Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature [Hardcover]

This study traces how medieval audiences judge bodies from Doomsday visions to beauty contests. Employing cultural and formalist approaches, this study breaks new ground on the historical obsession about ends and changes, reflected in different genres spanning several hundred years.Introduction: Time and the Audiences of Visual Judgment Visualizing Judgment in Anglo-Saxon England: Illumination, Metaphor, and Christ III Sum vnto bale and sum to blis : From Binary Judgment to Romance Closure Unto hir lyves ende : Time and the Wife of Bath's Remembered Bodies Conclusion: Romance Ends, or Transforming Closure in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

'Odd Bodies and Visible Ends is a very impressive piece of work. It is learned, textually proficient, and admirably wide ranging. Shimomura ably handles a variety of languages with accuracy and to excellent effect: Old and Middle English, Latin, Old Icelandic, Middle French. She makes effective use of an equally impressive variety of genres, from Old and Middle English homilies, to Old and Middle English poetry, to Latin history and hagiography, Icelandic verse and French romance. Often she has strikingly new and sometimes brilliant insights: for example, about an implicit but quite striking teleology surrounding the Wife of Bath's prologue, about the way Christian teleology operates in the Carl of Carlisle romances, about the overlapping of ideal stasis, regular seasonal time, and romance 'openness' in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Shimomura has something fresh and enlightening to say about every text on which she comments.' - Joseph Wittig, Professor of English, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This is traditional philological literary criticism in its finest form, based on close analysis and understanding of the texts concerned, and building appropriately on previous scholarship, while making an original, useful, and thoughtful contribution to the field. Cogent and accessible, thislÓÆ