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"English literature, 1100-1485 (Middle English period)"
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Birds as Harbingers of Spiritual Insight in the Dream Vision Genre
This article explores the element of birdsong in the opening type-scene of three medieval dream visions: the Guillaume de Lorris segment of the Romance of the Rose, the Middle English Pearl, and Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess. It details how each poet, through the characterization and placement of birds and birdsong in the scene, signals the extent to which heaven and earth can merge and intermingle here on earth.
Journal Article
The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture
\"This \"companion\" is designed to introduce a range of materials deemed to constitute the culture (or, perhaps better, cultures) of medieval England, from approximately the Norman Conquest to roughly the Reformation. The fields presented here may offer a rather unusual fit with standard courses and disciplines, but the pressures on modern frameworks are intended. It is not unusual, however, for study of early periods to offer some combination of \"literature,\" \"history,\" \"archaeology,\" \"art history,\" or other field. Studies in antiquity and the Renaissance do this regularly; and medieval studies was from the outset defined in an equally capacious frame\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
British Seafaring, Narrative Empathy, and Religious Instruction in the Middle English Patience
The Middle English poem \"Patience\" by the Pearl Poet expands on the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, particularly focusing on Jonah's disastrous sea voyage. The poet uses familiar maritime language and imagery to ground the narrative in a seascape that would have been recognizable to the audience in fourteenth-century northwestern England. By doing so, the poet creates empathy between the audience and the sailors in the poem, who serve as models for the audience's religious teachings. The poet also contrasts the sailors' heroic struggle to save their lives with Jonah's oafishness and cowardice, highlighting the sailors' moral superiority. The prevalence of seafaring in the Cheshire region, where the poem is set, further enhances the audience's connection to the sailors and their plight. Overall, the poet uses the seafaring narrative to convey important religious messages and encourage the audience to emulate the sailors' virtues.
Journal Article
The Embarrassments of Rhyme
Since most of the Tales end-rhyme, the term rymyng here likely embraces Thopas's whole poetic venture: meter, rhyme-scheme, plot, and narrative style. Aiming to enable such dexterity, Peter Levins compiled his Manipulus Vocabulorum [A Handful of Words] (1570), which, as its full title declares, is \"necessary not onely for Scholers that want varietie of words, but also for such as vse to write in English Meetre.\" Because these final syllables are frequently unstressed, Manipulus contains as many instances of homoioteleuton and homoioptoton as it does of rhyme proper. Because the \"rule of the Termination\" demonstrates \"the Art of Deriuing and Compounding,\" the grammatical value of word endings heightens.2 For example, the suffix - able can make an adjective out of a verb (\"teachable\") or out of a substantive (\"peaceable\"). By asserting its ornamental rather than functional nature, rhyme sets at odds sound (ornament) and sense (function) or what Giorgio Agamben calls semiotic and semantic events. 4 In similar vein, John Hollander contrasts the \"empty signaling\" of repetitions such as \"fa la la\" with the lyric's \"optimum density of reference,\" where each repetition acquires new meaning even as it sounds the same. 5 Identical rhyme, especially vulnerable to such empty signaling, forces those opposites together, simultaneously achieving hollow reiteration and referential density in its purest expression as the echo. 6 Storytelling as Theory Ovid's story of Narcissus and Echo fascinated the Middle Ages.
Journal Article
The Romance Hero in Translation: Beauty, Reputation, and Identity in Partonopeu de Blois and Partonope of Blois
This article offers a comparative study of the Old French romance Partonopeu de Blois and its fifteenth-century Middle English translation, focused on their different approaches to beauty and visual description in the construction of the romance hero. While beauty is a key feature of the protagonist’s characterization, scholarship on the Middle English romance has not approached the significant changes and omissions it operates in this regard. The omission of lavish description has traditionally been regarded as a common, and often deprecated, trend in Middle English romance, in line with a tendency to simplify plot. I argue, instead, that the translation’s omission of visual descriptions, associated with an accrued interest in reputation, is highly significant and makes space for the construction of a different and more subjective form of literary identity. My study suggests that this shift is the result of cultural and textual processes of literary transmission in the genre of the romance.
