Pre-order Releases Jan 19, 2027
Difficult pasts: Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture)
by Mimi Ensley
$29.19 / copy at 25+ copies As low as $25.87 at 1,000+Your best volume price
Volume pricing Applied automatically in your cart
About the book
Difficult pasts
Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and superstitious. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period.
Difficult pasts examines the reception of Middle English romances after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre’s popularity rested not in its violent or superstitious qualities, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’, a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. Difficult pasts reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England.
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Details
- Publisher
- Manchester University Press
- Author
- Mimi Ensley
- Format
- Paperback
- Release date
- Jan 19, 2027
- ISBN-13
- 9781807072926
- ISBN-10
- 1807072924
- Pages
- 248
- Carton quantity
- 20 copies
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Difficult pasts for groups: pricing
Volume pricing applies automatically in your cart. No codes, no account needed.
| Copies | Price per copy | You save |
|---|---|---|
| 25 – 99 | $29.19 | 21% off list |
| 100 – 249 | $28.08 | 24% off list |
| 250 – 499 | $27.71 | 25% off list |
| 500 – 999 | $26.60 | 28% off list |
| 1,000+ | $25.87 | 30% off list |
Where can I buy 100 copies of Difficult pasts?
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Difficult pasts: Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance (Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture)
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