Battles
Category=DCF
England
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Fourteenth Century
Halidon Hill
Middle English
Minot
Poetry
Product details
- ISBN 9781879288676
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 1996
- Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Little is known about fourteenth-century poet Laurence Minot, though his political convictions and proximity to military information suggest a position in the courts of King Edward III. Minot’s eleven Middle English poems celebrate a sequence of English victories on the Scottish border and the continent between 1333 and 1352, in a conflict that would become the Hundred Years’ War. Together, these poems—seemingly written immediately after the battles—form a propagandistic chronicle of military feats that ultimately glorify the English army. Minot’s verse is animated by an ardent patriotism that often manifests as denigration against the enemy Scots and French. Richard Osberg identifies the dialect as Lincolnshire, and links the texts’ alliteration, prosody, and lexicon to political lyrics found in MS Harley 2253. Osberg pieces together the extant evidence about Minot into a speculative biography and brings to light a series of poems that has been largely neglected.
Richard Osberg is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. His research interests include 14th and 15th century English literature, and 19th and 20th centuries' re-inventions of the Middle Ages in literature and film.
