The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World (Suny Series in Medieval Studies)

In this volume a variety of perspectives reevaluate the nature of friendship, desire, and the olde daunce of love in the Middle Ages. Challenging earlier scholarly notions about medieval marriage, this book suggests and explores the legitimacy of marital friendship, affection, and mutuality. The authors explore the relationship of medieval love to companionship, equality, and power, and relate medieval expressions of love to a number of issues including creativity, reading and writing, voyeurism, chastity, violence, and even hate. The book reconsiders the theological, philosophical, and legal background of medieval attitudes toward marriage, analyzes expressions of love and desire in European vernacular literature, and considers several implications of Chaucer's treatment of love, marriage, and sexuality.

Biographies & Memoirs

Edwards, Robert R.

Leaders & Notable People

State Univ of New York Pr

Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Interventions: New Studies Medieval Cult)

From the twelfth century onwards, medieval English writers adapted the conventions of high literary culture to establish themselves as recognized authors and claim a significant place for works of imagination beside those of doctrine and instruction. Their efforts extended over three languages—Latin, French, and English—and across a discontinuous literary history. Their strategy was to approach authorship as a field of rhetorical invention rather than a fixed institution. Consequently, their work is at once revisionary and ambivalent. Writers conspicuously position themselves within tradition, exploit the resources of poetic belatedness, and negotiate complex relations to their audiences and social authority. Authorial invention in the Middle Ages is the base of a national tradition that English writers in the Renaissance saw as stable and capable of emulating the canons of classical languages and the Italian and French vernaculars. In Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, Robert R. Edwards brings new interpretive perspectives to Walter Map, Marie de France, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. He offers a critical reading of key moments that define the emergence of medieval English authorship by showing how writers adapt the commonplaces of authorship to define themselves and their works externally and to construct literary meaning internally.

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

Ohio State University Press

From the twelfth century onwards, medieval English writers adapted the conventions of high literary culture to establish themselves as recognized authors and claim a significant place for works of imagination beside those of doctrine and instruction. Their efforts extended over three languages—Latin, French, and English—and across a discontinuous literary history. Their strategy was to approach authorship as a field of rhetorical invention rather than a fixed institution. Consequently, their work is at once revisionary and ambivalent. Writers conspicuously position themselves within tradition, exploit the resources of poetic belatedness, and negotiate complex relations to their audiences and social authority.     Authorial invention in the Middle Ages is the base of a national tradition that English writers in the Renaissance saw as stable and capable of emulating the canons of classical languages and the Italian and French vernaculars. In Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, Robert R. Edwards brings new interpretive perspectives to Walter Map, Marie de France, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. He offers a critical reading of key moments that define the emergence of medieval English authorship by showing how writers adapt the commonplaces of authorship to define themselves and their works externally and to construct literary meaning internally.   

1ST EDITION, hardcover in dust jacket. Published by Vanderbilt University Press 1989. Publisher's statement: "In Ratio and Invention, Robert R. Edwards examines the complex relations of literary theory and practice in the Middle Ages. Analyzing medieval arts of poetry, he shows that literary theory is not merely prescriptive nor does it describe the poet's craft; rather, it is part of poetic discourse and becomes a source of poetic meaning. Edwards concentrates on two key analytical concepts of the period. St. Augustine connected lyric poetry to the principles of mathematical ordering, the ratio, presumed to underly music. By its association with music, the lyric modulates between the human and the divine, the ethical and the metaphysical. Medieval narrative drew on the procedures of invention originally developed in classical rhetoric. Edwards shows that the categories that distinguished actual from hypothetical events in narrative came to share a common ground in medieval literary theory. The result, in the high and late Middle Ages, was to emphasize the power of poetic fiction to frame a self-consistent imaginative world."

Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative

History & Criticism

Vanderbilt Univ Pr

Chairside Chats with God: A One Year Daily Devotional

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Covenant Books

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Books by Edwards, Robert R.