Medieval English Literature

John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences.

This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton, A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite

This is not just a book about a battle; it is a book about the biggest battle before Hastings 1066.
This is a battle most people have probably never heard of, but it is a battle where five Scottish and Viking kings and seven earls died, somewhere in the kingdom of Northumbria in late 937. As well as royalty, the bones of tens of thousands of ordinary men from Northern England, Scotland and the Viking territories lie buried in a place which, according to the chroniclers, is no longer known.
This book is about that battle and the search to find the long-lost site. Thousands of pages have been written about the Battle of Brunnenburh, but this book is unique. It is written by descendants of a legendary Viking Egill Skallagrimsson. Thousands of pages have been written about Brunnenburh but all of them are written from the perspective of the victor, King Athelstan of Wessex and Mercia. This book is the closest anyone is likely to get to a Northern Viking account.
Even if you have no real interest in the site of the Battle of Brunnenburh this is worth the effort you will put into it this book to understand it. Take a deep dive into the world and beliefs and times of the competing factions in 10 th century England and beyond, and the battle that first unified the United Kingdom.

Many of Britain’s best known romances, such as the stories of Tristan, King Horn, Havelok, Guy of Warwick, and Bevis of Hampton, were first recorded in Anglo-Norman verse and later revised into Middle English versions.  Setting these English and French texts in conversation with one another illuminates the impact of the Norman Conquest on Britain's linguistic, literary, and social history. These romances form a distinctively "insular" body of works, closely related to one another and to their situation in England.

Chapters 1 and 2: Romances of English heroes assess the political ideas sustaining the shift from feudal toward national organization. Chapter 3: Pious romances counter the church's vision of irreconcilable opposition between worldly ambitions and devotion to God. Chapters 4 and 5: Romances concerned with courtliness question the hermetic elevation and spiritual refinement of conventional “courtoisie.”

This book is also available at http://dx.doi.org/10.7916/D8QZ2B94.

citation: Zsuzsanna Simonkay, "Friendly Knights and Knightly Friends: Sworn Brotherhood as Amicitia Perfecta in Medieval English Romances," Első Század 14 (2015)/1-2, pp. 101-119

ABSTRACT:

In the present paper I demonstrate that sworn brotherhood in English romances is depicted as an association of knights which meets almost all the requirements of a “true” or “perfect” friendship described by the ever-popular Roman philosopher Cicero in his work De Amicitia and his Greek predecessor, Aristotle in his books 8 and 9 of Nicomachean Ethics. These two works were the primary canons for medieval literates who wished to engage themselves in the study of friendship – only they added a little taste of  courtliness” and Christianity to them. Thus, in my paper I follow suit and found my analysis on the two above-named philosophers in order to point out the main characteristics of sworn brotherhood, the medieval amiticia perfecta, which seems to have been regarded the supreme kind of association – just like its classical antecedent.
I analyse three romances from the 14–15th centuries (Amis and Amiloun, Eger and Grime and Athelston), in which the protagonists are sworn brothers and the main plot is based on the various challenges through which their friendship is tested. I also investigate a fourth one, Sadius and Galo, which is an odd one out for it is in prose, written in Latin, and the knights do not in fact pledge friendship; what is more, it was written in the 12th century, at the peak of courtliness, while the others at the decline of it. Still, I believe that regardless of their distance in time all the four romances agree in the principles of the friendship they depict and in the standards of the parties’ actions.

Students may read a text in much the same way they read a
situation or another person. Critical reading can be a deeply self-aware and transformative process. However, at the undergraduate
level, it can often be a mere analytical performance that reinforces
the notion of radical discontinuity between historical eras and
among human experiences. Contemplative reading, as a practice
of generosity and connection, can generate self-awareness and
transformative engagement with an Other, supporting critical
reading. Contemplative readings of vilified or ignored subjects
paired with students’ direct experiences of their resistance can
surface intolerance and encourage meaning-making. In this piece,
a traditional assignment of weekly reading responses posted
by students to a Learning Management System is revised into a
Contemplative Reading assignment. This assignment makes visible
the reading process to highlight the skills of generous reading,
noticing novelty, recognizing emotional reactivity, owning emotions
rather than projecting them, and meaning-making, thereby
expanding students’ capacities to engage with the world using
critical, creative, and contemplative dispositions.

