Search results for ""author john m. bowers""
Boydell & Brewer Ltd The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II
Close analysis of the poem reveals extensive allusion to contemporary social, religious and political events. This is an entirely new and original reading of Pearl, placing the anonymous masterpiece in the context of the Cheshire coterie that flourished at the court of Richard II during the 1390s. The brilliance of its poetic construction has long been acknowledged, but here Pearl is also shown to engage with the social, religious and political events of the late fourteenth century. The poem's defense of infant baptism is seen as countering Lollardcriticism of the sacraments, its retelling of the Parable of the Vineyard as offering scriptural support to the aims of the Statute of Labourers. The poem's dazzling representation of aristocratic magnificence - jewelled crowns, gem-embroidered gowns, livery badges, civic processions, and monumental architecture - studied in this context, relates to the spectacular royal culture of one of England's most ambitious monarchs. The courtly elegy offered consolation after the death of Anne of Bohemia, while its vision of a royal child-bride figured in the intense national debate over the king's prospective marriage to the six-year-old Isabelle of France. Richard II's fall from power brought to an end not simply Cheshire privilege, but also a poetic tradition that produced some of the finest works of English literature, most notably Pearl and Gawain and the Green Knight. Professor JOHN BOWERS teaches at the Department of English at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
£80.00
University of Notre Dame Press Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition
Although Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland together dominate fourteenth-century English literature, their respective masterpieces, The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman, could not be more different. While Langland’s poem was immediately popular and influential, it was Chaucer who stood at the head of a literary tradition within a generation of his death. John Bowers asks why and how Chaucer, not Langland, was granted this position. His study reveals the political, social, and religious factors that contributed to the formation of a literary canon in fourteenth-century England. Through extensive manuscript evidence, Bowers tracks the reputations of the two writers into the fifteenth century, when studies of fourteenth-century literature became more clearly configured in terms of a double, antagonistic dynamic. Langland remained the largely invisible presence against which the official Chaucerian tradition was constructed. Never really separate, the two literary traditions constantly interacted, with the reputation of Chaucer the court poet eclipsing that of Langland the dissenter and critic. By examining the historical and social contexts within which these traditions arose, Bowers helps us to understand how some texts and writers become canonical and how others become marginalized.
£36.00
Medieval Institute Publications The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions
When Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, his massive project, the Canterbury Tales, lay unfinished and unpublished. This volume includes five works that aim to fill in the gaps in this incomplete masterpiece. The pieces presented here date from the fifteenth century and survive in at least one manuscript collection of Chaucer's tales: John Lydgate's Prologue to the Siege of Thebes, The Ploughman's Tale, The Cook's Tale, Spurious Links, and The Canterbury Interlude and Merchant's Tale of Beryn. These pieces of Chaucerian apocrypha have been collected into one student-friendly edition, including introductions, notes, glosses, and a glossary to accommodate students of all levels of experience in Middle English.
£17.50
