Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-poet
By
Jim Rhodes (Author)
Paperback
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What happens when poetry deals explicitly with a serious theological issue? In Poetry Does Theology, Jim Rhodes seeks one answer to that question by analyzing the symbiotic relationship that existed between theology and poetry in fourteenth-century England. He pays special attention to the narrative poems of Chaucer, Grosseteste, the Pearl-poet, the author of Saint Erkenwald, and Langland.
Rhodes shows that Chaucer and his contemporaries wrote at the end of a linguistic and theological revolution-a time when revised perspectives on the creation and incarnation gave rise to a new humanistic spirit that transformed late medieval theological culture and spurred the development of vernacular theology and poetry. Rhodes' careful analysis describes how the relationship between theology and poetry underwent a radical transformation as the latter half of the fourteenth century progressed.
What had previously been the exclusive prerogative of a Latinate and clerical elite became in the later Middle Ages a matter of concern within vernacular culture, particularly the emerging category of "literature." This newly defined and self-conscious literature provided not simply an arena in which theological questions could be raised; it also privileged a secular, humanist outlook that granted to earthly life its own legitimacy and dignity.
In Poetry Does Theology, Rhodes argues that one of the distinctive qualities of modernity-its secular and this-worldly orientation-is a phenomenon that took root in England in the fourteenth century and found its primary site of development not in theological or philosophical circles, but in a vernacular literature that opened for inquiry the theological and philosophical questions that dominated the era. CPSIA choking or other US hazard warning - No California Proposition 65 hazard warning necessary
About the Author
Jim Rhodes is professor emeritus of English at Southern Connecticut State University.
More Details
- Contributor: Jim Rhodes
- Imprint: University of Notre Dame Press
- ISBN13: 9780268038700
- Number of Pages: 336
- Packaged Dimensions: 152x229x19mm
- Packaged Weight: 500
- Format: Paperback
- Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
- Release Date: 2001-12-31
- Binding: Paperback / softback
- Biography: Jim Rhodes is professor emeritus of English at Southern Connecticut State University.
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