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In Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, King Arthur’s nephew, Sir Gawain, is presented as a troublesome figure whose vengefulness hastens the collapse of Camelot. This characterization is unsurprising in the light of traditional French depictions of Gawain, but it is distinctly at odds with a rival, Anglo-Scottish tradition that depicts him rather differently as a figure of moderation, wise counsel, and courtesy. Indeed, throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this version of Gawain was used by a number of romance writers to explore themes of kingship, identity, and regionalism in England and Scotland. This thesis attempts to explain the complexities and contradictions of Gawain’s role in the Middle English and Middle Scots tradition. Chapter one establishes a “northern Gawain type”, drawing on thematic patterns in four northern Gawain romances: The Weddyng of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, The Avowyng of Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle, and The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawain. Gawain’s popularity in the north, coupled with similarities in characterization and narrative focus, mark him as an important regional figure. This discussion continues in the second chapter, which examines The Awntyrs off Arthure, a poem specifically concerned with Arthurian kingship and imperialism. In Scotland, Gawain is used in romances to explore pertinent contemporary concerns with the recent loss of Scotland’s kings and attitudes towards English expansion. The third chapter considers Gawain’s role in two Scottish romances, particularly, The Knightly Tale of Golagros and Gawain and Lancelot of the Laik. The final two chapters examine Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. By exploring these narratives in the context of the “northern Gawain type,” these chapters offer new insights into Gawain’s literary significance for late medieval writers. This thesis offers a reconsideration of Gawain’s reputation in late medieval Middle English and Middle Scots literature. It suggests both why he was such a useful figure for the authors of the northern and Scottish romances and why Malory ultimately chose to reject their reading of him and followed instead the more critical and dismissive French tradition. The lasting legacy of Malory’s Gawain has influenced his reputation and representation in post-medieval Arthurian literature. Yet, his popularity in the north of England and Scotland during the late Middle Ages, and his symbolic significance in discussions of governance, make him a character deserving of rehabilitation in the pantheon of Arthurian knighthood.

While excellent scholarly work exists on medieval space, especially in cultural geography, no book-length study of the conceptual implications of medieval vertical space exists. Attention has been lavished on the surface of the medieval world, while the heights go unseen and the depths go unplumbed. Using theories of space by scholars such as Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Le Goff, this project explores this lacuna through close reading of three late medieval English texts. The emphasis within Christian theology on a vertically-oriented model of virtue and the afterlife (ascending to Heaven, falling to Hell) was likely the initial reason for the prominence of verticality in the Middle Ages; the work of religious writers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Walter Hilton set the stage for an explosion of the vertical imagination, as a blossoming of the incredible variety of what could be called "vertical thought." These ideas foreshadowed and accompanied similar developments in the secular arena, soon becoming an integral part of medieval life. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, closely interrelated--and strongly vertical--frameworks arose to structure complex concepts such as moral virtue, social class and kinship relations. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw several major developments in what can be called "vertical thought." The evolution of Augustinian ideas of religion and morality led to a nuanced vertical hierarchy of virtues and vices, while the rise of the middle class helped define the explicit division of class into vertical tiers. A shift in conceptions of kinship, from a synchronous network to a diachronic tree of ancestry, affected perceptions of gender and family. Finally, the growth of parliamentary and urban political capital in late medieval England, especially in response to the reign of child-king Henry VI, led to a battle of wills between the powerful men of London and their king. These concerns with verticality were not limited to the realms of religious belief or temporal power, but manifested themselves in medieval literature and iconography as well. Highness and lowness feature in the plots, characters, and settings of many texts, and tropes of height and depth and rising and falling make frequent appearances textually and visually. Depictions of Heaven and Hell, for example, frequently make use of height and depth, and instances such as the Virgin Mary's ascension to Heaven or Lucifer's fall from Heaven to Hell involve explicitly vertical movement which parallels the perceived virtue of said figures. The Jesse tree, a genealogy of Christ, is usually illustrated as a tree emerging from a recumbent man's body, and reflects a newly vertical visualization of familial ties, while the concept of degree or scale, often represented as a ladder or stairs, is explicitly used as a framework for both moral virtue and socioeconomic status. Through discussion of three specific medieval tropes in literature and art-- the tree of Jesse in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, the Dead Sea in Cleanness, and the giant of Lydgate's Triumphal Entry of Henry VI--this project attempts to demonstrate the importance of verticality in late medieval English literature from 1300-1500 and show how these tropes responded to and influenced changes in the way medieval, and modern, audiences perceived social class, kinship, politics, and religion.

