Medieval and Early Modern Authorship

Contents:

Introduction

Helen Cooper (Cambridge)
Choosing Poetic Fathers: The English Problem

Robert R. Edwards (Pennsylvania State)
Authorship, Imitation, and Refusal in Late-Medieval England

Lynn S. Meskill (Paris-Diderot)
The Tangled Thread of Authorship: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Jonson’s Sejanus, His Fall

Johann Gregory (Cardiff)
The “author’s drift” in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: A Poetics of Reflection

Neil Forsyth (Lausanne)
Authorship from Homer to Wordsworth via Milton

Stephen Hequembourg (Harvard)
Marvell’s Pronouns and the Ethics of Representation

Patrick Cheney (Pennsylvania State)
“The forms of things unknown”: English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime”

John Blakeley (Plymouth St Mark & St John)
Exchanging “words for mony”: The Parnassus Plays and Literary Remuneration

Colin Burrow (Oxford)
Fictions of Collaboration: Authors and Editors in the Sixteenth Century

Emma Depledge (Geneva)
Authorship and Alteration: Shakespeare on the Exclusion Crisis Stage and Page, 1678-1682

Julianna Bark (Geneva)
Portraiture, Authorship, and the Authentication of Shakespeare

Rita Copeland (Pennsylvania)
Producing the Lector

Stefania D’Agata D’Ottavi (Siena)
The Logic of Authorship in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

Nicole Nyffenegger (Bern)
Gestures of Authorship in Medieval English Historiography: The case of Robert Mannyng of Brunne

Alice Spencer (Turin)
“By Auctorite of Experyence”: The Role of Topography in Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of Native Saints

Alastair Minnis (Yale)
Ethical Poetry, Poetic Theology: A Crisis of Medieval Authority?

Notes on Contributors

Index of Names

Summary:

Reports of his death having been greatly exaggerated, the author has made a spectacular return in English studies. This is the first book devoted to medieval and early modern authorship, exploring continuities, discontinuities, and innovations in the two periods which literary histories and institutional practices too often keep apart. Canonical authors receive sustained attention (notably Chaucer, Gower, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Marvell), and so do key issues in the current scholarly debate, such as authorial self-fashioning, the fictionalisation of authorship, the posthumous construction of authorship, and the nexus of authorship and authority. Other important topics whose relation to authorship are explored include adaptation, paratext, portraiture, historiography, hagiography, theology, and the sublime. The contributors are an international team of leading medieval and early modern scholars, among them Colin Burrow, Patrick Cheney, Helen Cooper, Rita Copeland, Robert Edwards, Neil Forsyth, and Alastair Minnis.

Reviews:

“This rich, challenging and exceptionally well conceived collection addresses the construction of authorship in medieval and early modern England, and revises received opinion in important ways. All the essays are worth attention; several should be considered essential reading.”
Stephen Orgel, J. E. Reynolds Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University

“rich, engaging collection … focused eloquent introduction … The essays … are consistently provocative, complicating earlier criticism and devising new methodological approaches.” (Renaissance Quarterly)

“the contributions … possess an exceptionally high overall quality” (Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies)