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drama: first, under what Vincent Gillespie has called the ‘long shadow’ cast by Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions (1409), which placed strict limits on vernacular translations of scripture; secondly, in response to the various phases of the English Reformation, in the light of the onus that Reformers placed both on the Bible – rather than the Church – as the source of religious authority, and on worship in the vernacular, not (as previously) in Latin. 3 ‘Moralities’ have been selected for this study because they are
perspective and ideology, these references to authorities are crucial, especially in a time when hagiography had not yet become established as a genre for authorial self-fashioning. For this, we have to wait until the mid fifteenth century for professional hagiographer-poets such as John Lydgate, Osbern Bokenham, and, to some degree, John Capgrave. References to ecclesiastical writers, but also to passages from Scripture and Latin compilations of saints’ lives such as the Putting the saint in perspective 143 Legenda aurea are typical of medieval texts that seek to
saint that brings about the healing effect. Where God’s sensory contact with humanity is mediated by Jesus in the New Testament, it is mediated by Cuthbert in Northumbria, who takes on the healing role of Christ within his own specific milieu. In her discussion 145 Assembling and reshaping Christianity 145 of body and voice in the Judaeo- Christian scriptures, Elaine Scarry points out that in the Hebrew scriptures the powerful God does not have the power of self-substantiation and therefore the wounded human body becomes the confirmation of God’s ‘realness’. Man
, penitential romance, sacred romance, edifying romance, or secular scripture, equivalent terms for saints’ legends that make heavy use of romance elements are scarce.68 Only the term ‘secular hagiography’ suggests that romances usually classified as hagiographic in nature bear a closer resemblance to the genre of hagiography than to that of romance.69 Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has rightly criticised this treatment of saints’ lives, which gives preference to romances and takes them to be normative for genre development and transgressions: ‘Saints’ lives are thus something like
between ten and seventy lines. The fifth and last ‘question’ is not even posed as such. Zosimas is astonished that Mary can freely quote from Scripture (XVIII, 1023–30) and ‘persawit’, i.e. deduces, that she has read the holy writings or at least parts of them. To his puzzlement, Mary responds that she has never heard anybody read from Scripture nor read it herself (1039–44). Thus, the last question of Zosimas’s ‘interview’ is an imagined one and anticipated by Mary’s answer without him actually uttering it. The conversation between Zosimas and Mary, consequently, is as
without misconstrual. It is not therefore a statement against the traditional practices of the established church.59 The preface to the calendar in the ‘new fashion’ also emphasises its intention to increase the knowledge of the reader, this time describing the inclusion of references to Bible readings so that ‘the reader may knowe what scripture the church do use thorow out the yeare, & to study & use the same’.60 The preface in the 1545 manual of prayers and primer (Henry VIII’s Primer), which Salter, Popular reading in English.indd 57 21/05/2012 10:15:04 58
garden must have been moved to the top of a mountain and beyond human reach. There is no doubt that medieval exegetes were aware that any verse in Sacred Scripture could be given a metaphorical or spiritual sense, of a kind universally found in biblical commentaries. It was not clear, however, that such a reading should take primacy over the literal sense in passages presenting
It is surprising, at this point in the story of the rich and strange rediscovery of a text so important to French and English literary and social history, that no collection of scholarly essays related to Mandeville's Travels yet exists in English or French. This book is a collection of essays by scholars in England and France, who produce a complex and sometimes contradictory view of Mandeville's book as an important object of early modern attention, as well as a feature of early modern literary context. The chapters range in emphasis from textual and bibliographic studies of Mandeville's late medieval and early modern Nachleben to studies of 'Mandevillian ideologies', to readings of romances and especially theatrical productions, illuminated by understandings of the new life in print of the Travels and its excerpted account of the Levant. Part I of the book makes clear that there were profound changes in motives for publication, anthologisation and readerly reception of the text(s) from the time of the incunabula, through its use by explorers Columbus, Frobisher and Ralegh, to its appearance as a children's book in the Enlightenment. These changes underscore alterations of economies and geographical experience in the mostly post-medieval 'Age of Discovery'. Part II is on Mandevillian ideologies and examines the Nachleben of the Travels through a historical discourse on the Turks and Islam in early modern England, development and geography of scripture. Part III is on Mandevillian and focuses on the drama of the newly invented medium of the commercial theatre.
holiness of her life, but also the style and mode of performance deployed to give that holiness dramatic meaning. As such, this chapter is less an illustration of sanctity as literature as it is an exploration of both the drama of sanctity and the sanctity of drama. So where the author(s) of the Digby play deploy spectacle as a way of underscoring Mary’s holiness, Wager imagines the Magdalene’s conversion, the apotheosis of her sanctity, as an opportunity to reject spectacle in favour of a stagecraft centred on the naked truth of Scripture. For the author(s) of the Digby
and the two testaments of Christian scripture. As this chapter will demonstrate, the harmonised retelling sharpens contradictions between the two parables, holding up the complex multiplicity of scripture, even as it asserts that such multiplicity belongs to one, Paradox formed into story 179 unified truth. In Cleanness, in other words, we find a poignant example of parable as ‘paradox formed into story’.7 Most analyses of Middle English Wedding Feast narratives, and especially of the Cleanness retelling, regard the parable much more simply, as a negative