The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages explores the richness and variety of life-writing from late Antiquity to the threshold of the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages, writers from Bede to Chaucer were thinking about life and experimenting with ways to translate lives, their own and others', into literature. Their subjects included career religious, saints, celebrities, visionaries, pilgrims, princes, philosophers, poets, and even a few 'ordinary people.' They relay life stories not only in chronological narratives, but also in debates, dialogues, visions, and letters. Many medieval biographers relied on the reader's trust in their authority, but some espoused standards of evidence that seem distinctly modern, drawing on reliable written sources, interviewing eyewitnesses, and cross-checking their facts wherever possible. Others still professed allegiance to evidence but nonetheless freely embellished and invented not only events and dialogue but the sources to support them. The first book devoted to life-writing in medieval England, The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages covers major life stories in Old and Middle English, Latin, and French, along with such Continental classics as the letters of Abelard and Heloise and the autobiographical Vision of Christine de Pizan. In addition to the life stories of historical figures, it treats accounts of fictional heroes, from Beowulf to King Arthur to Queen Katherine of Alexandria, which show medieval authors experimenting with, adapting, and expanding the conventions of life writing. Though Medieval life writings can be challenging to read, we encounter in them the antecedents of many of our own diverse biographical forms-tabloid lives, literary lives, brief lives, revisionist lives; lives of political figures, memoirs, fictional lives, and psychologically-oriented accounts that register the inner lives of their subjects.
Greer, "Backward springs". The Self-Invention of Martha Moulsworth', 3. Lamb, 'The Poem as a Clock; Martha Moulsworth Tells Time Three Ways', 92. Folger MSVa.166. Further references to this manuscript (which is paginated rather than ...
Matthew Paris (d. ... Similarly detailed and introspective saints' lives continued to be written into the early modern period, as Alexander Barclay's Life of Saint George (1515) and Henry Bradshaw's Life of Saint Werburga (1521) attest.
This volume offers a sampling of approaches to the study of life-writing, bringing together eminent scholars and writers to reflect on specific examples of life-writing to reflect broader themes within the genre.
40 Greenstreet 21, 22, 37 Greer, Germaine 188, 327 n. 36 Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke 243 Grey, Lady Jane 45, 47, 84,209 Grimald, Nicholas 84 Grimston, Sir Harbottle 245 Grotius, Hugo 215, 249 Gruter, Issac.
Offers essays by leading scholars on the writing of history globally during the early modern era, from c.1400 to c.1800.
The bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, charged Thomas Harding that 'Ye scourged them with roddes: ye sette burninge torches to their handes, ye cutte of their tongues, ye hanged them, ye beheadded them, ye burnte them to ashes, ...
From rock and sport to film and popular literature, here is a cook’s tour of the sad, curious, and sometimes marvelous carnival of post-Soviet public expression.”-Jeffrey Brooks, Johns Hopkins University
This volume aims at once to provide an authoritative survey of the field, and especially to provoke cross-cultural comparisons.
And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume, which assembles 28 contributions from leading historians, tackles these and other questions.
A chronological scholarly survey of the history of historical writing in five volumes. Each volume covers a particular period of time, from the beginning of writing to the present day, and from all over the world.