Course description: More than any other secular variety of premodern writing, romances connect the literature of the Middle Ages with that of both earlier and later periods. They blend Classical myth with Celtic mystique, and oriental exotica with local concerns. Romances tell stories about King Arthur and his court, the crusades, and ancient English princes, many of which recur in the works of Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Eliot. In this course we will explore the romance tradition in England, with special attention to the origin and development of the Arthurian canon, the political meaning of Englishness and Britishness, the self-examination of courtly ethics and gender relations, and the ideological origins of the British Empire. The course will not only examine the aristocratic culture of medieval England but will also demonstrate how premodern writings inform the literature of later periods.

In Ari fróði Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók, the settlement of Iceland is said to have first begun from Norway in 870, the year that “Ívarr, son of Ragnarr loðbrók, had St Edmund, king of the English, killed.” He attributes his knowledge of the date of this martyrdom to a mysterious “saga” of St Edmund, the identity of which has long been debated. This note considers the various alternatives put forth by previous researchers and concludes that that the most likely candidate for this saga is in fact a composite of two texts, Abbo of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi and Hermannus the Archdeacon’s De miraculis Sancti Eadmundi. These texts are known to have been bound together in at least one manuscript from the early twelfth century. It is argued that a similar manuscript may have circulated in Iceland and was used to inform several other Old Icelandic texts composed over the following two centuries.

Although the sympathetic depiction of Otherness in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville is acknowledged to be indicative of the writer's celebrated tolerance, few critics have ventured to explore how Mandeville creates it. Yet his presentation of the Other is as much a product of his cultural openness as it is the result of a conscious process of careful psychological negotiation of difference in which the text engages with the reader via the medium of the Mandeville persona. The Other is imagined so convincingly by this fourteenth-century writer that he endows it with a complex existence of its own which transcends what Ian Macleod Higgins calls a 'self-critical mirror'. Foucault's notion of 'transgression' proves instrumental in elucidating the way in which Mandeville erects his image of the Other and then, by employing a number of examples, how the text and the language of The Travels convey this 'transgression'. The second aprt of the article evaluates Mandeville's categories of perception by comparing them with the cognitive paradigms expressed by his sources and some of his contemporaries.

Recent criticism on Chaucer’s Monk often reads the Monk through discourses of subjectivity. Working from Michel de Certeau’s theory of the tactic, this paper argues that the Monk should best be understood not as a subject but as a rhetorical representation of the monastic estate, and that his tale should be read as an affective (and effective) rhetorical weapon against that estate’s enemies, the noble Knight and the civic-elite Host who is also the governor of the game. By deploying tragedies, which take the noble estate as their subject, the Monk shows how the monastic estate’s forms of possession, especially collection, position it to be better able than the nobility to maintain its grasp on wealth in the face of chance. The monastic habit of patience becomes an effective tactic for dealing with the pain of fortune.

The Tale of Gareth combines Malory's interest in the ethics of the chivalric body with an emphasis on Gareth's conduct around food. Beginning his time in Arthur's court as a kitchen hand, he is deprived of courtly alimentation, particularly meat, and the associations of social entitlement that come with the consumption of such meals. Gareth proves his chivalric worth not only by fighting, but also through his exemplary behavior whilst consuming increasingly refined meals throughout the tale, culminating in his own wedding feast. Not only do these meals articulate the non-combative qualities that attest to Gareth's social superiority; they establish Gareth as a fitting symbolic successor to Arthur and his legacy, and thus offer an assurance of the inherent worthiness of the Arthurian regime despite its eventual tragic demise.

William of Ockham’s best known political work, "Dialogus inter magistrum et discipulum" (ca. 1332-1347), was republished in Frankfurt in 1614 by the prolific editor Melchior Goldast. The work contains an intense and close debate, a question-and-answer exercise – in a rather scholastic style – on political and religious issues, certainly dear to the interest of people living in the seventeenth century, plagued with  ecclesiological disputes that will lead to the Thirty Years War. Notwithstanding that, Ockham’s Dialogus does not feed sterile controversies, instead it promotes dialectic as a pacific mean in the pursuit of mutual understanding.

British Library Harley MS 3954’s Book of Sir John Mandeville has ninety-nine images, and another thirty-five blanks, carefully framed in thin lines of ink as part of the ruling of the manuscript. As is so often the case, the blanks appear more frequently toward the end.  On the final folio (69v) there appears a neatly framed blank space (Figure 1).  The manuscript’s final text block appears just below this space and tells us of “a bok of Latyn that conteyned al that and myche more, aff wych bok the mappa mundi was mad.” As if to tantalize the reader, “mappa mundi” is rubricated and so stands out from the black ink in which the rest of the page (and the book) is written. While I sat there, staring at the blank space, and the red name for an absent image, I caught myself dreaming of finding a new mappa mundi hidden within that empty frame, the perfect place for a map of the world according to Mandeville. What would it look like, and what would imagining it tell us about the Book’s portrayal of Jews?

