Access your Project MUSE content using one of the login options
below Close(X) Browse Results For: Essays on Medieval Culture
This volume brings together Lee Patterson’s essays published in
various venues over the past twenty-seven years. As he observes
in his preface, “The one persistent recognition that emerged
from writing these otherwise quite disparate essays is that
whatever the text . . . and whoever the people . . ., the values
at issue remain central to contemporary life.” Two dialectics
are at work in this book: that between the past and the present
and that between the individual and the social, and both have
moral significance. The first two chapters are methodological;
the first is on the historical understanding of medieval
literature and the second on how to manage the inseparability of
fact and value in the classroom. The next three chapters take up
three “less-read” late medieval writers: Sir John Clanvowe,
Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Each is used to illuminate a
social phenomenon: the