Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England offers a new history of Middle English romance, the most popular genre of secular literature in the English Middle Ages. Michael Johnston argues that many of the romances composed in England from 1350-1500 arose in response to the specific socio-economic concerns of the gentry, the class of English landowners who lacked titles of nobility and hence occupied the lower rungs of the aristocracy. The end of the fourteenth century in England witnessed power devolving to the gentry, who became one of the dominant political and economic forces in provincial society. As Johnston demonstrates, this social change also affected England's literary culture, particularly the composition and readership of romance. Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England identifies a series of new topoi in Middle English that responded to the gentry's economic interests. But beyond social history and literary criticism, it also speaks to manuscript studies, showing that most of the codices of the "gentry romances" were produced by those in the immediate employ of the gentry. By bringing together literary criticism and manuscript studies, this book speaks to two scholarly communities often insulated from one another: it invites manuscript scholars to pay closer attention to the cultural resonances of the texts within medieval codices; simultaneously, it encourages literary scholars to be more attentive to the cultural resonances of surviving medieval codices.
This book situates the medieval manuscript within its cultural contexts, with chapters by experts in bibliographical and theoretical approaches to manuscript study.
Romances Medieval French and English romances were particularly attractive to gentry readers , as the heroes and ... Although he looks archaic , he is in many ways a new man in fourteenth - century England : an adventure - seeker and ...
This collection investigates how the late-medieval household acted as a sorter, user and disseminator of different kinds of ready information, from the traditional and authoritative to the innovative and newly made.
... Jim Harris, Diane Leblond, Jacqui Lewis, Patrick Mulcare, Paul Oliver, Senia Paseta (YNWA), Solomon and Naomi Pomerantz, Owen Rees, Gary Snapper, Mark Thompson and Jane Blumberg, Diana and Nick Walton, and Wes Williams.
57; Goldberg, Medieval England, pp. 93–94; R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), p. 21. Goldberg, Medieval England, pp. 100–113; Sylvia Thrupp, “The Grouping of the Population by Crafts and ...
Livingston and Bollard (2013) contains texts, translation, and discussions of Iolo's work for Owain Glyndˆwr. SEE ALSO: Cywyddwyr; Owain Glynd̂wr REFERENCES Johnston, David. 1986. “Iolo Goch and the English: Welsh Poetry and Politics in ...
The Sherbrooke family sold the manuscript to Sir Walter Scott (in service to the Advocates Library in Edinburgh) around 300 years later, in 1806 (see Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England, pp. 142–53, esp. p. 144).
Thornton, moreover, added a decorative scheme to both of these romances, something he did not do elsewhere in the ... 8 (2007), 304–13; and M. Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (forthcoming, Oxford, 2014), ch. 5.
277–8; James Ralston Caldwell, ed., Eger and Grime: A Parallel-Text Edition of the Percy and Huntington-Laing Versions of the Romance, with an Introductory Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), p.
114; and Middle English Dictionary, mōn(e), senses 4, 5, 6. Moon proverbs in French are collected in Middle French Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases, ed. by James Woodrow Hassell, Jr. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ...