Books in the Studies in the Humanities Literature - Politics - Society series

While poets have traditionally inhabited cultural margins, prophets have brought poetic language to the center of cultural debate, not foretelling the future so much as diagnosing the present. This exciting collection of nine essays examines the range of social and political implications that inflects poetic discourse, from the Old English and Latin texts of the Anglo-Saxon world to the Scotland and England of the Renaissance. Whether saints¿ lives, Germanic heroic epics, chronicles, or satiric poems, the works discussed in this book retain their verbal power, if not their political influence, into our own time.

Beautiful ladies, dashing chevaliers, injuries, and death; how were these part of the literary tournament? This schematic analysis examines these and numerous other aspects of the knightly tournament as they were presented in works of the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries, and also identifies the role the tournament played in the literature of the day. This analysis of Old French narratives views the sport in its infancy, and in the process reveals contrasts with the more colorful and better-known tournament of the fifteenth century.

Two Natures Met addresses the spiritual conflicts depicted in George Herbert's The Temple from the perspective of Herbert's engagement with the mystery of the Incarnation. Herbert's commitment to his art develops as his apprehension of the fullness of the Incarnation advances. Against the iconoclasm of the Puritans, Herbert praises the stained glass windows, the vestments, and the perfumes that lead the poet to appreciate the bruised and broken body that gives him poetic lines and eternal life.