MACMILLAN Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages: Politics, Performativity, and Reception from Literature to Music (The New Middle Ages)

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.  Review “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) Review “This volume of essays offers a lively new perspective on vernacular texts and book production in late medieval England. Combining discussion of the aesthetics of English devotional song, alchemical language, antifraternal texts, mystical writings, and Passion lyrics, with explorations of multilingualism and multimodalism, and consideration of the impact of the English Rising of 1381 on the lyric, Gower, and Piers Plowman, this vibrant collection is as much about affect and the sensory as it is about the politics and aesthetics of medieval England’s vernaculars.” (Ruth Evans, Dorthy McBride Orthwein Professor of English, Saint Louis University, USA)  From the Back Cover 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.