22 results in Medieval Romance and Material Culture
4 - Devotional Objects, Saracen Spaces and Miracles in Two Matter of France Romances
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- By Siobhain Bly Calkin, Carleton University
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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- Medieval Romance and Material Culture
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- 16 April 2015, pp 59-74
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Summary
Caroline Walker Bynum argues in Christian Materiality that the period between 1100 and 1550 is marked by a ‘prominence of holy matter’ in western Christian devotion. ‘Issues of how matter behaved, both ordinarily and miraculously, when in contact with an infinitely powerful and ultimately unknowable God were key to devotion and theology’, she states, and these issues frequently manifested themselves as debates surrounding devotional objects. In late-medieval England, one of the cultural debates that erupted most violently was that surrounding images and relics. Firmly enshrined in orthodox theology and ritual, these devotional objects came under attack from Wycliffite writers who railed against ‘veyn pilgrimagis and offryngis to dede stones and rotun stokkis’. In her study of these debates in Middle English texts, Sarah Stanbury suggests that
If the theatrical display of ritual objects in a text provokes sharp emotional responses from its reader or from its characters, those reactions bespeak […] a response to the image debate out there in the world. They also describe a relationship to the […] physical spaces and cultural performances by which images were graphically and often strategically displayed.
This essay considers the ‘physical spaces’ and ‘cultural performances’ surrounding devotional objects in two Middle English Matter of France romances from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Specifically, it examines what happens when Christian devotional objects undergo translation into Saracen space. In The Sege of Melayne (London, BL Additional MS 31042, dated between 1430 and 1450), Saracen conquest of parts of Italy leads to the attempted destruction of Christian devotional images. In Sir Ferumbras (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 33, dated to the late fourteenth century, after 1377), the eponymous Saracen hero carries off the Crown of Thorns and the Crucifixion nails from Rome and entrusts them to his sister's keeping. In both cases, movement into Saracen space becomes an occasion for reflection on the material nature of the Christian object, on the manner in which it should be treated and understood, and on the ways in which this object can influence the Saracen and Christian communities with which it interacts.
8 - Ritual, Revenge and the Politics of Chess in Medieval Romance
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- By Megan G. Leitch, Cardiff University
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
In the Stanzaic Guy of Warwick, a prince and a sultan's son begin a game of chess in which the contest rapidly expands beyond the bounds of the chequered board: one strikes the other in the face with a chess piece, before being bludgeoned to death by the chessboard in turn. In William Caxton's The Foure Sonnes of Aymon, the game of chess similarly offers the material for revenge and sociopolitical rupture. Here, the French vassal Renaud is provoked by Charlemagne's nephew Berthelot during a chess match, and slays him with the chessboard—in this case, instigating a blood feud between Charlemagne and Renaud's family that lasts for years and sprawls across nearly six hundred pages in the EETS edition. In contrast to representations of chess elsewhere in romances and other medieval literature, this motif of homicide in high-stakes chess subverts a material and textual touchstone familiar to medieval readers. Medieval chess conventionally operates as a metaphor for social order, as expounded most fully in tracts in the Jacobus de Cessolis tradition, including William Caxton's The Game and Playe of the Chesse. Especially when read in connection with this literature of counsel and conduct surrounding chess, and alongside the startling woodcut at the beginning of Caxton's second (1483) edition of The Game and Playe of Chesse, the murderous chess episodes in romances such as the Stanzaic Guy and Caxton's Foure Sonnes offer a troubling political symbolism. This article will argue that romance deployments of the materials of chess to do violence or murder constitute a very material rupture of ritual, on multiple levels.
The normative symbolism of chess as an affirmation of political hierarchy and societal integration is demonstrated in the early fourteenth-century romance Richard Coer de Lyon. Between battles in the early, successful portion of his crusading campaign, Richard occupies himself with a game of chess:
Kynge Rycharde playe
At the chesse in his galaye;
The Erle of Rychemonde with hym played,
And Rychard wan al that he layed.
