Author: Helen Cooney File Type: pdf This book offers a multi-faceted view on the wide variety of late-medieval writings on love with which it deals and seeks to respect and reflect their gret diversite. Hence it represents an important and timely modification of the rather monolithic views on medieval writings on love which have prevailed ever since Lewis Allegory of Love. The essays discuss issues such as the relevance or otherwise to English, Anglo-Norman, and Scottish writings of the continental ethos of fyn amor, the importance of social class in medieval discourses on love, and the question of whether gender was a determining factor in the construction of these texts. In keeping with the volumes fundamental belief in variety and debate, the essays themselves contain an internal dialectic, with individual scholars expressing different views of similar bodies of work or even individual texts. The contributors to this volume are among the foremost scholars working in the field of medieval studies today. ReviewReaders seeking proof that good things still come in small packages need look no further than this fine collection....an indispensible resource for any reader interested in the subject matter.....simultaneously sophisticated and accesible.--EconomiaThis account of Middle English love literature, also of its historical background and continental context, is impressively comprehensive and illuminating. Beside lively discussions of English representations of the characteristically medieval but hotly debated courtly love mode other hitherto less recognized modes are brought into focus, especially in valuable essays dealing with early Middle English and Anglo-Norman romances.Among many excellent chapters in this volume is the editors own subtle and beautifully written contribution on love and aesthetics at the end of the Middle English period.--Thomas G. Duncan, University of St AndrewsCooney has here assembled a distinguished array of medievalists who, in a wide-ranging series of essays, address the big questions surrounding the debate on love in the Middle Ages. This is a very strong collection and will certainly be widely consulted.--J. A. Burrow, Emeritus Professor, University of BristolThe term courtly love will not be readily recuperated from the scorn that has been heaped upon it and the misrepresentations to which it has been subjected, but the medieval cult of idealized sexual love is here, in this book, definitively restored to its central position in the understanding of medieval English literature. A series of probing essays demonstrates how the courtly cult of being in love, in all its multiplicities, variously expressive of male or female subjectivity, and oriented according to whatever moral and cultural conventions, overrode constraint and gave narrative its very heart-beat.--Derek A. Pearsall, Harvard University (retired)This collection of essays presents a series of lively reassessments of English and Scottish writings on love in the Middle Ages. It is both insightful and accessible.--Douglas Gray, J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language Emeritus, University of OxfordAbout the AuthorHelen Cooney has taught Medieval and Renaissance literature at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, Nottingham University, and Trinity College, Dublin. She has published numerous articles on both Chaucer and Spenser and has just completed a monograph on the courtly poetry of Chaucer, entitled Chaucers Theodicies of Love. Her increasing interest in the fifteenth century was reflected in a collection of essays which she edited, Nation, Court and Culture New Essays on Fifteenth Century English Poetry (2001). Her current major project is a study of how the Middle Ages becomes the Renaissance in English literature, as seen through the lens of courtly allegory. She is currently lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance English at Trinity College, Dublin.

Author: Ruth Fuller Sasaki File Type: pdf p margin 14px padding TheLinji lu(Record of Linji) has been an essential text of Chinese and Japanese Zen Buddhism for nearly a thousand years. A compilation of sermons, statements, and acts attributed to the great Chinese Zen master Linji Yixuan (d. 866), it serves as both an authoritative statement of Zens basic standpoint and a central source of material for Zen koan practice. Scholars study the text for its importance in understanding both Zen thought and East Asian Mahayana doctrine, while Zen practitioners cherish it for its unusual simplicity, directness, and ability to inspire.p margin -4px 14px padding One of the eafont face=MS Shell Dlg 2, serifspan 12pxrliest attempts to translate this important work into English was by Sasaki Shigetsu (18821945), a pioneer Zen master in the U.S. and the founder of the First Zen Institute of America. At the time of his death, he entrusted the project to his wife, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who in 1949 moved to Japan and there founded a branch of the First Zen Institute at Daitoku-ji. Mrs. Sasaki, determined to produce a definitive translation, assembled a team of talented young scholars, both Japanese and Western, who in the following years retranslated the text in accordance with modern research on Tang-dynasty colloquial Chinese. As they worked on the translation, they compiled hundreds of detailed notes explaining every technical term, vernacular expression, and literary reference. One of the team, Yanagida Seizan (later Japans preeminent Zen historian), produced a lengthy introduction that outlined the emergence of Chinese Zen, presented a biography of Linji, and traced the textual development of theLinji lu.The sudden death of Mrs. Sasaki in 1967 brought the nearly completed project to a halt. An abbreviated version of the book was published in 1975, but neither this nor any other English translations that subsequently appeared contain the type of detailed historical, linguistic, and doctrinal annotation that was central to Mrs. Sasakis plan.spanfontp MS Shell Dlg 2, serif 12px margin -4px padding The materials assembled by Mrs. Sasaki and her team are finally available in the present edition of the Record of Linji. Chinese readings have been changed to Pinyin and the translation itself has been revised in line with subsequent research by Iriya Yoshitaka and Yanagida Seizan, the scholars who advised Mrs. Sasaki. The notes, nearly six hundred in all, are almost entirely based on primary sources and thus retain their value despite the nearly forty years since their preparation. They provide a rich context for Linjis teachings, supplying a wealth of information on Tang colloquial expressions, Buddhist thought, and Zen history, much of which is unavailable anywhere else in English. This revised edition of thefont color=#333333 face=Arial, serifspan 14px background- (255, 255, 255)Record of Linjispanfontis certain to be of great value to Buddhist scholars, Zen practitioners, and readers interested in Asian Buddhism.