Parliament And Literature In Late Medieval England

Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England investigates the relationship between the development of parliament and the practice of English poetry in the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this period, the bureaucratic political culture of parliamentarians, clerks, and scribes overlapped with the artistic practice of major poets like Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, all of whom had strong ties to parliament. Matthew Giancarlo investigates these poets together in the specific context of parliamentary events and controversies, as well as in the broader environment of changing constitutional ideas. Two chapters provide fresh analyses of the parliamentary ideologies that developed from the thirteenth century onward, and four chapters investigate the parliamentary aspects of each poet, as well as the later Lancastrian imitators of Langland. This study demonstrates the importance of the changing parliamentary environs of late medieval England and their centrality to the early growth of English narrative and lyric forms.

This book demonstrates that received views on orality and literacy underestimate the importance of public reading in the late Middle Ages.

Sixty years before the advent of the printing press, the first political pamphlets about parliament were circulated in the city of London. These handwritten pamphlets reported on victories against the crown and point to the existence of a market of readers hungry for news of parliament.

Focussing on the key role of the English medieval parliament in hearing and determining the requests of the king's subjects, this ground-breaking new study examines the private petition and its place in the late medieval English parliament (c.1270-1450). Until now, historians have focussed on the political and financial significance of the English medieval parliament; this book offers an important re-evaluation placing the emphasis on parliament as a crucial element in the provision of royal government and justice. It looks at the nature of medieval petitioning, how requests were written and how and why petitioners sought redress specifically in parliament. It also sheds new light on the concept of royal grace and its practical application to parliamentary petitions that required the king's personal intervention. The book traces the development of private petitioning over a period of almost two hundred years, from a point when parliament was essentially an instrument of royal administration, to one where it was self-consciously dispatching petitions as the highest court of the land. Gwilym Dodd considers not only the detail of the petitionary process, but also broader questions about the government of late medieval England. His conclusions contribute to our understanding of the nature of medieval monarchy, and its ability (or willingness) to address local difficulties, as well as the nature of local society, and the problems that faced individuals and communities in medieval society.

Eight studies of aspects of C15 England, united by a common focus on the role of ideas in political developments of the time. The concept of "political culture" has become very fashionable in the last thirty years, but only recently has it been consciously taken up by practitioners of late-medieval English history, who have argued for the need to acknowledge the role of ideas in politics. While this work has focused on elite political culture, interest in the subject has been growing among historians of towns and villages, especially as they have begun to recognise the importance of both internal politics and national government in the affairs of townsmen and peasants. This volume, the product of a conference on political culture in the late middle ages, explores the subject from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of spheres. It is hoped that it will put the subject firmly on the map for the study of late-medieval England and lead to further exploration of political culture in this period. Contributors CAROLINE BARRON, ALAN CROMARTIE, CHRISTOPHER DYER, MAURICE KEEN, MIRI RUBIN, BENJAMIN THOMPSON, JOHN WATTS, JENNY WORMALD. LINDA CLARK is editor, History of Parliament; CHRISTINE CARPENTER is Reader in History, University ofCambridge.

Fictions of Advice historicizes the late medieval mirrors (or handbooks) for princes to reveal how the ambiguities and contradictions characteristic of the genre are responses to—as well as attempts to manage—the risks implicit in advising a king. Often thought of as moralizing advice unable to engage political conflicts, the mirrors for princes have been taken for dull and conventionalized testimonies to the medieval taste for platitude. Judith Ferster maintains that advice was at the center of one of the important political debates in the late Middle Ages: how to constrain the king and allow for his subjects' participation. Fictions of Advice rereads the English mirrors for princes to show how their moralizing was often highly topical and even subversive. Although overtly deferential to the rulers they address, the mirrors' authors were surprisingly capable of criticism and opposition. In putting the texts back into their historical contexts, Ferster reveals the vital cultural and political function they fulfilled in their societies.

Scholars have long been aware of the looming presence of law in medieval English literature, from Christ as a litigious redemptor to Chaucer's deal-making Host in The Canterbury Tales. Most scholarly work on the subject has been confined either to tracking down representations of legal practices in texts or to examining formal questions relating to legal discourse. In a groundbreaking departure, The Letter of the Law suggests that law and literature should be understood as parallel forms of discourse -- at times complementary, at times antagonistic, but always mutually illuminating. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington maintain that medievalists are uniquely placed to make valuable new contributions to the subject of law and literature, in part because of the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the study of medieval law, inseparable as it was from political theory and theology. Treating texts as varied as Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the fifteenth-century Robin Hood ballads, and William Thorpe's account of his own heresy trial, the nine never-before-published essays in this volume reveal the intersections of legal and documentary culture with vernacular literary production. They establish that law and English literature were intimately bound up in processes of institutional, linguistic, and social change, and they explain how the specific conditions of medieval law and literature offer useful models in studying later periods. An appendix contains a translation by Andrew Galloway of History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386.