English language & literature

The early seventeenth-century English sermon was the bestselling print genre of its time and church preaching was more widely attended than any play. Jennifer Clement argues here that a major aim of these sermons was to teach people how to feel the right emotions — or as preachers would have said at the time the passions or affections — to lead a good Christian life. In the process preachers took a primarily rhetorical approach to the emotions; that is they used their sermons to define emotions and to encourage their listeners and readers actively to cultivate and shape their emotions in line with Scripture.

This study offers an overview of five key emotions — love fear anger grief and joy – in the sermons of key preachers such as John Donne Richard Sibbes Joseph Hall Launcelot Andrewes and others. It shows how these preachers engaged with contemporary treatises on the emotions as well as treatises on preaching to highlight the importance of the rhetorical as opposed to the humoral approach to understanding the emotions in a religious context. In addition Clement reads sermons next to early seventeenth-century religious poetry by writers such as Donne George Herbert Amelia Lanyer and Henry Vaughan to show how the emotional concerns of the sermons also appear in the poetry reverberating beyond the pulpit.

Bringing together rhetorical theory sermon studies and the history of the emotions Clement shows how the early seventeenth-century English sermon needs to inform our thinking about literature and its engagement with emotion in this period.

Graphic devices such as tables and diagrams and other visual strategies of organising text and information are an essential part of communication. The use of these devices and strategies in books and documents developed throughout the medieval and early modern periods as knowledge was translated and circulated in European vernaculars. Yet the use of graphic practices and multimodal literacies associated with them have mostly been examined in the context of Latin Greek Arabic and Hebrew and early vernacular writing remains an under-researched area. This volume brings together contributors from English historical linguistics and book studies to highlight multimodal graphic practices and literacies in texts across a range of genres and text types from the late medieval period until the eighteenth century. Contributions in the volume investigate both handwritten and printed materials from books in the domains of medicine religion history and grammar to administrative records and letter writing.

While the medieval regions that form modern-day Britain Ireland Iceland and the Scandinavian states were very much like today home to diverse ethnic and linguistic groups it is evident that the peoples who inhabited the north-western Atlantic seaboard at this time were nonetheless connected by key cultural environmental historical and ideological experiences that set them apart from other regions of Europe. This volume is the first to focus specifically on these cultural and linguistic connections from the perspective of the history of emotions. The contributions collected here examine cultural encounters among medieval North Atlantic peoples with regard to the gradual development of shared emotional models and the emergence of early cross-cultural emotional communities in this region. The chapters also explore how the folk psychologies illustrated in the oldest European vernacular writing traditions (Irish English and Scandinavian) bear witness to cultural models for emotions that first took shape in pre-Christian times.

As Britain’s global interests expanded from the mid-sixteenth century geographic mobility encouraged many forms of multilingual practices in English writings. Translations lexical borrowings and records of exchanges between travellers and far-off lands and peoples diversely registered communicated engaged and politicised encounters with alterity. Meanwhile earlier continental European translations also influenced and complicated the reception of distant otherness entailing questions of linguistic hybridity or pluralism.

This volume explores some of the practices and strategies underpinning polyglot encounters in travel accounts produced translated or read in England as well as in artistic and educational materials inflected by those travels. Drawing on linguistic lexicographic literary and historical methodologies the twelve chapters in this volume collectively look into the contexts and significances of textual contact zones. Particular attention is paid to uses of multilingualism in processes of identity construction defining and promoting national or imperial agendas appropriating and assimilating foreign linguistic capital or meeting resistance and limits from linguistic and cultural otherness refusing to lend itself to a subjected or go-between status. Treating of indigenous languages newly anglicized words and new artistic and instructional materials the volume makes the case for the vibrancy and influence of early modern English engagements with polyglossia and the need for multiple scales of approach to – and interdisciplinary perspectives on – the subject.

1066 is one of the most well-known dates in English history: but how far do we understand the mental and emotional lives of those who experienced it? In just over a month England was rocked by two separate invasions multiple pitched battles and the deaths of thousands. The repercussions of these traumatic events would echo through the history and literature of northern Europe for centuries to come.

Drawing on studies of trauma and cultural memory this book examines the cultural repercussions of the year 1066 in medieval England Normandy and Scandinavia. It explores how writers in all three regions celebrated their common heritage and mourned the wars that brought them into conflict. Bringing together texts from an array of languages genres and cultural traditions this study examines the strategies medieval authors employed to work through the traumas of 1066 narrating its events and experiences in different forms. It explores the ways in which history and memory interacted through multiple generations of writers and readers and reveals how the field of trauma studies can help us better understand the mental and emotional lives of medieval people.

