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This thesis investigates the prosody of Middle English and how the rhythmic structures of the language are manifested in metrical verse. I examine how tension is created through the matching or mis-matching of lexical stress with the expected metrical template and test an analysis proposed here to empirically measure different degrees of tension in verse. The analysis is applied to four selected tales from the Hengwrt manuscript of Chaucer's Canterburry Tales, as well as to selections of verse with known metrical structures from later periods of English in order to corroborate the analysis results with a series of control samples. The aim is to examine the metrical structure of Chaucer's verse in relation to how sequences Of lexically stressed syllables, syllable sequences based on the stress patterns in polysyllabic words, tit between the metrical boundaries of line beginnings and line ends. I ask if there is a correlation between the best-fit of lexical stress sequences and what has been established about the poem's metrical structure without violating that structure. It is this degree of correlation that gives a measure of metrical tension. The methodology developed for this analysis involves identifying the etymological origin and, in turn, the lexical stress pattern of each word in the text, then substituting the resulting lexis with either etymological or stress markers. This allows both the lexical stress and etymological patterns to be mapped throughout the text. After the words in the texts were substituted with their corresponding markers, a sub-corpus of purely Germanic lines, in which lexical stress is marc stable in late Middle English, is identified and analysed for comparison alongside the complete texts. 10 addition to the lexical stress test, a test is carried out on the lines after the stress substitution, confirming the degree to which they had a predominantly iambic rhythm. The results from the etymological analysis are striking. The etymological analysis shows that the placement of Latinate words is greatest at line-final and pre-caesural positions, and that that there are correlative concentrations of Germanic vocabulary at line-initial and post-caesural positions. The mirroring of Latinate and Germanic concentrations of vocabulary at caesural positions gives additional evidence to support the metrical role of caesura I marks within the Hengwrt manuscript, despite the fact that the marks were added by a later hand. The results of the analysis provide clear evidence for the existence of caesura in verse. The results of the stress analysis arc more problematic. On closer examination, the methodology for identifying label ling mismatches across the lines suffered from a lack of specificity. The analysis showed a slight preference for s-initial stress feet which could be used to indicate a degree of tension or counterpoint in verse. The results arc made more meaningful by associating specific mismatches with specific positions in the lines. In light of this, several suggestions were made on how the analysis could be improved and used to identify bracketing mismatches across the lines. The modified analysis will allow us to objectively quantify the tensions that arise between the interaction of trochaic and iambic lexical patterns and the metrical template of a given text. The approach developed in this thesis, j believe, brings us closer to answering the question to what degree has a poet developed metrical tension in his or her verse, and how has that tension been manifested while at the same time fulfilling metrical expectations.

This thesis explores the ways in which landscape is used, in texts from the English Middle Ages, in order to guide the response of the audience. It begins with an examination of the ways in which landscape was viewed more widely in the medieval period, especially the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, tracing literary theories derived from study of the Bible and arguing that these theories were likely to have been carried across into reading secular texts. I also examine some of the Biblical and classical archetypes that shaped literary understanding of particular landscape features.

This dissertation systematically evaluates the historicity of the epic poem The Bruce, written towards the end of the fourteenth century and attributed to Archdeacon John Barbour of Aberdeen. For the purposes of analysis, the poem has been divided into 119 discrete episodes, which cover 95 percent of the text. Ninety-one of these appear in other historical sources. A rigorous evaluative methodology establishes a satisfactory level of historicity of these 91 episodes, significantly higher than has been allowed by many critics of the poem. The 28 episodes that do not appear in other sources are assessed by a parallel methodology. The analyses of these two types of episode provide an original rationale for judiciously using The Bruce as a sole source. Using the battle of Bannockburn as a case study, the value of The Bruce as a source is clearly demonstrated. By implication, it may also be regarded as an indispensable source for the 1306-1329 period as a whole. However, a textual analysis of the poem indicates that at least four, and perhaps as many as six, hands were at work in the writing of The Bruce. It is suggested that John Barbour may have been the lead author and editor. The dissertation concludes that The Bruce was written as a historically accurate (insofar as the term was understood in the fourteenth century) account of the part Robert I and his lieutenants played in the War of Independence. It is nationalistic in tone. Its core ideologies are chivalry and freedom of the Scots from English domination. It uses literary devices to make the content accessible, persuasive and memorable. Thus, it may also be regarded as a fundamentally important contribution to Scottish literature.

