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The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. This volume explores the vast cultural, literary, social, and political transformations which characterized the period 1000-1350.
List of contents
- General Editors' Preface
- List of Figures
- Note on Languages and Translations
- Introduction
- 1. England c.1000: This World is in Haste
- I: Violence in Crisis: Wulfstan and Ælfric Writing the Last Days
- II: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles: Writing what Was Lost
- III: Meaning and Uncertainty: Interpreting History
- IV: The Battle of Maldon: Asking Questions
- 2. Conquests, Kings, and Transformations
- I: Visions and Dreams: Miracle Stories in Conquered England
- II: Transformations 1: Return of the Warrior King
- III: Transformations 2: Soul-Searching
- IV: Chronicles of Post-Conquest Kingship
- V: Paying Court: New Ideals in the World
- 3. Know Yourslef: Interiority, Love, and God
- I: My Flesh Is Immune to All Corruption: Christina of Markyate's Certainty
- II: The Self Enclosed: Guarding the Heart in the Ancrene Wisse
- III: For who Is Richer than Christ?: The Love of God
- IV: Conclusion: Selfhood without Individuality
- 4. The Bellator and Chevalerie: The Struggle for the Warrior's Soul
- I: Chansons and Chronicles of Crusade: The Warrior's Entreaty
- II: The Ordene de chevalerie and Roman des eles: Remaking Knighthood
- III: Epic vassalage and Romance chevalerie: Knighthood Shaped by Narrative
- IV: The Soldier's Sacred Oath: Knighthood and the State
- V: Gui de Warewic: The Moral Claims of English Knighthood
- VI: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight's Noble Device: An English Poet Criticizes chevalerie
- 5. It is Different with Us: Love, Individuality, and Fiction
- I: Marie de France's Lais, Lancelot, and Other Lovers
- II: Strange Love: Thomas of Britain's Tristan
- III: 'What appears to all, this we call Being'
- IV: The Four Degrees of Violent Love
- 6. Conversations with the Living and the Dead
- I: King Arthur, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Wace and Lazamon
- II: The Lamentations of Mary: Feeling for Christ in Latin Prose and French Verse
- III: 'Stond wel, morder, ounder rose': Lyrics of Passion
- IV: The Mirror of the Church and The Owl and the Nightingale: Orthodoxy and Reality
- V: The South English Legendary: Faith and Community
- 7. Engletere and the Inglis: Conflict and Construction
- I: The Community of the Realm: A New Public Discourse
- II: 'He dredden him so bhef doth clubbe': Power and Coercion in Havelok
- III: The French and English Brut: Vernacular Writing and the Politicization of History
- IV: Wynners and Defendours and Assaillours: Disorders of Society
- V: Conclusion
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Laura Ashe is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. She works on medieval English literary, cultural, and political history, with particular specialisms in England's multilingual literatures, chivalry and crusading, kingship, romance and historiography, sanctity and hagiography, devotional writings and thought, love, subjectivity, and the early literature of interiority. Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, her books include Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (2007), Early Fiction in England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer (2015), and Richard II (2016). She is one of the editors of New Medieval Literatures, has edited several other collaborative volumes, and published numerous articles, on topics ranging from the eighth to the seventeenth century.
Summary
The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. This volume explores the vast cultural, literary, social, and political transformations which characterized the period 1000-1350.
Additional text
Ashe's sure-handed and vigorous translations, particularly those from French, are one of the delights of this volume. The extensiveness of the quotations draws attention to the remarkable literary production "in all three English languages", especially in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. ... The enduring contribution of Conquest and Transformation is its demonstration that "English writers were in the vanguard of new literary developments - narrative fiction, the romance, vernacular historiography - and made great contributions to the transformative theories of selfhood, interiority, and the will, to the emergence of affective piety, and to the theology and secular expression and celebration of love".
