Search results
6 Chaucer and hagiographic authority Jennifer L. Sisk While much has been written about Chaucer’s debt to French, Italian and Classical literature,1 comparatively little attention has been devoted to Chaucer’s engagement with hagiography, even though writing about the saints was the most popular and widespread medieval narrative tradition.2 Chaucer’s own legend of St Cecilia is generally regarded as the first (or most) literary example of vernacular hagiography produced in late medieval England, but his engagement with the tradition goes far beyond the
machine, justify colonial expansion and establish authority, all under the control of a special elite class of technocrats’. 21 The narrator, Ambien, recounts (initially without any sense of discomfort) the continuous intervention of the Sirian empire in other cultures and less technically advanced native populations. The experiments of the title are often barbaric: one example that is particularly so is Ambien’s account of the Lombi experiment. The Sirian empire cannot seem to work out why it is that the mere appearance of Sirian colonisers on a planet leads
another, difficult as their close resemblance makes our task’ – though his conclusion that ‘Chaucer the pilgrim [resembles] in so many ways Chaucer the poet’ hardly accounts for how we might distinguish between the two, or, indeed, reconcile them with ‘Chaucer the man’. 7 This narratorial gap also poses a problem of authority: where is it located
(‘What was to be seen of our Redeemer has passed over into the Sacraments. In order that faith might be more perfect and more firm, teaching has taken the place of sight, and to this authority the hearts of believers, illumined by heavenly rays, have conformed’). 73 Leo elegantly justifies the physical disappearance of Christ by arguing that the sacraments, and thus faith, have replaced the once visible Christ. Furthermore, he strengthens the authority of the preacher and establishes a continuum between the Ascension and the celebration of the Mass that gives the
This study portrays Elizabeth Gaskell as an important social analyst who deliberately challenged the Victorian disjunction between public and private ethical values, maintaining a steady resistance to aggressive authority and advocating female friendship, rational motherhood and the power of speech as forces for social change. Since 1987, Gaskell's work has risen from minor to major status. Despite a wealth of subsequent gender-oriented criticism, however, this book's combination of psychoanalytic and political analysis is challenging in its use of modern motherhood theories. It presents the original text unchanged (except for bibliographical updating), together with a new critical Afterword. The Afterword offers detailed evaluation of all the Gaskell criticism published between 1985 and 2004 that has a bearing on the book's subject, and thus provides both a wide-ranging debate on the social implications of motherhood and a survey of Gaskell criticism over the last twenty years. This edition, with an updated bibliography and index, will bring the book to a new audience, while also offering a comprehensive overview of current Gaskell studies.
surfaces as a brief comment – as when Karma Lochrie characterises the episode with Julian as ‘the most famous’ of ‘a variety of glimpses into spiritual friendship among women in her Book ’ or Liz Herbert McAvoy describes it as ‘female-focused, non-hierarchical’, and fundamentally different from other ‘encounters with representatives of ecclesiastic authority’ – within interpretations that are thoughtful and persuasive overall. 4 The plays, too, are interpretations. They take a
commercial publishers. A non-negligible divergence lies in the fact these men had gained solid academic education pursued at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and University College London, institutions that, apart from strengthening their scholarly authority (with academic degrees displayed in the title pages of their books), provided the resources for the catalysation of their initial amateur interest into life-long scholarly commitment
Mrs Milne and I flirting all the morning. … I get tired of her and don't like to be seen with her. … Would not give up my authority to her, tho’ I did to Mrs Norcliffe and Isabella ….I off from the Black Swan at 1¾….Made the best of my way to Shibden (never stopt in Leeds) & arrived at 8. A little while with my father & Marian & then with my aunt…her leg more inflamed….Changed my dress—took John to carry my night things and off (walked) to Lidgate at 9 10/” and there at 9 35/”. Miss W– delighted to see me
natural world is established early on as a metonymy for Kempe as the ‘creatur’ of the Book : a textualised embodiment of God's creation and a spiritual work-in-progress. This ongoingness with ‘nature’, expressed through the ‘tunge’ and the cognisance of a sixty-five-year-old holy woman, not only chimes with Haraway's call for a revised and co-operative existential narrative but curiously reveals the synchronicity of two seemingly disparate aspects of the Book : the authority and genesis of Book II, and Kempe's maturing encounters, in Book II, with the natural
) presumes and endows it with a certain amount of authority and ensures, in turn, its continuity. Several chapters in this volume (Mishtooni Bose, Richard Newhauser and Ian Cornelius) explore the representation of voice as an ethical or moral instrument in Middle English literature and consider what those textual voices may be said to convey to their medieval and modern audiences. If voice presumes authority, its textual