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This study of Plays 26-36 of the York Cycle (The Conspiracy to the Death and Burial) establishes the following: 1. These dramatisations adhere closely to the Gospel accounts of Christ's Passion; additionally there is distinct evidence in some plays of dependence upon other works. In the case of one poem, The Northern Passion, this is found to be less than had been previously claimed. These materials have been interpreted and shaped into dramatic form, often reworking an earlier version of the same subject, with such modifications and additions as are described. 2. The only surviving manuscript is a compilation made 1430-40 of plays with different textual histories. Some are unmodified, complete compositions, in some cases replacing earlier plays; yet others, far from indicating a poet's preference for experimentation with different metres and stanza forms as has been previously supposed, are a patchwork of modification, interpolation and revision. 3. Certain plays display the distinctive metrical features of alliterative poetry as defined, particularly that form in rhyming stanzas which flourished in the North of England from c.1350. Thus the plays continue and also modify certain Old English metrical practices. The number and distribution of the unstressed syllables in the line is not completely undetermined as has been sometimes maintained, but is fixed in a high proportion of lines in rhythmical types of different syntactical structure. 4. Other plays present very different metrical features, the line having a fixed number of syllables and a basically iambic rhythm; two plays have such similar metrical characteristics as to be the work of the same author. One play successfully combines elements of both metrical styles. 5. There is no evidence in these plays that the York and Towneley cycles were at one time identical, as has been claimed, although in certain cases (notably Play 34) Towneley clearly depends upon York.

St. Patrick's Purgatory is today a pilgrimage centre on Station Island in Lough Derg, County Donegal, Ireland. From the late twelfth to fifteenth centuries the site was one of the most famous pilgrimage centres in Western Europe. Its popularity was spread principally through transmission of a late twelfth century Latin work, the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii, by a Cistercian monk usually known as Henry of Saltrey, or Sawtry in Huntingdonshire. This work tells of the founding of the Purgatory by St. Patrick. During his conversion of the pagan Irish, Patrick prayed to Christ for assistance, and the Purgatory was revealed to him as a physical entrance to the otherworld. Pilgrims spending a day and a night in the 'cave' of the Purgatory would pass bodily through purgatory, and if firm of faith, would also enter the Earthly Paradise. Provided that no unshriven mortal sins were subsequently committed, such a sojourn was deemed sufficient penance to exempt the pilgrim from purgatory after death. The Tractatus also tells of the visit to the Purgatory by an Irish knight, Owayne. His experiences were reported to Henry of Saltrey by another Cistercian monk, Gilbert, former abbot of Basingwerk, Flintshire. In various versions this Tractatus was widely copied throughout Europe, and translated into most Western European vernaculars from Dutch and Spanish to Norwegian. Pilgrims from as far afield as Italy and Hungary have, amongst others, left reports of their visits to the Purgatory, nearly all drawing to a greater or lesser degree on Henry of Saltrey's Tractatus. Six Middle English verse versions were made of Owayne's adventures in the Purgatory. [continued in text ...]

This is a study of the multiple constructions and appropriations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s paternitas of the English literary canon. It examines the evidence from the compilatio and ordinatio of fifteenth-century manuscript anthologies containing the poet’s works, and it interrogates the social conditions of production of these codices, as well as the ideology informing their compositional and paratextual programmes. Conceptually, my thesis is underpinned by a broad engagement with manuscript studies, as the codices to which I attend become objects of bibliographical and codicological examination, while being scrutinised through a post-structuralist framework. This theoretical approach, which comprises Michel Foucault’s revisions o f historiography and the contiguous debates on translation practices and queer theories, allows me to read critically the socio-cultural situations which inform the plural incarnations and appropriations of Chaucer's paternal authority. My study is structured in four chapters. I begin in Chapter I by engaging with Thomas Hoccleve's literary and iconographic mythopoeia o f Chaucer who is positioned as the clerical and sober fons et origo of English vemacularity. In Chapter III interrogate the appropriations of this initial paradigm of paternal authorship and I demonstrate how fifteenth-century manuscript collections fabricate Chaucer as a courtly and lyrical Father whose work is validated by his affiliations to and reproduction of dominant aristocratic literary practices. Chapter III situates these hegemonic modes of composition and mise-en-page in the context of French manuscript culture with which Chaucer's patemality of the English canon is inextricably intertwined. These associations with the ‘master’ culture, however, disperse the Father's authority in an intervemacular site of linguistic and cultural negotiations. Similarly, Chapter IV engages with the displacement of Chaucer's paternitas in the material space of the codex, as the glossarial apparatus of the manuscript copies of his works articulates voices of dissent. No longer the stable patriarch constructed by Hoccleve, Chaucer occupies a fluid and permeable space of authority that can be inhabited by a polyvocality of hermeneutic voices and is, therefore, susceptible to perpetual acts of co-option.