Abbreviations
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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10 - Reading King Robert of Sicily's Text(s) and Manuscript Context(s)
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- By Raluca L. Radulescu, Bangor University
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
The earliest known extant copies of the Middle English pious romance Roberd of Cisyle (henceforth Robert) survive in the compendious Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Eng. poet. a. 1) and its sister, the Simeon manuscript (London, British Library Additional MS 22283), both dated to around the last decade of the fourteenth century. Overall Robert is extant in ten manuscripts dated from the end of the fourteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. Its length in these witnesses ranges from 79 to 516 lines, with the ‘standard’ version being 444 lines (in Vernon and Simeon). The distribution of the extant manuscripts is broad geographically and linguistically, attesting to the popularity of this text in later medieval England. By the time the text was selected for inclusion in these manuscript books, however, the story had been popular for a long time. Its analogues are numerous and wide- spread in a number of languages and geographical areas across Europe. This is not surprising, given the exemplary nature of the story, focused on the fall of a king from power due to his excessive pride. It fulfils the expectations of a medieval audience that God will overthrow the mighty rulers of this world for their overweening pride.
Little or no attention, however, has been paid by modern scholars to the cultural significance of this text apart from its penitential and didactic features. It is commonly relegated to the category of ‘pious romances’ (on which see below) and its core message reduced to that of a lesson in humility intended for ‘Everyman’. Close scrutiny of the manuscript contexts in which Robert survives, including formal features, reveals that much can be gained by reading this text afresh and in the material contexts in which it survives. The examination of the material appearance of the text on the page reveals previously unexplored generic affiliations of manuscript versions of Robert, making a case for a combined secular and spiritual reading of the romance, rather than a purely didactic one, as has been the case in earlier studies.
1 - Introduction: The Materiality of Medieval Romance and The Erle of Tolous
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- By Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
The essays in this book explore how medieval romances respond to material culture, but also how romance itself helps to constitute and transmit that culture. In this introductory chapter I shall touch on how romances do this and why it might be important, but I should like to start with a very material example to provide a way of thinking about the theme of the collection.
Folio 2 recto of Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 45 is the title page for a copy of the romance The Erle of Tolous (plate I). The title ‘The Story of the Erle of Tolous’ is written at the top of the page in display script, with an elaborate strapwork initial letter ‘T’, characteristic of legal and government scribes in London in the 1520s to 1530s. The page in fact mimics the developing layout of title pages in contemporary printed books. Beneath the title is a finely drawn pen-and-ink presentation picture, in which a young man appears to hand a book to a lady. His speech scroll contains the words ‘PRENES : ENGRE’. Under the couple, the words ‘Maid Maria’ are presented as a pair of monograms. In a valuable essay investigating this manuscript's context and ownership, Carol Meale has discussed the picture's artistic milieu and likely circumstances of production. She dates this copy of The Erle of Tolous to the late 1520s, linking the style of the presentation picture to the influence of a family of Flemish artists, the Horenbouts, who were active in London in the 1520s. The romance's scribe includes his name, ‘Morganus’, in the decorated initial of the opening of the text on fol. 3r, and Meale convincingly links his ‘variety of legal anglicana’ to analogous administrative and legal documents of the period. What is striking for our purposes is the way in which the likely gift of this book, perhaps on the occasion of the engagement or marriage of a well-to-do, urban couple, immediately binds the reading of the romance into a material environment.
15 - The Victorian Afterlife of The Thornton Romances
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- By Nancy Mason Bradbury, Smith College
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
This essay takes its impetus from the thriving discipline of ‘book studies’ with its dual emphasis on the book as material object and as cultural force. Of the five ‘events’ in the life of a book defined in a foundational article by Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker—publication, manufacture, distribution, reception and survival—I limit my discussion to just two, publication and reception, in the life of The Thornton Romances, a volume edited by James Orchard Halliwell and published in London in 1844 by the Camden Society. While studies of the literary sources for Victorian medievalism most often focus on widely known works by Dante, Chaucer, Malory and Froissart, I hope to demonstrate that the four anonymous poems collected in The Thornton Romances played a surprisingly significant role in that medieval revival, despite the modest reputations today of Sir Perceval of Galles, Sir Isumbras, Sir Eglamour of Artois and Sir Degrevant.
‘The text’, Adams and Barker write, ‘is the reason for the cycle of the book’, and ‘publishing is the name we have given to the point of departure, the initial decision to multiply a text or image for distribution’. The decision to publish these four anonymous Middle English romances in one volume at this particular historical moment was made by the Council of the Camden Society, an organization founded in 1838 as one of numerous nineteenth-century learned societies devoted to securing publication for historically important books that no commercial publisher would undertake. The Society's stated object was ‘to perpetuate, and render accessible, whatever is valuable, but at present little known, amongst the materials for the Civil, Ecclesiastical, or Literary History of the United Kingdom’. Its members constitute a Who's Who of prominent mid-century figures, including Francis Egerton (later Earl of Ellesmere); Henry Hallam; Sir Robert Peel; the young John Ruskin; William John Thoms (later to found Notes ' Queries and coin the term folklore); Sir Frederic Madden (Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum); the scholar Sir Henry Ellis; the Bishop of Durham; the Archbishop of Canterbury; the Prince Consort; and the Queen as patron.
