Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England examines the censorship issues that propelled the major writers of the period toward their massive use of visionary genres. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton suggests that writers and translators as different as Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, “M.N.,” and Margery Kempe positioned their work to take advantage of the tacit toleration that both religious and secular authorities extended to revelatory theology. The book examines controversial ideas as diverse as the early experimental humanism of Chaucer, censured beatific vision theology and the breakdown of Langland's A Text, the English reception of M.N.'s translation of Marguerite Porete's condemned book, Julian's authorial suppression of her gender, and the impact of suspect Continental women's activism on Kempe. /// Kerby-Fulton also narrates success stories of intellectual freedom, tracing evidence of ecclesiastical tolerance of revelation, the impossibility of official censorship in a manuscript culture, and the powerful, protected reading circles for radical apocalypticism and mysticism, such as those of the Austins and the Carthusians. Until now, Wycliffism has been seen as the only significant unorthodox or radical body of writings in late medieval England. Books under Suspicion is the first comprehensive study of banned non-Wycliffite materials in Insular writing during the period of the Avignon and Great Schism papacies. /// This weighty, complex, and rewarding book makes use of neglected material in manuscripts and archives to reconstruct new aspects of the history of religious thought and vernacular writing in Ricardian and early Lancastrian England. As such it will interest scholars of late medieval religious history and Middle English literary history.

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn

Reference

University of Notre Dame Press

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England examines the censorship issues that propelled the major writers of the period toward their massive use of visionary genres. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton suggests that writers and translators as different as Chaucer, Langland, Julian of Norwich, “M.N.,” and Margery Kempe positioned their work to take advantage of the tacit toleration that both religious and secular authorities extended to revelatory theology. The book examines controversial ideas as diverse as the early experimental humanism of Chaucer, censured beatific vision theology and the breakdown of Langland's A Text, the English reception of M.N.'s translation of Marguerite Porete's condemned book, Julian's authorial suppression of her gender, and the impact of suspect Continental women's activism on Kempe. /// Kerby-Fulton also narrates success stories of intellectual freedom, tracing evidence of ecclesiastical tolerance of revelation, the impossibility of official censorship in a manuscript culture, and the powerful, protected reading circles for radical apocalypticism and mysticism, such as those of the Austins and the Carthusians. Until now, Wycliffism has been seen as the only significant unorthodox or radical body of writings in late medieval England. Books under Suspicion is the first comprehensive study of banned non-Wycliffite materials in Insular writing during the period of the Avignon and Great Schism papacies. /// This weighty, complex, and rewarding book makes use of neglected material in manuscripts and archives to reconstruct new aspects of the history of religious thought and vernacular writing in Ricardian and early Lancastrian England. As such it will interest scholars of late medieval religious history and Middle English literary history.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

This book addresses the need for scholarly attention to the field of alternative, non-Augustinian apocalypticism and its implications for the study of Piers Plowman. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton discusses the major prophets and visionaries of such alternative traditions, who are characterised by their denunciation of clerical abuses, the urging of religious reform, and an ultimate historical optimism. Her book offers a proposal for the importance of such traditions, particularly as represented in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen, to the understanding of Langland's visionary mode and reformist ideology. Dr Kerby-Fulton also explores the relevance of the prophetic mentality fostered by Joachite thought, and the reactionary response which it triggered in antimendicant eschatology. Above all, this book provides a stimulating challenge to assumptions that Langland's views of the course and end of history are wholly conventional, or easily explained by Augustinian eschatology. The outcome of this study of contexts for Piers Plowman suggests that Langland's position in relation to different apocalyptic traditions was at once more sophisticated and more original than scholars have hitherto realised.

Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Series Number 7)

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex―its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuriesKathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo―scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts―focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns' libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book.

Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

Arts & Photography

Olson, Linda

Hilmo, Maidie

Cornell University Press

This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex―its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo―scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts―focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns’ libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. 
Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book.

Despite the great literary achievements of Chaucer, Langland, and the Pearl Poet, Ricardian English books were still a niche market in 1400. As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton shows, however, their generation was transformational in nurturing the resurgence of English writing, in part as a result of the mass underemployment of clerks originally trained for the church but unable to find steady positions in it. Surviving instead as ecclesiastical or choral "piece workers," or in secular jobs in government or private households, this "clerical proletariat" lived and worked in liminal spaces between the ecclesiastical and lay world. And there the most enterprising found new material--and new audiences--for poetry in English. Since English book production in London prior to 1380 was rare, Kerby-Fulton's study begins in the prior century with great regional poets, revealing their early experimentation with a new poetics of vocational crisis. Preoccupied with underemployment, patronage, careerist ambition, alienation, and changing literary fashion, these thirteenth-century writers were choosing the more avant garde option of writing in English while feeling backwards to earlier tradition in works such as La&#541;amon's Brut and The Owl and the Nightingale. These early experimenters invoked semi-remembered literary forms in a still evolving written vernacular, breaking ground for Ricardian writers, who turned to these conventions during the massive clerical unemployment of the Great Schism era. Kerby-Fulton's is the first study of Langland's legacy of articulating an authorial employment crisis, and its echoes in Hoccleve and Audelay. It also uses new tools for uncovering proletarian writers in unattributed Middle English works, including the famous Harley 2253 lyrics, the "York Realist's" Second Trial from the York Cycle, St. Erkenwald, and Wynnere and Wastour. Taking in proletarian themes, including class, meritocracy, the abuse of children ("Choristers' Lament"), the gig economy, precarity, and the breaking of intellectual elites (Book of Margery Kempe), The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry speaks to both past and present employment urgencies.

The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (The Middle Ages Series)

University of Pennsylvania Press

The medieval reading process was unusually multi-faceted, and can surprise the modern reader by offering an alternative grid or map of a text we believe we know well -- one that cuts across or unsettles familiar stereotypes we all hold. These essays were collected together to offer practical, manuscript-based studies of medieval reading habits in use.

The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Els Monograph Series)

English Literary Studies

Margot Kathleen Louis (1954–2007) published largely as a scholar of Victorian poetry, but medieval literature was her first love, and an abiding passion she shared enthusiastically with students, audiences and colleagues throughout her entire career. But medieval English literature, as it was studied in 1976, included as yet no women authors, and virtually no dissenting or religiously radical writing – in short, none of the kinds of texts that she most valued. In Victorian literature she found more of what she would later call the “anguished and passionate debate that mediated the shift from various forms of Christianity to a far greater spiritual diversity.” Focusing on the role of allegory, myth, visionary experience, and the feminine divine in the medieval imagination, this volume seeks to pay tribute to Louis’ fascination with the rise of literary studies involving early women writers, which brought with it an opening up of the pre-1700 canon to both gender and religious pluralism. The present volume seeks to marry her love of early women writers with her other great passion, women’s literary and pedagogical challenges to male-dominated religious traditions.

Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)

ELS Editions

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England

Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Series Number 7)

Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, Series Number 7)

Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (The Middle Ages Series)

The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer Langland, Kempe, and Gower (Els Monograph Series)

Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis (E L S MONOGRAPH SERIES)