We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136) changed the course of history writing for centuries. It newly provided the Britons with a substantial role in the insular past and inspired the writing and copying of several Brut chronicles. This chapter surveys the development of Brut chronicles in England, in terms of the incorporation of legendary British history into accounts of Anglo-Saxon and later English rulers. It then focuses on one Brut history, the Prose Brut – the most popular secular, vernacular text written in late medieval England – looking at this chronicle’s reshaping of Geoffrey’s Historia at the transfer from British to English power. An exploration of the role of Cadwallader in the Prose Brut provides a case study to consider some of the ways in which the chronicle reshaped this period in the past in its original Anglo-Norman version (the Oldest Version) and then in later versions, written in English. The Oldest Version reimagined the British, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman conquests, providing a distinctive account of Brutus’s foundation of Britain and describing William’s reign in positive terms. But most strikingly, the Oldest Version omitted Cadwallader – Geoffrey of Monmouth’s last British king – from its narrative of the past. However, many English Prose Bruts added the famous ruler back into the historical record. Their distinctive account of Cadwallader’s reign shows some of the ways in which medieval writers reflected on moments of conquest and on the transitions between peoples in this history. Brut texts and manuscripts are ripe for further critical study.
Tukaram was born into a merchant family of modest wealth and social importance. He spent increasing amounts of time in prayer and devotion before the small shrine dedicated to Vithoba in his village of Dehu, chanting and singing the songs that earlier poets had composed in praise of the deity. The Indrayani River, which for thirteen days had claimed Tukaram's manuscripts, is one of several tributaries of the Bhima, the middle of three major river systems that flow in an east-south easterly direction across the upper Deccan plateau. Although a diachronic movement from tribal to pastoral to agrarian societies is found in many parts of South Asia, pastoralists of the Desh have played an especially prominent role in shaping Marathi society and culture. The courts of the Deccan did patronize the production of vernacular literature, though in varying degrees as one moves from west to east across the plateau.
In 1576 the actor James Burbage constructed the first purpose built public theatre in Europe, which was called simply 'The Theatre'. Over the next fifty years and more, what followed was the emergence of two histories, one of material objects and the marketplace, and the other of an eruption and opening in human consciousness manifested in and provoked by the drama that Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote for the stage. In the late Elizabethan period, the arrival of the recognizably modern literary author, and the beginnings of the formation of the English literary canon, is seen. One of the major transformations of the upper crust of European society was more or less completed in England even before Queen Elizabeth was born. The literary canon was becoming accessible to the many rather than just the few, and the fecundity and riotousness of the public stage threatened to overturn fundamental rules of sexual decency, law and order, and artistic decorum.
The period from around 1400 saw the swift emergence of Middle English as a broadly based literary vernacular. Prior to the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the literary potential of the language had been largely expressed in local, provincial forms of verse. New forms of vernacular compilation emerged, often with a significant poetic component, such as anthologies or miscellanies. Seemingly random compilations representing the whims of individual taste, or determined by unrecoverable peculiarities in the availability of exemplars, might perhaps be regarded as distinctive products of a manuscript culture. Provincial families anxious about the reading matter of children and household members, Londoners with civic and mercantile as well as literary interests, and coteries experimenting with the cultivation of polite social verse have been convincingly associated with certain surviving collections. The development of secular literature in the vernacular produced both pronounced continuities and equally pronounced disjunctions after the introduction of printing into England.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.