Dissertations / Theses on the topic '450-1100 History and criticism'

This thesis examines the positive role of evil in select Old English Poetry, namely The Junius Book, "Guthlac", "Vainglory", "The Whale", "Juliana", "Judith" and "Beowulf". Using a background of Augustan and Boethian thought, each adversarial character is discussed with regard to role and imagery, but specifically in relationship to the protagonist. Evil plays a surprisingly positive role when it offers the protagonist the opportunity to defeat it. The protagonists' honour at the poem's conclusion is necessarily defined by the extent of resisting the antagonists. The hero must fight evil on two levels: the temporal in humans and the metaphysical in Satan. The thesis examines the various levels of victory and indeed failure they achieve, and concludes that of all the heroes only Juliana is completely successful. Although evil itself cannot be defined as "good", this thesis discovers that in its relationship with the human hero, it can indeed give rise to goodness.

Bibliography: pages 71-72.
This dissertation investigates the concept of Christian heroism as it appears in a number of Old English poems, through a study of the figure of the miles Christi. These poems present a specific Christian heroism which, though couched in terms culled from Germanic heroism, nevertheless exists in its own right and is quite different from it. Christ and his saints are seen as heroes in themselves (Christian servants obedient to the will of God) rather than as heroic warriors as they are usually regarded (Germanic heroes fighting for a Christian cause). They are leaders and heroes in the sense of servants, and not only like kings and warriors of the Germanic code. A study of some poems from the Cynewulf canon shows that the poets understood Christian heroism to mean more than brave battling for the cause of good; in essence, it is complete submission to the will of God.

This thesis investigates how Old English poets understood the processes of signification and interpretation through analysis of depictions of poor interpreters and the use of 'sign terms' such as tacen and beacen in the longer Old English poems. The first chapter deals with the Beowulf Manuscript, the second and third chapters consider Elene and Andreas within the network of related poems found in the Vercelli Book and the begin- ning of the Exeter Book, the fourth chapter is on the Junius Manuscript, and the conclusion looks at the use of the 'bright sign' motif across all four major poetic codices. I suggest that there is a 'heroic sign-bearing interpreter' character-type which several of the poems utilize or ironically invert, and that poor interpretation is nearly always asso- ciated with hesitation, which often resembles acedia. I also argue that there is greater nuance in the poems' depictions of modes of understanding than has previously been acknowledged: Eve in Genesis B does not stand for the senses which subvert the mind, but rather models the limits of rational thought as a means of understanding God, and Elene does not depict a simple opposition of letter and spirit, but a threefold mental pro- cess of learning about the Cross with analogues in exegesis and Augustine's Trinity of the Soul. Finally, I argue that there is a 'bright sign' motif which functions within a brightness-sign-covenant concept cluster, whose evocation as a traditional poetic unit is not identical to the denotation and connotation of its constituent parts. These strands of inquiry taken together demonstrate how Old English poems invest signs with significance by tapping into a specifically poetic network of allusion.

This thesis explores the relationship between Creation and the saints Cuthbert and Guthlac in their Anglo-Latin and Old English vitae. It argues that this relationship is best understood through received theological exegesis concerning Creation's present state in the postlapsarian world. The exegesis has its foundation in Augustine's interpretations of the Genesis narrative, though it enters the textual tradition of the vitae via an adapted portion of De Genesi contra Manichaeos in Bede's metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCM). Both Augustine and Bede argue, with slight differences, that fallen Creation can be restored into prelapsarian harmony with humanity by way of sanctity. Each individual vita engages with this understanding of the Fall in distinct, though ultimately interrelated, ways, and the chapters of this thesis will therefore explore each text individually. Chapter 1 argues that the anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCA) unites Cuthbert's ability to restore Creation with the theme of monastic obedience, linking the ordering of a monastery to the restoration of prelapsarian harmony. The VCA also seeks to create sites for potential lay pilgrimage in the landscapes of Farne and Lindisfarne by highlighting the present efficacy of Cuthbert's miracles. Chapter 2 argues that Bede's VCM not only reveals his early attempt to fashion Cuthbert into the primary saint for Britain, via a focus on Cuthbert's obedience to the Divine Office, but also that the restoration of Creation functions as a ruminative tool. Chapter 3 argues that Bede transforms the nature of Cuthbert's sanctity in his prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti (VCP) from static to developmental, influenced by the Evagrian Vita Antonii, and that Creation is adapted to function as the impetus for, and evidence of, Cuthbert's progression. Chapter 4 argues that Felix's Vita Sancti Guthlaci (VSG) unites the development of Guthlac with a physically delineated Creation, and that the restoration of Creation is elevated to an even greater degree here than in Bede's hagiography. Chapter 5 argues that the author of the Old English Prose Guthlac (OEPG) grounds his vita by utilizing a landscape lexis shared with contemporary boundary clauses, so that here the relationship between the saint and Creation has greater force; it further argues that Guthlac A uniquely connects Guthlac with the doctrine of replacement, consolidating links between his arrival to the eremitic space and the restoration of prelapsarian Eden.

This dissertation discusses the complicated relationship (known as the comitatus) of kings and followers as presented in the heroic poetry of the Anglo-Saxons. The anonymous poets of the age celebrated the ideals of their culture but consistently portrayed the real behavior of the characters within their works. Other studies have examined the ideals of the comitatus in general terms while referring to the poetry as a body of work, or they have discussed them in particular terms while referring to one or two poems in detail. This study is both broader and deeper in scope than are the earlier works. In a number of poems I have identified the heroic ideals and examined the poetic treatment of those ideals. In order to establish the necessary background, Chapter I reviews the historical sources, such as Tacitus, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the work of modern historians. Chapter II discusses such attributes of the king as wisdom, courage, and generosity. Chapter III examines the role of aristocratic women within the society. Chapter IV describes the proper behavior of followers, primarily their loyalty in return for treasures earlier bestowed. Chapter V discusses perversions and failures of the ideal. The dissertation concludes that, contrary to the view that Anglo-Saxon literature idealized the culture, the poets presented a reasonably realistic picture of their age. Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry celebrates ideals of behavior which, even when they can be attained, are not successful in the real world of political life.

