{"product_id":"9781526157898-difficult-pasts","title":"Difficult Pasts","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003ePost-Reformation Memory and the Medieval Romance\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eDifficult Pasts\u003c\/i\u003ecombines book history, reception history and theories of cultural memory to explore how Reformation-era audiences used medieval literary texts to construct their own national and religious identities. In doing so, it challenges narratives that separate manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eMedieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and superstitious. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eDifficult pasts \u003c\/i\u003eexamines the reception of Middle English romances after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre’s popularity rested not in its violent or superstitious qualities, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’, a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. \u003ci\u003eDifficult pasts\u003c\/i\u003e reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56063086068086,"sku":"9781526157898","price":107.12,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/orig_38975374.jpg?v=1767936959","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9781526157898-difficult-pasts","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}