21 results in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
Dedication
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp xiii-xiv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
10 - Of Dragons and Saracens: Guy and Bevis in Early Print Illustration
-
- By Siân Echard, Professor of English and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 154-168
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Men speken of romances of prys,
Of Horn child and of Ypotys,
Of Beves and sir Gy,
Of sir Lybeux and Pleyndamour –
But sir Thopas, he bereth the flour
Of roial chivalry!
Shortly before Harry Bailey's protest puts an end to his ‘drasty speche’, the Chaucer-pilgrim lists the heroes of romance to whom his Thopas should be (favourably) compared. While the list includes the obscure and possibly the non-existent, it also invokes such well-known figures as King Horn and Bevis of Hampton, and it is often argued that, in the structure and form of Thopas, Chaucer was particularly targeting Guy of Warwick. This attention to Guy and his fellow romance-heroes is hardly intended to be flattering, but what is more important – what serves as the point of departure for this chapter – is the yoking together of Bevis and Guy. In this practice Chaucer of course reflects the manuscript history of these romances, but he also anticipates what would become a critical norm in later assessments of the nature (and value) of these texts. Thomas Warton may be said to originate this trend in literary criticism in his History of English Poetry (1774). He links Bevis and Guy in his asser- tion that ‘monks often wrote for the minstrels’, and he treats them together in a section on English romances received from the French. Joseph Ritson also joins the two in his ‘Dissertation on Romance and Mintrelsy’, noting that ‘Bevis and Guy were no more “English heroes” than Amadis de Gaule or Perceforest: they are mere creatures of the imagination, and onely obtain an establishment in history because (like mister Wartons) it is usually writen upon the authority of romance’. And many of the first modern anthologizers and critics of romance follow this early lead, both categorizing the romances together and then – and this is the significant point – allowing one to stand as definitive of both.
I cite Ritson here not merely as an early example of this persistent trend; for despite his linking of the two romances, Ritson also shows an unusual awareness of the complex (and different) manuscript and print histories of Bevis and Guy, observing that all ’are extant in MSS.
11 - Guy of Warwick and The Faerie Queene, Book II: Chivalry Through the Ages
-
- By Andrew King, College Lecturer in Medieval and Renaissance English at University College Cork.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 169-184
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene, comprising Books I to III, offers an engagingly complex response to native medieval romance and its related mythopoeic historical traditions. Not surprisingly, given its popularity and numerous literary and iconographical manifestations by the late sixteenth century, Guy of Warwick is a key text in that response. Spenser's engagement with Guy throughout Book II of The Faerie Queene seems to be part of a conscious programme in the 1590 text: signalling at various stages his roots in medieval English romance, he seeks to provoke his readers into recognition and consideration of the nature of his adaptations. The reader is encouraged to hold in mind a weighty native tradition in which providential worlds, pretensions to historicity, and topographical familiarity typically coincide. Like The Faerie Queene itself, this tradition could function rhetorically for both medieval and Early Modern readers as a ‘fayre mirrhour’ – a world both the same as and different from the viewer/reader's surrounding context. Remembering that tradition in the act of reading The Faerie Queene positions the reader close to the narrator, who unfolds the story with a comparable sense of literary and historical depth – ‘matter of iust memory’ (II.Proem.1). Eumnestes's chamber, or the room of ‘Good Memory’, visited in the Castle of Alma in Book II can be read as the library or bookish heritage out of which The Faerie Queene has been produced:
His chamber all was hangd about with rolls,
And old records from auncient times deriud,
Some made in books, some in long parchment scrolls. [II.ix.57]
But this room could also be an image of the reader's mind, the memory of literary tradition that must be brought to the task of reading The Faerie Queene. As Guyon the Knight of Temperance reads the book ‘Antiquitee of Faery lond’, he becomes an image of the reader, who should approach the poem with a similarly zealous commitment to memory and past literary traditions impinging on the present. Guyon reads ‘burning […] with feruent fire’ to gain understanding of his Elvish origins and his ‘countreys auncestry’ (II. ix.60). In the process, his reading becomes creative, almost authorial, since it produces in the following canto the text that we in turn read.