This thesis reveals the considerable influence of contemplation (sometimes referred to as mysticism) on Anglo-Saxon literature, manifested through the arrangement of narratives according to the theological concepts of apophasis and kenosis. This is demonstrated through a lengthy contextual discussion of the place of contemplation in Anglo-Saxon spirituality, and close analysis of four poems and a prose text. Although English mysticism is commonly thought to start in the High Middle Ages, this thesis will suggest that this terminus post quem should instead be resituated to the Anglo-Saxon period. The first chapter seeks to reveal the centrality of contemplation to Anglo-Saxon spirituality through analysing a range of diverse material, to evidence the monastic reader borne from this culture capable of reading and composing the texts that make up the rest of the thesis in the manner suggested. The thesis places chronologically diverse Anglo-Saxon texts in a contemplative context, with close reference to theology, phenomenology, and narrative structure, to suggest that our interpretation of them should be revised to apprehend the contemplative scheme that they advocate: to cleanse the reader of sin through inspiring penitence and kenosis (humility and emptying of one's will) and direct the mind intellectually beyond the words, images and knowledge of the terrestrial sphere (apophasis), so as to prepare them for the potential coming of God's grace in the form of a vision. This reading is supported by the close taxonomical resemblance of each text's narrative structure. The thesis thus suggests that contemplation was central to Anglo-Saxon spirituality, producing an elite contemplative audience for whom certain texts were designed as preparative apparatus.

Courtly love lyrics, like other courtly genres, are dominated by male-voiced texts that privilege male perspectives. In conventional courtly love lyrics, women are silenced and objectified by the male speaker. Still, a handful of women-voiced lyrics--"women's songs"--exist in the courtly love lyrical tradition. This thesis studies women's songs in Middle English and their role in the androcentric courtly love tradition.
In the first chapter, I discuss critical perspectives on conventional courtly representations of women. In the second chapter, I locate Middle English women's songs in literary contexts other than courtly love: the Middle English lyrical tradition, the cross-cultural phenomenon of medieval women's songs, and the manuscript contexts of Middle English women's songs. In Chapter Three, I discuss the individual songs themselves and examine the range of perspectives found in woman-voiced lyrics.
My discussion of Middle English women's songs includes texts not previously admitted to the genre. This expanded collection of women's songs creates an alternative courtly discourse privileging female perspectives. Middle English women's songs create a space for women's voices in courtly love.

The extent to which translation moulded Middle English romance as an emerging genre remains largely unexamined. In this dissertation I identify the principal methodological difficulties that have prevented scholars from giving due attention to this problem, and offer a case study in which I look at how translational procedures shaped the romance of Sir Beves of Hampton, a translation of the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone .
Having outlined the practical difficulties posed by the intricate textual tradition of Boeve and Beves, the multilingualism of medieval England, and the scarcity of concrete evidence regarding the audience for Middle English romance, I focus on methodological issues: the inability of equivalence-based definitions of translation to accommodate medieval translation practice, the futility of attempts to demarcate translation from adaptation, and the difficulty of integrating different textual levels in the study of translations.
In the first two analytical chapters of the dissertation I concentrate on those aspects of Beves that can best highlight the importance of translation processes in the constitution of the genre. I begin by examining the way in which the translator dealt with the most important translational constraints, some of which, like language, were beyond his control, while others, such as versification, were partly self-imposed. I then proceed to study the workings of the so-called laws of translation (explicitation, simplification, and repertorization) in the process whereby Boeve became Beves. The analyses carried out in these two chapters allow me to contest the received opinion according to which the author of Beves treated his original very freely. I show that, on the contrary, the distinctive features of the Middle English text result from a constant productive tension between source and target.
My study ends with an analysis of what happens when the translator's impulse to be faithful to his source is frustrated by the inaccessibility of the socio-historical context of the original. I examine the most closely translated sections of the poem to show how unrecognized topical references are flattened into literary cliches, which bring into the text their own generic connotations and disassemble some of the carefully constructed thematic parallels and analogies of the Anglo-Norman romance.

This thesis examines the heroines in Middle English romances and argues that, like the noblewomen who lived in England during the Plantagenet period, they are not helpless princesses simply waiting to be rescued by the brave, strong hero. In fact, these heroines show an enormous amount of intelligence, ingenuity, perseverance, and strength of character. Many play a pivotal role in the hero's success in his quest by giving him a token, providing knowledge, or teaching him a lesson. Also, it is the heroines who provide the heroes with rewards after the quests are completed. The present thesis offers a contribution to the study of Medieval English Romances in providing a revision of standard feminist analyses. In many of these studies there seems to be a lack of appreciation for the role of female characters and their relation to the outcome of the hero's quest. Even studies written from a feminist perspective tend to overlook the strength of the heroine's character, the attainment of her goals, and the fact that she is often a powerful figure who is of much higher status than her suitor. In these romances the female characters wield a substantial amount of both private and public power, an aspect of the genre which has often been ignored.

