Tag: Poetry in the Middle Ages

Articles

The Monk Who Knew the Ways of Love

It has been suggested that the art of the troubadour is original primarily in its exercise of choice within a relatively strictly limited field and that, if art results from the tension between freedom and restraint, then the two poles of this dialectic are the exercise of choice of expression and the limitation of the field in terms of subject-matter and linguistic register.

Chaucer
Articles

Guilt and Creativity in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer

I argue that as Chaucer develops his own expansive, questioning poetics in The House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales, he problematises the principle of allegory on which the legitimacy of literary discourse was primarily based in medieval culture and the final fragments of The Canterbury Tales see Chaucer struggling, increasingly, to reconcile the boldness and independence of his poetic vision with the demands of his faith.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - from original manuscript, date unknown.
Articles

Medieval Misogyny and Gawain’s Outburst against Women in “‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’

The view has been gaining ground of late that the Gawain of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a knight renowned as ‘Pat fyne fader of nurture’ (1. 919) and as ‘so cortays and coynt’ of his ‘hetes’ (1. I525), degenerates at the moment of leave-taking from the Green Knight, his erstwhile host, to the level of a churl capable of abusing the ladies of that knight’s household (11.2411 -28).