• 1. The pastoral movement and deviant speech: major texts
• 2. The lies of the Fall, the tongues of Pentecost: typing and converting the deviant speaker
• 3. Exemplifying deviant speech: murmur in Patience
• 4. Confessing the deviant speaker: verbal deception in the Confessio Amantis
• 5. Reforming deviant social practices: turpiloquium/scurrilitas in the B Version of Piers Plowman
• 6. Restraining the deviant speaker: Chaucer's Manciple and Parson.

Drawing on manuscript sources, this book examines how the medieval clergy developed the authority and persuasive force to attempt to govern the day-to-day speech of Western Christians. It shows how attempts were made to portray some political, social and private speech as deviant and destructive, labelling it lying, slander, blasphemy and other Sins of the Tongue. It explores, for the first time, how Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the 'Patience' poet use the different strains of this pastoral discourse not only to expose the destructive power of speech in political and social life but also to judge clerical claims to authority and efficacy in formulating and applying codes of speech.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction--
• 1. The pastoral movement and deviant speech: major texts--
• 2. The lies of the Fall, the tongues of Pentecost: typing and converting the deviant speaker--
• 3. Exemplifying deviant speech: murmur in Patience--
• 4. Confessing the deviant speaker: verbal deception in the Confessio Amantis--
• 5. Reforming deviant social practices: turpiloquium/scurrilitas in the B Version of Piers Plowman--
• 6. Restraining the deviant speaker: Chaucer's Manciple and Parson-- Bibliography-- Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Drawing on manuscript sources, this book examines how the medieval clergy developed the authority and persuasive force to attempt to govern the day-to-day speech of Western Christians. It shows how attempts were made to portray some political, social and private speech as deviant and destructive, labelling it lying, slander, blasphemy and other Sins of the Tongue. It explores, for the first time, how Chaucer, Langland, Gower and the 'Patience' poet use the different strains of this pastoral discourse not only to expose the destructive power of speech in political and social life but also to judge clerical claims to authority and efficacy in formulating and applying codes of speech.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Contents: The Significance of the Pentangle Symbolism in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - The Action of the Hunting and Bedroom Scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - The Meaning of Kind Wit, Conscience and Reason in the First Vision of Piers Plowman - Langland's Conception of Favel, Guile, Liar and False in the First Vision of Piers Plowman - The Status and Meaning of Meed in the First Vision of Piers Plowman - The Universality of the Portraits in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - Rhetorical Perspectives in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales - A Defence of Dorigen's Complaint - The Self-Revealing Tendencies of Chaucer's Pardoner - Holiness as the First of Spenser's Aristotelian Moral Virtues - The Idea of Temperance in the Second Book of The Faerie Queene - The Meaning of Spenser's Chastity as the Fairest of Virtues.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This collection of essays is conceived not as a summary of past endeavours but as the beginning of an attempt to present a sense of the wholeness of a distinctively English literature from Beowulf to Spenser. The native alliterative tradition of England is represented by its final flowering in two essays on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and three on Piers Plowman. The renewal of English letters in the fourteenth century, inspired by continental models in French and Italian, is represented by four essays on Chaucer. The poetic achievement of these three medieval masters remains unmatched until Spenser announces himself in a third great age in the history of English poetry and this is represented by three essays on the first three books of "The Faerie Queene". Spenser's indebtedness to Langland and Chaucer, and his philosophical conservatism in drawing on the thought of Aristotle and the tradition of medieval commentary surrounding the works of Aristotle, ensure that the tradition of English poetry in the Renaissance is securely rooted in its medieval inheritance.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

What happens when poetry deals explicitly with a serious theological issue? In Poetry Does Theology, Jim Rhodes seeks one answer to that question by analyzing the symbiotic relationship that existed between theology and poetry in fourteenth-century England. He pays special attention to the narrative poems of Chaucer, Grosseteste, the Pearl-poet, the author of Saint Erkenwald, and Langland. Rhodes shows that Chaucer and his contemporaries wrote at the end of a linguistic and theological revolution - a time when revised perspectives on the creation and incarnation gave rise to a new humanistic spirit that transformed late medieval theological culture and spurred the development of vernacular theology and poetry. Rhodes' careful analysis describes how the relationship between theology and poetry underwent a radical transformation as the century progressed. What had previously been the exclusive prerogative of a Latinate and clerical elite became in the later Middle Ages a matter of concern within vernacular culture, particularly the emerging category of "literature." This newly defined and self-conscious literature provided not simply an arena in which theological questions could be raised; it also privileged a secular, humanist outlook that granted to earthly life its own legitimacy and dignity. In Poetry Does Theology, Rhodes argues that one of the distinctive qualities of modernity - its secular and this-worldly orientation - is a phenomenon that took root in England in the fourteenth century and found its primary site of development not in theological or philosophical circles, but in a vernacular literature that opened for inquiry the theological and philosophical questions that dominated the era.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)