Literary Collections Ancient, Classical & Medieval
A Crisis of Truth
Literature and Law in Ricardian England
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
- Initial publish date
- May 2002
- Category
- Ancient, Classical & Medieval, Medieval
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780812218091
- Publish Date
- May 2002
- List Price
- $28.95 USD
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Description
In the late fourteenth century the complex Middle English word "trouthe," which had earlier meant something like "integrity" or "dependability," began to take on its modern sense of "conformity to fact." At the same time, the meaning of its antonym, "tresoun," began to move from "personal betrayal" to "a crime against the state." In A Crisis of Truth, Richard Firth Green contends that these alterations in meaning were closely linked to a growing emphasis on the written over the spoken and to the simultaneous reshaping of legal thought and practice.
According to Green, the rapid spread of vernacular literacy in the England of Richard II was driven in large part by the bureaucratic and legal demands of an increasingly authoritarian central government. The change brought with it a fundamental shift toward the attitudes we still hold about the nature of evidence and proof—a move from a truth that resides almost exclusively in people to one that relies heavily on documents.
Green's magisterial study presents law and literature as two parallel discourses that have, at times, converged and influenced each other. Ranging deeply and widely over a huge body of legal and literary materials, from Anglo-Saxon England to twentieth-century Africa, it will provide a rich source of information for literary, legal, and historical scholars.
About the authors
Contributor Notes
Richard Firth Green is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario. He is the author of Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages.
Other titles by Richard Firth Green
Other titles by Ruth Mazo Karras
Balaam's Ass: Vernacular Theology Before the English Reformation
Volume 1: Frameworks, Arguments, English to 1250
The Christian Jew and the Unmarked Jewess
The Polemics of Sameness in Medieval English Anti-Judaism
To Live Like a Moor
Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain
Elf Queens and Holy Friars
Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church
The Medieval Salento
Art and Identity in Southern Italy
Wonderful to Relate
Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England
Gender and Christianity in Medieval Europe
New Perspectives
Past Convictions
The Penance of Louis the Pious and the Decline of the Carolingians
Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London
Medieval Woman's Song
Cross-Cultural Approaches