Appendix: Synopsis of the Guy of Warwick narrative
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 201-214
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Short summary
Guy, the son of the steward of Earl Rohaud of Warwick, falls helplessly in love with the Earl's daughter Felice. Felice will grant him her love once he has proved himself as a knight. Guy travels to France with his companions, including Herhaud of Ardern. He distinguishes himself in a tournament at Rouen and as a prize is offered the love of Blancheflour, the daughter of the German Emperor Reiner. Guy returns to England to claim the love of Felice [E 209–1054; Auchinleck 235–1130; CUL 177–792].
On his return, Felice tells Guy that she will grant him her love only when he has proved himself the best of all knights. Guy travels abroad again and distinguishes himself in a series of tournaments. His adventures include: the ambush at the orders of Duke Otes (whom he had earlier wounded at Rouen) and the battle for the Duke of Louvain against the Emperor Reiner. The Emperor Reiner's champion is Tirri. Otes is also fighting on his side and violently opposes the reconciliation that Guy finally effects between the two former enemies. Guy next travels to Constantinople. He frees the land of the Emperor Hernis from the forces of the Sultan and is offered his daughter in return. However, Guy is hated by the Emperor's jealous steward Morgadour, who slanders him and kills his pet lion. At this, Guy kills Morgadour, refuses to marry the daughter, and leaves. In Lorraine Guy rescues Tirri (who has become his sworn brother) and his mistress Oisel and then helps Albri (Tirri's father) against Loher (Oisel's father) and Otes (now Oisel's intended husband). After rescuing Tirri from prison Guy kills Otes. Then, whilst hunting Guy kills a young knight and has to fight with the vassals of Florentin, the knight's father. Guy returns to England and kills a dragon that is devastating Northumberland. He returns to Warwick, marries Felice, and conceives a child [E 1055–7562; Auchinleck 1131–7306, stanzas 3–19; CUL 793–7116].
A fortnight after the marriage, Guy repents that he has so long neglected God through his excessive devotion to Felice and sets out on a pilgrimage of atonement. After visiting Jerusalem and Bethlehem, he successfully fights for King Triamour against the Sultan's gigantic champion, Amoraunt.
9 - ‘In her owne persone semly and bewteus’: Representing Women in Stories of Guy of Warwick
-
- By Martha W. Driver, Distinguished Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University in New York.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 133-153
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The romances about Guy of Warwick focus mainly on his derring-do and heroic battles, while his wife, Felice, is described rather conventionally, as by John Lydgate: ‘In alle her tyme was holden noon so ffayre, Called ensaumple of truthe & womanhed’ (179–80). In Lydgate's poem, produced about 1442, Felice spends her time ‘wepyng nyght & day’ (176) after her son is kidnapped, and she dies promptly after Guy is buried, as she also does in the other Middle English versions of the tale, which typically portray the mature Felice as beautiful, passive, virtuous, and religious. Such a model might have been particularly appropriate for (and flattering to) Lydgate's patron, Margaret, the eldest daughter of Richard Beauchamp (1382–1439), Earl of Warwick, from his first marriage, for whom Lydgate composed ‘the lyffe of that moste / worthy knyght of Guy of Warrewyk of whos blode she is / lenyally descendid’.
This chapter examines the exemplary character of Felice as she appears in the fifteenth-century legends of Guy against the often difficult and demanding realities of the lives of women readers and patrons for whom these later legends were reshaped and retold. In its analysis of fifteenth-century texts made for or associated with members of the Beauchamp family, this chapter considers the later reception and appropriation of the Guy romances in order to explore more generally the influences of fiction, in this case romance, upon the larger historical record.
Among the primary sources to be discussed are texts commissioned by or written specifically for the Beauchamp family circle, including Lydgate's poem, the Irish Life of Sir Guy, composed before 1449, and the Rommant de Guy de Warwik of c. 1445, along with the undated ‘second or fifteenthcentury version’ of Guy of Warwick (Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38), which I argue contains previously unnoticed internal evidence of a Beauchamp connection. Stories of Guy and Felice are told as well in two of the most famous illustrated heraldic manuscripts of the fifteenth century.