This thesis argues that both Lollard efforts to disseminate heterodox opinions in simple terms for simple readers and the Church’s reactionary and ineffective endeavours to combat this heresy with legislation and writing of its own constrained fifteenth-century vernacular theological writing. First, I summarise the current debate about the restrictive aims and effects of legislative efforts to eliminate the Lollard heresy, and I outline the historical context leading up to and following Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409. The subsequent chapters trace the effects of ecclesiastical restrictions over time on vernacular theological writing. In Chapter 2, I explore the use of literary devices in two Lollard dialogues, and I argue that in the years preceding the Constitutions Lollard writers exhibited a readiness to employ literary tools as a means to persuade effectively. In Chapter 3, I argue that many of Langland’s major C revisions to Piers Plowman, undertaken in the aftermath of ecclesiastical restrictions, represent a response to Lollard-inspired rebel misreadings of the poem and sacrifice instances of bold poetic imagery as they endeavour to clarify doctrinal positions. In Chapter 4, I argue that Thorpe’s foregrounding of the generic conventions of hagiography in his Testimony reflects the pre-Constitutions readiness of Lollard writers to use literary tools to persuade simple readers. In Chapter 5, I argue that Love’s Church-sanctioned Mirror represented an orthodox tool in the war on heresy, but it failed to curb lay misinterpretation of theological issues. In Chapter 6, I argue that The Book of Margery Kempe serves as a reader’s response to Love’s Mirror and, therefore, demonstrates the ways in which Love’s orthodox text could be misread by orthodox readers. I conclude the thesis by considering the Lollard Lanterne of Li?t and Pecock’s orthodox vernacular theology. I argue that these works show that after the Constitutions both heterodox and orthodox writers demonstrated an increased urgency to tailor their writing for simple readers and that this tailoring meant, for both sides, an eschewing of literary features. I assert that the Church’s aggressive response to these works further constrained vernacular theological writing by suppressing its writers, readers, and circulation.

This thesis examines the way the absence of moral consideration of the animal in Christian doctrine is evident in Middle English literature. A fundamental difference between the theology and literature of the medieval period is literature's capacity to present and theorise positions that cannot, for various reasons, be theorised in the official discourses provided by commentators and theologians. Patterns of excluding the animal from moral consideration by Christianity are instigated with the rejection of the ethics of late Neoplatonism. Highlighted by Neoplatonists, and evident in the stylistic differences in reading scripture and philosophy, is an early Christian ideological predisposition toward purely humanocentric concerns. The disparity between a definite Hellenic ethic of the animal and its absence in Christian thought is most evident in the contrast between an outward looking Neoplatonic understanding of creation, and the closed matrix of scholastic interpretative thought. Influential textual representations of the universe require that creation is interpreted through a fideistically enclosed system of signs. The individual must have faith before approaching knowledge. The animal is placed into a system dominated by the primacy of faith in God, which paradoxically produces the predetermined answers supplied by Christian doctrine and selective scriptural and doctrinal suppositions. In literary texts, the animal provides an obvious method of Christian debate. Contemporary theological values, such as the doctrinal commonplace of comparing man with animal in the corporeal context highlights the uncomfortable similarity to, yet prescribes that man aspire to distance himself from, the animal. The primacy of man and the importance of his salvation, is a doctrine which countermands the theocentric basis of Christian theology, in which God is understood as a presence in all his creation. Such conflicting perspectives result in animals in medieval literature being used to test theological and philosophical parameters, illustrating the inadequacy of sharp theological boundaries, and demonstrating the ability of literary expression to escape that which has already been enclosed.

abstract: This study examines the ways in which translators writing in two contemporary medieval languages, Old Norse-Icelandic and Middle English, approached the complicated doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary. At its core this project is dedicated to understanding the spread and development of an idea in two contemporary vernacular cultures and focuses on the transmission of that idea from the debates of Latin clerical culture into Middle English and Old Norse-Icelandic literature written for an increasingly varied audience made up of monastics, secular clergy, and the laity. The project argues that Middle English and Old-Norse Icelandic writing about the bodily Assumption of Mary challenges misconceptions that vernacular translations and compositions concerned with Marian doctrine represent the popular concerns of the laity as opposed to the academic language, or high Mariology, of the clergy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014

