Bøger af Lee Patterson

The President of Iran is assassinated while sitting on the Peacock Throne, a throne dating back to the ancients and adorned with many precious stones. The assassination occurred during the celebration of the anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The Iranian police could not discover the identity nor the location of the killer. General Alavi Ali, head of the Islamic Secret Police, VAVAK, invited the Russian Secret Police, the North Korean Secret Police, Scotland Yard, and None of them could discover a single clue to the person or whereabouts of the assassin. General Alavi Ali then prevailed upon the U.S. for help in solving this crime. Come on this adventure with Rocky Storm, his fiancee, and his talented police detectives as they go to Iran and Iraq in an attempt to assist in solving the greatest assassination plot and mystery ever conceived.

As a traditional site of historicist practice, medieval studies is particularly well-placed to benefit from the recent reemergence of historicism in literary studies. But this new "critical historicism" is different in both method and interests from past forms of historicist work. The differences are well illustrated by this collection. The concern with politics, the reliance on the materials of economic and social history, the conception of writing as a form of social practice, the focus upon the forces of change in medieval culture, the unwillingness to observe the usual distinction between literary and historical texts, and the historicization of their own practice--these characteristics make the publication of these essays a significant event for medieval studies.

Two dialectics are at work in this book: that between the past and the present and that between the individual and the social, and both have moral significance. The first two chapters are methodological; the first is on the historical understanding of medieval literature and the second on how to manage the inseparability of fact and value in the classroom. The next three chapters take up three "e;less-read"e; late medieval writers: Sir John Clanvowe, Thomas Hoccleve, and John Lydgate. Each is used to illuminate a social phenomenon: the nature of court culture, the experience of the city, and Henry V's act of self-making. The following chapter explicitly links past and present by arguing that the bearing of the English aristocrat comes from a tradition beginning with Beowulf and later reinvoked in response to nineteenth-century imperialism. The next three chapters are the most literary, dealing with Chaucer and with literary conventions in relation to a number of texts. The final chapter is on the man Patterson considers one of the most important of our medieval ancestors, Francis of Assisi.