Contents
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp v-vi
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
4 - From Gui to Guy: The Fashioning of a Popular Romance
-
- By Rosalind Field, Reader in English at Royal Holloway, University of London.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 44-60
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Gui de Warewic is one of the latest of the Anglo-Norman romances; Guy of Warwick is a comparatively early Middle English romance – the one responds to the foundational texts of insular romance and the other has an ongoing influence on later texts (as this volume demonstrates). Between them they form one of the most popular legends created by English romance writers, and the essential question remains that asked by M. Domenica Legge: ‘What, then, could be the cause of the strange fascination this story [Gui] has exerted?’ This chapter will re-examine the relationship between these two versions, arguing that the close resemblances are more significant to our understanding of the development of insular romance than the differences – the most obvious of which is the change in language.
The story of Guy of Warwick indeed provides one of the most popular romances of the English middle ages, sufficiently popular to give rise to numerous versions across several centuries. Popularity is itself a slippery concept; it can be measured variously: by evident success, by subjective assessment of literary quality, or by assumptions about audience. By the first measure, Gui is evidently as popular, if not more so, than Guy, in that more manuscripts survive or are recorded. By the second measure, the legend of Guy is recognized as a benchmark – ‘an epitome of what was most popular’ – but in response to the apparent register of literature in French, subjective readings of the two linguistic versions have tended to find ‘popular’ attitudes and styles in the Middle English rather than the Anglo-Norman versions. This relates to the third, more problematic, measure. Gui, written in the socially superior vernacular of the thirteenth century, is associated with baronial patrons and audiences, seen as distinct from the ‘popular’ or populist audiences posited for Guy. I would suggest, however, that the popularity, however assessed, of the English-language versions of the story of Guy owes its existence to that of Gui, or to be more precise, it is the author of Gui de Warewic who can be given the double-edged compliment of being recognized as the first writer of popular fiction amongst insular romance writers.
5 - The Manuscripts and Texts of the Middle English Guy of Warwick
-
- By Alison Wiggins, Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 61-80
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Before the era of print, there was no single standard text of the Middle English romance Guy of Warwick. Although Guy's legend was known in many regions and over an extended period, his status and portrayal were not always and everywhere the same. The manuscript record does not indicate a situation whereby a single dominant version of the romance was repeatedly copied and re-copied and thus disseminated around the country. Like the majority of Middle English romances, Guy of Warwick never had contact with any organizing production force of the kind that can, at least to some extent, be associated with those medieval texts that survive in higher numbers or which cluster around, or spread out from, a single point of origin. Rather, the textual and manuscript evidence implies a tradition which was far more erratic, fragmented, and decentred, and which was varied in terms of language, manuscript context, readership, and locality. The impulse to translate, copy, or compile Guy of Warwick was influenced and inspired at particular moments by specific cultural stimuli. Versions emerged and receded at different times and in different locales. There are instances of re-writing, adaptating, extracting, and combining versions of this, one of the most lengthy of Middle English romances, as it moved between different communities and environments. This chapter describes this mobile, animate, and responsive textual tradition and how versions of the romance came to be translated, adapted, discarded, or revived according to the interests of some of its earliest reading communities.
The situation is a dynamic one but it is worth pointing out that it is specifically and distinctively a written tradition. The romance (which is between eight and twelve thousand lines in the various Middle English versions) may have been read aloud from the manuscripts, but there is no evidence it was ever transmitted memorially or merged in any way with oral traditions. It is clear from the manuscript record, and from the kinds of very common othographic revisions and visual slips associated with copying, that the romance was transmitted in written form, copied from exemplars by scribes.
Frontmatter
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp i-iv
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
1 - Gui de Warewic at Home and Abroad: A Hero for Europe
-
- By Judith Weiss, an Emeritus Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 1-11
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The thirteenth-century Jatvartharsaga, about Edward the Confessor, and the Chronicon Universale, which ends in 1219, both record the same story about a late-eleventh-century English emigration to Constantinople. A group of Anglo-Saxon nobles go and fight for the emperor Alexius, who is besieged by the Turks. Some stay as members of his bodyguard, others establish settlements further from the city. The story is based on the historical fact, recorded by several chroniclers, that English people settled in Constantinople from the 1070s onwards, entered imperial service and played a large part in campaigns against the Turks in 1081–84, earning the emperor's gratitude.
