Items related to Learning to Die in London, 1380-1540 (The Middle Ages...
Taking as her focus a body of writings in poetic, didactic, and legal modes that circulated in England's capital between the 1380s—just a generation after the Black Death—and the first decade of the English reformation in the 1530s, Amy Appleford offers the first full-length study of the Middle English "art of dying" (ars moriendi). An educated awareness of death and mortality was a vital aspect of medieval civic culture, she contends, critical not only to the shaping of single lives and the management of families and households but also to the practices of cultural memory, the building of institutions, and the good government of the city itself.
In fifteenth-century London in particular, where an increasingly laicized reformist religiosity coexisted with an ambitious program of urban renewal, cultivating a sophisticated attitude toward death was understood as essential to good living in the widest sense. The virtuous ordering of self, household, and city rested on a proper attitude toward mortality on the part both of the ruled and of their secular and religious rulers. The intricacies of keeping death constantly in mind informed not only the religious prose of the period, but also literary and visual arts. In London's version of the famous image-text known as the Dance of Death, Thomas Hoccleve's poetic collection The Series, and the early sixteenth-century prose treatises of Tudor writers Richard Whitford, Thomas Lupset, and Thomas More, death is understood as an explicitly generative force, one capable (if properly managed) of providing vital personal, social, and literary opportunities.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Amy Appleford teaches English at Boston University.
Review:
"An original and significant work that demonstrates the different, and evolving, ways in which Londoners understood the nature of death and prepared themselves for it, and for what was to come afterwards."—Caroline Barron, University of London
"An astonishingly good book that recenters our understanding of late medieval religious devotion."—Fiona Somerset, University of Connecticut
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherUniversity of Pennsylvania
- Publication date1969
- ISBN 10 081229047X
- ISBN 13 9780812290479
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want