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Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England

Online ISBN:
9780191886072
Print ISBN:
9780198790778
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England

Sebastian Sobecki
Sebastian Sobecki
Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture, University of Groningen
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Published online:
19 December 2019
Published in print:
28 November 2019
Online ISBN:
9780191886072
Print ISBN:
9780198790778
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

No medieval text was designed to be read hundreds of years later by an audience unfamiliar with its language, situation, and author. By ascribing to these texts intentional anonymity, we romanticize them and misjudge the social character of their authors. Instead, most medieval poems and manuscripts presuppose familiarity with their authorial or scribal maker. Last Words: The Public Self and the Social Author in Late Medieval England attempts to recover this familiarity and understand the literary motivation behind some of the most important fifteenth-century texts and authors. Last Words captures the public selves of such social authors when they attempt to extract themselves from the context of a lived life. Driven by archival research and literary inquiry, this book will reveal where John Gower kept the Trentham manuscript in his final years, how John Lydgate wished to be remembered, and why Thomas Hoccleve wrote his best-known work, the Series. This book will include documentary breakthroughs and archival discoveries, and will introduce a new life record for Hoccleve, identify the author of a significant political poem, and reveal the handwriting of John Gower and George Ashby. Through its investments in archival study, book history, and literary criticism, Last Words charts the extent to which medieval English literature was shaped by the social selves of their authors.

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