This thesis examines the poetics and politics of ‘olde bokes’ (Legend of Good Women, G, 25) in selected works by Chaucer and Gower, paying particular attention to the way in which both writers appropriate their sources and the theories of history and political ideas informing these appropriations. It argues that Chaucer eschews metanarratives in his appropriations of the past and its writings, emphasising the multiplicity of voices that are contained in written discourse across time. In contrast, Gower, while acknowledging the presence of multiple voices, appropriates the writings of the past in an attempt to arrive at a harmonised poetic voice of his own. These poetics of the past result in different politics of the present in both writers’ works. While Gower’s politics are generally nostalgic and conservative, Chaucer is apolitical and primarily interested in the processes of political discourse. In this respect, Gower is a writer who strives to make sense of history and tradition and formulate poignant political statements in the face of contemporary struggles, whereas Chaucer does not offer unambiguous statements, but rather creates a multi-facetted poetic voice that highlights the reasons why such statements are impossible to achieve in the face of discursive heterogeneity.

This thesis examines the production of the Middle English poetic manuscript. It analyses the mise-en-page of manuscripts created during a crucial period for book production, immediately after 1400, when there was a sudden explosion in the production of vernacular manuscripts of literary texts, when the demand for books increased, and the commercial book trade swiftly followed. It offers a close analysis of the mise-en-page of the manuscripts of three central authors: Chaucer’s, Gower’s, and Hoccleve’s manuscripts were at the heart of this sudden flourishing and were, crucially, produced when scribal methods for creating the literary page were still unformed. Previous studies have focused on the localised readings produced by single scribes, manuscripts, or authors, offering a limited examination of broader trends. This study offers a wider comparison: where individual studies offer localised analysis, the multi-textuality of this thesis offers broader perceptions of book production and of scribal responses to the new literary texts being produced. In analysing the layout of seventy-six manuscripts, including borders, initials, paraphs, rubrics, running titles, speaker markers, glosses and notes, this thesis argues that scribes were deeply concerned with creating a manuscript page specifically to showcase texts of poetry. The introduction outlines current scholarship on mise-en-page and defines the scribe as one who offers an individual response to the text on the page within the context of the inherited, commercial, and practical practices of layout. The three analytical chapters address the placement of the features of mise-en-page in each of the seventy-six manuscripts, each chapter offering three contrasting manuscript situations. Chapter 1 analyses the manuscripts of Chaucer, who left no plan for the look of his page, causing scribes to make decisions on layout that illuminate fifteenth-century scribal responses to literature. These are then compared to the manuscripts of Gower in Chapter 2, directly or indirectly supervised by the poet, which display rigorous uniformity in their layout. This chapter argues that scribes responded in much the same way, despite the strict control over meaning. Chapter 3 focuses on Hoccleve’s autograph manuscripts which are unique in demonstrating authorial control over layout. This chapter compares the autograph to the non-autograph manuscripts to argue that scribal responses differed from authorial intentions. Each of the three chapters analyses the development of mise-en-page specifically for literary texts. Focussing on the mise-en-page, this thesis is able to compare across a range of texts, manuscripts, scribes, and authors to mount a substantial challenge to current perceptions that poetic manuscripts were laid out in order to assist readers’ understanding of the meaning of the texts they contain. Instead, it argues that though there was a concern with representing the nuances of poetic meaning, often scribal responses to poetry were bound up with presenting poetic form.

This thesis places Chaucer within the tradition of philosophical poetry that begins in Plato and extends through classical and medieval Latin culture. In this Platonic tradition, poetry is a self-reflexive epistemological practice that interrogates the conditions of art in general. As such, poetry as metapoetics takes itself as its own object of inquiry in order to reinforce and generate its own definitions without regard to extrinsic considerations. It attempts to create a poetic-knowledge proper instead of one that is dependant on other modes for meaning. The particular manner in which this is expressed is according to the idea of the loss of the Golden Age. In the Augustinian context of Chaucer’s poetry, language, in its literal and historical signifying functions is an effect of the noetic fall and a deformation of an earlier symbolism. The Chaucerian poems this thesis considers concern themselves with the solution to a historical literary lament for language’s fall, a solution that suggests that the instability in language can be overcome with reference to what has been lost in language. The chapters are organized to reflect the medieval Neoplatonic ascensus. The first chapter concerns the Pardoner’s Old Man and his relationship to the literary history of Tithonus in which the renewing of youth is ironically promoted in order to perpetually delay eternity and make the current world co-eternal to the coming world. In the Miller’s Tale, more aggressive narrative strategies deploy the machinery of atheism in order to make a god-less universe the sufficient grounds for the transformation of a fallen and contingent world into the only world whatsoever. The Manciple’s Tale’s opposite strategy leaves the world intact in its current state and instead makes divine beings human. Phoebus expatriates to earth and attempts to co-mingle it with heaven in order to unify art and history into a single monistic experience. Finally, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale acts as ars poetica for the entire Chaucerian Performance and undercuts the naturalistic strategies of the first three poems by a long experiment in the philosophical conflict between art and history. By imagining art and history as epistemologically antagonistic it attempts to subdue in a definitive manner poetic strategies that would imagine human history as the necessary knowledge-condition for poetic language.