In Medieval Allegory as Epistemology, Marco Nievergelt argues that late medieval dream-poetry was able to use the tools of allegorical fiction to explore a set of complex philosophical questions regarding the nature of human knowledge. The focus is on three of the most widely read and influential poems of the later Middle Ages: Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose; the Pélerinages trilogy of Guillaume de Deguileville; and William Langland's vision of Piers Plowman in its various versions. All three poets grapple with a collection of shared, closely related epistemological problems that emerged in Western Europe during the thirteenth century, in the wake of the reception of the complete body of Aristotle's works on logic and the natural sciences. This study therefore not only examines the intertextual and literary-historical relations linking the work of the three poets, but takes their shared interest in cognition and epistemology as a starting point to assess their wider cultural and intellectual significance in the context of broader developments in late medieval philosophy of mind, knowledge, and language. Vernacular literature more broadly played an extremely important role in lending an enlarged cultural resonance to philosophical ideas developed by scholastic thinkers, but it is also shown that allegorical narrative could prompt philosophical speculation on its own terms, deliberately interrogating the dominance and authority of scholastic discourses and institutions by using first-person fictional narrative as a tool for intellectual speculation.

This volume shows how late medieval dream-poetry explored problems arising from the reception of Aristotle's philosophical work concerning human knowledge. Marco Nievergelt explores how the work of three medieval poets in the genre of allegorical fiction addressed these problems in distinctive, non-academic terms.

This title provides a new account of the literary history of fourteenth-century England, arguing that many of this period's most distinctive literary experiments emerge through a productive dialogue with the 'Romance of the Rose', a jointly-authored medieval French poem.

The Routledge Companion to Medieval English Literature offers a new, inclusive, and comprehensive context to the study of medieval literature written in the English language from the Norman Conquest to the end of the Middle Ages. Utilising a Trans-European context, this volume includes essays from leading academics in the field across linguistic and geographic divides. Extending beyond the traditional scholarly discussions of insularity in relation to Middle English literature and ‘isolationism’, this volume: Oversees a variety of genres and topics, including cultural identity, insular borders, linguistic interactions, literary gateways, Middle English texts and traditions, and modern interpretations such as race, gender studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism. Draws on the combined extensive experience of teaching and research in medieval English and comparative literature within and outside of anglophone higher education and looks to the future of this fast-paced area of literary culture. Contains an indispensable section on theoretical approaches to the study of literary texts. This Companion provides the reader with practical insights into the methods and approaches that can be applied to medieval literature and serves as an important reference work for upper-level students and researchers working on English literature.

The thirteenth-century allegorical dream vision, the Roman de la Rose, transformed how medieval literary texts engaged with philosophical ideas. Written in Old French, its influence dominated French, English and Italian literature for the next two centuries, serving in particular as a model for Chaucer and Dante. Jean de Meun's section of this extensive, complex and dazzling work is notable for its sophisticated responses to a whole host of contemporary philosophical debates. This collection brings together literary scholars and historians of philosophy to produce the most thorough, interdisciplinary study to date of how the Rose uses poetry to articulate philosophical problems and positions. This wide-ranging collection demonstrates the importance of the poem for medieval intellectual history and offers new insights into the philosophical potential both of the Rose specifically and of medieval poetry as a whole.

In this study Bardzell unveils the way signification in medieval allegorical narrative depends not on Aristotelian theories of language, but rather on an alternative theory of language, which began with the Stoics and was transmitted through the Middle Ages via grammar theory.

New essays on the unjustly neglected Pèlerinage works by de Guileville, showing in particular its huge contemporary influence. The fourteenth-century French pilgrimage allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville (or "Digulleville") shaped late medieval and early modern European culture. Portions of the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, Pèlerinage de l'Ame and Pèlerinage de Jhesucrist survive in more than eighty medieval manuscripts and translations into English, German, Dutch, Castilian and Latin appeared by the early sixteenth century, along with adaptations into Frenchprose and dramatic forms and numerous early printed editions. This volume furnishes a better understanding of the allegories' circulation, creation and importance from the 1330s into the 1560s, via trans-national, multilingual and interdisciplinary perspectives. The collection's first section, on "Tradition", identifies the patterns that developed as Deguileville's corpus captured the attentions of adaptors, annotators and illustrators. The second section, on "Authority", addresses the cultural context of Deguileville himself, his approach to poetic craft and the status of his French and Latin poetry. The third section, on "Influence", closely examines selected connections between the Pèlerinages and the literary productions of later authors, translators and reading communities, including the French verse of Philippe de Mézières, Castilian print adaptation, and the early modern Croatian novel.Overall, the collection provides a variety of approaches to examining literary reception, attending not only to texts but also to evidence of surviving manuscripts and early printed editions; it offers new insights into a rich and complex allegorical corpus and its impact on European literary history. Marco Nievergelt is a Maître-Assistant in Early English Literature in the English department of the University of Lausanne.Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath studies English and French medieval literature, with a particular interest in allegory, translation studies, and the history of the material text. Contributors: Flor Maria Bango de la Campa, Robert L.A. Clark, Graham Robert Edwards, Dolores Grmaca, Andreas Kablitz, John Moreau, Ursula Peters, Fabienne Pomel, Pamela Sheingorn, Sara V. Torres, Géraldine Veysseyre