BiblioVault - Books about Strohm, Paul

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme

Time and Medieval Life

Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm

Reaktion Books, 2023

An insightful account of how medieval people experienced time.

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme recreates medieval people’s experience of time as continuous, discontinuous, linear, and cyclical—from creation through judgment and into eternity. Medieval people measured time by natural phenomena such as sunrise and sunset, the motion of the stars, or the progress of the seasons, even as the late-medieval invention of the mechanical clock made time-reckoning more precise. Negotiating these mixed and competing systems, Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm show how medieval people gained a nuanced and expansive sense of time that rewards attention today.

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Social Chaucer

Paul Strohm

Harvard University Press, 1989

Each generation finds in Chaucer’s works the concerns and themes of its own era. But what of Chaucer’s contemporaries? For whom was he writing? With what expectations would his original audience have approached his works? In what terms did he and his audience understand their society, and how does his poetry embody a view of society?

These are some of the questions Paul Strohm addresses in this innovative look at the historical Chaucer. Fourteenth-century English society was, he reminds us, in a state of accelerating transition: feudalism was yielding to capitalism, and traditional ways of understanding one’s place in society were contending with new social paradigms. Those like Chaucer who lived on the fringe of gentility were particularly sensitive to these changes. Their social position opened the way to attractive possibilities, even as it exposed them to special perils.

Strohm draws on seldom-considered documents to describe Chaucer’s social circle and its experiences, and he relates this circle to implied and fictional audiences in the texts. Moving between major works like the Canterbury Tales and less frequently discussed works like Complaint of Mars, he suggests that Chaucer’s poetry not only reproduces social tensions of the time but also proposes conciliatory alternatives. His analysis yields a fuller understanding of Chaucer’s world and new insight into the social implications of literary forms and styles.

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Theory And The Premodern Text

Paul Strohm

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

A major reconsideration of relations between new theories and old texts.

Medieval Studies/Literary Theory

A major reconsideration of relations between new theories and old texts. The work of Paul Strohm allies the most distinguished traditions of medieval study with the most challenging and innovative of theoretical approaches. These features, working together to revise and expand our understanding of both medieval texts and contemporary critical practice, are apparent in full and compelling force in this collection of essays, most now in print for the first time. In a range of theoretical engagements with late medieval texts, dealing with social practice, time, and narrative, this volume proposes a "practical" relation between the text and the theory that illuminates it.Insisting on the imaginative multiplicity of the text, Strohm finds in theory an augmentation of interpretive possibilities-an augmentation that sometimes requires respectful disagreement with what a work says-or seems to want known-about itself. He thus defines theory as "any standpoint from which we might challenge a text’s self-understanding." Coupled with this strategic disrespect is a new and amplified form of respect-for the text as a meaning-making system, for its unruly power and its unpredictable effects in the world.In this spirit, Strohm offers new and illustrative readings of Hoccleve’s "Male Regle" and Regiment of Princes, Ricardian coronation documents, Chaucer’s "Cook’s Tale," Capgrave’s chronicle, the Gesta Henrici Quinti, records of the king’s bench, Malory’s "Knight of the Cart," and other later medieval texts. Throughout, Strohm traverses categories of "literary" and "non-literary" in the service of a more comprehensive understanding of texts and the resourcefulness with which they accomplish their social work.Medieval Cultures Series, volume 26Translation Inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

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