3 - Emplaced Reading, or Towards a Spatial Hermeneutic for Medieval Romance
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- By Robert Allen Rouse, University of British Columbia
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
Reading Spatially
To take a spatial approach to the study of medieval texts is to emphasize the importance of reading texts in place; a critical practice of context-driven interpretation which places an interpretive weight upon the geography of the place in which a text is consumed, producing what one might call an emplaced reading of a given text. This chapter is an experiment in just such a practice of reading: an attempt to reconstruct what a particular narrative may have meant to a community of readers in a particular place at a particular time. What I am interested in attempting here is to consider how the material context of a place might affect the reading of a text. How might the physical urban landscape of early fifteenth-century London provide a hermeneutic frame for understanding the urban reading contexts of the Middle English narratives of St Erkenwald, The Siege of Jerusalem, and Titus and Vespasian?
A Literary City: Writing London, Reading London
Just as the book was made by the city – using London's scribes, craftsmen, and inter-regional networks – so the city is made by the book.
In this chapter I examine late-medieval London, home of a burgeoning audience for Middle English popular literature, and a resonant site of anxieties surrounding geographically-defined notions of English identity. London is a complex site of identity negotiation within the developing national fantasy of Englishness: the porous nature of the cosmopolitan port-city as a liminal contact-zone, contaminated by contact with and the presence of the other in the form of merchants and other foreign contaminants, whether human or as material commodities. The problematic nature of the heterogeneous medieval city was such that civic authorities regularly sought to regulate the nature of the urban populace. Here I wish to interrogate the role that popular narrative may have played in the construction of a fantasy of a homogeneous urban Englishness in late-medieval London, both through acts of writing and through acts of reading.
14 - Romancing the Orient: The Roman d'Alexandre and Marco Polo's Livre du grand Khan in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodl. 264
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- By Mark Cruse, Arizona State University
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
The oldest textual tradition of Marco Polo's account of his travels in Asia between 1271 and 1295 survives in nineteen Old French manuscripts or fragments copied between the early fourteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. Twelve copies—eighty percent of those whose original contents are known – are compilations, and across these twelve manuscripts a total of twenty other texts accompanies Polo's account. Striking for their variety, these cotexts encompass numerous genres (a crusade chronicle, a roman d'antiquité, first-person travel accounts), historical periods (biblical and Greco-Roman antiquity, the 1320s) and personages (Alexander the Great, Franciscan monks, Prester John). Equally noteworthy are the extensive illustrational programs of Polo's account and its co-texts. Out of the surviving nineteen manuscripts eight possess miniatures, among which are three of the most sumptuously illuminated manuscripts of the entire Middle Ages.
These manuscripts are significant because they allow us to see Marco Po - lo's account as his earliest readers saw it. They suggest that Polo's account was not an authoritative and transparent text for these early readers, but rather was strange and problematic. Although copies were owned by some of the most powerful figures in medieval Europe, including Kings Philippe VI and Charles V of France, the addition of other works on Asia and of images to the Polo text indicates that it incited comparison and visualization to aid its interpretation. The reasons for this supplementary material are clear when one compares Polo's account to other medieval texts on the East. Unlike previous writers of antiquity and the Middle Ages who treated the East, Polo largely eschewed the fantastic, described places no other European had seen or mentioned, and spoke glowingly of non-Christian peoples, especially the Mongols. Polo's vision of the East was unprecedented for European readers, who therefore sought to compare it to other accounts so as to gauge its veracity and authority.
