Where the Middle Ages Begin
The main manuscripts (i.e. leaving aside E’) range in date from the mid- thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. The eartiest seem to be C and A. These manuscripts both seem to date on textual and palaeographical grounds from around the middle of the first half of the thirteenth century (C has revisions by other scribes in hands from towards the end of the century).
A survey of the major themes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) reveals both the poem’s complexity and the poet’s artistry. A general examination of the poem permits commentary upon the work’s historical background, thematic unity, and narrative structure.
Working with three major Middle English texts – William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde – my thesis argues that the languages of service available to these writers provided them with a rich set of metaphorical tools for expressing the relation between metaphysics and social practice.
In my view, Criseyde’s inquiry about Troilus’s verbal skill in “luf talk” highlights more a problematic issue of Criseyde’s concern about a man’s “loves craft” than that of his class in society. As Chaucer’s narrator remarks in the proem of Book II (22-42), every human activity in love is governed by language conventions, expressive shortcuts that a community agrees to understand and honor…
This paper will argue that rather than being controlled by the process of sexual commodification Lady Mede uses the correlation of gender, money, and sex to counter Conscience’s attempts to discount her place in the court and, in so doing, her agency.
Pilgrimage, after Whitby, and before Vatican II, was a secular activity, a performance of piety by the laity, not by the clergy; although there were a few exceptions.7 Chaucer’s Monk, Friar, Prioress, Nun, Priest, Summoner, Pardoner and Parson ought not to be here. Their presence is outrageous comedy. Inns were forbidden to the cloistered clergy who, if they had to travel, were enjoined to stay in other monastic establishments along their route.
It is the contention of this thesis that the link between fairytale and romance which I previously mentioned as disparaging to romance is in fact a strength of romance.
It is widely accepted that the Old English diphthong /e(:)o/ generally monophthongized, around the eleventh century, to the central rounded /ø(:)/.
My purpose in writing this article is to expose a different view of romantic relationships that exist in medieval literature, a view that is in opposition to courtly love.
In the Middle Ages, Troy was not ancient history. As a living myth that continued to evolve along with the English nation, Troy functioned as a site for examining England’s cultural and political questions.
Does the season of the dark and the increasing day correspond to our own journeys into the dark and a celebration of light with new understanding and strengthened connectedness? Perhaps there is more than a bit of Pluto symbolism in our activities of the winter solstice.
In Producing the Middle English Corpus: Confession and Medieval Bodies, I argue that confessional discourse played an important role in the creation of the Middle English canon.
The history of lovesickness in the Middle Ages is the record of physicians’ attempts to understand what happens to the body and the mind when passion renders a lover a patient.
The concept of knighthood began as a military strategy used to supply men to fight kings’ wars, but it gradually developed into the glamorized ideal of chivalry and became associated with virtuous behavior expected during times of both war and peace.
In this essay I examine the location in the material world that calls forth that cognitive frontier: the page.
Indecent bodies: gender and the monstrous in medieval English literature Oswald, Dana Morgan Thesis: Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English, (2005) Abstract While Old English literature rarely represents sexualized bodies, and just as rarely represents monsters, Middle English literature teems with bodies that are both sexualized and monstrous. In Old English, sexualized bodies appear in […]
The Æðelen of Engle: Constructing Ethnic and Regional Identities in Laȝamon’s Brut Kleinman, Scott (California State University — Northridge) Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16.1 (2004) Abstract At the beginning of Laȝamon’s Brut, the author makes a striking point of identifying himself by telling us his name and that of […]
“Of Fish and Flesh and Tender Breede / Of Win Both White and Reede”: Eating and Drinking in Middle English Narrative Texts By Patricia Shaw Selim: Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature, No.1 (1991) Introduction: The human condition is subject to a series of everyday physiological demands – eating / […]
The Romance of England: Richard Coer De Lyon, Saracens, Jews, and the Politics of Race and Nation By Geraldine Heng The Postcolonial Middle Ages, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York, 2000) Introduction: At the heart of one version of the thirteenth/fourteenth/fifteenth century romance, Richard Coer de Lyon – whole Middle English text recount, in […]
Sir Launfal may follow the footsteps of its ancestor, but probably with a different intent.
The Danes in Medieval Romance: Myth, Memory, Identity By Daniel Wollenberg Paper given at the Vagantes: Medieval Graduate Student Conference, held at the University of Pittsburgh (2011) Did medieval readers/listeners believe that the information in chivalric romances to contain at least some historical truth? Wallenberg looks at this question by examining how the Danes were […]
Various studies in recent years have illuminated the almost pandemic nature of clandestine marriage in late-medieval Europe – the Church considered it to be a pernicious social problem,
Continuity and Discontinuity: Illuminating and Interlacing the Adventures of Viviane and Merlin in the Prose Merlin Fabry, Irene Marginalia, Vol. 3 (2006) Abstract In the Estoire de Merlin, Viviane and Merlin’s love affair is illustrated and narrated intermittently through the use of manuscript illumination and the technique of interlace, with formulas indicating a change in […]
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