Textual Production ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Thomas Usk

Richard II’s reign as king of England was characterized by an explosion in the production of literary and political vernacular texts and by dramatic political upheaval. In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, crises such as the Great Revolt, the development of Lollardy, mayoral disputes, and usurpation coincided with the emergence of writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William Langland, along with many other literary practitioners such as John Clanvowe and Thomas Usk. Broadsides, pamphlets, and other publically-circulated documents employed literary modes for political ends. This article examines the highly politicized and difficult environment in which late fourteenth-century English literature was born. It considers the political nature of textual production and how increased access to textuality encouraged people to employ texts as political ammunition.

Enclosed Spaces

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn Staley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
Ethnic Diversity ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Sacred Geography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Enclosed Space ◽  
A Site ◽  
William Of Malmesbury

Bede described Britain as a bountiful and beautiful island characterized by ethnic diversity, whereas Gildas viewed it as a fallen garden or bride. Bede and Gildas established the foundations of a nation whose boundaries enclosed people or peoples, a site of the struggles between individuals and of individuals. English historians from Gervase of Canterbury to Ralph of Diceto, William of Malmesbury, and William of Newburgh look at the history of Britain as a history instituted by Bede and Gildas, whose impulses to write geography as narrative are evident in the two most important histories of the later Middle Ages:Brutand Ranulf Higden’sPolychronicon. This article examines Britain as an enclosed space protected by the sea. It begins with an analysis of Andrew Marvell’s poem “Upon Appleton House” and locates Marvell within the company of those who wrote Britain’s history through its geography, particularly William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer. It then describes the Wilton Diptych as an icon of sacred kingship and sacred geography.

Symbolic Economies

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Cady
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Piers Plowman ◽  
Neoclassical Economics ◽  
Linguistic Practice ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
Language And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Money and language are intertwined. From Geoffrey Chaucer to Friedrich Nietzsche, William Langland, and Jacques Derrida, writers and thinkers invoke the language of money when talking about linguistic practice. The pervasive relationship between money and language is more than metaphorical. As a discipline, neoclassical economics is a language consisting of metaphors, foundational myths, and fictional underpinnings. In Symbolic Economies, Jean-Joseph Goux argues that money, language, and psychoanalysis are symbolic economies because they share a similar gendered investment in exchange and value. This article explores some of the links among money, gender, and language in the realm of value and its accompanying anxieties in the Middle Ages. It considers the idea among medieval writers that language and money are based on nature and analyzes William Langland’s Piers Plowman to highlight not only the instantiations among money, language, and gender but also the projection of social instability onto women.

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