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Title: Difficult Pasts Condition: New Subtitle: Post-Reformation Memory and the Medieval Romance ISBN-10: 1526157896 EAN: 9781526157898 ISBN: 9781526157898 Publisher: Manchester University Press Format: Hardback Type: Hardback Release Date: 28/02/2023 Description: Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and superstitious. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period. Difficult pasts examines the reception of Middle English romances after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre’s popularity rested not in its violent or superstitious qualities, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’, a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. Difficult pasts reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England. Language: English Country/Region of Manufacture: GB Item Height: 216mm Item Length: 138mm Author: Mimi Ensley Genre: Literary Criticism Book Series: Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Item Width: 16mm Topic: History, Philosophy & Spirituality Release Year: 2023 Missing Information?
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