ENGL 3312 - Medieval Literature: Fabulous History and Cultural Fantasy in the Middle Ages: Monsters, Race, Nationhood - Aulakh

God and the Gawain-Poet

A fresh examination of the four poems of the Cotton manuscript, arguing that they share a profound theological vision. Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are accomplished examples of four different literary genres and represent some of the finest poetry in Middle English. They are, by turns, fast and funny, powerfully dramatic, gentle and ironic, telling of painful bereavement and the terror of victims of disaster and violence, as well as the comic bewilderment of people entangled in alarmingly mysterious situations. The anonymous poet's evident delight in the pleasures and artistry of courtly life has led some readers to suggest that he was a gifted but complacent frequenter of courts, his attention dedicated to the wealthy and his sympathies to the powerful, and moreover, that his poems pay the merest lip service to religious observance. God and the Gawain-poet argues that, on the contrary, the poet's wide-ranging engagement with all human life explicitly acknowledges all material creation as God's gift, revelling in its physicality, in bodily senses and movement and the ways a community celebrates itself. 

Medieval romance: the aesthetics of possibility

Illustration of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, from the late-fourteenth-century Pearl Manuscript (Cotton Nero A.x) in the British Library

Anonymous artist. The surviving manuscript is a copy., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Life in Words

This volume collects fifteen landmark essays published over the last three decades by the distinguished medievalist Jill Mann. Bringing together her essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and Malory, the collection foregrounds the common interest in the semantic implications of key vocabulary such as "authority," "adventure," and "price" that links them together. Mann, one of the finest critics of Middle English literature in her generation, uses the concepts suggested by the language of medieval literature itself as a way into the masterpieces of Middle English, including The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Morte Darthur. An extended introduction by Mark Rasmussen brings out the nature of the themes that run through the collection, analyses the critical methods in play, and assesses their significance in the context of Middle English studies over the last thirty years.

Illumination of a 15th-century manuscript of Historia Regum Britanniae showing king of the Britons Vortigern and Ambros watching the fight between two dragons.

See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Lyric Poetry

This is the first comprehensive and comparative study of compositional and stylistic techniques in medieval Arabic and Persian lyric poetry. Ranging over some seven countries, it deals with works by over thirty poets in the Islamic world from Spain to present-day Afghanistan, and examines how this rich poetic traditions exhibits both continuity and development in the use of a wide variety of compositional strategies. Discussing such topics as principles of structural organisation, the use of rhetorical figures, metaphor and images, and providing detailed analyses of a large number of poetic texts, it shows how structural and semantic features interacted to bring coherence and meaning to the individual poem. It also examines works by the indigenous critics of poetry in both Arabic and Persian, and demonstrates the critics' awareness of, and interest in, the techniques which poets employed to construct poems which were both eloquent and meaningful. Comparisons are also made with classical and medieval poetics in the west. 

First page of The Knight's Tale from the Ellesmere manuscript of Canterbury Tales

Text by Geoffrey Chaucer, illustrations by unknown artists (probably 3), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World

A cross-cultural study of magical phenomena in the Middle Ages.   Marvels like enchanted rings and sorcerers' stones were topics of fascination in the Middle Ages, not only in romance and travel literature but also in the period's philosophical writing. Rather than constructions of belief accepted only by simple-minded people, Michelle Karnes shows that these spectacular wonders were near impossibilities that demanded scrutiny and investigation.   This is the first book to analyze a diverse set of writings on such wonders, comparing texts from the Latin West--including those written in English, French, Italian, and Castilian Spanish --with those written in Arabic as it works toward a unifying theory of marvels across different disciplines and cultures. Karnes tells a story about the parallels between Arabic and Latin thought, reminding us that experiences of the strange and the unfamiliar travel across a range of genres, spanning geographical and conceptual space and offering an ideal vantage point from which to understand intercultural exchange. Karnes traverses this diverse archive, showing how imagination imbues marvels with their character and power, making them at once enigmatic, creative, and resonant. Skirting the distinction between the real and unreal, these marvels challenge readers to discover the highest capabilities of both nature and the human intellect. Karnes offers a rare comparative perspective and a new methodology to study a topic long recognized as central to medieval culture.

 Two pages from the Galland manuscript, the oldest text of The Thousand and One Nights. Arabic manuscript, ca the 14th century, Syria, in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris

See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons