SHARE

Difficult pasts

Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance

By Mimi Ensley

Difficult pasts
Hardcover -
  • Price: £85.00
  • ISBN: 9781526157898
  • Publish Date: Feb 2023
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
  • Buy Now £85.00

    Delivery Exc. North and South America

    Buy

    Delivery to North and South America

    Click Here to Buy from Your Preferred Bookseller
    eBook +
  • Price: £85.00
  • ISBN: 9781526157881
  • Publish Date: Feb 2023
  • Publisher: Manchester University Press
  • Buy Now £85.00

    Delivery Exc. North and South America

    Buy

    Delivery to North and South America

    Click Here to Buy from Your Preferred Bookseller

    Book Information

    Description

    Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and superstitious. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period.

    Difficult pasts examines the reception of Middle English romances after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre's popularity rested not in its violent or superstitious qualities, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent 'difficult past', a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers' perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. Difficult pasts reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England.

    Contents

    Introduction: Palimpsests: Reformation, romance and erasure
    1 Catalogues: Sammelbände, libraries and defining the romance genre
    2 Collage: A recusant's romance connection to the past
    3 Monuments: Reviving and restoring Chaucer's Squire's Tale
    4 Museums: Temporality and timelessness in artefacts, relics and romance
    Conclusion: Palimpsests and gaps

    Index

    Author

    Mimi Ensley is an Assistant Professor of English at Flagler College

    Difficult pasts

    By Mimi Ensley

    Hardcover £85.00 / $130.00

    Or buy from your preferred bookseller:

    Amazon Waterstones Blackwells Bookshop

    Newsletter Sign Up

    Manchester University Press
    Close

    Your cart is empty.

    Total
    Select your shipping destination to estimate postage costs

    (Based on standard shipping costs)

    Final cost calculated on checkout
    Checkout
    Promotional codes can be added on Checkout