Vernacular Aesthetics in the Later Middle Ages

Katharine W. Jager is a poet and medieval scholar.  She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston–Downtown, USA, and has published essays on medieval aesthetics, the masculine performativity of chivalric speech acts, onomatopoeia and multimodality in alliterative verse, and aurality in late medieval English poetry, among other subjects.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: Past Vernaculars: The Aesthetic and the Everyday, Katherine W. Jager.- Chapter 2: The Weight of Experience: John Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt, Joel D. Anderson.- Chapter 3: ’Stonde Manlyche togedyr in Trewthe’: Lyric and Rebellion Among Late Medieval Men, Katharine W. Jager.- Chapter 4: On Bells and Rebellion: The Auditory Imagination and Social Reform, Medieval and Modern, Adin Lears.- Chapter 5: High or Low?: Medieval English Carols as Part of Vernacular Culture, 1380-1450, Lisa Colton and Louise McInnes.- Chapter 6: Rethinking the Passion Lyric: Verbal Devotion, Narrative Variation, and the Poetics of Comfort in Middle English Poetry, Barbara Zimbalist.- Chapter 7: Multimodality and Memory in the Mise-en-page of Guillaume de Machaut’s Mass, Kate Maxwell.- Chapter 8: Alchemical Language: Latin and the Vernacular inthe Poetry of Thomas Norton and John Gower, David Hadbawnik.- Chapter 9: Vernacular ‘Makynge,’ Jack Upland, and the Aesthetics of Antfraternalism, Noëlle Phillips.- Chapter 10: Read It and Weep: Affective and Literate Engagement in Richard Rolle’s Meditations and The Book of Margery Kempe, Jessica Barr.

“The essays in this collection are carefully written and researched: the abundant notes are a resource in themselves. Many are richly illustrated and offer a wealth of information about the manuscript record. … If we wish to grasp how medieval aesthetics were just as important to the lives of ordinary people as they were to the rich and the writers they patronized, then we will certainly need more books like this one.” (Taylor Cowdery, Speculum, Vol. 96 (2), April, 2021)