IMC 2008: Sessions
Session 1319: Nature, Artifice, and Eternity in the Middle English Lyric
Wednesday 9 July 2008, 16.30-18.00
| Sponsor: | Centre for Medieval Research, University of Leicester |
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| Organiser: | Anne Marie D'Arcy, Department of English, University of Leicester |
| Moderator/Chair: | Greg Walker, Department of English Literature, University of Edinburgh |
| Paper 1319-a | 'Stones in Sermons': Nature Turned Upside Down in the Vernon Manuscript (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Lay Piety, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Sermons and Preaching |
| Paper 1319-b | The Transvaluation of Natural Values in the Christological Lyric (Language: English) Index terms: Art History - General, Language and Literature - Middle English, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Theology |
| Paper 1319-c | 'Written in Gold upon a Purple Stain': The Book of Nature and the Alchemy of Aureate Diction (Language: English) Index terms: Art History - General, Language and Literature - Middle English, Liturgy, Theology |
| Abstract | Erwin Panofsky defined the art (and at least some of the literature) of the later middle ages as a mixture of 'extreme stylization' and 'precocious naturalism', and this aesthetic pluralism is discernible in the treatment of nature in at least some of the Middle English lyrics. This session not only explores the transgression, transvaluation, and transmutation of the natural world in the lyric tradition, but more particularly, how liminality and hyperreality as refracted in the speculum naturale influences christological, mariological and moral themes and images in this tradition. |