Excerpt: ...corner. The ballad-man has his own pithy judgment in the guise of an artless rhyme. The teacher has his admonitions, whence may be learnt what men conceived to be the nun's ideal and purpose in this cloistered life. The moralist has his satire, to show wherein she fell short of such lofty heights. And the poet himself will hold his mirror up to nature, that we may see after five hundred years what he saw with his searching eyes, when Madame Eglentyne rode to Canterbury, or when the nuns of Poissy feasted a ...
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Excerpt: ...corner. The ballad-man has his own pithy judgment in the guise of an artless rhyme. The teacher has his admonitions, whence may be learnt what men conceived to be the nun's ideal and purpose in this cloistered life. The moralist has his satire, to show wherein she fell short of such lofty heights. And the poet himself will hold his mirror up to nature, that we may see after five hundred years what he saw with his searching eyes, when Madame Eglentyne rode to Canterbury, or when the nuns of Poissy feasted a cavalcade from court. The world was subject matter for all these, whether they wrote with a purpose or without one; there is life even in the crabbed elegiacs of Gower, grumbling his way through the Vox Clamantis; there is much Pg 500 life in the kindly counsels of the Ancren Riwle; there is God's plenty indeed in the stories and songs which the people told. It is the historian's business to call in these literary witnesses to supplement his documents. To the account-roll and the bishop's register must be added the song, the satire and the sermon. Alnwick's visitations, with the story of "Beatrix the Sacristan" behind them, have twice as much significance; Madame Eglentyne and Margaret Fairfax lend to each other a mutual illumination; little captured Clarice Stil needs Deschamps' Novice of Avernay by her side before her case can be well understood. It is of these composite portraits that truth is put together and history made. An analysis of the classes of medieval literature in which there is mention of nuns shows from how wide a field the historian can draw. The most obvious of these classes is that which contains biographies and autobiographies of saints and famous women who were nuns. Such are the writings of the great trio who made famous the nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century, the b
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Add this copy of Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 to cart. $29.16, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2022 by Legare Street Press.
Add this copy of Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 to cart. $30.82, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2023 by Alpha Edition.
Add this copy of Medieval English nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 to cart. $31.57, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2019 by Alpha Edition.
Add this copy of Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 to cart. $38.60, new condition, Sold by Ingram Customer Returns Center rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from NV, USA, published 2022 by Legare Street Press.
Add this copy of Medieval English Nunneries C. 1275 to 1535 to cart. $44.75, new condition, Sold by Russell Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Victoria, BC, CANADA, published 2023 by Alpha Edition.
Add this copy of Medieval English nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 to cart. $45.86, new condition, Sold by Booksplease rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Southport, MERSEYSIDE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2019 by Alpha Edition.
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Amazing that this book is available at all. I do not believe one can grasp the milieu of Middle English writing without an understanding of the nuns and nunneries of those centuries. For example, this essential book brings a great depth of meaning to Chaucer's Prioress in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
Kendallishere
Feb 19, 2009
The Mother Lode
Eileen Power is the mother of feminist medieval studies. Nobody does it better except those who stand on her shoulders. This 725-page encyclopedia of knowledge is the mother lode. Everybody who has come since has relied on it, and it never disappoints. If you want to know about women in the middle ages, start here.
