The poetry we call 'alliterative' is recorded in English from the seventh century until the sixteenth, and includes Caedmon's 'Hymn', Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman. These are some of the most admired works of medieval English literature, and also among the most enigmatic. The formal practice of alliterative poets exceeded the conceptual grasp of medieval literary theory; theorists are still playing catch-up today. This book explains the distinctive nature of alliterative meter, explores its differences from subsequent accentual-syllabic forms, and advances a reformed understanding of medieval English literary history. The startling formal variety of Piers Plowman and other Middle English alliterative poems comes into sharper focus when viewed in diachronic perspective: the meter was in transition; to understand it, we need to know where it came from and where it was headed at the moment it died out.

The conquest of Wales by the medieval English throne produced a fiercely contested territory, both militarily and culturally. Wales was left fissured by frontiers of language, jurisdiction and loyalty - a reluctant meeting place of literary traditions and political cultures. But the profound consequences of this first colonial adventure on the development of medieval English culture have been disregarded. In setting English figurations of Wales against the contrasted representations of the Welsh language tradition, this volume seeks to reverse this neglect, insisting on the crucial importance of the English experience in Wales for any understanding of the literary cultures of medieval England and medieval Britain.

From William Langland's Piers Plowman, through the highly polemicized literary culture of fifteenth-century Lollardy, to major Reformation writers such as Simon Fish, William Tyndale and John Bale, and into the 1590s, this book argues for a vital reassessment of our understanding of the literary and cultural modes of the Reformation. It argues that the ostensibly revolutionary character of early Protestant literary culture was deeply indebted to medieval satirical writing and, indeed, can be viewed as a remarkable crystallization of the textual movements and polemical personae of a rich, combative tradition of medieval writing which is still at play on the London stage in the age of Marlowe and Shakespeare. Beginning with a detailed analysis of Piers Plowman, this book traces the continued vivacity of combative satirical personae and self-fashionings that took place in an appropriative movement centred on the figure of the medieval labourer. The remarkable era of Protestant 'plowman polemics' has too often been dismissed as conventional or ephemeral writing too stylistically separate to be linked to Piers Plowman, or held under the purview of historians who have viewed such texts as sources of theological or documentary information, rather than as vital literary-cultural works in their own right. Radical Pastoral, 1381-1594 makes a vigorous case for the existence of a highly politicised tradition of 'polemical pastoral' which stretched across the whole of the sixteenth century, a tradition that has been largely marginalised by both medievalists and early modernists.

No detailed description available for "The Body Politic".

This book provides fascinating studies of English religious men and women through their reading and writing during the turbulent period of the Dissolution.

Ranging from the extraordinary burst of English literary writing under the reign of Richard II to the literature of the Reformation, this title challenges traditional assumptions and argues that the stylistic diversity enjoyed by late medieval writers was curtailed by the authoritarian practice of the 16th-century cultural revolution.