The early-thirteenth century Gui de Warewic differs from previous Anglo- Norman romances (by which it was certainly influenced and with which it was intimately familiar) because it is set against a huge historical and geographical canvas. It concerns itself not only with its hero's homeland but also with the portrayal of two empires, the Western and the Eastern – the Holy Roman Empire and the one centred on Constantinople. Its immediate predecessors, Boeve de Haumtone and Waldef, perhaps provided the inspiration, by widening their range of action from southern English or East Anglian home-bases to an exotic abroad, but they were not as knowledgeable as Gui's author about that ‘abroad’. This knowledge includes information that there was an English colony at Constantinople and that it was joined by a mercenary from England who defeated the Sultan of Konya. Gui de Warewic is also unusual in that, for its period, it gives a surprisingly favourable picture of the Eastern emperor as opposed to his Western counterpart. This chapter will address the question of what relation the romance might have to historical events, a question which in turn impinges on a possible date for the poem.
It has long been recognized that Gui de Warewic is extremely dependent on previous chansons de geste and romances. A. J. Holden's edition of Waldef, an Anglo-Norman romance dating from the very beginning of the thirteenth century, pointed out such numbers of verbal parallels between it and Gui that the latter's close reliance on it seems indisputable.
Contributors
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp ix-x
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Abbreviations
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp xi-xii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
Illustrations
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp vii-viii
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
2 - Gui de Warewic in its Manuscript Context
-
- By Marianne Ailes, College Lecturer in French at Wadham College Oxford and Honorary Research Fellow at Reading University.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 12-26
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The Anglo-Norman poem Gui de Warewic was composed in the early thirteenth century, and survives in six fragments and ten mauscripts. While the survival of only a few manuscripts or even fragments does not preclude the text or at least the narrative being well known, survival of a large number of manuscripts does indicate a text of some popularity. The sixteen extant manuscripts and fragments of Gui is a good number for a text of this type. It is, in fact, more than any of the other so-called ‘ancestral romances’. For example, Waldef survives in only one manuscript, as does Fouke le Fitz Waryn, while Haveloc survives in two. Although five manuscripts and fragments exist of Horn none is complete. Boeve has a more complex manuscript tradition as it survives in several forms, three in continental French. The extant manuscripts of Gui can give us some clues about the reception, as well as the popularity of the tale.
Gui de Warewicin single-text manuscripts and fragments
The complete text runs to nearly 13,000 lines. Many of the manuscripts, however, are incomplete, with lacunae or missing folios, and six of the extant manuscripts are relatively short fragments:
Cambridge, University Library, Additional MS 2751 (J)
This is a fragment of manuscript which had been used as a binding. It is a very short piece of text corresponding to lines 7389–522 of Ewert's edition. The date is difficult to determine and has been variously placed in the thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries. It is a manuscript of middle quality with some rubricated capital initials; the first letters of the lines are also touched in red. The orthography of the text is Anglo-Norman.
Nottingham University Library, Oakham Parish Library, MS Bx 1756 S 4 (N) This is a single leaf with text corresponding to lines 11,794–941 of the edition. Dating from the last third of the thirteenth century this fragment consists of two strips (190cm x 50cm and 190cm x 55cm) which had been used to reinforce the binding of an early printed book of sermons from Oakham Parish Library. It includes one five-line rubricated initial ‘P’.
12 - Guy as Early Modern English Hero
-
- By Helen Cooper, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 185-200
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Guy of Warwick appears quintessentially a hero of medieval romance. Created in Anglo-Norman, translated into Middle English, with occasional appearances in the chronicle tradition, and an enthusiastic reception in early prints, his story follows a trajectory that is typical of a large number of early romances. He is unique, however, for the number and variety of further texts that he generated in the decades on either side of 1600, the period of the explosion of high Renaissance English writing when it might be thought that such a story was due for extinction. A handful of romances of medieval origin continued a vibrant life under the Stuarts at the popular chapbook level, and a number of others make a farewell appearance in the Percy Folio Manuscript of the 1640s; only Guy additionally makes a serious attempt to break into anything resembling high culture. His function as legendary ancestor of the Earls of Warwick kept the story active at the level of the high aristocracy, since the Dudleys, who held the title under Elizabeth, took an active interest in it – though that interest was pursued less by the Earl himself than by his more famous brother Robert, Earl of Leicester and the Queen's favourite. In some of its many versions, Guy did indeed follow the downward trend in cultural level, appearing in broadside ballad form in the 1590s and in chapbooks from the later seventeenth century; but alongside those, a series of further redactions offered the story, if not to the humanist elite, then at least to the public who were thronging to the playhouses or to touring companies, and to a readership who had at least some acquaintance with the writing of epic and epyllion in English. This chapter concentrates on two such texts, the dramatic Tragical History of Guy of Warwick, and Samuel Rowlands’ twelvecanto Famous Historie of Guy of Warwick; but they are far from representing the whole story. The play is the only one surviving of what seems to have been a flourishing industry of Guy plays; and Rowlands’ text itself became the ancestral romance for a series of further narrative redactions in both verse and prose.
