Description
Book SynopsisThis essay collection is gathered on the occasion of the retirement of Denise N. Baker, Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature draws together the work of young and early career scholars who have worked with Baker as students as well as peers who have published her work, contributed to collections Baker has edited, and have been inspired and influenced by her wide-ranging and important scholarship over the past four decades. This collection includes studies of the wide variety of the texts and topics that have been the subject of Baker’s scholarly work, from the importance of philosophical and intellectual history in Julian of Norwich’s Showings and Langland’s Piers Plowman, to the gendered nature of martyrdom in medieval hagiography, to the preoccupation of architectural memorialization in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These essays bridge the often wide gap between scholarship on medieval mystical texts, such as the writings of Julian of Norwich and the Cloud of Unknowing author, and scholarship on the work of major medieval vernacular authors such William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer.
Table of ContentsIntroductionAmy N. Vines
List of Denise N. Baker’s Publications
Chapter 1“‘What is Synne?’: Exploring Julian of Norwich’s Question”
David Aers
Chapter 2“The Coveting of ‘Muche’ Instead of ‘Measure’: The Connection between Lady Mede and Nede in the C-Text of Piers Plowman”
Jessica D. Ward
Chapter 3“The ‘Stalke’ and the ‘Balke’: Cherry Picking the Ethics of Reproof in The Canterbury Tales”
Edwin Craun
Chapter 4“From ‘Pore Pacient’ to ‘Childische Thyng’: Versions of the Life of Charity in Piers Plowman C.XV-XVII”
Grace Hamman
Chapter 5“Conceiving Community: Familial Trinitarian Analogies in Augustine, William Langland, and Julian Norwich”
Jessica Hines
Chapter 6“Julian of Norwich and the Cloud Author: How Could They Both be ‘Mystical Theologians’?”
Denys Turner
Chapter 7“Beatrice of Nazareth and the Desire for Death”
Jessica Barr
Chapter 8“Julian of Norwich: Lives and Afterlives”
Nancy Bradley Warren
Chapter 9“‘Heere of myn house perpetuelly a cherche’: Imagining Perpetuity in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale”
Gina Hurley
Chapter 10“Chaucer and John of Gaunt: Finding a Way to Break into History”
Lynn Staley
