The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1. The Middle Ages

Description

The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages explores the richness and variety of life-writing from late Antiquity to the threshold of the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages, writers from Bede to Chaucer were thinking about life and experimenting with ways to translate lives, their own and others', into literature. Their subjects included career religious, saints, celebrities, visionaries, pilgrims, princes, philosophers, poets, and even a few 'ordinary people.' They relay life stories not only in chronological narratives, but also in debates, dialogues, visions, and letters. Many medieval biographers relied on the reader's trust in their authority, but some espoused standards of evidence that seem distinctly modern, drawing on reliable written sources, interviewing eyewitnesses, and cross-checking their facts wherever possible. Others still professed allegiance to evidence but nonetheless freely embellished and invented not only events and dialogue but the sources to support them. The first book devoted to life-writing in medieval England, The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume 1: The Middle Ages covers major life stories in Old and Middle English, Latin, and French, along with such Continental classics as the letters of Abelard and Heloise and the autobiographical Vision of Christine de Pizan. In addition to the life stories of historical figures, it treats accounts of fictional heroes, from Beowulf to King Arthur to Queen Katherine of Alexandria, which show medieval authors experimenting with, adapting, and expanding the conventions of life writing. Though Medieval life writings can be challenging to read, we encounter in them the antecedents of many of our own diverse biographical forms-tabloid lives, literary lives, brief lives, revisionist lives; lives of political figures, memoirs, fictional lives, and psychologically-oriented accounts that register the inner lives of their subjects. Cover The Middle Ages: Volume 1 Copyright Dedicatioin Acknowledgements General Editor’s Preface Contents Introduction 1: Career Religious Pre-Conquest Biography: Methodologies Tradition and Innovation Bede’s Embedded Lives Diverse Forms, Continuing Ideals New Directions Private Lives and Relationships Garnier’s Life of Thomas Becket: A Literary Approach ‘Reinventing’ Autobiography Guibert’s Monodies Abelard’s Calamities Heloise and the ‘Personal Letters’ Hildegard of Bingen’s (Auto)biography 2: Holy Women Life-writing and Friendship: Goscelin of St. Bertin and Eve of Wilton Goscelin’s Edith: Eve Redux? Life Friendships: Christina of Markyate Heterospirituality, circa 1200: The Life of Saint Gilbert of Sempringham The Strange Case of Margery Kempe 3: Kings and a Marshal Asser’s Life of King Alfred The Last Anglo-Saxon King: History and Hagiography The Norman Conquest: Winners and Losers William of Normandy: A Peaceable Conqueror Harold: The Untold Story Bio-History Regnal Biography Blacman’s Henry VI: The Private Life of a King William Marshal, Advisor to Kings 4: Authors and Poets Early Literary Biography Troubadour Vidas and Razos Historian Autobiographers Francesco Petrarch and Christine de Pizan Autobiographical Impulses in Middle English Texts ‘Master Chaucer’ and the Anti-autobiographical Prologue Hoccleve’s Runaway Prologues Autobiographical Hybrids and Interpolations The Testaments of Thomas Usk and John Lydgate Towards ‘Literary (Auto)Biography’ 5: Polemical Anthologies Defining Sainthood On the Nature of Women Of Princes and Fortune 6: Fictional Lives Beowulf : Writing Life in Old English Poetry Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin and the Life of the Mind Hagiographical Fictions Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources Index