x, 208 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
The scattered instances depicting material literature in Anglo-Saxon poetry should be regarded as a group. This phenomenon occurs in Beowulf, The Dream of the Rood, and The Husband's Message. Comparative examples of material literature can be found on the Ruthwell Cross and the Franks Casket. This study examines material literature in these three poems, comparing their depictions of material literature to actual examples. Poems depicting material literature bring the relationship between man and object into dramatic play, using the object's point of view to bear witness to the truth of distant or intensely personal events. Material literature is depicted in a love poem, The Husband's Message, when a prosopopoeic runestick vouches for the sincerity of its master, in the heroic epic Beowulf when an ancient, inscribed sword is the impetus to give an account of the biblical flood, and is also implied in the devotional poem The Dream of the Rood, as two crosses both pre-and-post dating the poem bear texts similar to portions of the poem. The study concludes by examining the relationship between material anxiety and the character of Weland in Beowulf, Deor, Alfred's Consolation of Philosophy, and Waldere A & B. Concern with materiality in Anglo-Saxon poetry manifests in myriad ways: prosopopoeic riddles, both heroic and devotional passages directly assailing the value of the material, personification of objects, and in depictions of material literature. This concern manifests as a material anxiety. Weland tames the material and twists and shapes it, re-affirming the supremacy of mankind in a material world.
Committee in charge: Martha Bayless, Chairperson, English; James Earl, Member, English; Daniel Wojcik, Member, English; Aletta Biersack, Outside Member, Anthropology

This thesis traces the afterlife of the Romance of the Rose in fourteenth-century England. Whether it was closely imitated or only faintly recalled, I argue that the Rose exercised its influence on fourteenth-century English literature in two principal ways. Firstly, in the development of a self-reflexive focus on how meaning is produced and transmitted. Secondly, in a concern with how far the author's intentions can be recovered from a work, and to what extent the author must claim some responsibility for the meaning of a text after its release into the world of readers. In the Rose, many of these issues are presented through the lens of a disordered erotic desire, and questions of licit and illicit textual and sexual pleasures loom large in the later responses. My investigation focuses on four English writers: William Langland, John Gower, the Gawain-Poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer. In my final chapter I suggest that the Rose ceased to be a generative force in English literature in the fifteenth century, and I try to offer some explanations as to why. In examining the influence of the Rose in England I am not trying to suggest a linear transmission of cultural dominance, but rather a complex and plural process of interaction that expands to include texts that both antedate and post-date the Rose - especially Neoplatonic allegories and Ovid, on the one hand, and, on the other, Deguileville and Machaut. The individual English writers I look at are not seen as having a single and stable attitude towards the Rose; instead, I argue, the Rose emerges as a way of thinking about the interaction between texts, how meaning is produced, and how authorial ownership is claimed or refused. Using not only literary evidence but also detailed archival research into the manuscript circulation of the Rose, I question the usefulness of 'English' and 'French' as critical categories for the study of late-medieval literature, and attempt to show that, for a certain kind of literary activity, the Rose occupied a central position in England: not a stable foundation of cultural authority, but a realm of self-questioning subversion and instability.

This dissertation contributes to medieval feminist scholarship by forging new insights into the relationship between gender theory and developing notions of orality and textuality in late medieval Europe. I examine three conventional satirical depictions of women as deviant speakers in medieval literature---as loquacious gossips, scolding shrews and cursing witches---to reveal how medieval perceptions of oral and textual discursive modes influenced literary representations of women. The dissertation demonstrates that our comprehension of the literary battle between the sexes requires a recognition and understanding of how discursive modes were gendered in a culture increasingly defining itself in terms of textuality. My work pursues the juxtaposition of the rational, literate male and the irrational, oral female across a wide range of texts, from Dunbar and Chaucer's courtly literature, to more socially diffused works, such as carols, sermon exempla and the Deluge mystery plays, as well as texts, like Margery Kempe's autobiography and witchcraft documents, that pertain to historical women. I demonstrate the social impact of this convention by anchoring these literary texts in their socio-historical context. The significance of my identification of this nexus of orality and femininity is that I am able to delineate an ideology profoundly affecting the way women's speech and writings have been received and perceived for centuries. This notion of gendered discourse can also redefine how we perceive medieval literature. Mikhail Bakhtin's discursive principles---ideas that stem from his application of the dynamics of oral communication and performance to the literary text---help to liberate new meanings from old texts by allowing us to read against the grain of convention. Both Bakhtin's theory of dialogism and Walter Ong's summary of the psychodynamics of orality suggest that orally influenced discourse is less interested in monolithic truth than in the art of tellin

While many riddles exist in the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book containing female characters, both as actual human females and personified objects and aspects of nature, few scholars have discussed how the anthropomorphized “females” of the riddles challenge and broaden more conventional portrayals of what it meant to be “female” in Anglo-Saxon literature. True understanding of these riddles, however, comes only with this broader view of female, a view including a mixture of ferocity and nobility of purpose and character very reminiscent of the valkyrie (OE wælcyrige), a figure mentioned only slightly in Anglo-Saxon literature, but one who deserves more prominence, particularly when evaluating the riddles of the Exeter Book and two poems textually close to the riddles, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, the only two poems with a female voice in the entire Old English corpus. Riddles represent culture from a unique angle. Because of their heavy dependence upon metaphor as a vehicle or disguise for the true subject of the riddle, the poet must employ a metaphor with similar characteristics to the true riddle subject, or the tenor of the riddle. As the riddle progresses, similarities between the vehicle and the tenor are listed for the reader. Within these similarities lie the common ground between the two objects, but the riddle changes course at some point and presents a characteristic the vehicle and tenor do not have in common, which creates a gap. This gap of similarities must be wide enough for the true solution to appear, but not so wide so that the reader cannot hope to solve the mental puzzle. Because many of the riddles of the Exeter Book involve women and portrayal of objects as “female,” it is important to analyze the use of “female” as a vehicle to see what similarities arise.

