Books by A. C. Spearing

Although the exact identity of this text's author remains obscure, he was probably an English country parson of the late 14th century. The main theme of this book is that God cannot be reached by human intellect but only by a love that can pierce the "cloud of unknowing".

In Medieval Autographies, A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on the roles and functions of the "e;I"e; as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as the label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies and explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it "e;autography."e; He describes this form as emerging in the mid-fourteenth century and consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in the first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in and commentaries on third-person narratives, and descendants of the dit, a genre of French medieval poetry. He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from the requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions and as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability and inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to the texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, and a concern with writing and textuality. Beginning with what may be the earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, Winner and Waster, the book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue as a textual performance, and devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve's Regement of Princes prologue, his Complaint and Dialogue, and the witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham's legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of the concept of autography, including discussion of the intermittent autographic commentaries on the narrative in Troilus and Criseyde and Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine.

This 1976 book is a study of the medieval English dream-poem, set against the background of classical and medieval visionary and religious writings and the theory of dreams from classical times down to Freud and Jung. Mr Spearing examines explores the nature of the visionary tradition in which medieval dream-poets felt themselves to be writing.

A study of the four great Middle English poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Purity, which are in the same manuscript and are attributed to the same anonymous poet. After a general chapter devoted to the poet and his background, Mr Spearing turns to the poems.

Readings in Medieval Poetry is a linked collection of essays on such poems as the Song of Roland, King Horn, Havelok, Sir Orfeo, Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde, the alliterative Morte Arthure, The Siege of Jerusalem, Purity, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Piers Plowman.

This is a critical book to study in depth the transition from the 'medieval' to the 'Renaissance' periods in English literature. Mr Spearing examines the period from Chaucer to the early Spenser. The author engages with the larger problems of literary history through the detailed analysis of specimen texts.

In his new book, leading medievalist A. C. Spearing provides the only study of the many scenes of secret watching and listening in medieval love-stories, and of the way that the central importance of these scenes encourages both the poets and their readers to imagine themselves as voyeurs in relation to what they read.