Acquiring Wisdom: Teaching Texts and the Lore of the People
Daniel Anlezark
This article examines the acquisition of wisdom through literary text in medieval England. The most famous collections of wisdom in the Middle Ages were found in two Old Testament books ...
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Active and Contemplative Lives
Jennifer Summit
This article examines the debate over the vita activa versus the vita contemplativa in England across the late medieval and early modern periods. After considering the inversion of the ...
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The Adventures Passed by Master George Gascoigne: Experiments in Prose
Gillian Austen
This article examines George Gascoigne's prose writing. Gascoigne's modern reputation rests principally upon four works: the prose fiction A Discourse of the Adventures passed by Master ...
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Ælfric of Eynsham
Andrew Scheil
This article introduces and surveys the life and writings of the Anglo-Saxon monk, Ælfric of Eynsham (c.955–c.1010). It provides a summary of the main scholarly work that has been done on ...
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All Talk and No Action? Early Modern Political Dialogue
Cathy Shrank
This article examines sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century dialogue. It considers why so many writers chose to convey opinions or explore ideas in works laid out as conversations. The ...
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Anachronism
Margreta De Grazia
To an age enjoined to “Always Historicize,” anachronism is an embarrassment. It is not merely getting a date wrong, a chronological error. It is mistaking some aspect of a period’s ...
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Ancient Greek Elegy
Gregory Nagy
This article fully considers the tradition and function of ancient Greek elegy. It is shown that the elegy uses its own peculiar hexameters existing in a codependent relationship with the ...
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Anti‐Social Reform: Writing Rebellion
Stephen Kelly
This article examines writing about rebellion and anti-social reform in medieval England. It discusses examples where carnivalesque inversion of social hierarchy reveals political ...
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Astrology, Magic, and Witchcraft
P. G. Maxwell-Stuart
The Elizabethans and Jacobeans along with all their European contemporaries lived simultaneously in the physical world and a spiritual realm inhabited by spirits, angels, demons, and the ...
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Authorial Work
Kellie Robertson
Michel Foucault declared that authors became subject to punishment and discourse became transgressive. In the late fourteenth century, both “discourse” and the very act of writing itself ...
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Authority, Constraint, and the Writing of the Medieval Self
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton
This article examines the genres and the constraint in writing about the self in England during the medieval period. It explains that autobiography is a rare species in the Middle Ages and ...
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Authorizing Female Piety
Diane Watt
This article offers a broad overview of English women's authority and piety from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fifteenth century that looks at accounts of women's visions either written ...
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Autobiography and the History of Reading
Brian Cummings
Autobiography as a concept asks deep questions about the periodization of history. It is also a scene of persistent rivalry in the construction of medieval and Renaissance models of ...
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Being Green in Late Medieval English Literature
Gillian Rudd
This article traces links between late medieval English literature and the 20th century ecology movement. It suggests that the medievalists consider the question of how animals appear in a ...
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The Book of Common Prayer
Daniel Swift
This article discusses early modern prayer books, focusing on the Book of Common Prayer. It shows that the early modern prayer book was a work in progress — not only revised but revisable ...
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