Early and Medieval Literature

Whilst French romances of the 12th and 13th centuries enjoy a privileged place in the literary history of France, romances from the later middle ages have been neglected by modern scholars. In particular, although this genre has been seen as providing a forum within which contemporary ideas about masculine and feminine roles were debated, little work has been done on the gender ideology of 14th- and 15th-century texts. This book's aims is to fill this gap in the scholarship by analysing how the views of gender found in earlier romances were reshaped in the texts produced in the moralising intellectual environment of the later medieval period. In order to explore these topics, the book discusses sixteen historico-realist prose romances written between 1390 and 1480, many of which were commissioned at the court of Burgundy. It addresses key issues in recent studies of gender in medieval culture including the construction of chivalric masculinity, the representation of adolescent desire, and the social and sexual roles of husbands and wives. In addition to offering close readings of these texts, it shows how the romances of the period were informed by ideas about gender which circulated in contemporary works such as manuals of chivalry, moral treatises, and marriage sermons. It aims to question the critical consensus on the role of gender in medieval romance that has arisen from an exclusive focus on earlier works in the genre.

What do stories about animals have to tell us about human beings? This book analyses the shrewd perceptions about human life—and especially human language—that emerge from narratives in which the main figures are ‘talking animals’. Its guiding question is not ‘what’ but ‘how’ animals mean. Drawing a clear distinction between beast fable and beast epic, it examines the complex variations of these forms that are to be found in the literature of medieval Britain, in English, French, Latin, and Scots (modern English translations are provided for all quotations). The analytical method of the book combines theoretical and literary‐critical discussion with a constant awareness of the historical development of the tradition. The works selected for study are the fables of Marie de France, the Speculum stultorum of Nigel of Longchamp, the Middle English poem The Owl and the Nightingale, Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls and the tales of the Squire, Manciple and Nun's Priest, the Reynardian tale of The Vox and the Wolf, and the Moral Fabillis of Robert Henryson.

This book is the first study to investigate both the relation between gender and violence in the Old Norse Poetic Edda and key family and contemporary sagas, and the interrelated nature of these genres. Beginning with an analysis of Eddaic attitudes to heroic violence and its gendered nature through the figures of Guðrún and Helgi, the study broadens out to the whole poetic compilation and how the past (and particularly the mythological past) inflects the heroic present. This paves the way for a consideration of the comparable relationship between the heroic poems themselves and later reworkings of them or allusions to them in the family and contemporary sagas. Accordingly, the study moves on to consider the use of Eddaic allusion in Gísla saga’s meditation on violent masculinity and sexuality, assesses the impact of the Church on attitudes to revenge in family and contemporary sagas, and finally explores the scapegoating of women for male violence in the contemporary sagas. Although the Eddaic poems themselves present a complex and conflicting attitude to vengeance, revenge and other forms of violence are in later texts regularly associated with the past, often represented by Eddaic figures. Moreover, saga authors often attempt to construct a national narrative which shows moderation and peace-making as the only viable alternative to what is seen as the traditional destructive model of vengeance. Nevertheless, the picture the sagas present is far from uniform, rather being one of conflicting voices as the attractions of heroic violence for many prove difficult to resist. The book’s thematic concentration on gender/sexuality and violence, and its generic concentration on Poetic Edda and later texts which rework or allude to it, enable a diverse but coherent exploration of both key and neglected Norse texts and the way in which their authors display a dual fascination with and rejection of heroic vengeance

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings—those of flesh as well as those of myth—for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer's belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths. This book unearths the layers of the British Isles' unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The book finds a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote “The Wife of Bath's Tale” in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain, itself a hybrid mythology. Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable.