My doctoral thesis, "Producing Piers Plowman to 1475: Author, Scribe, and Reader," charts a new material history of William Langland's fourteenth-century dream vision, Piers Plowman, from its earliest composition to the onset of print in England. The study is divided into three sections, which examine the production of Piers from three perspectives: textual history, manuscript circulation, and medieval reception. The first section of the thesis conducts a study of Langland's revisionary process, presenting a new theory of authorial revision from the A to B version that has important implications for our understanding of authorship in Piers Plowman and for the future editing of the poem. The second section transitions into an examination of the early circulation of the Piers manuscripts in various geographical and social milieux. It examines two case studies of manuscript circulation in the Southwest Midlands and East Anglia, linking them to regionalized networks of scribes and patrons. Finally, Section III moves into a discussion of the literary contexts in which Piers circulates, particularly in multi-text manuscripts, examining how the poem's reception by a medieval audience affected its development as a literary text. This section treats production from a more theoretical standpoint, investigating the relationship between the poem's audience and the "production" of meaning in a social and historical context. As I will argue, each of these sections acts as an important frame of reference for understanding the multifaceted formation of Piers Plowman as a literary text and cultural landmark. In particular, the thesis emphasizes the importance of Piers's various contexts, from its textual genesis in the author's composition and revision to its circulation and reception in an unstable manuscript culture. It suggests that the people and the places that surrounded Piers Plowman in its early development fundamentally shaped the poem we have today.

This study advances and adds detail to our history of the reading of verse in England c.1350-1500. Scholarship has established major twelfth- and thirteenth-century changes in reading, and linked these changes to manuscripts containing the modern Middle English verse canon. Historians of early modern reading have also argued for distinctive changes in their own period. But the examination of reading between these two clusters of change has been limited. This study therefore asks how later medieval Middle English verse was read. The surviving copies of The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, two hugely successful religious instructional poems, form the primary body of evidence. This body is augmented by reference to hundreds of other manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Together, these can reveal much about what was normal and abnormal in reading. They are also an important part of the context for the reading of more canonical Middle English verse. Manuscript studies often proceeds through case studies of individual books and unusual evidence such as marginalia. This thesis turns to codicology to understand more widespread evidence for reading, combining qualitative case studies with quantitative techniques borrowed and developed from continental scholarship. The first chapter examines evidence of provenance, revealing that both The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae were read by an impressive range of people and remained current into the sixteenth century. The second chapter considers the navigational aids used in copies of both poems. Reading in this period has been characterised as 'discontinuous', but it could be discontinuous in diverse ways, and readers also read continuously. The third chapter is a large-scale study of books' size and shape, showing how these features can reveal books' reading histories, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. The fourth chapter contends that readers in this period attended closely to rhyme and probably read for balanced rhyme structures. The fifth chapter uncovers the ways in which these poems were rewritten for new readers and investigates the composition of the Southern Recension of The Prick of Conscience, arguing that this new text was partly a formalist intervention. The conclusion summarises the new 'baseline' history of the reading of Middle English verse which is offered here, and gestures towards implications for our reading of the Middle English poems which are canonical today.

For the past century, medievalism studies generally and Anglo-Saxonism studies in particular have largely dismissed the eighteenth century as a dark period in English interest in the Anglo-Saxons. Recent scholarship has tended to elide Anglo-Saxon studies with Old English studies and consequently has overlooked contributions from fields such as archaeology, art history and political philosophy. This thesis provides the first re-examination of scholarly, antiquarian and popular Anglo-Saxonism in eighteenth-century England and argues that, far from disappearing, interest in Anglo-Saxon culture and history permeated British culture and made significant contributions to contemporary formulations and expressions of Englishness and English national, legal and cultural identities. Each chapter examines a different category of Anglo-Saxonist production or activity, as those categories would be distributed across current scholarship, in order to explore the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons were understood and deployed in the construction of contemporary cultural- historiographical narratives. The first three chapters contain, respectively, a review of the achievements of the ‘Oxford school' of Saxonists of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; antiquarian Anglo-Saxon studies by members of the Society of Antiquaries of London and their correspondents; and historiographical presentations of the Anglo-Saxons in local, county and national histories. Chapters four and five examine the appearance of the Anglo-Saxons in visual and dramatic art, and the role of Anglo-Saxonist legal and juridical language in eighteenth-century politics, with reference to discoveries resulting from the academic and antiquarian research outlined in chapters one to three. It is my contention that Anglo-Saxonism came to serve as a unifying ideology of origins for English citizens concerned with national history, and political and social institutions. As a popular as well as scholarly ideology, Anglo-Saxonism also came to define English national character and values, an English identity recognised and celebrated as such both at home and abroad.

William Langland's The Vision of Piers Plowman was probably the first medieval English poem to achieve a national audience because Langland chose to write in the vernacular and he used the specialized vocabularies of his readership to open the poem to them. During the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, writers began using the vernacular in an attempt to allow all English people access to their texts. They did so consciously, indicating their intent in prologues and envois when they formally address readers. Some writers, like Langland and the author of Mankind, actually use representatives of the rural classes as primary characters who exhibit the beliefs and lives of the rural population. Anne Middleton's distinction between public-the readership an author imagined-and audience-the readership a work achieved-allows modern critics to discuss both public and audience and try to determine how the two differed. While the public is always only a presumption, the language in which an author writes and the cultural events depicted by the literature can provide a more plausible estimate of the public. The vernacular allowed authors like Gower, Chaucer, the author of Mankind, and Langland to use the specialized vocabularies of the legal and rural communities to discuss societal problems. They also use representatives of the communities to further open the texts to a vernacular public. These open texts provide some representation for the rural and common people's ideas about the other classes to be heard. Langland in particular uses the specialized vocabularies and representative characters to establish both the faults of all English people and a common guide they can follow to seek moral lives through Truth. His rural character, Piers the Plowman, allows rural readers to identify with the messages in the text while showing upper class and educated readers that they too can emulate a rural character who sets a moral standard.

