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Book Cover
E-book
Author Justice, Steven, 1957- author.

Title Adam Usk's secret / Steven Justice
Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2015]

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Description 1 online resource (211 pages)
Series Middle Ages Series
Middle Ages series
Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The First Secret -- Chapter 2. The Story of William Clerk -- Chapter 3. Fear -- Chapter 4. Prophecy -- Chapter 5. Utility -- Chapter 6. Grief -- Chapter 7. Theory of History -- Chapter 8. Adam Usk's Secret -- Conclusion -- List of Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary Adam Usk, a Welsh lawyer in England and Rome during the first years of the fifteenth century, lived a peculiar life. He was, by turns, a professor, a royal advisor, a traitor, a schismatic, and a spy. He cultivated and then sabotaged figures of great influence, switching allegiances between kings, upstarts, and popes at an astonishing pace. Usk also wrote a peculiar book: a chronicle of his own times, composed in a strangely anxious and secretive voice that seems better designed to withhold vital facts than to recount them. His bold starts tumble into anticlimax; he interrupts what he starts to tell and omits what he might have told. Yet the kind of secrets a political man might find safer to keep--the schemes and violence of regime change--Usk tells openly. Steven Justice sets out to find what it was that Adam Usk wanted to hide. His search takes surprising turns through acts of political violence, persecution, censorship, and, ultimately, literary history. Adam Usk's narrow, eccentric literary genius calls into question some of the most casual and confident assumptions of literary criticism and historiography, making stale rhetorical habits seem new. Adam Usk's Secret concludes with a sharp challenge to historians over what they think they can know about literature--and to literary scholars over what they think they can know about history
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-206) and index
Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (De Gruyter, viewed February 27, 2017)
Subject Adam, of Usk, active 1400 -- Writing skill
Adam, of Usk, active 1400. Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377-1421
SUBJECT Adam, of Usk, active 1400 -- Writing skill
Adam, of Usk, active 1400. Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377-1421
Adam, of Usk, active 1400 fast
Chronicon Adae de Usk, A.D. 1377-1421 (Adam, of Usk) fast
Subject Written communication -- England -- History -- To 1500
LITERARY CRITICISM -- Medieval.
Historiography
Written communication
SUBJECT Wales -- History -- 1063-1536 -- Historiography
Great Britain -- History -- House of Lancaster, 1399-1461 -- Historiography
Great Britain -- History -- Richard II, 1377-1399 -- Historiography
Subject England
Great Britain
Wales
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 1322877300
9781322877303
9780812291056
0812291050
9780812246933
0812246934