The literary career of Thomas Walsingham, a significant figure in late fourteenth-century classicist letters in England and an overlooked major contemporary of Chaucer, has been somewhat neglected - which this book remedies. Following the texts, rather than individuals or institutions, it demonstrates both authors' participation in a previously unrecognized discursive field that spans Latinate clerical prose and secular vernacular poetry, opening for reexamination the "idea" of public literature in the late Middle Ages and recalibrating the terms of the conversation about the advent of humanistic textual practice in England. Providing a connected and comparative reading of Walsingham's works, alongside those of Chaucer, the book extends understanding of Chaucer through the exploration of his relationship to the clerical constituencies of London, Oxford, and monasteries in the South-East, and thoroughly inserts Walsingham into the modern study of the reception of the Latin classics among the vernacular authors of his period.
Author(s): Sylvia Federico
Series: Writing History in the Middle Ages, 2
Publisher: York Medieval Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 216
List of Illustrations vi
Acknowledgments vii
Note on Walsingham’s Texts viii
Introduction: The Watlyng Street Circuit and the Field of Classicist Letters 1
Chapter 1. Portraits of Princes in 'Liber benefactorum', 'Prohemia poetarum', and the 'Monk’s Tale' 17
Chapter 2. The Textual Environment of the 'Historia Alexandri magni principis' 49
Chapter 3. Court Politics and Italian Letters in 'Ditis ditatus' and 'Troilus and Criseyde' 95
Chapter 4. 'Omnia vincit amor': Passion in the Chronicle 137
Conclusion: The Learned Clerk and Humanistic Practice 173
Bibliography 181
Index 201
