Culture and History 1350-1600 - Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing

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Culture and History, 1350-1600
Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing

Edited by David Aers

This book explores the making of human identities and agency in English communities from 1350 to 1600. The volume is informed by a commitment to historical research and interdisciplinary analysis, combined with attention to hermeneutic issues raised in the work on critical theory which has emerged in the last thirty years.
Written by historians and literary critics from both Britain and the United States, the book is concerned with the diversity of medieval culture and its texts. Altogether the essays offer a powerful challenge to the dominant aspects of the paradigm which has shaped the writing of the transformation of English culture in the 16th century and point to areas of surprising continuity where much previous criticism has posited decisive discontinuities. The book also offers important and provocative ways of understanding the forms of power and identity in medieval communities, which are independent of current neo-Foucauldian fashions.

1. Court Politics and the Invention of Literature: The Case of Sir John Clanvowe (Lee Patterson)
2. The Eucharist and the Construction of Medieval Identities (Miri Rubin)
3. Ritual, Church and Theatre: Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body (Sarah Beckwith)
4. Imagining Communities: Theatres and the English Nation in the Sixteenth Century (Peter Womack)
5. Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide (Judith M. Bennett)
6. A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the 'History of the Subject' (David Aers)

$39.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-2415-0
$21.95s paper / ISBN 0-8143-2416-9

216 pages

1992

For sale only in Canada, the United States, and the Philippines