Search results for ""Author Mary-Jo Arn""

Readers have noticed that the fifteenth century saw a remarkable flourishing of poems written in conditions of physical captivity or on the subject of imprisonment. The largest body of this poetry is from the pen of Charles of Valois, duke of Orléans, who was captured by the English at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and not released until 1440. The longest single poem on the subject is James I of Scotland's The Kingis Quair, purportedly written at the time of his release from an eighteen-year imprisonment in England. This volume reflects the wide scope of these "prison poems" by bringing together a new edition of The Kingis Quair, a selection from Charles d'Orléans' Fortunes Stabilnes, a poem by George Ashby, who was imprisoned in London's Fleet prison, and the poems of two other poets, both anonymous, who wrote about physical and/or emotional imprisonment.

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New investigations into Charles d'Orléans' under-rated poem, its properties and its qualities. The compilation Fortunes Stabilnes, the English poetry Charles d'Orléans wrote in the course of his twenty-five year captivity in England after Agincourt, requires a larger lens than that of Chaucerianism, through which it has most often been viewed. A fresh view from another perspective, one that attends to form and style, as well as to the poet's French traditions, reveals a more conceptually complex and innovative kind of poetry than we have seen until now. The essays collected here reassess him in the light of recent work in Middle English studies. They detail those qualities that make his text one of the most accomplished and moving of the late Middle Ages: Charles's use of English, his metrical play, his felicity with formes fixes lyrics, his innovative use of the dits structure and lyric sequences, and finally, above all, his ability to write beautiful poetry. Overall, they bring out the underappreciated contribution made by Charles to the canon of English poetry.

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