Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing

This thesis analyses twelfth- and thirteenth-century French texts from a range of genres to demonstrate how the inter-relation of narrative and place is a catalyst for the production of vernacular literary works. Rooted in close criticism of the texts in question (the Roman d’Eneas, lives of the martyrs Christina of Tyre and Catherine of Alexandria, the Voyage de saint Brendan, lives of the ascetics Alexis and Mary of Egypt, and the Roman de Brut), this study examines the ways in which narration both generates and delimits place. In tandem with this it interrogates the representations of, and disturbances to, the spatial organization of these texts, encompassing such themes as empire-building, genealogy, travel and exile. This juxtaposition of diverse materials opens up mutually illuminating spaces, demonstrating the instability of the entrenched generic categories applied to them and prompting consideration of the ambiguous principles of medieval poetic craft. Hagiography is a particularly pertinent crossing-point for multiple thematic concerns, from the tension between revelation and concealment of the body to the relationship between a state and its citizens. Its location at the confluence of liturgy, lay spirituality and entertainment makes it an apt focus for a study such as this. The thesis also considers questions of cultural and political appropriation and re-appropriation of place, drawing on medieval writers’ and thinkers’ conflicted relationship with their classical antecedents and non-Christian ‘others’. The many and varied journeys undertaken in these texts, meanwhile, offer critical meeting points between practices of writing about place across a range of modes, and they invite consideration of the historical contexts for their production. Foremost in this study, however, is a concern with the ways in which medieval narratives reify story; through close attention to how narratives are produced, preserved and transmitted in these texts, I examine the ethics and efficacy of storytelling as a means for creating place. Whether they re-present foundation myths, the trials of saints, or the fantastical journeys of adventurers, these stories are both container and content for reflections on how authors can relate to their world, and it this sense of the two faces of narrative that underpins my interpretation of these texts and their representations of places and spaces.

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'Une aventure novele est en cele sale venue': dynamics of narrative, people and place in Old French literature

CHAUCER S TROILUS AND CR1SEYDE IN MALE HOMOSOCIAL CONTEXTS THE POLITICIZATION OF SAME-SEX DESIRE by Richard E. Zeikowitz Adviser: Professor Steven F. Kruger I explore the dynamics o f homosociality in late medieval culture, investigating both Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and its cultural and political environments. I articulate two conflicting attitudes toward male same-sex relations: one affirming and celebratory, the other homophobic. I conclude that Chaucer's poem both replicates and generates a late medieval sociocultural discourse characterized by tension between normative male same-sex behavior and the potential politicization o f such behavior. In the introductory chapter. I survey important recent historical and feminist criticism o f Troilus and Criseyde and situate my project within the current debate regarding definitions o f premodem sexuality. In chapter 2. part one. drawing on medieval concepts o f imagination and vision, as well as psychoanalytically-inflected film theory. I suggest that chivalric treatises, biographies, and romances invite novice knights/readers to call forth potentially homoerotic images o f model figures. I go on to examine eroticized male-male encounters in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Stanzaic Morte Arthur. In part two. I delineate the emotional intensity which informs male same-sex bonds in Amys and Amylion and the French Prose Lancelot by situating these texts within a biblical, classical, and medieval literary tradition that celebrates Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. homosocial intimacy. Chapter 3 examines politically-motivated depictions of male same-sex intimacy in important fourteenth-century historical texts. After exploring how testimonies from the trials o f the Knights Templar produce a narrative o f aggressive same-sex behavior. I demonstrate how the major chronicles o f the reigns o f Edward II and Richard II wage a politically-motivated attack on each king's relationship with his court favorites. I argue that the chroniclers were not attacking the idea o f close male friendships, but rather Edward's and Richard's choice o f intimate companions. Chapter 4 examines how Chaucer's poem exemplifies, complicates, and dramatizes key homosocial interactions illustrated or suggested in chivalric texts. Drawing on Freud, his feminist and queer interpreters, as well as Rene Girard's and Eve Sedgwick's theories o f triangulated desire. I articulate the interplay between homoeroticism and heterosexual desire. In chapter 5 ,1 argue that, by depicting Troilus and Pandarus as advisee and adviser, respectively. Troilus and Crisey de suggests the highly criticized relationship between Richard II and his court favorites. I then demonstrate how the text moves against Troilus and Pandarus" friendship. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde in Male Homosocial Contexts: The Politicization of Same-Sex Desire