By comparison with Latin Europe Anglo-Saxon civilization is notable for the amount of literature preserved in contemporary manuscripts in the vernacular language formerly called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ but now more usually called ‘Old English’. This literature includes some remarkable poetry which is the subject of the present collection of essays. Some of the earliest poems may well have been written at a time when northern England held the intellectual leadership of Europe. The approach is holistic investigating important issues in the manuscripts that affect the integrity of the texts to be studied or the way they relate to each other examining metrical issues that affect the way the poems are appreciated for their compositional skill studying particular textual problems that require elucidation or even emendation to make the meaning clear and finally offering readings of particular poems focussing on themes that are central to Old English poetry. A postscript examines Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky which is presented as a ‘Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’.

King Alfred the Great (r. 871–899) remains a key figure in English literary history. Although his reputation as a scholar who was personally responsible for the translation of a number of Latin works is no longer secure the figure of the wise king nevertheless casts a long shadow over vernacular writing from the late ninth century through to the twelfth. This volume takes stock of recent developments and debates in the field of Alfredian scholarship and showcases new directions in research. Individual chapters consider how English authors before during and after Alfred’s reign translated and adapted Latin works often in innovative and imaginative ways. Other contributions provide new contexts and connections for Alfredian writing highlighting the work of Mercian scholars and expanding the corpus beyond the works traditionally attributed to the king himself. Together these essays force us to rethink what we mean by ‘Alfredian’ and to revise the literary history of the ‘long ninth century’.

The corpus of sermons and saints’ lives from early medieval England in English and Latin is the largest and most varied of its kind from a contemporary European perspective. In recent years this extraordinary body of literature has attracted increasing attention as witnessed by an efflorescence of new editions translations commentaries essay collections dissertations and amply funded research projects such as the Electronic Corpus of Anonymous Old English Homilies (ECHOE) project based at the University of Göttingen.

The present collection of thirteen essays grew out of a 2022 conference sponsored by the ECHOE project on Old English anonymous homilies and saints’ lives and their sources and reflects the best of current scholarship on early medieval homiletic and hagiographic literature from England. This literature is central to an understanding of the spiritual imagination and social practices of non-élite audiences. Together they introduce new discoveries identify new sources edit new texts make new claims about authors revisers and textual relationships revise previous arguments about aspects of literary history and provide new interpretations of Old English and Latin sermons and saints’ lives. These studies show vividly how European learning influenced the liturgical practices and peripheral education of early medieval England.

Contributors include Helen Appleton Aidan Conti Claudia Di Sciacca R. D. Fulk Thomas N. Hall Christopher A. Jones Leslie Lockett Rosalind Love Hugh Magennis Stephen Pelle Jane Roberts Winfried Rudolf and Charles D. Wright.

Cambridge University Library MS Additional 2604 contains a unique prose legendary almost entirely of female saints all of whom are virgins martyrs or nuns. The manuscript which also has varied post-medieval items is written in one hand probably dating from c. 1480 to c. 1510. This previously unstudied Middle English collection features twenty-two universal and native saints both common (like John the Baptist and Æthelthryth) and rare (such as Wihtburh and Domitilla). These texts are dependent on a complex mixture of Latin sources and analogues. Specific linguistic and art-historical features as well as attention to the predominant female saints of Ely and post-medieval provenance suggest an East Anglian convent for the original readership. Through an exploration of the manuscript and its later ownership (both recusant and antiquarian) a discussion of its linguistic attributes a consideration of local female monastic and book history a comparison of hagiographical texts and a wide-ranging source and analogue study this Study fully contextualises these Middle English lives. The book concludes with a survey of the structural and stylistic aspects of the texts followed by three appendices and an extensive bibliography. The texts are edited for the first time in its companion volume Saints’ Lives for Medieval English Nuns II: An Edition of the ‘Lyves and Dethes’ in Cambridge University Library MS Additional 2604.

Published anonymously in 1733 Memoirs of the Twentieth Century is one of the earliest futuristic novels known in Anglophone and Euro-American literature. It foregrounds an acceleration of history brought about by an increasing degree of global interconnectedness and the exclusion of prophetism and astrology as credible ways to know the future. The work of Samuel Madden an Irish writer and philanthropist of Whig sympathies it consists of a collection of diplomatic letters composed in the 1990s which the narrator claims were brought to him from the time to come by a supernatural entity. Through these correspondences twentieth-century world scenarios are spread out before the reader in which British naval power rules the waves and international commerce while the transnational scheming of the Jesuits threatens the independence of weaker European courts.

This book — which includes a study followed by an annotated edition of the text — assesses the cultural significance of this literary work as an apt observatory on how historical time as a cultural construction was shaped during the eighteenth century by new forms of transnational circulation of information and by the dubious space carved out in European culture by seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century debates on the nature of historical knowledge.

Through and by means of the Memoirs case study this volume aims to contribute to a wider cultural history of the future and speculative fiction. The novel’s ironic distancing of beliefs considered to be superstitious and absurd — such as divination techniques and occult and magical disciplines — offers an exceptional testimony to the negotiation of the boundaries of verisimilitude and credibility within a religious enlightenment.