[Truncated abstract] The later medieval Western European economy was shaped by a marked increase in commerce and rapid urbanisation. The commercialisation of later medieval society is the background to this research, whose focus is the ways in which later medieval Italian and English literature registers and responds to the expanding marketplace and the rise of an urban mercantile class. What began as an investigation of the representation of merchants and business in a selection of this literature has become an attempt to address broader questions about the later medieval economy in relation to literary and artistic production. This study is therefore concerned not just with merchants and their activities in literature, but also the way economic developments are manifested in narrative. Issues such as the moral position and social function of the merchant are addressed, alongside bigger economic issues such as value and exchange in literature, and to some extent, the position of the writer and artist in a commercialised economy. The study is primarily literary, but it adopts a cross-disciplinary method, drawing on economic and social history, literary criticism, art history and sociology. It begins with an assessment of the broader socio-economic context, focusing on ecclesiastical and social responses to the growth of … This chapter discusses the thirteenth-century Floris and Blauncheflur (c. 1250), and the late fourteenth-century Sir Amadace, Sir Launfal, Octavian and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in relation to the commercialised economy and with reference to late medieval thought concerning value, exchange and the role and function of merchants. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1380s) is the subject of the third and final chapter, “Narrative and Economics in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”. Chaucer treats commerce and merchants with a complexity very close to Boccaccio’s approach to commerce. Both writers are acutely aware of the corruption to which merchants are susceptible, and of the many accusations levelled at merchants and their activities, but they do not necessarily perpetuate them. Rather than discussing exclusively the tales that deal extensively with merchants and commerce, or that told by the Merchantpilgrim, this discussion of the Canterbury Tales focuses on the Knight’s Tale, the Man of Law’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale and the way they relate to broader ideas about the exchange and the production of narrative in the Canterbury Tales as a whole.

Literary texts of medieval England feature trees as essential to the individual and communal identity as it intersects with nature, and the compelling qualities and organic processes associated with trees help vernacular writers interrogate the changing nature of this character. The early depiction of trees demonstrates an intimacy with nature that wanes after the tenth-century monastic revival, when the representation of trees as living, physical entities shifts toward their portrayal as allegorical vehicles for the Church's didactic use. With the emergence of new social categories in the late Middle Ages, the rhetoric of trees moves beyond what it means to forge a Christian identity to consider the role of a ruler and his subjects, the relationship between humans and nature, and the place of women in society. Taking as its fundamental premise that people in wooded regions develop a deep-rooted connection to trees, this dissertation connects medieval culture and the physical world to consider the variety of ways in which Anglo-Saxon and post-Norman vernacular manuscripts depict trees. A personal identification with trees, a desire for harmony between society and the environment, and a sympathy for the work of trees lead to the narrator's transformation in the Dream of the Rood. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Junius 11 manuscript, illustrated in Genesis A, Genesis B, and manuscript images, scrutinizes the Anglo-Saxon Christian's relationship and responsibility to God in the aftermath of the Fall. As writers transform trees into allegories in works like Genesis B and Geoffrey Chaucer's Parson's Tale, the symbolic representations retain their spontaneous, organic processes to offer readers a visual picture of the Christian interior-the heart. Whereas the Parson's Tale promotes personal and radical change through a horticultural narrative starring the Tree of Penitence and Tree of Vices, Chaucer's Knight's Tale appraises the role of autonomous subjects in a tyrannical system. Forest laws of the post-Norman period engender a bitter polemic about the extent of royal power to appropriate nature, and the royal grove of the Knight's Tale exposes the limitations of monarchical structures and masculine control and shapes a pragmatic response to human failures.

For every famous author of the twelfth-century renaissance, there are numerous lesser-known writers. Despite being overshadowed by more brilliant scholars or those closer to the centre of important events, their voices add depth to the study of the intellectual history of this period. A founding member of one of the earliest Premonstratensian houses; a highly-educated and prolific author, much in demand as a hagiographer; and a vigorous defender of the clerical order, Philip of Harvengt is one such writer, and a worthy subject for study. This thesis examines two bodies of Philip’s works – his letters and his hagiographical writings – analysing the predominant and recurrent concerns and ideals expressed in them, and the means by which they are expressed. The letters are carefully crafted works, examples of the literary labour which Philip writes is incumbent upon the cleric. The first part of this thesis approaches these letters in chapters on four themes: the role of the ecclesiastical prelate; the importance of learning; the relationship between religious orders; and Philip’s use of the motif of friendship. His hagiographical works, too, are examples of literary artistry, to move as well as to educate the audience. In the second part of the thesis, these will be discussed individually, with the first chapter analysing his vita of Oda, a nun attached to his own house, whom he portrays as a martyr. The succeeding chapters consider Philip’s rewritings of earlier vitae, and show how he managed his sources in order to produce vitae depicting their subjects according to his ideal model of sanctity. Philip’s letters express concerns shared by contemporaries, reflecting anxieties surrounding roles and ideal forms of living in a period immediately following the first fervour of religious renewal. His hagiographies articulate ideals of sanctity, clarifying these when they are not made sufficiently explicit in earlier works, for the better edification of an audience pursuing this vita perfecta. Both letters and hagiographies are designed to exhort and instruct the reader or listener: above all, Philip is a teacher.

In the fifth century, after the departure of the Romans, according to tradition, which is based on the ancient written sources, Britain was invaded by the Angles and Saxons. This view has been questioned in the last century. The size of the ‘invasion’, and indeed its very existence, have come into doubt. However, this doubting school of thought does not seem to take into account all of the evidence. An interdisciplinary, nuanced approach has been taken in this thesis. Firstly, the question of Germanic raiding has been examined, with reference to the Saxon Shore defences. It is argued that these defences, in their geographical context, point to the likelihood of raiding. Then the written sources have been re-examined, as well as physical artefacts. In addition to geography, literature and archaeology (the disciplines which are most commonly used when the coming of the Angles and Saxons is investigated), linguistic and genetic data have been examined. The fields of linguistics and genetics, which have not often both been taken into consideration with previous approaches, add a number of valuable insights. This nuanced approach yields a picture of events that rules out the ‘traditional view’ in some ways, such as the idea that the Saxons exterminated the Britons altogether, but corroborates it in other ways. There was an invasion of a kind (of Angles – not Saxons), who came in comparatively small numbers, but found in Britain a society already mixed and comprising Celtic and Germanic-speaking peoples: a society implied by Caesar and Tacitus and corroborated by linguistic and genetic data.

