Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England

This book situates the development of English medieval literature in the context of parliament, focusing on Chaucer and Langland.

Matthew Giancarlo (Author)

9780521875394, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 September 2007

308 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.8 cm, 0.58 kg

'Giancarlo's study successfully interfaces with a range of recently prominent critical concerns … The strength of Giancarlo's arguments resides in the discovery and analysis of a public space in which all these topics achieve a common prominence … There is much to learn from and to admire in Giancarlo's most general argumentative moves. The volume makes a strong, if not always robustly and analytically argued, case for reading across the divide between "the [conventionally] literary" and "the [conventionally] historical." … Giancarlo's argument proceeds through a series of elegant and well chosen juxtapositions … Giancarlo has a strong framework for his analysis, and he handles it adeptly throughout the book … In this documentary study, the volume is unfailingly interesting … His chosen exemplary bills are richly suggestive and, generally, provocatively analyzed … Parliament and Literature does a richly provocative job, especially with materials conventionally the province of historians.' The Journal of Ecclesiastical History

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.

List of illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations and textual notes
Introduction
1. Parliament and voice in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries
2. Parliament, criticism, and complaint in the later fourteenth century
3. Property, purchase, parliament: the estates of man in John Gower's Mirour de l'Omme and Cronica Tripertita
4. 'Oure is the voys': Chaucer's parliaments and the mediation of community
5. Parliament, Piers Plowman and the reform of the public voice
6. Petitioning for show: complaint and the parliamentary voice, 1401–14
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Medieval history [HBLC1]