Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150-1400
- Author / Editor
- Breen, Katharine.
Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150-1400
- Published
- Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
- Physical Description
- x, 287 pp.; 13 b&w illus.
- Series
- Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, no. 79.
- Description
- Describes late medieval efforts to "formulate vernacular languages that could stand in for Latin grammar as a first and paradigmatic 'habitus'," i.e., as a rule-based discipline of the mind that shapes cognition and moral action. Dante, the "Ormmulum," Matthew Paris, Wycliffite translators, and William Langland offer alternatives to the traditional Latin "habitus" and seek to contain the ways that their readers read, shaping and serving emergent, nontraditional reading populations. The volume concludes with an epilogue on Astr: Chaucer legitimates English as an alternative to Latin in "explicitly political terms"; he enjoins "the people of England to defer to their superiors and govern their inferiors," replacing the Latin habitus with an English courtly version.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Treatise on the Astrolabe
- Language and Word Studies