Scholarship of the anonymous Old English prose Life of St. Mary of Egypt ranges from source studies and linguistic analyses to explorations of Anglo-Saxon female sexuality and comparisons to saints' lives translated by the monk Ælfric, but all of these studies have been based on either the text extant in BL MS Cotton Julius E. vii or on W. W. Skeat's edition of the Julius manuscript, Ælfric's Lives of Saints (1881-1900). There is, however, an as yet unedited fragmentary copy of the Old English Mary of Egypt in BL MS Cotton Otho B. x, a manuscript severely damaged by fire in 1731. Digital imaging of damaged manuscripts in concert with ultraviolet fluorescence and other special lighting techniques has been shown to be effective for restoring the legibility of previously inaccessible texts. By means of such digital facsimiles I have transcribed the text of Mary of Egypt in Otho B. x, have collated this text with Skeat's edition, and have discovered that Otho B. x contains textual evidence not found in Julius E. vii. In this thesis, I present my findings and discuss the significance of this new textual evidence for the Old English Life of St. Mary of Egypt.

Many Old English poems reflect the Anglo-Saxon writers's interest in who could exercise power and how language could be used to signal a position of power or powerlessness. In previous Old English studies, the prevailing critical attitude has been to associate the exercise of power with sex—the distinction between males and females based upon biological and physiological differences—or with sex-oriented social roles or sphere of operation. Scholarship of the last twenty years has just begun to explore the connection between power and gender-coded traits, attributes which initially were tied to the heroic code and were primarily male-oriented. By the eighth and ninth centuries, the period in which most of the extant Old English poetry was probably composed, these qualities had become disassociated from biological sex but retained their gender affiliations. A re-examination of "The Dream of the Rood," "The Wanderer," "The Husband's Message," "The Wife's Lament," "Wulf and Eadwacer" and Beowulf confirms that the poets used gender-coded language to indicate which poetic characters, female as well as male, held positions of power and powerlessness. A status of power or powerlessness was signalled by the exercise of particular gendered traits that were open for assumption by men and women. Powerful individuals were depicted with masculine-coded language affiliated with honor, mastery, aggression, victory, bravery, independence, martial prowess, assertiveness, physical strength, verbal acuteness, firmness or hardness, and respect from others. Conversely, the powerless were described with non-masculine or feminine-coded language suggesting dishonor, subservience, passivity, defeat, cowardice, dependence, defenselessness, lack of volition, softness or indecisiveness, and lack of respect from others. Once attained, neither status was permanent; women and men trafficked back and forth between the two. Depending upon the circumstances, members of both sexes could experience reversals of fortunes which would necessitate moving from one category to the other, on more than one occasion in a lifetime.

Includes bibliography (leaves 709-711) and indexes.
lxix, 968 leaves ; 30 cm.
Chronological survey of editions and criticisms of the Middle English lyric emphasising 20th century works. Summarizes the content of each work and conveys its style and the author's voice by means of quotations. A general introduction discusses critical trends and aspects of the genre. Concludes with indexes of scholars and critics ; subjects discussed ; first lines of poems listed in the Index of Middle English Verse and its Supplement ; and, a temporary index of poems not noted in either.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1999

