The Medieval Python

The Purposive and Provocative Work of Terry Jones

R. Yeager, T. Takamiya, R. Yeager, T. Takamiya

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780230112674
• eBook ISBN: 9781137075055
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This is a collection of essays by diverse hands engaging, interrogating, and honoring the medieval scholarship of Terry Jones. Jones' life-long engagement with the Middle Ages in general, and with the work of Chaucer in particular, has significantly influenced contemporary understanding of the period generally, and Middle English letters in particular. Both in film of all types - full-feature comedy (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) as well as educational television series for BBC, the History Channel, etc. (e.g., Medieval Lives) - and in his published scholarship (e.g., Chaucer's Knight, in original and revised editions, Who Murdered Chaucer?), Jones has applied his unique combination of carefully researched scholarship, keen intelligence, fearless skepticism of establishment thinking, and his broad good humor to challenge, enlighten and reform. No one working today in either Middle English studies or in period-related film and/or documentary can proceed untouched by Jones' purposive, provocative views. Jones, perhaps more than any other medievalist, can be said to be an integral part of what Palgrave deems the "common dialogue."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Frontispiece
• Introduction
• 1 The Medieval Works of Terry Jones
• 2 Young Jones at Oxford, 1961–62
• 3 The Earl of Arundel, the War with France, and the Anger of King Richard II
• 4 Terry Jones’s Richard II
• 5 Terry Jones: The Complete Medievalist
• 6 Medieval Monks and Friars: Differing Literary Perceptions
• 7 Gower’s Manuscript of the Confessio Amantis
• 8 Gower in Winter: Last Poems
• 9 The Naughty Bits: Dating Chaucer’s House of Fame and Legend of Good Women
• 10 Honi soit qui mal y pense: Adultery and Anxieties about Paternity in Late Medieval England
• 11 Needy Knights and Wealthy Widows: The Encounters of John Cornewall and Lettice Kirriel, 1378-1382
• 12 Making Medievalism: Teaching the Middle Ages through Film
• 13 The “Silly” Pacifism of Geoffrey Chaucer and Terry Jones
• 14 Legs and the Man: The History of a Medieval Motif
• 15 Chaucer, Langland, and the Hundred Years’ War
• 16 Jack and John: The Plowman’s Tale
• 17 A Prayer Roll Fit for a Tudor Prince
• 18 Macbeth and Malory in the 1625 Edition of Peter Heylyn’s Microcosmus: A Nearly Unfortunate Tale
• Notes on Contributors
• Works Cited