The Politics of Middle English Parables: Fiction, Theology, and Social Practice

This study explores how writers reconciled provocative biblical stories with late-medieval culture. Highlighting the many variations and points of conflict across renditions of the same story, the book unfolds a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections, lives of Christ and devotional treatises. Ambiguous, paradoxical, and filled with reversals of expectation, they stand apart from other instructional stories in their tendency to render the familiar unfamiliar.Most scholarship treats parables as stable vehicles of Christian teaching, but this book takes a new approach, highlighting the many variations and points of conflict between different renditions. It looks at how translators negotiated scriptural portrayals of everyday life relevant to labour laws, social inequality, charity, and penance. At the same time, it explores translations in different literary settings, revealing not what a given parable means in a definitive sense but rather how it conveys the ideologies, power structures, and cultural debates of late-medieval Christianity.Investigating the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology, and social practice in late-medieval England, The politics of Middle English parables provides a new paradigm for approaching familiar biblical stories. It is essential reading for scholars and students of medieval literature, history, and religion. The politics of Middle English parables examines the dynamic intersection of fiction, theology and social practice in late-medieval England. Parables occupy a prominent place in Middle English literature, appearing in dream visions and story collections as well as in lives of Christ and devotional treatises. While most scholarship approaches the translated stories as stable vehicles of Christian teaching, this book highlights the many variations and points of conflict across Middle English renditions of the same story. In parables related to labour, social inequality, charity and penance, the book locates a creative theological discourse through which writers attempted to re-construct Christian belief and practice. Analysis of these diverse retellings reveals not what a given parable meant in a definitive sense but rather how Middle English parables inscribe the ideologies, power structures and cultural debates of late-medieval Christianity.