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Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018
John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences. This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton, A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite
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2018, In Sebastian Sobecki and John Scattergood, eds, A Critical Companion to John Skelton (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2018)
2008, Literature Compass
John Skelton's writing career took place roughly between 1488 and 1528, years that straddle two centuries and, most awkwardly, two epochs. Perhaps because of that awkwardness he has been a poet marginalized in our literary histories and critical discourse until quite recently. This overview essay suggests that to re-engage Skelton is to test alternative literary histories that think beyond the fifteenth century as a merely transitional moment and that put into play methodologies flexible enough to accommodate inter-related notions of aesthetics and context. This essay traces Skelton's critical tradition as a series of perspectives on the poet's own nimble engagements with form and history. The first section follows the story of formalist and historicist approaches to Skelton working in tension up until the last part of the twentieth century. The second section explores the interventions of the new Skelton scholars. The third and final sections speculate briefly about fresh directions in Skelton scholarship, noticing that many of the themes and questions raised around Skelton over the past century remain open for more extensive development.
"This thesis considers a range of sixteenth-century literary texts in order to trace the evolution of the public image(s) of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (c.1470-1530), Henry VIII’s chief minister from 1515 until 1529. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate and explore the genesis and subsequent evolution of literary characterizations of Wolsey. This process in turn reveals much about the individual authors, editors, and playwrights who generated these images; the readers and audiences who received them; and the social, political, and religious events to which they responded and with which they interacted. Moreover, this thesis argues that through analyzing case studies (like Wolsey’s), we can better understand how sixteenth-century authors conceptualized and represented history itself, as well as the uses to which these histories might be put. To explore this concept, this thesis creates a framework of ‘mimetic’, ‘poetic’, and ‘documentary’ representations of history to better distinguish how Tudor authors organized and created their respective histories. In order to identify common themes and highlight evolving textual features, this thesis moves chronologically through a diverse corpus, looking at early satires in doggerel poetry and drama; biography and de casibus verse; Elizabethan historiographies (both religious and secular); and Jacobean drama. This approach demonstrates how the public images of Tudor political figures were constructed in a web of interconnected texts, and how authors constructed and adapted representations of history over the course of the sixteenth century. In addition, this thesis considers how characterizations of Wolsey in particular demonstrate the means by which a particular image could be adapted to interact with a rapidly changing public sphere."
2012, New Perspectives on Tudor Cultures
This study examines how the images of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey (c.1471–1530) provided in the poetry of John Skelton (c.1460–1529) compare with those supplied by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher in Henry VIII at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. These authors, separated by a full century and the bulk of the Tudor dynasty, created imagery of Wolsey for purposes dramatic, satirical, religious, and political. Despite ostensible differences in motivation, these poets used similar techniques to create powerful literary characterizations of this historical figure. By comparing the images of Wolsey found in Skelton’s poetry and in Henry VIII, this study will explore the nature and mechanisms of characterization through the use of imagistic rhetorical devices in these two literary bookends of the 16th century. Furthermore, this examination will seek more broadly to highlight the identifiable transmission and evolution of literary devices and practices across the gulf of the ‘Drab Age’. Through illustrating these elements, this consideration will attempt to help further dismantle the notion that the mid-Tudor period produced little of value to the Elizabethan and Stuart literary giants.
Uniting literary analysis, theories of affect from the sciences and humanities, and an archival-based account of Tudor history, this project examines how literature reflects and constructs the emotional dynamics of life in the Renaissance courtly sphere — arguing that emotionality, as a primary mode through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, should be adopted as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis. Spanning the 16th Century, chapters on John Skelton and Henrician satire, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and elegy, Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabethan pageantry, and the Earl of Essex and factional literature demonstrate how the dynamics of disgust, envy, rejection, and dread, as they are understood in the modern affective sciences, can be seen to guide literary production in the early modern court. By aligning Renaissance discourses of emotion with current trends in empirical and theoretical research, the study provides a new methodology for an affective analysis of literature.