This thesis applies an interarts approach to the Middle English dream visions, Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess (BD), The House of Fame (HF), The Parliament of Fowls (PF), James I of Scotland’s The Kingis Quair (KQ), and the anonymous Pearl. It considers the application and presentation in these poems of ideas relating to hearing and vision, and the arts which engage them, music and figurative art. The first chapter outlines relevant theoretical contexts of speculative and practical music: antique Neoplatonism (via Calcidius, Proclus, and Macrobius), Augustine, twelfth-century liberal arts treatises, and French attitudes toward musical composition, lyric narrative, and the proper expression of emotional truth. The second chapter follows with an analysis of music (including harmony, discord, noise, and vox) in BD, with an emphasis on meaningful sound and lyric composition; HF on the symbolism of corporeal speech; PF in relation to harmony, polyphony, and discordant concord; and concluding with the internalisation of harmony and triumph of artistic self-realisation in KQ. The second part of the thesis concerns vision and visual art, with a chapter on natural philosophical, theological, and mystical theories of bodily and mental vision, spiritual illumination, the comparison of nature and art, and the literary techniques of visualisation, enargeia and ekphrasis. These themes are elucidated with reference to Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia, Alan of Lille’s De planctu Naturae, and the Roman de la rose. The final main chapter examines creative recollection and the relationship between poetry and visual experience in BD; the instability of perception and visualisation of abstract process of motion and transformation of meaning in HF; and contemplation, symbolism, illumination, and Grosseteste’s theory of multiplication of species in Pearl.

'Y slepe, and myn herte wakith' : music and visual art in Middle English dream visions

Let us imagine Chaucer sitting at his desk in his house over Aldgate in front of his PC. It is 1379. On the screen is the poem he is currently working on, The House of Fame (1379–80).1 Behind this he has opened a number of windows, on which are copies of Latin, French, and Italian texts he has downloaded from the Internet, texts he intends to use as sources: Macrobius’s discussion of dream classification in his commentary on the Somnium Scipionis, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Ovid’s Heroides, Metamorphoses, and Ars amatoria. On Chaucer’s hard disk are yet more sources: commentaries on Ovid (the Ovide moralisé; Pierre Bersuire’s commentary); collections of quotations from the Bible; French love poetry by Machaut and Froissart; most of the Roman de la rose. Also on his hard disk are copies of texts in Middle English—though Chaucer chooses not to own up to using them.2 Piers Plowman (Bversion, ca. 1379)3 and the famous Auchinleck manuscript (National Library of Scotland, Advocates’ MS 19.2.1, ca. 1330–40), containing vernacular romances and religious verse.4 He has bookmarks to his fa-

Chaucer in Cyberspace: Medieval Technologies of Memory and The House of Fame

The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature

Scholars have discussed extensively the medieval French use of Narcissus and mirrors to figure love experience. However, the claim to be like Narcissus is often closely associated with a counter-claim to be unlike him. Focusing on Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, Bernart de Ventadorn’s ‘Can vei la lauzeta mover’, and Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la rose, I argue that this counter-claim is caught up in a larger process of affirmation. For a loving subject really to become like Narcissus requires both the establishment and the negation of such an identification. Examining this dual movement entails a reconceptualization of Narcissus.

'I Am Not He': Narcissus and Ironic Performativity in Medieval French Literature

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The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature

'I Am Not He': Narcissus and Ironic Performativity in Medieval French Literature