The overt mercantilism of The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye has overshadowed important questions surrounding the poem’s purpose and literary form. As the work attempts to justify economic protectionism, its preoccupation with legal and bureaucratic practices breaks new ground for the hybrid genre of bill-poems. This article associates The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye with civilian bills, or libelli, and re-evaluates the immediate historical context surrounding the poem’s composition. The wealth and accuracy of economic, political, and legal information that is contained in the poem points to the poet’s intimate familiarity with the highest functions of the King’s writing offices at Westminster. I argue that The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye must have been composed from within the closest circle of Henry VI’s senior administrators. The poem, I shall contend, formed part of the Privy Seal’s strategy to identify the adolescent monarch, who had only just begun to exercise the royal privilege of granting petitions, with a defence of Calais and an ideological pursuit of peace. Central to this process were William Lyndwood, Keeper of the Privy Seal, and Walter Hungerford, the poem’s sponsor. In additionto historical and circumstantial evidence, Lyndwood’s association with The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye is supported by the centrality the poem assigns to seals and documentary validity, its legal mode as a libellus, and its programmatic emphasis on peace and unity, which Lyndwood had championed in a parliamentary sermon of 1431.

Come Tolkien scrive in una lettera al figlio, "quel ‘dannato piccolo ignorante di Adolf Hitler’ si è appropriato di una mitologia che non gli compete: Inghilterra e Scandinavia non sono meno ‘nordiche’ della Germania. Tuttavia egli si accorge di come l’Inghilterra non abbia una sua propria mitologia, laddove la Germania abilmente enfatizza la propria. Nemmeno il grande corpus arturiano costituisce una mitologia autenticamente inglese: è ‘esagerato e fantastico, incoerente e ripetitivo’, troppo esplicitamente ‘legato alla tradizione cristiana’, ‘imperfettamente naturalizzato’ sul suolo d’Inghilterra perché in realtà e in origine è piuttosto bretone che inglese . Non gli rimane che costruirselo da sé, questo corpus non ancora esistente, e inventarselo fin nei minimi dettagli, genealogie, calendari, alfabeti, onde sottrarlo alla Germania hitlerita.

The focus of action in the East Anglian Croxton Play of the Sacrament is a consecrated communion wafer, the host. Aristorius, a Christian merchant, steals a consecrated host from a church. He sells it to a group of Jewish merchants (who instigated the theft) as they wish to use the host to disprove the dogma of transubstantiation. The Jewish characters subject the host to several tests which parallel the Passion in various ways. In the process, one of the Jewish characters (Jonathas) is injured. A vision of the Christ-child appears and addresses them. They repent their sins and Jonathas is miraculously healed. As a result, they convert to Christianity. Aristorius confesses his sacrilegious theft and the host is returned to its rightful place in the local church: a happy ending for all, in medieval Christian terms.
This article argues that in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, the Christian playwright enacts a ritual of transgression (and thus of impurity) that neutralises the threat of religious heterodoxy. Making use of a dramatic representation of imaginary Jewish characters, the playwright ponders the nature of the doctrine of transubstantiation, and possible Christian doubts and anxieties concerning it at a safe remove. The Christian thus uses a representation of a Jewish Other to consider the divine Other, thereby crossing social and spiritual boundaries, while Christ may also be perceived as reaching out to the human Other by transgressing limits.

When the Dreamer asks the Pearl-Maiden, “What kind of thing may be that Lamb / that he would wed you as his wife?” (ll. 771-72), she answers by describing the communal inclusivity of her spiritual marriage to Christ, John’s spiritual vision of the New Jerusalem, and the crucifixion itself. She emphasizes the symbolic representation of Christ as Lamb and the theme of redemption made possible through Christ’s death. Although the Dreamer’s question appears to be motivated by an earthly jealousy, the Pearl-Maiden attempts to lift his understanding into a heavenly realm. Her words specifically foreshadow the vision the Dreamer will experience of the New Jerusalem and the bleeding Lamb later in the poem. Her explanation acts as both invitation and preparation, not only for the dreamer, but also for the reader.