Tese de Doutoramento em Ciências Humanas e Sociais na especialidade em Estudos Portugueses e Franceses, Época Medieval apresentada à Universidade Aberta
O século XII francês caracteriza-se por múltiplas transformações (políticas, sociais, económicas, jurídicas, ideológicas, culturais) que redefinem, lenta mas profundamente, os contornos da civilização medieval. Ora, uma das mutações mais decisivas (senão a mais decisiva e marcante) reside justamente na passagem, que perscrutamos atentamente a partir dos múltiplos discursos que in-formam o texto poético, de uma economia oblativa, intimamente ligada ao pensamento simbólico, para uma economia mercantil e monetária, subordinada ao imaginário do signo. Será por mero acaso se vemos nascer e desenvolver-se, neste preciso contexto, a narrativa ficcional em língua vernacular (em romance)? Ou será uma mesma viragem epistemológica que dá simultaneamente origem à notável monetarização (aos mais diversos níveis) das relações sociais, ao renascimento da vitalidade urbana (factores através dos quais tendem a dissolver-se os laços, extremamente fortes e ritualizados, que uniam os homens uns aos outros na sociedade feudal), ao desabrochar do pensamento escolástico e das Ordens Mendicantes, à irrupção das catedrais góticas e à emergência de uma literatura profana que reivindica, pouco a pouco, a sua autonomia perante os sistemas poéticos latinos ou neolatinos? Surgia assim uma rede coerente de possíveis analogias na qual se vislumbrava a estranha e singular geminalidade entre a imagem ambígua do mercador (modelo da fertilidade e comunicação restauradas sobre o qual plana, todavia, e inelutavelmente, o espectro da usura, da avareza, da fraude, da mentira e da falsificação diabólicas) e a não menos ambígua figura do poeta, esse demiurgo que se compraz no jogo, ao mesmo tempo lúdico e subversivo, dos simulacros da Palavra, da Criação e da Verdade. Sobre ambos, pesa o anátema da danação; ambos aspiram, no limiares de uma espécie de Purgatório da linguagem, à plena legitimação dos respectivos discursos. Numa altura em que começam a desagregar-se os valores constitutivos do feudalismo, em que a relação com um Significado fundador, referencial, se torna cada vez mais longínqua e irrecuperável, a ficção e a moeda cunhada emergem assim como dois novos tipos de mediação ante o objecto de desejo, como duas formas de escrita (homólogas, embora distintas e autónomas) que modificam as relações com o Outro e com o mundo (e com o Outro-Mundo inclusive), tanto quanto as suas respectivas representações, e através das quais se elaboram, em suma, novos processos de simbolização. A dualidade e duplicidade que se instauram entre estes dois modos privilegiados de representação (mental e socialmente construída) não podia deixar de ter influências na própria concepção da palavra poética. Com efeito, a forma como dialogam, se entrelaçam, colidem ou se excluem mutuamente imaginário oblativo (bem patente no ideal cavaleiresco e cortês de liberalidade, por exemplo) e imaginário mercantil, abre-nos um terreno de investigação único para observarmos o modo como os dois principais géneros narrativos em verso dos séculos XII-XIII (a canção de gesta e o romance que analisamos mais minuciosamente), reflectem e/ou inflectem o universo que os rodeia e, nesse processo, verificar de que forma se interrogam sobre o seu próprio estatuto e se posicionam um face ao outro através de secretas ou explícitas relações dialógicas e intertextuais. Se, nesta perspectiva, vemos o discurso épico dar, frequentemente, corpo e voz ao inconsciente ideológico e textual recalcado nos inúmeros inter-ditos, ou não-ditos, que estruturam o imaginário romanesco (e vice versa), evidenciando simultaneamente as potencialidades e os limites de uma determinada concepção da linguagem poética e da visão do mundo que (a) sustenta e veicula, caberá à chamada narrativa "realista" do século XIII levar este processo de reflexão (no sentido cognitivo e especular do termo) às últimas consequências. Com efeito, ao multiplicar falaciosamente os "efeitos de real" e as referências ao universo económico, esta narrativa sugere que a única realidade da/na literatura consiste, na verdade, no facto de ser uma arte, subtil e engenhosamente, tecida através de uma temível e sedutora manipulação da retórica da linguagem e das formas significantes nas quais se espelha incessantemente. Desta nova economia poética, emerge uma (in)suspeita, mas agora triunfal e triunfante, relação entre o poeta e o mercador de palavras, entre a usura e a narrativa ficcional enquanto infinita reprodução de simulacros e perpétua deslocação metafórica de uma significação ao mesmo tempo proliferante e sempre ausente; relação na qual se vislumbra a natureza paradoxal, evanescente e profundamente enganadora, do texto medieval como eterna falsa moeda sígnica e semântica.
The twelfth century is a complex period, characterised by an unusual quantity of transformations at all levels (political, social, economic, juridical, ideological and cultural) which would, slowly but profoundly, redefine the contours of Western Civilization. One of the most decisive mutations (if not the most decisive and impactive one) lies in the transition, deeply analysed by us through the several discourses which in-form the poetical text, from the so-called gift economy, closely related to the symbolic though, to a monetary mercantile economy, subordinated to the sign imaginary. Can it be mere chance if we can also find, precisely during that period and context, the beginning and development of the written fictional narrative in vernacular language, (the romance)? Or is it not rather the same epistemological turnover which originates, simultaneously, the remarkable monetarization of social relationships, the rebirth of urban vitality (the towns being the set for an important progressive weakening of the strong and ritualised personal bonds which maintained the cohesion of the traditional feudal society), the flourishing of scholastic thought and Mendicant Orders, the irruption of Cathedral churches and the emergence of profane Literature which slowly takes its autonomous place among the latin and neolatin poetic systems? Faced with this vast net of possible analogies, we were forced to recognise the strange and singular similarity and closeness between the ambiguous image of the merchant (a model of restored fertility and communication, upon whom, nevertheless, always planes the spectre of usury, greed, fraud, lie and devilish forgery) and the none the less ambiguous one of the poet, the demiurge who indulges himself permanently in the vain, ludic and subversive gamble of playing with the Word, the Creation and the Truth. The anathema of damnation stands upon both of them; they both aspire - at the verge of a sort of Purgatory of the Language – to the universal recognition of the legitimacy of their respective discourses. In an era in which the feudal values were starting to dissolve, and the relation to a founding Signified, source of every reference, becomes more and more distant and irrecoverable, the fiction and the minted coin emerge as the two new models for mediation in the face of the object of desire, as two forms of writing (similar although very distinct and autonomous), which drastically modify the relation to the Other and to the World (and to the Other World, as well), just as their respective representations, thus creating a whole new process of simbolization. The duality and duplicity which pervade these two privileged forms of representation (mentally and socially constructed) would forcibly end up behaving serious reflections in the poetic word. In