Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England
- Author / Editor
- Zieman, Katherine.
Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England
- Published
- Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,2008.
- Physical Description
- xvii,294 pp. 6 b&w illus.
- Series
- The Middle Ages Series.
- Description
- Explores how liturgical training and practice, particularly the interrelated devotional activities of singing and reading, affected literacy in late medieval England. Lay devotional ritual became separated from clerical practice, and definitions of "literate" shifted from "repertory based knowledge" to development of skills--both changes resulting in an increase in "extragrammatical" liturgical activity and new uses for liturgical texts. Zieman considers the impact of such practices on the apologia of "Piers Plowman" C.5 and on Chaucer's PrT and SNT, examining how the poets represent contemporary anxiety about public verbal production and performance of spoken and written rituals. The pairing of PrT and SNT is paralleled by Th and Mel.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Prioress and Her Tale
- Second Nun and Her Tale
- Tale of Sir Thopas
- Tale of Melibee