The centuries just after the Norman Conquest are the forgotten period of English literary history. In fact, the years 1066–1300 witnessed an unparalleled ingenuity in the creation of written forms, for this was a time when almost every writer was unaware of the existence of other English writing. In a series of detailed readings of the more important early Middle English works, the author shows how the many and varied texts of the period laid the foundations for the project of English literature. This richness is for the first time given credit in these readings by means of an innovative theory of literary form that accepts every written shape as itself a unique contribution to the history of ideas. This theory also suggests that the impoverished understanding of literature we now commonly employ is itself a legacy of this early period, an attribute of the single form we have learned to call ‘romance’. A number of reading methods have lately taught us to be more generous in our understandings of what literature might be, but this book shows us that the very variety we now strive to embrace anew actually formed the grounds of English literature — a richness we only lost when we forgot how to recognize it.

This book traces the influence of humanism on English literature during the fifteenth century, much earlier than the influence is usually thought to be felt. It considers humanist influences on the reception of some of Chaucer's work and on important authors such as John Lydgate, Osbern Bokenham, William Caxton, Sir John Tiptoft, Henry Medwall, and Sir Thomas Elyot, and in many anonymous translations, political treatises, and documents such as On Husbondrie, Knyghthode and Bataile, and Somnium Vigilantis. At its heart is a consideration of William Worcester, the 18h-century scholar. The method is a blend of literary criticism and codicology, informed by an interest in the ‘history of reading’ more common in studies of the late 16th and 17th centuries than of earlier periods. The book examines evidence in manuscript and early print of the English study and imitation of antiquity, in marginalia on classical works, and in the ways in which people copied and shared translations. It then examines how various English works were shaped by such reading-habits and, in turn, how those English works reshaped the reading-habits of the wider community. Humanism thus, contrary to recent strictures against it, appears not as ‘top-down’ dissemination but as a practical process of give-and-take between writers and readers. Humanism also prompts writers to imagine their potential readership in ways which challenge them to re-imagine the commonweal, common good, or imagined community of the realm, and the intellectual freedom of the reader.

Incest is a frequent motif in medieval literature. It was more broadly defined in the Middle Ages than today; definitions in lawcodes varied from century to century, but at its broadest incest meant sexual relations with any relative, however distant, including in-laws (consanguinity and affinity), and also with ‘spiritual relatives’ such as godparents, godchildren, and priests. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the ways in which the incest motif was used during the Middle Ages, and especially from the 12th to the 15th centuries, when imaginative literature in vernacular languages as well as Latin was increasingly preserved in written form. The discussion covers narratives in a range of languages, principally Latin, French, German, and English, grouped by relationship (mother-son, father-daughter); it traces some of the ways in which particular types of incest plot were used and adapted by religious and secular writers in saints' lives, exemplary tales, romances, and chronicles. Recurring motifs include exposure of babies as foundlings, recognition scenes, violence (parricide, matricide, filicide, rape), confession, and penance. Women can initiate incestuous relationships, as well as men; the over-devoted mother is a popular theme in exempla. Literary analysis is framed by consideration of the social, historical, and theological contexts, medieval and earlier, such as the development of incest laws in Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian societies, the legacy of classical culture, and the exceptional trope of the Virgin Mary as mother, daughter, sister, and bride of Christ.

In the Middle Ages Ireland's extensive and now famous literature was unknown outside the Gaelic‐speaking world of Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man — with Wales an important exception. Irish emigrants had settled in Wales from the fifth century onwards, Irish scholars worked in Wales in the ninth century, and throughout the Middle Ages there were ecclesiastical, mercantile, and military contacts across the Irish Sea. From this standpoint, it is not surprising that the names of Irish heroes such as Cú Roí, Cú Chulainn, Finn, and Deirdre became known to Welsh poets, and that Irish narratives influenced to authors of the Welsh Mabinogion. Yet the Welsh and Irish languages were not mutually comprehensible, the extent to which the two countries still shared a common Celtic inheritance is contested, and Latin provided a convenient lingua franca. Could some of the similarities between the Irish and Welsh literatures be due to independent influences or even to coincidence? Patrick Sims‐Williams provides a new approach to these controversial questions, situating them in the context of the rest of medieval literature and international folklore. The result is the first comprehensive estimation of the extent to which Irish literature influenced medieval Welsh literature. The book will be of interest not only to medievalists but to all concerned with the problem of how to recognize and evaluate literary influence.