Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages explores the formal composition, public performance, and popular reception of vernacular poetry, music, and prose within late medieval French and English cultures. This collection of essays considers the extra-literary and extra-textual methods by which vernacular forms and genres were obtained and examines the roles that performance and orality play in the reception and dissemination of those genres, arguing that late medieval vernacular forms can be used to delineate the interests and perspectives of the subaltern. Via an interdisciplinary approach, contributors use theories of multimodality, translation, manuscript studies, sound studies, gender studies, and activist New Formalism to address how and for whom popular, vernacular medieval forms were made.

About the Author

Katharine W. Jager is a poet and medieval scholar. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, USA, and has published essays on medieval aesthetics, the masculine performativity of chivalric speech acts, onomatopoeia and multimodality in alliterative verse, and aurality in late medieval English poetry, among other subjects.

Reviews

"The essays in this collection are carefully written and researched: the abundant notes are a resource in themselves. Many are richly illustrated and offer a wealth of information about the manuscript record. ... If we wish to grasp how medieval aesthetics were just as important to the lives of ordinary people as they were to the rich and the writers they patronized, then we will certainly need more books like this one." (Taylor Cowdery, Speculum, Vol. 96 (2), April, 2021)

Book Information
ISBN 9783030183332
Author Katharine W. Jager
Format Hardback
Page Count 312
Imprint Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Publisher Springer Nature Switzerland AG