fact, the forms through which the oblative imaginary (in the centre of the chivalric and courtly code of honour) communicates, intermixes, collides or opposes the mercantile imaginary, opens a unique field of research which enables us to observe the way in which the two main versified narrative genres in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries (the chanson the geste and the romance being the ones here under scrutiny) reflect and/ or inflect the universe surrounding them. And, in the course of that same process, to verify the ways in which they position themselves facing one another, through secret or explicit dialogic and intertextual relations. If, under this perspective, we frequently see the epic discourse as voicing and embodying the ideological and textual unconsciousness of the repressed inumerous inter-dicts or non verbalised (unsaid) concepts which shape the romance imaginary (and vice versa), thus enlightening the potentialities and the limits of a certain conception of poetic language and of the respective world vision which feds it and promoted it, it will be the "realistic" narrative of the thirteenth-century to take this process of reflection to its last consequences. By fictively multiplying the "reality effects" and the references to the economic universe, this narrative suggests that the only reality of/ in Literature consists, basically, in the fact that it is an art, subtle and ingeniously, woven through a frightening and seductive rhetoric manipulation of the language and the signifier forms in which it is unceasingly mirrored. From this new poetic economy comes an unsuspected but now triumphal and triumphant relation between the poet and the merchant of words, between usury and fictional narrative. An infinite reproduction of fictiveness and a perpetual metaphoric dislocation of a meaning which is simultaneously proliferating and absent. A relation in which we can envisage the paradoxical, evanescent and profoundly deceiving nature of the medieval text as an eternal false coin of sign and meaning.
Le XIIe siècle est incontestablement une période bigarrée dont les contours multiformes traduisent les diverses transformations (sur le plan politique, social, économique, juridique, culturel ou idéologique) qui redessinent, lentement mais en profondeur, les traits de la civilisation médiévale. Or, une des plus marquante, sinon la plus marquante et décisive, de ces mutations réside justement dans le passage, que nous observons attentivement en nous appuyant sur les nombreux discours qui in-forment le texte poétique, d'une économie du don, intimement liée à la pensée symbolique, à une économie monétaire et marchande subordonnée à l'imaginaire du signe. Est-ce, dès lors, une simple coïncidence si nous voyons immerger et se développer, dans ce contexte, une foisonnante littérature écrite en langue vernaculaire (le roman)? Ou est-ce un même tournant épistémologique qui ouvre simultanément les portes à une remarquable (sous tous les points de vue) monétarisation des rapports sociaux, au renouveau de la vitalité urbaine (la ville étant l'espace où se distendent désormais les liens, extrêmement forts et ritualisés, qui unissaient les hommes au cœur de la société féodale traditionnelle), à l'éclosion de la pensée scolastique et à la multiplication des Ordres Mendiants, à l'irruption des cathédrales gothiques et à la naissance d'une littérature profane qui revendique, peu à peu, son autonomie face aux systèmes poétiques latins ou néo-latins? On voit ainsi se mettre en branle un réseau très cohérent d'analogies possibles au sein duquel on commence à soupçonner d'une étrange et singulière gémellité entre l'image ambiguë du marchant (modèle de fertilité et exemple d'une communication restaurée sur lesquels plane cependant le spectre diabolique de l'usure, de l'avarice, de la fraude, du mensonge et de la contrefaction) et celle, non moins ambiguë, du poète, ce démiurge qui se plait incessamment à prendre le lecteur au jeu tout à la fois vain, ludique et subversif des simulacres de la Parole, de la Création et de la Vérité. Sur l'un comme sur l'autre pèse l'anathème de la damnation; tout deux aspirent également – au seuil d'une espèce de Purgatoire du langage – à voir leurs discours accéder pleinement à la légitimité. À une époque où l'on assiste à la désagrégation des valeurs constitutives de la féodalité, où le rapport à un Signifié fondateur et source de toutes références devient de plus en plus lointain et irrécupérable, la fiction et la monnaie frappée émanent comme deux nouveaux modèles de médiation à l'égard de l'objet du désir, comme deux formes d'écriture (analogues bien que distinctes et autonomes) qui modifient profondément les rapports à l'Autre et au monde (et à l'Autre-Monde, bien entendu), aussi bien que la façon dont ils sont représentés, et autour desquelles se bâtissent, en somme, de nouveaux processus de symbolisation. La dualité et la duplicité qui s'instaurent ainsi entre ces deux modes privilégiés de représentation (mentalement et socialement construite) avaient forcément des reflets sur la conception même de la parole poétique. En effet, la façon dont l'imaginaire oblatif (au cœur de l'idéal de la largesse chevaleresque et courtoise, par exemple) dialogue, s'entrelace ou entre en rupture avec l'imaginaire marchand, ouvre à la recherche un domaine riche et unique où il est permis d'observer comment les deux principaux genres narratifs en vers des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (la chanson de geste et le roman que nous analysons le plus en détail) réfléchissent et/ou infléchissent l'univers qui les entoure, et ce faisant, comment ils se questionnent sur leur propre statut et se positionnent l'un par rapport à l'autre par le biais des relations dialogiques ou intertextuelles qu'ils maintiennent secrètement ou explicitement. Si le discours épique apparaît, dans cette perspective, comme une forme qui donne fréquemment corps et voix à l'inconscient idéologique et textuel refoulé ou enfoui dans les innombrables inter-dits et non-dits qui structurent l'imaginaire romanesque (et vice versa), mettant ainsi en évidence les potentialités et les limites d'un certain langage poétique et de la vision du monde qu'il véhicule et qui le soutient tout à la fois, il incombera au récit - que la critique désigne vulgairement de "réaliste" - du XIIIe siècle de pousser jusqu'aux ultimes conséquences ce processus de réflexion (au sens cognitif et spéculaire du terme). En effet, en multipliant illusoirement les "effets de réel" et les références à l'univers économique, ce récit suggère, en fait, qu'il d'existe d'autre réalité de/dans la littérature que celle qui la définit comme un art subtilement tissé par une menaçante et séductrice manipulation (de la) rhétorique du langage et des signifiants où il se miroite continûment. Il ressort de cette nouvelle économie poétique un (in)suspect, mais désormais triomphal et triomphant, rapport entre le poète et le marchant de paroles, entre l'usure et la fiction en tant que reproduction infinie de simulacres et perpétuel déplacement métaphorique d'une signification à la fois sans cesse foisonnante et toujours absente; rapport qui laisse deviner la nature paradoxale, évanescente et profondément trompeuse, du texte médiéval en sa qualité d'éternelle fausse monnaie du signe et du sens. Sujets: Littérature médiévale française (XIIe-XIIIe siècles); Le marchant dans la littérature médiévale; Culture et civilisation du Moyen Âge, Histoire et critique littéraires; Théorie(s) de la littérature (rhétorique, poétique, théorie des genres); Économie et littérature; Langage et imaginaire.