This essay considers the concept of spiritual marriage, as developed in the Bible and later Christian commentary tradition, and the poet’s exegetical glossing, through the Pearl-Maiden’s speech, of biblical texts like Isaiah, Revelation, and the Gospels, which aims to foreground the theological importance and intimacy of the crucifixion in the context of late medieval affective piety.

Ultimately, the Pearl-Maiden’s dazzling answer to the Dreamer’s question is all about how death, though it temporarily deprives the lover of the beloved, has been conquered through the redemptive sacrifice of Christ. While the Dreamer is not yet ready to accept this, the Pearl-Maiden’s answer constitutes an important step on his journey toward consolation. The manner in which the Pearl-Maiden describes the crucifixion catches the reader in a spiritual vision with implications for the reader’s own spiritual formation and pilgrimage through the sorrows of life toward surrender to God in the light of heaven.

Dahvana Headley's novel The Mere Wife explores different approaches to maintaining selfhood. This essay argues that the novel perceives selves – and artistic works – as simultaneously absolutely individual and profoundly composite, interwoven networks. In particular, the essay argues that this is presented through the twinned-but-opposed maternal figures of Dana and Willa, and by its use of plural voices for the mountain, the mothers, and the dogs.

This essay will discuss the early feminist ideas seen in "The Wife of Bath's Prologue", how the concepts add to the understanding the prologue and how The Wife of Bath's ideas can be analyzed as "protofeminist". The main question which will be examined in the essay is going to be; "Through which ideas from 'The Wife of Bath's Prologue' can be considered as a protofeminist piece?" With the quotes from the prologue, her actions towards patriarchy and how it can be interpreted as wrong are going to support the main idea behind the question. Her woman-dominant behaviors will be criticized as well as the general male-dominant regulations. Even though it is seen "protofeminist" mainly because the stories were written way before the concepts of feminism showed up, it wouldn't fit the understanding of equality anytime in history but it surely has some feminist characteristics to be labeled as "early forms of feminism". The early-feminist ideas from the text highlight that the concept of feminism have changed and shifted a lot throughout history. "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" is considered "protofeminist" because of her rejecting the biases of women in that time by using her ideas and attitudes such as being confident while talking, justifying sexual desire and taking the control in the marriage.

This research involves the study of the character Merlin, the prophet and a powerful character in many historical texts which came out in between the 6th century and 14th century, including Geoffrey’s History of Kings of Britain. The goal of this research is to show different portrayals of Merlin and how he is presented in each literary text of that time. The research draws upon different literary texts to investigate the development of  Merlin and his characteristics which is very unique in each literary text. Literature and art are the cultural products of each period and so the characters also become the product of culture. So, each character is constructed around the culture of that time. With this observation, the research investigates the character study of Merlin using different literary texts and through that, to study the cultural history of that period.

Resumo: Os diálogos entre História e Literatura possibilitam a análise do mundo medieval sob novas formas de abordagem. Nesse sentido, o enfoque será dado à condição feminina retratada a partir de dois contos selecionados da obra literária Os contos de Cantuária, do escritor inglês medieval Geoffrey Chaucer. Em O conto do Estudante, a protagonista é uma mulher frágil e submissa ao seu marido, enquanto que em O conto da Mulher de Bath, a personagem-título é irreverente e contestadora, que reclama, por exemplo, o direito ao prazer sexual, além de afirmar que a mulher deve comandar a relação no casamento. Pretende-se, portanto, a partir dessas duas histórias, apresentar a percepção desse autor sobre os papéis da mulher na sociedade inglesa de seu tempo. Palavras-chave: História e literatura. Literatura inglesa medieval. Condição feminina.

Course Description:

In contrast to popular depictions of the Middle Ages as an era of drab and dull suffering, games and other forms of play flourished across Western Europe. Contemporary games such as chess, backgammon, and playing cards began to develop into their modern forms during the Middle Ages, and the upper classes enjoyed numerous leisure activities including hunting,  hawking, jousting, and more. In this course, we will study the place of games and gaming in medieval culture, but with particular emphasis on the intersection of those games with Middle English literature. Evidence exists of the oral performance of medieval literary texts alongside other types of entertainments, and the distinction between "game" and "literature" can sometimes become blurred in, for example, the audience-driven "demaunde d'amor" poem; formal contests of poetic composition; and ritualized insult exchanges -- these last the medieval analogue of the rap battle. Our primary readings will include some of the major works of medieval English literature, including Beowulf, the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and a selection of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. But we will read these texts paying particular attention to various issues related to games and gaming, contests, competitions, sport, entertainment, and play, for example the famous "beheading game" motif in Gawain and the exchange of boasts in Beowulf. Alongside these canonical literary narratives, we will also be reading some less familiar medieval texts, including the Lydgatean verse party game known as The Chance of the Dice; an allegorical poem on The Game and Play of the Chess; fortune-telling poems such as John Metham's Book of Destinies; and some Old English riddles and enigmas that influenced the riddling game in J.R.R. Tolkien's classic fantasy novel The Hobbit.

