Thesis (Ph. D.)--New York University, 1938. / "The tract Contra querelas fratrum" p. 25-37. "Canon of Uhtred's works" p. 65-75.

No description available.

Les poèmes allitératifs anglais, dont le représentant le plus illustre est le Piers Plowman de William Langland, s'inscrivent au sein d'un système de communication en pleine évolution dans l'Angleterre du XIVe siècle. L'extension de la literacy – l'aptitude à lire et à écrire – et le développement de l'anglais en sont les éléments les plus significatifs. L'objet de cette étude est l'interaction entre les différents aspects de ce système et les poèmes, afin de dégager toute la richesse de textes littéraires qui peuvent être considérés comme des sources historiques à part entière. Les thèmes abordés sont nombreux, au regard des multiples intérêts des poètes, préalablement replacés dans leur cadre social et culturel : l'organisation de la société, le gouvernement et la justice, l'institution ecclésiastique et la connaissance, la perception du salut de chacun et de tous, le positionnement des auteurs par rapport à leur activité. Leurs critiques, mais aussi leurs propositions et leurs espoirs, reflètent et enrichissent un dialogue de plus en plus large au sein de la société anglaise.

No description available.

Several earlier generations of historians described the later Middle Ages as an 'age of fear'. This account was especially applied to accounts of the presumed mentality of the later medieval layperson, seen as at the mercy of the currents of plague, violence and dramatic social, economic and political change and, above all, a religiosity characterised as primitive or even pathological. This 'great fear theory' remains influential in public perception. However, recent scholarship has done much to restitute a more positive, affective, incarnational and even soteriologically optimistic late-medieval vernacular piety. Nevertheless, perhaps due to the positive and recuperative approach of this scholarship, it did not attend to the treatment of fear in devotional and literary texts of the period. This thesis responds to this gap in current scholarship, and the continued pull of this account of later-medieval piety, by building an account of fear's place in the rich vernacular theology available in the Middle English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It takes as its starting point accounts of the role of fear in religious experience, devotion and practice within vernacular and lay contexts, as opposed to texts written by and for clerical audiences. The account of drede in Middle English strikingly integrates humbler aspects of fear into the relationship to God. The theological and indeed material circumstances of the later fourteenth century may have intensified fear's role: this thesis suggests that they also fostered an intensified engagement with the inherited tradition, generating fresh theological accounts of the place of fear. Chapter One begins with a triad of broadly pastoral texts which might be seen to disseminate a top-down agenda but which, this analysis discovers, articulate diverse ways in which the humble place of fear is elevated as part of a vernacular agenda. Here love and fear are always seen in a complex, varying dialectic or symbiosis. Chapter Two explores how this reaches a particular apex in the foundational and final place of fear in Julian of Norwich's Revelations, and is not incompatible even with her celebratedly 'optimistic' theology. Chapter Three turns to a more broadly accessed generic context, that of later medieval cycle drama, to engage in readings of Christ's Gethsemane fear in the 'Agony in the Garden' episodes. The N-Town, Chester, Towneley and York plays articulate complex and variant theological ideas about Christ's fearful affectivity as a site of imitation and participation for the medieval layperson. Chapter Four is a reading of Piers Plowman that argues a right fear is essential to Langland's espousal of a poetics of crisis and a crucial element in the questing corrective he applies to self and society. It executes new readings of key episodes in the poem, including the Prologue, Pardon, Crucifixion and the final apocalyptic passus, in the light of its theology of fear.

This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.