The Middle Ages.

Author / Editor
Winstead, Karen.

Title
The Middle Ages.

Published
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Physical Description
xii, 243 pp.

Series
Oxford History of Life-Writing, no. 1.

Description
Examines life-writing in the European Middle Ages, with commentary on late antique prototypes and focus on England, ranging widely in languages and forms: Latin and vernacular, history and fiction, poetry and prose, biography and autobiography, hagiography and hybrids, polemical collections of life-writing, and life-writing embedded in longer works. Includes consideration of Chaucer as "one of England's cagiest and 'least' forthcoming authors," although highly influential in the development of "quasi-fictional," "self-deprecatory" prologues in his dream visions and in GP, and of first-person, fictional prologues in WBP and PardP. Also comments on Astr, Chaucer’s life-records, and LGW and MkT as examples of polemical collections of biographical life-writing. The volume includes an index.

Chaucer Subjects
Background and General Criticism
Chaucer's Life
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
Wife of Bath and Her Tale
Pardoner and His Tale
Monk and His Tale
Treatise on the Astrolabe
Legend of Good Women