2008, Literature Compass
Today we largely take it for granted that every text has an author, but what is understood by the term ‘author’ was very different in the Middle Ages. Medieval English ideas of authorship were many and varied, and show some key changes from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. In manuscript cultures, like England before the late fifteenth century, the author has little control over the repetition of his text; in many medieval vernacular texts the author is represented as a craftsman and translator rather than a visionary or virtuoso. Texts in manuscript were inherently open to rewriting and were often anonymous. The role and status of the author was interrogated by poets and scholars, often revealing a remarkably open sense of who, or what, an author could be. In the later medieval period, traditions of depicting real (Geoffrey Chaucer) and imagined (Sir John Mandeville) authors developed, signalling a growing trend of attaching an authorial identity to a text worth reading. The development of mysticism and affective religion brought further transformations in the role of the author, given the anxiety over who has the right and access to represent divine communication; this issue is raised in The Cloud of Unknowing and The Book of Margery Kempe, both of which play with conceits of anonymity. After Chaucer, in particular in the poetry of John Lydgate, we can identify the development of the English ‘laureate’ poet. In the early era of print, especially in the prologues of William Caxton, one discerns the emergence of an author, through the posthumous image of Chaucer, similar to that known today: not only a writer but also a creator, a celebrity and an authority.
2017, Critical Survey
This article will attempt to take stock of what we know about Chaucer’s earliest audiences, that is, about uses of and references to his work made during his lifetime. Relevant new research on manuscript use and ownership has been included in the case of Thomas Hoccleve and the scrivener Thomas Spencer. In addition to various named addressees of Chaucer’s works – Peter Bukton, Henry Scogan and Philip de la Vache – this brief survey lists contemporary references to Chaucer and his works in the poetry of John Gower, Eustache Deschamps, John Clanvowe and Thomas Usk.
2000, A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Blackwell, Oxford, 2000), 442-463
English popular verses of the early modern period as found in libels, nursery rhymes, riddles, etcand as 'applied'/inscribed on artefacts, especially banqueting- trenchers, but also bellows, ceramics, etc
2010, New Medieval Literatures
The overt mercantilism of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye has overshadowed important questions surrounding the poem’s purpose and literary form. As the work attempts to justify economic protectionism, its preoccupation with legal and bureaucratic practices breaks new ground for the hybrid genre of bill-poems. This article associates The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye with civilian bills, or libelli, and re-evaluates the immediate historical context surrounding the poem’s composition. The wealth and accuracy of economic, political, and legal information that is contained in the poem points to the poet’s intimate familiarity with the highest functions of the King’s writing offices at Westminster. I argue that The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye must have been composed from within the closest circle of Henry VI’s senior administrators. The poem, I shall contend, formed part of the Privy Seal’s strategy to identify the adolescent monarch, who had only just begun to exercise the royal privilege of granting petitions, with a defence of Calais and an ideological pursuit of peace. Central to this process were William Lyndwood, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Walter Hungerford, the poem’s sponsor. In additionto historical and circumstantial evidence, Lyndwood’s association with The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye is supported by the centrality the poem assigns to seals and documentary validity, its legal mode as a libellus, and its programmatic emphasis on peace and unity, which Lyndwood had championed in a parliamentary sermon of 1431.
2010, JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology
2007, Renaissance Quarterly
The article is available in the online journal Theta at the link above.
2008, Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600
My three contributions cover Piers Plowman (Passus 17), The Piers Plowman Tradition, and the “Maye Eclogue” in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender.
A talk on John Skelton's parrot's translingualism / multilingualism delivered at Multilingual Poetry panel, Reverse: Copenhagen International Poetry Festival 2015, Copenhagen (Sep 26, 2015).
Treats early edition of Chaucer's work in terms of family trees.
