Writing Old Age and Impairments in Late Medieval England.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (160 pages)
- Borderlines Series .
- Borderlines Series .
Front Cover -- Half-title -- Series information -- Title page -- Copyright information -- Table of contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Staves and Stanzas -- Old Man Yells at Cloud: Old Bodies and Common Complaints -- Four Aging Authorities: Aristotle, Cicero, Juvenal, Maximianus -- Chapter 1. Crooked as a Staff: Narrative, History, and the Disabled Body in Parlement of Thre Ages -- The Timeliness of Age: Narrative Economies and Young Minstrels in Wynnere -- Narrating Age: The Old Stories of Elde -- Worthy Narrations -- Chapter 2. A Reckoning with Age: Prosthetic Violence and the Reeve -- General Portraits of Age and Ability -- Dirty Tricks and Textual Transgressions -- Chapter 3. The Past is Prologue: Following the Trace of Master Hoccleve -- Politics is Prologue -- Hoccleve's Trace and Empty Inheritances -- Erasing Prosthesis: Printing Paratexts -- Broken Bodies and Narrating Destruction: Troy and Caxton -- Imprinting Age: Caxton's Cicero -- Papa Don't Preach: Correct Texts and a Genealogical Tradition -- The Old Terms of Prosthesis -- Polychronicon and Old Histories -- Chapter 4. Playing Prosthesis and Revising the Past: Gower's Supplemental Role -- Restoring Prostheses: Gower's Old Speech Fills the Gaps -- Remember Gower's Old Body -- "This 'longs the Text": Gower as Medieval Prosthesis -- Epilogue: Impotence and Textual Healing -- Words, words, words -- Works Cited -- Primary Sources -- Secondary Sources -- Index.
A ground-breaking study of old age impairments in Middle English literature and their function as prosthetic additions, which draw attention both to the debility of old age and its ability to complete and drive narrative.