12 - The Image of the Knightly Harper: Symbolism and Resonance
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- By Morgan Dickson, Université de Picardie Jules Verne
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
This essay explores the symbolism and material contexts of a number of knightly figures who play the harp in twelfth-century Insular texts. Tristan is perhaps the best known of the harpers, and Horn is close at his heels, followed by the more problematic Hereward. The texts in which these figures appear differ significantly in form, and they find striking parallels in other twelfth-century works, including chronicles and saints’ lives. Both Horn and Tristan either harp or refer to their harping in the course of their narratives and this particular attribute of the hero, reinforced by the stories of historic harpers who appear in other contemporary texts, emphasizes an aspect of the characters’ heroism that somehow sets them apart and becomes integral to their identities; in the case of Tristan, the iconography of the hero harping serves to identify him outside his literary context, as would a saint's emblem. The hero is presented with a material attribute that goes beyond those of his contemporaries and that both elevates and enhances him. The symbolism and significance of harping define certain aspects of this nexus of characters whose identities are bound to one another through the instrument they play and with which one of them is portrayed in visual art. These images evoke diverse literary and material contexts and reflect the varied nature of the Insular sources on which Anglo-Norman authors drew: the stories examined here look both to Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions, as well as to Biblical imagery.
Tristan harps in several different contexts in the early texts in which he appears. Three of these contexts were emblematic enough to have been preserved in a series of thirteenth-century floor tiles discovered at Chertsey Abbey in the nineteenth century. As Melissa Furrow has recently argued, the tiles would not serve to tell the story of Tristan, but rather to remind viewers of what they knew already.
Contents
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Index
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Frontmatter
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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6 - ‘Ladyes war at thare avowing’: The Female Gaze in Late-Medieval Scottish Romance
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- By Anna Caughey, University of Oxford
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
Throughout the canon of late-medieval Scottish secular writing, love and sex are frequently seen either as trivial distractions from the hero's main business of achieving military victory, or as an active threat to his wellbeing. This is apparent in texts ranging from the history epics The Bruce (c. 1375) and The Wallace (c. 1471–79), in which women and love endanger the heroes’ defence of the nation, to the 1460 Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour, in which Alexander's amorous adventures threaten his mission of conquest. In other Older Scots romances and romance-derived texts, the challenge of love is absent (as in Rauf Coilyear, c. 1475–1500) or, in the case of Gologras and Gawain (also c. 1475–1500), it is removed altogether, even when this involves making significant changes to the romance's French source material. Similar difficulties surrounding love and sex are seen in a number of fifteenth-century Northern English romances, such as the Gawain-romances’ depictions of monstrous brides, brutal relatives and sexuality as a cause of conflict between knights, or the use of adulterous sexual love as a site of rebuke for the characters’ moral failings.
Three Scottish texts depart from these trends. The 1438 Buik of Alexander, the late fifteenth-century Lancelot of the Laik and the sixteenth-century Clariodus are all translated from French sources, and draw upon their presentation of sexual love as a positive motivating force for the knights’ military actions. As Richard Kaeuper comments, this is of course a common pattern in French chivalric literature: ‘the mental—perhaps the glandular—link of sex and violence […] writ large’. However, the decision to maintain this link in the Scottish translations is a somewhat unusual one: as noted above, other contemporary Scottish translators and redactors, including Gilbert Hay and the Gologras-poet, instead choose to omit or drastically reduce their sources’ interests in the amatory.
List of Contributors
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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9 - Adventures in the Bob-and-Wheel Tradition: Narratives and Manuscripts
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- By Ad Putter, University of Bristol
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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- 16 April 2015, pp 147-164
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Summary
In his annotated bibliography English Versification, 1570–1980, Terry V.F. Brogan delivered a damning verdict on the discipline of Middle English:
In comparison with the study of OE verse, which is a discipline relatively coherent in its terms and its methods, our understanding of ME verse is far less advanced. One wonders why those departments charged with the study of the English language and its poetry have allowed this situation to persist […] Much work needs to be done. The study of ME verse may be as much as a century behind that of Old English.
Since this was written, certain areas of Middle English (I think especially of alliterative metre) are no longer so far behind, but it is surely still true that ‘[m]uch more work needs to be done’, perhaps especially by those of us working on Middle English romances, which present us with an impressive variety of verse forms. Leaving aside the more familiar forms—the rhyming couplets and tail-rhyme, each itself encompassing diverse species —we find the following:
• aaabab stanza (Octavian, Southern Version)
• abab stanza (e.g. Sowdon of Babylon, Apollonius of Tyre fragment)
• septenaries with medial and end rhyme (Ashmole Sir Ferumbras)
• abababab stanza (Stanzaic Morte Arthur and prologue to Thomas of Erceldoune)
• abababab+cbc stanza (Sir Tristrem) [+ indicates that the stanza ends in a wheel]
• abababab+cdddc stanza (e.g. Awntyrs off Arthure)
• alliterative long lines (e.g. Wars of Alexander, Alliterative Morte Arthure)
• stanza consisting of alliterative long lines+ababa (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)
• the rhyme-royal stanza (e.g. Generides, Trinity College Cambridge MS)
In reality, the variety is greater still, for this is a simplified classification which largely ignores not only rhythmical distinctions but also variations of stanza forms within some of the romances mentioned. For example, the Ashmole Sir Ferumbras shifts from septenaries to tail-rhyme at line 3411, 4 and Sir Tristrem, as it stands in the Auchinleck manuscript, also has stanzas rhyming abababab+cac (stanzas beginning at lines 34, 67, 78, 244, 1178, 2168), along with various anomalous stanza forms which are probably scribal in origin.