Note that there is a language component to the course, as more than half of the course readings will be in the original Middle English. In the final few weeks, we will examine some 20th and 21st-century games and literary texts that nevertheless bear many traces of the Middle Ages. A genericized version of the medieval West has become the default setting for a number of gaming genres, electronic and otherwise: there are video games based on particular medieval narratives and settings, but also innumerable fantasy role-playing games (Skyrim, World of Warcraft), as well as real-time strategy games (Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings) and even first-person shooters (Chivalry) and stealth games (Assassin's Creed). As we examine medieval games and their afterlives, we will take up several questions bearing on the epistemology of reading, writing, game-playing, and "game-making": what, for instance, might we learn from understanding literature itself as a kind of game?

This is a study of the metre of alliterative verse. There are chapters on line endings, on final-e, on alliterative patterning, on stress and beat,  and on the rules of the a-verse. The book was co-written by Myra Stokes and Judith Jefferson, and is available in an affordable paperback from Medium Aevum monographs (http://mediumaevum.modhist.ox.ac.uk/)

"'The late-fourteenth-century romance Sir Launfal narrates the financial, martial and erotic adventures of one of the lesser-known knights of the Arthurian court.  In Thomas Chestre’s popularised version of Marie de France’s Breton Lai (Lanval), our hero’s woes begin when he is excluded from the Arthurian court’s largesse after he refuses the predatory Guinevere’s sexual advances.  Shamed by his resulting poverty, which is only amplified by the financial demands of his role as Arthur’s royal steward, Launfal takes his leave of the court and departs for Caerleon, where he vainly seeks succour at the hands of the city’s mayor, who has benefited in the past from Launfal’s own generosity.  However, a knight out of favour in the royal court is of no current use to the mayor, who begrudgingly offers only meagre lodgings, and this is only forthcoming after Launfal sarcastically rebukes him regarding the value of past loyalties.  Denied not only the company of men due to his poverty, but also access to the Church, as he lacks clean clothing in which to visit it, Launfal is approaching the depths of despair.  After a final humiliation of being excluded from the invitations to a Trinity feast hosted by the mayor, Launfal rides out into the forest to seek refuge both from the ridicule of the townsfolk and from his own sense of shame.

It is in this moment of extreme financial deprivation and social exclusion, the pathos of which is further intensified by his fall into a fen while riding to the forest, that Launfal encounters what turns out to be the unsought answer to his social and pecuniary predicament.  Having stopped to rest and to contemplate his woes under a tree in a forest clearing, he is visited by two beautifully arrayed maidens, who greet him nobly before leading him to the pavilion of their mistress, Dame Triamoure.  Once there, Launfal comes across a most magnificent scene of exotic opulence...'
"

This book review is for Essays on the Medieval and the Renaissance: Things Old and New co-edited by Ágnes Matuska and Larisa Kocic-Zámbó. The volume is a fresh rethinking of things old and new in both Medieval and Renaissance literatures and scholarships. It covers a wide range of texts starting from Tudor drama, plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and eventually Milton. Transdisciplinary in its approach, the volume re-examines old paradigms of criticism from within to bring to the fore new readings and findings and to contribute to English studies in Hungary. The essays rely upon different approaches including digital humanities, film and drama studies, and social and cultural criticism.

"This book is the first (linguistic) publication which exclusively focuses on one of the most famous and important documents in the history of English: the Early Middle English 'Peterborough Chronicle'. The book contains 10 original and hitherto unpublished papers which deal with phonological, orthographic, morphosyntactic and lexical aspects pertaining to this special manuscript. Moreover, one section is exclusively devoted to teaching the history of English on the basis of the Peterborough Chronicle.

With contributions by Cynthia L. Allen, Bridget Drinka, Malasree Home, Carol Percy, Betty S. Phillips, Agnieszka Pysz, Lynn Sims, Oliver M. Traxel, Elly Van Gelderen, and the editors."