Adam Usk's Secret by Steven Justice

Adam Usk's Secret by Steven Justice

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.

"In prose that is extraordinarily alive both to its subject and to its own suspenseful disclosures, Steven Justice teaches us to read a Latin chronicle as a piece of written craft, and few have sustained that attention this far or this finelyMore importantly, Justice assesses and advances major principles of narrative interpretation, concerning how narratives relate to contexts, how rhetorical traditions foster or undermine particular visions of history, and how the discipline of literary analysis maintains a delicate balance between rigorous adherence to its established tenets and wider connections to other questions and explanations-matters that must surely energize discussion among humanities scholars of all periods." * Andrew Galloway, Cornell University *

Steven Justice is Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780812246933
ISBN 10	0812246934
Title	Adam Usk's Secret
Author	Steven Justice
Series	The Middle Ages Series
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	University of Pennsylvania Press
Year published	2015-03-25
Number of pages	224
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.