Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature
- Author / Editor
- Rice, Nicole R.
Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature
- Published
- Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
- Physical Description
- xviii, 247 pp.
- Series
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, no. 73.
- Description
- Rice studies late fourteenth-century vernacular prose devotional guides, with attention to their relationship with works by Chaucer and Langland. Wycliffite writings and changes in religious discipline affected notions of how to live the "best life," reflected in new guides and translations. In light of these works, Chaucer's ShT is a "knowing response to intersections of lay spiritual desire and monastic discipline" that focuses on "confusions of material and spiritual capital." The merchant's desire for brotherhood and his closing himself in his counting room enact a longing for a monastic ideal that Daun John fails to live.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Shipman and His Tale