2 - Courtly Culture and Emotional Intelligence in the Romance of Horn
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- By Rosalind Field, University of London
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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Summary
The Romance of Horn is widely admired as one of the most impressive Insular romances of the twelfth century, ‘a neglected masterpiece’, ‘an astonishing and unprecedented—and perhaps unmatched—achievement’. Despite its quality and importance, however, it has received comparatively little close attention. It is recognized as an important piece of evidence for our understanding of the wider political and cultural context within which Anglo-Norman romances were written—as in Laura Ashe's important chapter— and appears regularly in discussions of the Horn story across two vernaculars and three centuries. But remarkably few studies have given attention to the detailed fabric of Thomas's narrative and the focus on those areas it shares with the English language versions neglects its greatest strengths. Unlike the Middle English versions of the Horn story, the Romance of Horn is a lengthy work of some 5,200 lines, written in the long line laisse of French epic poetry. The leisured narrative is indicative of its courtly provenance and provides opportunity for generous elaboration of action and place unavailable in the briefer, sharper, English language versions. This paper looks specifically at the areas of the poem where Thomas has provided rich details of courtly life, its material culture, and, it will be argued, its range of emotional behaviour.
Dated fairly confidently to around 1170, and credibly placed in the Dublin celebrations of Henry II's visit to the Anglo-Norman colony in Ireland in 1171–2, its context is further confirmed by the courtly nature of the romance itself. Long, richly detailed and self-consciously crafted by a named poet, Thomas, it demonstrates knowledge of fashionable contemporary literature— the chansons de geste, the romans antiques, Wace, the Tristan story. There are other aspects of its courtly nature which are important if not so immediately evident: a certain type of insider humour, a realistic rather than deferential attitude to courtly life and behaviour, an ability to analyse and at times criticize the society and social mores it describes.
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- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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- Book:
- Medieval Romance and Material Culture
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 05 May 2015
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- 16 April 2015, pp vii-x
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5 - The Werewolf of Wicklow: Shapeshifting and Colonial Identity in the Lai de Melion
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- By Neil Cartlidge, Durham University
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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- Book:
- Medieval Romance and Material Culture
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 05 May 2015
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- 16 April 2015, pp 75-90
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Summary
This essay is an analysis of the implied cultural geography of the Lai de Melion, an anonymous Old French narrative lay now extant only in a thirteenth-century manuscript in the Bibliothèque d'Arsenal in Paris. What is argued here is that the Irish landscape in which Melion's adventures are set is actually much more solidly and precisely imagined than is generally assumed; and that the complexity of the particular political and ethnic identities associated with this landscape is visibly figured in the bodily metamorphoses of the werewolf who is the Lai's eponymous protagonist.
Initially at least, this is not a text that would seem to encourage such an approach. In its first few lines, the action is located (both temporally and geo - graphically) only in terms that are conspicuously vague. The poet refers simply to ‘the time when King Arthur reigned’ (‘Al tans que rois Artus regnoit’ (1)); and describes him blandly as ‘he who conquered lands’ (‘cil ki les terres conqueroit’ (2)), without even saying what those lands were. Melion himself also seems like an appropriately conventional inhabitant for so colourlessly generic a setting. He is introduced as a knight who is both ‘courtly and noble’ (‘cortois et prous’ (7)) and universally popular (‘amer se faisoit a tos’ (8)). Then one day the knights in Arthur's household decide to hold some sort of chivalric competition in which each of them chooses to make a vow of some kind. The vow that Melion decides to make is a particularly extravagant one: he swears not to love any woman who has ever before loved any another man, or even ever before spoken of any other man (13–22). Not surprisingly, this rather presumptuous undertaking fails to win him any approval from the women of King Arthur's court. Indeed, they are said to hate him for it (‘Molt durement l'en enhaïrent’ (28)), with the result that Melion becomes downcast (37–42), and the king attempts to console him for this by giving him a fine estate by the sea (‘sor cele mer’, (55)).
