Where the Middle Ages Begin
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.
The main issue, then, is how Arthurian women characters have been portrayed throughout the centuries and the reasons for those particular ways of portrayal.
Three stories from this time period focus on a sort of courtly love relationship between two people that involves this characteristic giving of a gift: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Guigemar, and an apocryphal account of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven by “John the Evangelist”. These seemingly different stories share one unifying bond: a belt.
On Lesbian and Gay/Queer Medieval Studies By David Lorenzo Boyd Medieval Feminist Forum, Vol.15 No. 1 (1993) Introduction: A graduate student sitting next to me at an MLA panel on “Lesbian and Gay/Feminist Approaches to Middle English Texts” turned to me happily and said: ”Thank God, at last it’s the year of the queer for […]
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the hero, like many another knight, sets out on a quest. In a couple of interesting ways, however, this quest journey is different from others in medieval romance: we know with some precision in which direction the hero is going — North
The Folk-Tale Element in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight By Claude Luttrell Studies in Philology, Vol.77:2 (1980) Introduction: Ever since Kittredge published his fundamental study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and its analogues in 1916, discussion of the models for this romance has been almost entirely conducted in terms of the beheading […]
The earliest recorded version of the beheading game dates back to about 1100, although it is believed that the story itself may be much older than its Middle Irish prose account
Reading and Believing: Covenant in the Poems of the Pearl Manuscript Bates, Linda R. Marginalia, Vol. 4, (2005-2006) Cambridge Yearbook Abstract The narrator of Patience recalls the Psalmist’s words: no one can escape the omniscience of God. This omniscience is specifically related by both poet and Psalmist to the faculties of sight and hearing: Jonah […]
Courtliness and Transgression at Arthur’s Court With Emphasis on the Middle High German Poet Neidhart and the Anonymous Verse Novella Mauritius von Craûn Classen, Albrecht Arthuriana 20.4 (2010) Abstract Despite all efforts by courtly poets to maintain the impression of stability and continuity within the courtly world, by the early thirteenth century individual texts such […]
‘Segges slepande’ and Cotton Nero A.x: The Ethics of Sleep in Patience, Cleanness, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Leitch, Megan Marginalia, Vol. 10 Cambridge Yearbook (2008-2009) Abstract When Patience’s Jonah, cowering in the storm-tossed ship in a vain attempt to escape both God’s wrath and his fellow-mariners’ sacrificial impulses, falls asleep in despair, his […]
Re-reading Through Return in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Some Late Medieval Carols Steer, Alex Marginalia, Vol. 2, Cambridge Yearbook (2004-2005) Abstract From its opening line, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight demonstrates an interest in time: its passage, events and record. It begins with a marking of time which is also an […]
The Christmas motif is readily observable in the poem’s externals, particulary in its setting and in the person of the Green Knight.
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