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Full Description
Directs scholarly focus towards a deeper appreciation of medievalist trends in the Elizabethan literary landscape and challenges traditional narratives of 'modernity'.
Themes and motifs from the Middle Ages are found across the drama, poetry, prose fiction, polemic, and satire of the later Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, but their impact and influence on this literary landscape have rarely been considered. This study offers a nuanced examination of this intricate interplay between pre-Reformation culture and its post-Reformation reception in England.
Each chapter explores a particular genre or aspect of medievalism at play in this writing: civic medievalism; literary adaptation and satire in ecclesiastical polemic; multiple uses of temporality in post-Marprelatian prose fiction; the poetics of memorialisation and voice in medievalist complaint poetry; and the construction of Reformation history and confessional difference on the stage in the early Jacobean period. Moving beyond canonical writers such as Shakespeare and Spenser, the book deals in detail with the drama of Thomas Heywood and Thomas Dekker (alongside unattributed plays); the prose fiction of Robert Greene, Thomas Deloney, Henry Chettle and anonymous others; the historical verse of Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, and the polemical writing of Samuel Harsnett, Job Throckmorton and Matthew Sutcliffe. Through a meticulous analysis of these writers and their works, it shows how medieval texts were creatively deployed and adapted in new literary forms, fashioning the emergence of early forms of medievalism, and challenging conventional notions of temporal and cultural divides.
Contents
Introduction: Strange Histories
1. Forms of Civic Medievalism in the 1590s
2. Polemic, Citation, Satire or Chaucer the Puritan
3. Chaucer on Grub Street or The medievalist moment of Elizabethan prose fiction, c. 1590
4. The Medievalism of Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton
5. Remembering the Reformation: The late Elizabethan and early Jacobean 'Reformation History Play'
Postscript - 'In Diebus Illis': Medieval poets, debating breeches, and the (proto) Creation of Medievalism
