Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Map of the Irish Sea and Northern Sea Area c. 1000–1200 CE
- Preface
- Introduction: Manannán and His Neighbors
- 1 Hiberno-Manx Coins in the Irish Sea
- 2 Hunferth and Incitement in Beowulf
- 3 Cú Chulainn Unbound
- 4 Ragnhild Eiríksdóttir: Cross-cultural Sovereignty Motifs and Anti-feminist Rhetoric in Chapter 9 of Orkneyinga saga
- 5 Statius’ Dynamic Absence in the Narrative Frame of the Middle Irish Togail na Tebe
- 6 The Stanley Family and the Gawain Texts of the Percy Folio
- 7 Ancient Myths for the Modern Nation: Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf
- 8 Kohlberg Explains Cú Chulainn: Developing Moral Judgment from Bully to Boy Wonder to Brave Warrior
- 9 Language Death and Language Revival: Contrasting Manx and Texas German
- Index
6 - The Stanley Family and the Gawain Texts of the Percy Folio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Map of the Irish Sea and Northern Sea Area c. 1000–1200 CE
- Preface
- Introduction: Manannán and His Neighbors
- 1 Hiberno-Manx Coins in the Irish Sea
- 2 Hunferth and Incitement in Beowulf
- 3 Cú Chulainn Unbound
- 4 Ragnhild Eiríksdóttir: Cross-cultural Sovereignty Motifs and Anti-feminist Rhetoric in Chapter 9 of Orkneyinga saga
- 5 Statius’ Dynamic Absence in the Narrative Frame of the Middle Irish Togail na Tebe
- 6 The Stanley Family and the Gawain Texts of the Percy Folio
- 7 Ancient Myths for the Modern Nation: Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf
- 8 Kohlberg Explains Cú Chulainn: Developing Moral Judgment from Bully to Boy Wonder to Brave Warrior
- 9 Language Death and Language Revival: Contrasting Manx and Texas German
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Rhonda Knight intrepidly re-examines the connections between the Stanley family, sometimes known as the “Kings of Man” during the period of English domination, and what has been called a “farrago” of texts contained in the famous seventeenth-century manuscript known as the Percy Folio. The mysterious and disruptive outsider of medieval romance together with the marcher lord, a major player in the politics of late medieval and early modern Britain, come together in the Percy Folio to provide posterity with a picture, vividly presented in Knight's essay, of a turbulent and changing society.
Keywords: Gawain, Percy Folio, Stanley earls of Derby, kings of Man, discourse colony
The Percy Folio (British Library, Additional MS 27879) has been an enigma to several generations of literary scholars and historians. The inclusion of “Newarke,” a Royalist song referencing the 1644 siege of Newark-on-Trent, sets the manuscript's terminus a quo; the manuscript was probably compiled in the decade after that date. However, many of the other 194 separate items contained in the manuscript originated one or even two hundred years earlier. The manuscript derives its name from Bishop Thomas Percy, an antiquarian who discovered the manuscript when he was visiting Sir Humphrey Pitt in Shropshire (c. 1760). Pitt's maids were using the manuscript to start fires. Percy rescued most of the manuscript from becoming kindling, but the first twenty items in the manuscript are missing a half of each page because of the maids’ destruction. Because the texts are written on folio-sized paper instead of vellum, Percy usually referred to it as his “ancient folio manuscript”; thus, Percy's Folio became its de facto title. The Folio, written in a single hand in the Lancashire dialect, has only been printed in toto once, edited by John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall in 1867–68. Their prudish attitudes caused them to excise texts they judged lewd and place these in a subsequent volume, subtitled Loose and Humorous Songs. The order of the texts in the previous three volumes is otherwise unchanged. Percy called the manuscript “an infinite farrago of ancient Songs, Ballads, Metrical Romances, Legends in verse and poems of the low and popular kind.” An early commentator, Joseph Ritson, similarly calls the Percy Folio “a multifarious collection.”
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- Information
- The Medieval Cultures of the Irish Sea and the North SeaManannán and his Neighbors, pp. 123 - 142Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019