About this ebook
Written, according to its anonymous poet, to motivate “sympyll men” toward a greater interest in Scripture, The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament presents a deft, animated late-fourteenth-century translation and expansion of Peter Comestor’s twelfth-century Historia Scholastica, the single most authorized paraphrase of the Bible for much of the Middle Ages. However, to judge the Paraphrase a mere paraphrase is to undervalue its complexity and importance; it masterfully interweaves material from numerous sources, including an Old French metrical paraphrase, the Northumbrian Middle English poem Cursor Mundi, and several other Middle English texts. In a way few other texts can claim, the Paraphrase engages a breadth of core cultural issues definitive of late medieval England: vernacular translations of the Bible, the Bible’s influence upon medieval romance and vice versa, a trend toward realism in conceptions of individual and social circumstances, cultural heterogeneity, and greater sympathy toward women and Jews.
Written, according to its anonymous poet, to motivate “sympyll men” toward a greater interest in Scripture, The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament presents a deft, animated late-fourteenth-century translation and expansion of Peter Comestor’s twelfth-century Historia Scholast...
About the author
Michael Livingston is Associate Professor of English at The Citadel, in Charleston, S.C. He is an author of both fiction and non-fiction and has published on topics as diverse as early Christianity, Tolkien, and James Joyce.
Michael Livingston is Associate Professor of English at The Citadel, in Charleston, S.C. He is an author of both fiction and non-fiction and has published on topics as diverse as early Christianity, Tolkien, and James Joyce.
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