2017, UCL
This thesis is a study of the form and transmission of John Lydgate’s 'Life of Our Lady'. The 'Life' survives in over fifty manuscripts that date from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It was also printed several times in the pre-modern period. The thesis examines the ways in which the text was presented in these various forms and shows what such forms suggest about the transmission of the poem. It discusses the manuscripts’ physical construction, design and decoration. It taxonomizes the types of textual apparatus that accompany the text and considers textual extraction and modification. These aspects of the manuscripts show how the poem’s meaning was framed in a variety of cultural contexts and demonstrate the role played by non-authorial figures in shaping the 'Life' for its readers. All the located manuscripts are described in an appendix at the end.
A corrected version of these proofs was published in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100-c.-1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al.
2019, Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages
Late medieval English polemical poetic and prose texts, particularly those affiliated with Lollardy, have long been judged as aesthetically unappealing even as they are acknowledged to be historically, politically, and socially illuminating. They are important documents, but not beautiful literature. This chapter considers how we might understand these texts as emerging from an aesthetic tradition that turns away from tradition Aristotelian models of artistic beauty and toward a model of vernacular aesthetics. Through a review of English poetic precedent, this chapter argues that the notion of vernacular makynge offers an alternate way to understand the aesthetic patterns of one particular group of late medieval polemical texts: the fifteenth-century Jack Upland series. The chapter’s analysis of Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoinder explores how the features of makynge—performance, process, transformation—actually align with Lollard beliefs about artistic skill and open up our understanding of these texts whose literary value continues to be overlooked.
2013, Traditions and Innovations in the Study of Medieval English Literature
Argues that the chief characters in Chaucer's poem weep, are agitated, and carefully visualize their situation in their mind's eye whenever they need to solve a dilemma, in order to help them reason their way to a conclusion; weeping is thus part of their rationally creative process. This psychological response is based in an essential Augustinian concept of 'intention', a combination of desire and will that motivates perception as well as rationality.
2019, In Candace Barrington and Sebastian Sobecki, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
2019
The aim of this thesis is to explore and uncover the strong presence chivalry had during the development of the early Tudor dynasty, particularly following the end of the Wars of the Roses and into the early modern era. It seeks to answer the questions of how prevalent the phenomena of chivalry and courtly love were during the transition from the medieval to the early modern period, as well as their importance in the political and dynastic foundations of the Tudor dynasty. Further, the work aims to examine what chivalry and courtly love reveals about gender, politics, and social dynamics during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. In the foundations of his reign, Henry VII craved dynastic stability, legitimacy, and monarchical power. In establishing his dynasty, Henry attempted to create a legacy that emphasised the conceptual ideals of chivalry, and courtly love, as critical for strength, courtly performance and politics. The thesis will argue that the early Tudor kings sought to drive cultural chivalric elements into the political, and dynastic foundations of the early Tudor public sphere. It will explore how chivalric and courtly love ideals created a framework for conversation and behaviour, gauging how gender roles were perceived and performed by courtiers during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Chivalry’s place in Tudor court culture has been considerably understated, discussed as a cultural undertone, and not properly contextualised. By focussing on this cultural ideal in early Tudor court life, the thesis will argue chivalric discourse was crucial to both kings and courtly performance.
2008, English Literary Renaissance
2010, A Companion to Tudor Literature, ed. Kent Cartwright
Corrected proofs were published in Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. C. Cannon and M. Nolan (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011), 166-181.
Corrected proofs were published in Medieval Romance and Material Culture, ed. N. Perkins (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015), 147-164
1984, The Modern Language Review
"Medieval poets, whether writing in Latin or Old French or Middle English, whether composing love lyrics of narrative works, lavished their efforts on formal descriptions of persons, particularly of young women. When singing the praises of beautiful maidens, the poets followed a rigid canon that determined not only which parts of the body and face they dwelled on and which they omitted from consideration, but also the order in which they examined these features and even the adjectives and similes they used."