Literature and complaint in England, 1272-1553 / Wendy Scase.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Scase, Wendy.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Middle English, 1100-1500--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700--History and criticism.

Law and literature--History--To 1500.

Law and literature.

Narration (Rhetoric)--History--To 1500.

Narration (Rhetoric).

History.

Complaints (Rhetoric).

Law in literature.

Physical Description:

xii, 215 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007.

Summary:

Literature and Complaint in England, 1272-1553 gives an entirely new and original perspective on the relations between early judicial process and the development of literature in England. Wendy Scase argues that texts ranging from political libels and pamphlets to laments of the unrequited lover constitute a literature shaped by the new and crucial role of complaint in the law courts. She describes how complaint took on central importance in the development of institutions such as Parliament and the common law in later medieval England, and argues that these developments shaped a literature of complaint within and beyond the judicial process. She traces the story of the literature of complaint from the earliest written bills and their links with early complaint poems in English, French, and Latin, through writings associated with political crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to the libels and petitionary pamphlets of Reformation England. A final chapter, which includes analyses of works by Chaucer, Hoccleve, and related writers, proposes far-reaching revisions to current histories of the arts of composition in medieval England. Throughout, close attention is paid to the forms and language of complaint writing and to the emergence of an infrastructure for the production of plaint texts, and many images of plaints and petitions are included. The texts discussed include works by well-known authors as well as little-known libels and pamphlets from across the period.

Contents:

1 Judicial Plaint and Peasant Plaint 5

Peasant Plaint and Judicial Reform 5

Peasant Plaint in the Royal Courts 11

Peasant Plaint and New 'Villeins' 17

Peasant Plaint and Vernacular Poetry 33

2 Complaint, Clamour, and Libels 42

Criminal Justice and Satirical Complaint 42

Complaint and Clamour of the People 54

Clamour of the People in the Later Fourteenth Century 62

Clamour and the Appellants 65

3 The Literature of Clamour 83

The Beginnings of Clamour Literature 83

Lollard Petitions and Libels 87

Lollard Bills and the Literature of Clamour 101

The Clamour Literature of the 1450s 110

4 Transmission, Response, and Development: Clamour Writing 1460-1553 137

Clamour in Yorkist and Early Tudor England 137

Developments in the Transmission of Clamour 143

Reformation Responses to Clamour Writing 149

Complaint from the Dissolution to the Fall of Somerset 157

5 Literature, Complaint, and the Ars Dictaminis 170.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [188]-204) and index.

ISBN:

9780199270859

0199270856

OCLC:

71541586