7 - An Exemplary Life: Guy of Warwick as Medieval Culture-Hero
-
- By Robert Allen Rouse, Assistant Professor of English at the University of British Columbia.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 94-109
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The Middle English Guy of Warwick narrates a vita that is, even by the often outrageous standards of medieval romance, extraordinary. Guy's life leads him from somewhat humble beginnings as the son of a provincial steward – the very margins of chivalric society – to his predestined place as chivalric, Christian, and most importantly, English culture-hero. Along the way he obtains chivalric glory, a courtly paramour, and associated noble title (Earl of Warwick), he vanquishes Saracen threats both defensively (at the walls of Constantinople) and offensively (whilst on a one-man Crusade in the Middle East) – thus taking on the mantle of defender of European Christianity – before returning home to become England's saviour from invasion and to finally die, as the circle of his life completes, back in Warwickshire as a devout hermit. As an example of popular romance entertainment, Guy of Warwick has few peers either in terms of popularity or its impact on wider English culture. However, the romance's importance is not limited to its function as popular entertainment. Much recent scholarship has established the important role of medieval romance in the articulation of national and group identity, figuring romance as a genre that is of great interest to the literary scholar and cultural historian alike. In addition to the importance of Guy of Warwick in the discourse of identity politics, the figure of Guy also enjoys a powerful influence outside the romance, as he is appropriated for the promotion of family, civic, and national pride more widely within English culture. The narrative development of Guy as a medieval culture-hero – a figure who embodies a number of different identity groups – is the subject of this chapter.
Thorlac Turville-Petre has described Guy as ‘the model of the knight of England’. Implicit within this designation is an understanding of this romance as exemplary narrative: a vita that in some fashion was intended to be imitated by its audience, or at the very least was intended to inspire its readers through admiration of the hero's deeds.
6 - The Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate's Guy of Warwick: The Non-Romance Middle English Tradition
-
- By A. S. G. Edwards, Professor of Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montford University.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 81-93
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
The two verse works discussed in this chapter, the Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate's Guy of Warwick, have in common their radical realignment of the Guy of Warwick narrative. In both the figure of Guy is moved from the world of romance into the orbit of devotional literature and reconstituted in ways that provide testimony to the associative adaptability of the legendary knight. Such new formulations have an intrinsic interest that is heightened by the demonstrable extent of their appeal to medieval audiences. The factors that led to them achieving such a degree of popularity invite examination both of the intrinsic qualities of the works themselves and of the surviving forms in which they were transmitted.
The poem now generally known as the Speculum Guy de Warwick, which in its fullest form runs to 1034 lines, in couplets, recounts the desire of an ‘erle of gode fame, / Gy of Warwyk’ (29–30), to seek Christian guidance from ‘a god man […] / þat liued al in godes lawe / Alquin was his rihte name’ (37–39). Several of the manuscript titles of the poem draw attention to this association with Alcuin (c. 740–804), the English poet, scholar, and exegete, and advisor to Charlemagne. In British Library, Additional MS 36983, the poem is simply titled ‘Alquyne’ in both title and colophon (fols 268rb and 275ra); in Cambridge University Library MS Dd.11.89 it is described as ‘þe sermon þat a clerk made þat was cleput Alquyn to Gwy of Warwyk how ich Cristen man owe for to hafe a remembraunce of þe passion of our lord Ihesu Criste’ (fol. 162v); and in British Library, Harley MS 525 it is called ‘Speculum Gydonis de Warewyke secundum Alquinam heremitam’ (fol. 44); this is also the only manuscript title to incorporate a form of words (‘Speculum Gydonis’), that corresponds to its modern one.
