This volume would comprise a great unit on anticlerical poetry in late medieval England, collecting Piers the Plowman's Crede, The Plowman's Tale, Jack Upland, Friar Daw's Reply, Upland's Rejoinder, and Why I Can't Be a Nun. These Middle English poems attack ecclesiastical corruption; most of the poems were written by disgruntled Lollards about clerics and friars in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. Piers the Plowman's Crede deals with a poor man trying to learn the Apostle's Creed from friars, who cannot teach him and only want his money; eventually the man can only learn the creed from Piers the Plowman. The Plowman's Tale casts an anticlerical tale in the mold of one of the Canterbury Tales. Jack Upland, Friar Daw's Reply, and Upland's Rejoinder comprise a debate over the hypocrisy of friars. Meanwhile, Why I Can't Be a Nun decries the sins of nuns in convents. These texts are well glossed and include introductions and copious notes, making them approachable for students of Middle English of any level of experience.

That resistance, informed by a model of literary influence grounded on the idea of interruption, would keep the Canterbury Tales away from the Decameron, though not the rest of Chaucer from other works by Boccaccio. In the end, of course, that resistance tells us more about Chaucer's reception since the fifteenth century than about Chaucer himself or his sources."--BOOK JACKET.

Vernacular writers of late medieval England were engaged in global conversations about orthodoxy and heresy. Entering these conversations with a developing vernacular required lexical innovation. The Language of Heresy in Late Medieval English Literature examines the way in which these writers complemented seemingly straightforward terms, like heretic, with a range of synonyms that complicated the definitions of both those words and orthodoxy itself. This text proposes four specific terms that become collated with heretic in the parlance of medieval English writers of the 14th and 15th centuries: jangler, Jew, Saracen, and witch. These four labels are especially important insofar as they represent the way in which medieval Christianity appropriated and subverted marginalized or vulnerable identities to promote a false image of unassailable authority.

Published in 1997: An edition of the literary virus that inserted itself into the Canterbury Tales and passed as authentic until the late 19th century. The virulent attack on the clergy made possible the Renaissance conception of Chaucer as a pre-Protestant English patriot.

In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe wrote a profoundly religious drama despite the theater's newfound secularism and his own reputation for anti-Christian irreverence. The Aesthetics of Antichrist explores this apparent paradox by suggesting that, long before Marlowe, Christian drama and ritual performance had reveled in staging the collapse of Christianity into its historical opponents—paganism, Judaism, worldliness, heresy. By embracing this tradition, Marlowe's work would at once demonstrate the theatricality inhering in Christian worship and, unexpectedly, resacralize the commercial theater. The Antichrist myth in particular tells of an impostor turned prophet: performing Christ's life, he reduces the godhead to a special effect yet in so doing foretells the real second coming. Medieval audiences, as well as Marlowe's, could evidently enjoy the constant confusion between true Christianity and its empty look-alikes for that very reason: mimetic degradation anticipated some final, as yet deferred revelation. Mere theater was a necessary prelude to redemption. The versions of the myth we find in Marlowe and earlier drama actually approximate, John Parker argues, a premodern theory of the redemptive effect of dramatic representation itself. Crossing the divide between medieval and Renaissance theater while drawing heavily on New Testament scholarship, Patristics, and research into the apocrypha, The Aesthetics of Antichrist proposes a wholesale rereading of pre-Shakespearean drama.

This volume collects poems and historical documents relevant to understanding the political climate of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Britain, many of which have been out of print for a century. This new edition, geared towards classroom use with its notes, introductions, gloss, and glossary, opens up the fascinating study of late medieval English history. This volume contains five sections: Poems of Political Prophecy; Anticlerical Poems and Documents; Literature of Richard II's Reign and the Peasants' Revolt; Poems against Simony and the Abuse of Money; and Plowman Writings-all tied together by a common attitude of satire and complaint, and a distrust of those who may abuse power. This volume would make an excellent source for a class on English satire or late medieval politics.

Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England bridges the disciplines of literature and history by examining various kinds of literary language as examples of social practice. Readings of both English and Latin texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are grounded in close textual study which reveals the social positioning of these works and the kinds of ideological work they can be seen to perform. Distinctive new readings of texts emerge which challenge received interpretations of literary history and late medieval culture. Canonical authors and texts such as Chaucer, Gower, and Pearl are discussed alongside the less familiar: Clanvowe, anonymous alliterative verse, and Wycliffite prose tracts.

Challenging the view that England's monasteries and mendicant convents fell into a headlong decline long before Henry VIII set about destroying them at the Dissolution, these essays offer a reassessment of the religious orders on the eve of the Reformation.

Close analysis of the poem reveals extensive allusion to contemporary social, religious and political events.

Between 1532 and 1602, the works of Geoffrey Chaucer were published in no less than six folio editions. These were, in fact, the largest books of poetry produced in sixteenth-century England, and they significantly shaped the perceptions of Chaucer that would hold sway for centuries to come. But it is the stories behind these editions that are the focus of Megan L. Cook's interest in The Poet and the Antiquaries. She explores how antiquarians—historians, lexicographers, religious polemicists, and other readers with a professional, but not necessarily literary, interest in the English past—played an indispensable role in making Chaucer a figure of lasting literary and cultural importance. After establishing the antiquarian involvement in the publication of the folio editions, Cook offers a series of case studies that discuss Chaucer and his works in relation to specific sixteenth-century discourses about the past. She turns to early accounts of Chaucer's biography to show how important they were in constructing the poet as a figure whose life and works could be known, understood, and valued by later readers. She considers the claims made about Chaucer's religious views, especially the assertions that he was a proto-Protestant, and the effects they had on shaping his canon. Looking at early modern views on Chaucerian language, she illustrates how complicated the relations between past and present forms of English were thought to be. Finally, she demonstrates the ways in which antiquarian readers applied knowledge from other areas of scholarship to their reading of Middle English texts. Linking Chaucer's exceptional standing in the poetic canon with his role as a symbol of linguistic and national identity, The Poet and the Antiquaries demonstrates how and why Chaucer became not only the first English author to become a subject of historical inquiry but also a crucial figure for conceptualizing the medieval in early modern England.