Challenging communion : the Eucharist and Middle English literature / Jennifer Garrison.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Garrison, Jennifer (Professor of English), author.

Series:

Interventions: new studies in medieval culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lord's Supper in literature.

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

English literature.

English literature--Middle English.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

x, 207 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Columbus : The Ohio State University Press, [2017]

Summary:

In this Book, Jennifer Garrison examines literary representations of the central symbol of later medieval religious culture: the Eucharist. In contrast to scholarship that depicts mainstream believers as enthusiastically and simplistically embracing the Eucharist, Challenging Communion: The Eucharist and Middle English Literature identifies a pervasive Middle English literary tradition that rejects simplistic notions of eucharistic promise. Through new readings of texts such as Piers Plowman, A Revelation of Love, The Book of Margery Kempe, and John Lydgate's religious poetry, Garrison shows bow writers of Middle English often take advantage of the ways in which eucharistic theology itself contests the boundaries between the material and the spiritual, and how these writers challenge the eucharistic ideal of union between Christ and the community of believers, troubling the definitions of literal and figurative, Middle English writers respond to and reformulate eucharistic theology in politically challenging and poetically complex ways. Garrison argues that Middle English texts often reject simple eucharistic promises in order to offer what they regard as a better version of the Eucharist, one that is intellectually and spiritually demanding and that invites readers to transform themselves and their communities. Book jacket.

Contents:

Resisting the fantasy of identification in Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne

Devotional submission and the Pearl-poet

Christ's allegorical bodies and the failure of community in Piers Plowman

Julian of Norwich's Allegory and the mediation of salvation

The willful surrender of eucharistic reading in Nicholas Love and Margery Kempe

John Lydgate and the eucharistic poetic tradition: the making of community

Conclusion.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-201) and index.

ISBN:

9780814213230

0814213235

OCLC:

959922497

Publisher Number:

99969295168

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description