Although the figure of Alcuin is given considerable prominence in the manuscript titles, as it is in the narrative itself, where his is the dominant expository voice, none of these titles indicate the specific work of his with which the Middle English poem is associated.
Index
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 215-223
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
8 - The Visual History of Guy of Warwick
-
- By David Griffith, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 110-132
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
King Arthur's only serious rival for the affections of the late medieval public was the legendary English hero Guy of Warwick. Guy's fame is the result of a combination of factors but, as with Arthur, it is rooted in an intersection of history and romance that raises him above mere chivalric exemplar to the status of national hero. This iconic role manifests itself in a diverse textual culture from the thirteenth century that spans fictional and historiographic works. These texts in turn generate a substantial visual and material legacy that complements the literary versions and which must have appealed to the same kinds of audiences. Such a diverse collection of objects is a testimony to the power and influence of textual activity over an extended period of time, and to the ways in which Guy, like Arthur, inhabited a central place in the nation's cultural heritage. Images and artefacts underline the ways in which Guy functions as a model of martial prowess and spiritual growth but, further, they reveal how his legend contributes to the formation of familial, civic, and political identities in the late medieval period.
Guy's position as acknowledged English hero is demonstrated by the appearance of episodes from his career in a number of mid-fourteenth-century English manuscripts. To judge from these surviving examples Guy found relatively early pictorial form in a variety of linguistic and generic contexts. Of these the most technically proficient, and probably the earliest, appears in a copy of Peter Langtoft's French verse Chronique d'Angleterre produced between 1307 and 1327 (British Library, MS Royal 20. A. II). As a history of the English peoples Langtoft's work hardly emerges from the shadows of its authorities – Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and others – though it does provide an important contemporary witness of most of the reign of Edward I. This range and topicality accounts for its general popularity, and for its use in the late 1330s as a primary source for Robert Mannyng's English chronicle Brut.
3 - Guy of Warwick as a Translation
-
- By Ivana Djordjevic, Assistant Professor in the Liberal Arts College at Concordia University, Montreal.
- With contributions by Marianne Ailes , Helen Cooper , Ivana Djordjevic , Martha W. Driver , Sian Echard , A. S. G. Edwards , David Griffith , Andrew King , Robert Rouse and Judith Weiss
- Edited by Rosalind Field, Rosalind Field was formerly Reader in Medieval Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. [Retired], Alison Wiggins, Alison Wiggins is Lecturer in English Language at the University of Glasgow.
-
- Book:
- Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 24 October 2017
- Print publication:
- 19 July 2007, pp 27-43
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Many Middle English romances are translations of earlier Anglo-Norman or in some cases continental French narratives. While the use of the word ‘translation’ to describe some of them has been contested, few would deny that Guy of Warwick is indeed a translation, so closely does it follow its Anglo-Norman source. And yet, to say that the Middle English Guy of Warwick is a translation of the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic is to beg at least three questions at once. What do we mean by ‘the Middle English Guy of Warwick’? What do we mean by ‘the Anglo-Norman Gui de Warewic’? And what do we mean by ‘translation’? Let me begin by addressing this last question.
Much has been written in recent years about the nature of medieval translation. In a move that may at first sight appear paradoxical, emphasis on its uniqueness, its difference from translation as we now understand it, has made it possible to argue for the inclusion of medieval translation practices in the transhistorical category of ‘translation’. To look at Guy of Warwick as a translation can help highlight and problematize the opposite aspect of medieval translation: its frequent indistinguishability from many other medieval literary processes. In what is still the most influential study of the insular romance tradition, Susan Crane concedes that the romances of Sir Beues of Hamtoun and Guy of Warwick are ‘so closely related to Anglo-Norman versions that some critics have treated them as translations’. Yet Crane herself is reluctant to think of the different versions of such stories as products of any kind of ‘textual revision’ because ‘no English manuscript translates an extant Anglo- Norman manuscript, so that their differences cannot be considered evidence of direct poetic reworking’. Although Crane is more interested in differences between texts, whereas I will be looking for similarities, her comment pinpoints an important reason why the study of medieval translation is often a very frustrating undertaking and why, more specifically, the answers to my first two questions are not at all simple. It must be said, however, that if we cannot establish direct transmission between entire manuscripts we can do this for individual passages, sometimes of considerable length.