In this edition of the British Museum manuscript Cotton Vitellius C.V., I have attempted to give a faithful reproduction of the MS. exactly as it stands. The MS. was damaged in the fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, and is now defective. The edges of the pages are charred; in some places they are only partly legible. I have transcribed all that I have been able to read: where part of a letter is all that remains, I have given the entire letter where possible, although in many words it is extremely difficult to say what the original reading might have been. The MS. has been typed page by page, so that the presentation here is as near the original as possible. The only alteration in the text is the placing of the heading of each homily in a central position above the text. Each homily, moreover, begins on a new page, although there is no such break in the MS. I have set the beginning of each homily at approximately the position it occupies in the MS. arrangement.

Books III and Iv of Spenser's Faerie Queene construct an intricate philosophy of love involving the association of feminine with matter and masculine with form, or spirit. As a Christian, Spenser recognized the polarization of spirit and flesh and sought to sanctify human love by arguing that the marriage of man and woman represents a reformation of the polarities of divided human nature: indeed, that man and women bring spiritual and material gifts, respectively, to one another. Women provide material generation and a lineage which is eternal through change. Men add spiritual and intellectual purpose which transcends both flesh and time.

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This thesis proposes that the character of Grendel’s mother in Beowulf is a manifestation of a mythic type, derived from studies of European goddess figures and named here as the Woman in the Water. This myth takes the form of an inherent association between femininity and water, and connotes the binary oppositions of birth and death, creativity and destruction, and the overarching themes of chaos and transience. By examining the imagery in Beowulf and its contemporary literature, this thesis studies the figure of Grendel’s mother in the context of this myth, looking at how the nature of motherhood and the element of water combine to form a powerful symbolic image emblematising the transience of life. These images are interpreted within a psychoanalytical framework as well as a mythic contextual one, providing the myth with an analogue in the human subconscious; that of the abject mother, a figure which represents the inevitable return of life to the void of the womb. The thesis concludes by demonstrating how the entire poem can be read with the character of Grendel’s mother and the battle against transience in mind, and how it complements the poem’s overall theme and structure.

This thesis investigates Lyly's ironic use of traditional images, character types, plot situations, and forms of expression to suggest that Euphues was conceived in a spirit of extravagance. Part One examines the irony in Lyly's drama. His technique is based upon the principle of contrast, the part always to be considered in the light of its context. The integration of the songs supports their claim to Lyly's authorship. Sometimes the play is 'framed' by pertinent prologue and epilogue, confirming the effect of context. Lyly's court comedies aroused and complimented Queen Elizabeth but also contained a hidden element of instruction and request. Part Two suggests that Euphues was an ironic exhibition of false wit, sophistry, and rhetorical artifice intended to test the reader's power to discriminate substance from style. Lyly remains uncommitted to the style and the attitudes of Euphues. Part Three offers further evidence of Lyly's subtlety in wording and his skill in other-statement. A tradition of ironic euphuism is traced through Gascoigne, Pettie, Lyly and Shakespeare. The conclusion summarises the motives of the ironist.