Journal Article
Who (What) Lies in the Tomb in the Middle English St. Erkenwald?
This article makes the case for an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity for the nameless man in the tomb in the Middle English St. Erkenwald on textual, hagiographic, historical, art historical, and literary grounds. The poem’s historical proem, akin to similar prologues in Middle English lives of pre-Conquest saints, evokes the negative stereotype of the primitive Saxon heathen popular in the post-Conquest era, which the remainder of the poem dispels. The incorrupt corpse and garments, in the guise of a king, signal two abiding markers of Anglo-Saxon sanctity that distinguish it from post-Conquest hagiography, while the body’s social role as a judge announces a primary arena of continuing authority of early English culture. The material culture of the tomb and robes bespeaks Anglo-Saxon design and the social and economic networks that facilitated these artforms. When revived, the body expresses an Anglo-Saxon worldview in terms of time, historical orientation, poetic sensibility, codes of reciprocity, spirituality, and life after death. The poem portrays a golden age of early English society and proposes its acceptance in the contemporary world of the poem.
Journal Article
The Ruined Landscapes of Beowulf
A wide variety of scholars have examined the settings of the Old English epic Beowulf, interpreting the text in a myriad of ways and providing valuable information on sources and analogues. This article seeks to build upon and add to this body of scholarship by applying landscape history and a variety of archaeological evidence to the poem in order to develop a further understanding of the landscape settings of Beowulf as literary representations of real topographical features of early medieval England. Attention is paid to the mere and lair of the Grendle-kin, the barrow of the dragon, and Beowulf’s own final resting place. Analysis of these landscapes, grounded in the historical topography of England, enhances an interpretation of the text as a statement on humanity’s relationship with the past and hope for the future.
Journal Article
Aid from the Elf-Ruler
Line 1314b of Beowulf is regularly emended to “alwalda” (Ruler of All) from the manuscript form “alf walda” (Ruler of Elves). But the other instances of “alwalda” in Beowulf do not have visible space between the l and the w, and no plausible motivation for the addition of an f and a space has been proposed if the exemplar read “alwalda.” We contend, therefore, that MS “alf walda” is correct, and that the compound refers to the pre-Christian deity Yngvi-Freyr (to use the more familiar Norse name) rather than to the Christian God. We note that in the same passage in which “alf walda” appears, the Danes are called the “Ingwine” (friends/followers of Ing) and that later in the poem Hrothgar’s daughter is named “Freawaru” (watchful care of Freyr). Connecting this material with archaeological finds at Gamle Lejre that indicate the sacrifice of pigs (Freyr’s sacred animal), the place name Hleiðra (“the place of the tent”), and the statement in line 175 that the Danes made sacrifices “æt hærgtrafum” (at the pagan tabernacles), we argue that “alf walda” is part of a larger pattern of connections between the Danes in Beowulf and pre-Christian Germanic practices that appear to have been understood by one of Beowulf’s sources (and perhaps by the Beowulf-poet) but which were opaque to later scribes.
Journal Article
Investigating English Sanctity in the Middle English St. Erkenwald
This essay extends the analysis of an earlier article, published in the previous issue of Studies in Philology, which argues for an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity for the nameless man in the tomb in the Middle English St. Erkenwald. The present essay examines the fictional scenario of the poem, involving the exhumation and investigation of an early English saintly body during renovations at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, within the context of the historical investigations of Anglo-Saxon saints’ cults in the decades following the Conquest of 1066, proceedings that track the nationwide cathedral-building program inaugurated by the Normans. The poem’s emotional staging of a skeptical high-ranking prelate questioning the body, flanked by an anxious community, and the conspicuous absence of written documentation concerning the body capture the spirit and methodology of the historical investigations conducted by Norman prelates on early English saints pending reinterment in new ecclesiastic buildings. The poem emulates features of post-Conquest hagiography of early English saints in its long historical proem, while challenging the vision of history it proclaims. The source text of the Trajan legend and its importance to pre-Conquest society underscore and reassert early English formulations of salvation, supplying the distinctly early English mode of baptism of tears. The poem subtly undermines the investigatory process, defending early English identity in post-Conquest society.
Journal Article