Revelation and the Apocalypse in Late Medieval Literature

The Writings of Julian of Norwich and William Langland

Author(s) Justin M. Byron-Davies

Language: English

Genre(s): Literary Criticism, Religion

Series: Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages

  • February 2020 · 288 pages ·234x156mm

  • · Hardback - 9781786835161
  • · eBook - pdf - 9781786835178
  • · eBook - epub - 9781786835185

About The Book

This interdisciplinary book breaks new ground by systematically examining ways in which two of the most important works of late medieval English literature – Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love and William Langland’s Piers Plowman – arose from engagement with the biblical Apocalypse and exegetical writings. The study contends that the exegetical approach to the Apocalypse is more extensive in Julian’s Revelations and more sophisticated in Langland’s Piers Plowman than previously thought, whether through a primary textual influence or a discernible Joachite influence. The author considers the implications of areas of confluence, which both writers reapply and emphasise – such as spiritual warfare and other salient thematic elements of the Apocalypse, gender issues, and Julian’s explications of her vision of the soul as city of Christ and all believers (the fulcrum of her eschatologically-focused Aristotelian and Augustinian influenced pneumatology). The liberal soteriology implicit in Julian’s ‘Parable of the Lord and the Servant’ is specifically explored in its Johannine and Scotistic Christological emphasis, the absent vision of hell, and the eschatological ‘grete dede’, vis-à-vis a possible critique of the prevalent hermeneutic.

Contents

Acknowledgements
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1 - A Comparison of the Apocalypse and the Writings of Julian of Norwich
Chapter 2 - Orthodox and Heterodox Currents in the Writing of Julian of Norwich
Chapter 3 - Langland’s Poetics
Chapter 4 - Personification and Allegorisation in Piers Plowman
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography

About the Author(s)

Author(s): Justin M. Byron-Davies

Justin M. Byron-Davies completed his PhD at the University of Surrey, where he worked as an associate tutor in English literature and lectured on late medieval writings. His research interests include medieval theology and anchoritic, revelatory and apocalyptic texts.

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