My dissertation demonstrates the importance of an examination of the literary works included as part of the curriculum in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English grammar schools both for understanding the instruction of generations of schoolchildren and for reading the Middle English literature created and read by those trained in these schools. As Chapter 1 explains, thirty-four extant manuscripts used in an educational context in late medieval England, listed with their contents in the Appendix, suggest the identification of seven literary works that appear to have been taught most often: Disticha Catonis, Stans puer ad mensam, Cartula, Peniteas cito, Facetus, Liber Parabolarum, and Ecloga Theoduli. Considering these schoolbooks both individually and as a group reveals their usefulness for teachers and the instruction that they share: an emphasis on epistolary conventions, an awareness of the malleability of selves and social hierarchies, and the prioritization of ordinary human experience. As this project shows, the influence of the lessons of the grammar classroom pervades the production of vernacular literature and the reading practices of contemporary audiences. In Chapter 2, a reading of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde informed with a knowledge of the formal features of letter writing, particularly the attention to audience stressed in the grammar schoolbooks, reveals Criseyde’s control of both the story’s ending and the responses of readers through her final letter to Troilus. Chapter 3 offers a reexamination of The Book of Margery Kempe that argues against Kempe’s presumed illiteracy and demonstrates how she utilizes classroom teachings on self presentation in both her lived experience and the writing of her Book to manipulate her reception by her contemporaries and readers of the text. The final chapter turns to the works of John Lydgate to show how he incorporated the schoolroom’s emphasis on the diversity of ordinary human experience into his influential Fall of Princes, thereby spreading grammar school lessons to new audiences. Appreciating the teachings of the literary schoolbooks thus enables not only a better understanding of the grammar curriculum that shaped schoolchildren for two centuries but also a recognition of schoolbooks’ profound effect on authors and audiences in late medieval England. / text

Vollst. zugl.: Marburg, Univ., Diss., 2007

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This dissertation examines the ideological role and adaptation of the mythical British past (derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae) in chronicles of England written in Anglo-Norman, Latin, and English from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, in terms of the shaping of English history during this time. I argue that the past is an important lens through which we can read the imagined geographies (Albion, Britain and England) and ‘imagined communities’ (the British and English), to use Benedict Anderson’s term, constructed by historical texts. I consider how British history was carefully re-shaped and combined with chronologically conflicting accounts of early English history (derived from Bede) to create a continuous view of the English past, one in which the British kings are made English or ‘of England’. Specifically, I examine the connections between geography and genealogy, which I argue become inextricably linked in relation to mythical British history from the thirteenth century onwards. From that point on, British kings are increasingly shown to be the founders and builders of England, rather than Britain, and are integrated into genealogies of England’s contemporary kings. I argue that short chronicles written in Latin and Anglo-Norman during the thirteenth century evidence a confidence that the ancient Britons were perceived as English, and equally a strong sense of Englishness. These texts, I contend, anticipate the combination of British and English histories that scholars find in the lengthier and better-known Brut histories written in the early fourteenth century. For the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, my study takes account of the Albina myth, the story of the mothers of Albion’s giants (their arrival in Albion before Brutus’s legendary conquest of the land). There has been a surge of scholarship about the Albina myth in recent years. My analysis of hitherto unknown accounts of the tale, which appear in some fifteenth-century genealogical rolls, leads me to challenge current interpretations of the story as a myth of foundation and as apparently problematic for British and English history. My discussion culminates with an analysis of some copies of the prose Brut chronicle (c. 1300) – the most popular secular, vernacular text in later medieval England, but it is seldom studied – and of some fifteenth-century genealogies of England’s kings. In both cases, I am concerned with presentations of the passage of dominion from British to English rulership in the texts and manuscripts in question. My preliminary investigation of the genealogies aims to draw attention to this very under-explored genre. In all, my study shows that the mythical British past was a site of adaptation and change in historical and genealogical texts written in England throughout the high and later Middle Ages. It also reveals short chronicles, prose Brut texts and manuscripts, and royal genealogies to have great potential future research.