13 - Carving the Folie Tristan: Ivory Caskets as Material Evidence of Textual History
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- By Henrike Manuwald, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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- Book:
- Medieval Romance and Material Culture
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- Boydell & Brewer
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- 05 May 2015
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- 16 April 2015, pp 215-232
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Secular carved ivories complement manuscripts in so far as they too testify to the overall ‘life’ of stories in the Middle Ages. In particular, the close connection between ivories and romance has been widely discussed. Nonetheless, the relationship between word and image remains opaque. Even if an ivory can be clearly associated with a specific story, there is still the epistemological problem that the modern viewer is dependent on its written transmission in order to identify the story. The medieval viewer, by contrast, may have known variants of the story (circulating in written or oral form) that are now lost—and the same goes for the person who conceived the original scene (or scenes). While this person may have started out from a verbal manifestation of the story, the ivory is a unique and individual articulation, in its choice of episodes, style of depiction and, sometimes, combinations with scenes from other stories. However, just as the narratives contained in individual manuscripts may either be read on their own terms or as representatives of a wider textual version, so pictorial narratives—for all their specific, individual features—may also be understood to represent a particular version of the story (defined as a sub-group of variants linked by their similarity).
The premise that ivory caskets may be viewed on a par with manuscript texts as manifestations of a particular version of a story has the advantage of encouraging a combined assessment of the material evidence provided by related written and pictorial narratives, whilst still allowing for the fundamental differences between text and image as media. This article will seek to demonstrate the fruitfulness of this approach by considering the relationship between the Folies Tristan and two fourteenth-century ivory caskets depicting Tristan as a fool. The first of these caskets is now in the Musée de Cluny— Musée national du Moyen Âge—in Paris; the second is in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Neither has yet received much scholarly attention.
11 - The Circulation of Romances from England in Late-Medieval Ireland
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- By Aisling Byrne, University of Oxford
- Edited by Nicholas Perkins, University Lecturer and Tutor in medieval English, University of Oxford
- With contributions by Siobhain Bly Calkin , Nancy Mason Bradbury , Aisling Byrne , Anna Caughey , Neil Cartlidge , Mark Cruse , Morgan Dickson , Rosalind Field , Elliott Kendall , Megan Leitch , Henrike Manuwald , Ad Putter , Raluca Radulescu and Robert Rouse
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- Book:
- Medieval Romance and Material Culture
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- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 05 May 2015
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- 16 April 2015, pp 183-198
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Summary
The fifteenth century saw a striking upturn in the number of texts from foreign vernaculars that were translated into Irish. Indeed, one might go so far as to speak in terms of a ‘translation trend’ in Ireland during the mid- to late fifteenth century. A notable feature of this trend is that a particularly high number of these Irish translations are of romances; contextual and textual evidence suggests that the original exemplars for many of these translated texts appear to have come from England, though not all of them were necessarily in English. Irish translations of eight romances have survived to the present day: Guy of Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; La Queste de Saint Graal; Fierabras; Caxton's Recuyell of the Histories of Troie; William of Palerne; the Seven Sages of Rome; and Octavian. The last three all survive in manuscripts of the seventeenth century, but the Seven Sages and William almost certainly go back to the fifteenth or early sixteenth century respectively, while Octavian, though its scholarly neglect has been rather more total than that of the other texts, seems likely to date from the same period. Two of these texts, Fierabras and the Seven Sages of Rome, also survive in late-medieval Latin versions in an Irish manuscript. This copy of Fierabras represents the only known version of that narrative in Latin and appears in turn to have been translated from the French chanson de geste.
The translation of texts from foreign vernaculars in late-medieval Ireland has received little in the way of concerted scholarly examination. The most complete overviews of the fifteenth-century translations still remain the short preliminary accounts by Robin Flower and James Carney. These Irish adaptations have a pronounced tendency to fall into the cracks between disciplines: they have often been overlooked by Celticists because they are not part of the ‘native’ corpus and they also remain untapped by medievalists in other areas, presumably because they are not clearly part of their own fields and, perhaps, because of the forbidding linguistic barrier of medieval Irish.