III: Subjectivity and the Self -- 6. Re-reading Troilus in Response to Tony Spearing -- 7. The English Charles: Subjectivity, Texts and Culture -- IV: Reading for Form -- 8. The Inescapability of Form -- 9. Destroyer of Forms: Chaucer's Philomela -- 10. Gower's Confessio Amantis and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as Dits -- 11. Poems without Form? Maiden in the mor lay Revisited -- 12. "I" and "We" in Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity -- V: Epilogue -- 13. Two Appreciations of A.C. Spearing -- 14. Announcing a Literary Find Apparently Related to the Gawain-poet -- Works Cited -- Index

Readings in Medieval Texts offers a thorough and accessible introduction to the interpretation and criticism of a broad range of Old and Middle English canonical texts from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. The volume brings together 24 newly commissioned chapters by a leading international team of medieval scholars. An introductory chapter highlights the overarching trends in the composition of English Literature in the Medieval periods, and provides an overview of the textual continuities and innovations. Individual chapters give detailed information about context, authorship, date, and critical views on texts, before providing fascinating and thought-provoking examinations of crucial excerpts and themes. This book will be invaluable for undergraduate and graduate students on all courses in Medieval Studies, particularly those focusing on understanding literature and its role in society.

In Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the roles and functions of the “I” as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it "autography.” He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in and commentaries on third-person narratives, and descendants of the dit, a genre of French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, and a concern with writing and textuality. Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, Winner and Waster, the book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue as a textual performance, and devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes prologue, his Complaint and Dialogue, and the witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham’s legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of the concept of autography, including discussion of the intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in Troilus and Criseyde and Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine.

Uses the life of Richard I to argue that medieval England's public talk was essential to the production of texts and was a fundamental part of the transmission and reception of literature.

The Visible Text offers an innovative new vision of literary history and the history of the book from Beowulf to present day graphic novels.

Absent Narratives is a book about the defining difference between medieval and modern stories. In chapters devoted to the major writers of the late medieval period - Chaucer, Gower, the Gawain -poet and Malory - it presents and then analyzes a set of unique and unnoticed phenomena in medieval narrative, namely the persistent appearance of missing stories: stories implied, alluded to, or fragmented by a larger narrative. Far from being trivial digressions or passing curiosities, these absent narratives prove central to the way these medieval works function and to why they have affected readers in particular ways. Traditionally unseen, ignored, or explained away by critics, absent narratives offer a valuable new strategy for reading medieval texts and the historically specific textual culture in which they were written.

This collection brings together twelve original essays by prominent medievalists which address problems posed by contemporary literary and cultural theory. Taken together, the essays call into question the view that contemporary criticism has little to say about medieval literature and that medieval studies should remain isolated from the issues of contemporary criticism. The contributors apply a variety of critical methodologies to explore issues in textuality, intertextuality, and the role of the reader in works of medieval writers as diverse as Chaucer, Dante, Christine de Pizan, Anselm, and Talavera. Incorporating critical approaches such as deconstructionism, Marxism, feminism, new-historicism and reader-response criticism, the essays place these writers and their texts within a wider realm of cultural reference that embraces philosophy, religion, rhetoric, history, politics, and anthropology.

Generations of scholars have meditated upon the literary devices and cultural meanings of The Song of Roland. But according to Andrew Taylor not enough attention has been given to the physical context of the manuscript itself. The original copy of The Song of Roland is actually bound with a Latin translation of the Timaeus. Textual Situations looks at this bound volume along with two other similarly bound medieval volumes to explore the manuscripts and marginalia that have been cast into shadow by the fame of adjacent texts, some of the most read medieval works. In addition to the bound volume that contains The Song of Roland, Taylor examines the volume that binds the well-known poem "Sumer is icumen in" with the Lais of Marie de France, and a volume containing the legal Decretals of Gregory IX with marginal illustrations of wayfaring life decorating its borders. Approaching the manuscript as artifact, Textual Situations suggests that medieval texts must be examined in terms of their material support—that is, literal interpretation must take into consideration the physical manuscript itself in addition to the social conventions that surround its compilation. Taylor reconstructs the circumstances of the creation of these medieval bound volumes, the settings in which they were read, inscribed, and shared, and the social and intellectual conventions surrounding them.

"This is an exciting exploration of the world of Buddhist attitudes towards religious texts, from Indian scriptures to Japanese medieval tales. Its emphasis on discursive strategies—how Buddhist texts function and what they expect of their readers/users (especially, the connection between books, their content, and their readers' bodies)—is a welcome new perspective."—Fabio Rambelli, author of Buddhist Materiality "Miracles of Book and Body is fluidly written and engaging. This book brings the reader to an awareness of the range and foci of medieval 'popular' readings of sutra literature, and Eubanks provides an important perspective to interpreting these narratives that is original and stimulating."—Thomas W. Hare, author of Zeami: Performance Notes "Charlotte Eubanks' sophisticated, insightful and readable study of the physicalities of sutra texts and sutra recitation makes sense of some of the strangest phenomena in medieval Japan. By disentangling the literal and metaphorical meanings in Buddhist setsuwa, Eubanks explains such things as how memorizing a text is an embodiment thereof, how texts can become sentient beings, and why the scroll is an appropriate format for recording dharma. Her work is both important and engaging."—Margaret H. Childs, University of Kansas "Drawing on an impressive range of Mahayana scriptures and medieval Japanese didactic tales, Eubanks unpacks recurrent tropes correlating text and flesh to reveal surprising connections among the literary, material, and ritual dimensions of Buddhist textual culture. Elegantly written and theoretically astute, this volume will be welcomed not only by specialists in Buddhist literature but also by readers interested in broader issues of text-based religious practice."—Jacqueline Stone, author of Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism