No description available.

No description available.

[Typescript] Includes bibliography.

[Typescript]

[Typescript] / Includes bibliography. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 1965

This study explores how four medieval poems—the Junius manuscript’s Genesis B and Christ and Satan and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls—engage with medieval conjugal rights through their depictions of agentive female protagonists. Although many laws at this time sought to suppress the rights of women, especially those of wives’, both pre- and post-conquest poets illustrate women who act as subjects, exercising legal rights. Medieval canon and common law supported a certain amount of female agency in marriage but was not consistent in its understanding of what that was. By considering the shifts in law from Anglo-Saxon and fourteenth century England in relation to wives’ rights and female consent, my project asserts that the authors of Genesis B and Christ and Satan and the late-medieval poet Chaucer position their heroines to defend legislation that supports female agency in matters of marriage. The Anglo-Saxon authors do so by conceiving of Eve’s role in the Fall and harrowing of hell as similar to the legal role of a forespeca. Through Eve’s mimesis of Satan’s rhetoric, she is able to reveal an alternate way of conceiving of the law as merciful instead of legalistic. Chaucer also engages with a woman’s position in society under the law through his representation of Criseyde’s role in her courtship with Troilus in his epic romance, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer disrupts his audiences’ expectations by placing Criseyde as the more agentive party in her courtship with Troilus and shows that women might hope to the most authority in marriage by withholding their consent. In his last dream vision, The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer engages again with the importance of female consent in marriage but takes his interrogation of conjugal rights a step further by imagining an alternate legal system through Nature, a female authority who gives equal consideration to all classes and genders.

This thesis has concerned itself with two medieval poems, Frangois Villon's Testament and Jorge Manrique's Copias for la muerte de su padre. Both poems contain an ubi sunt digression which becomes the essential leitmotif in a more complete comprehension and appreciation of the two works. From the aspects of both structure and content, an understanding of the ubi sunt convention, as utilized by the poets, reveals key insights into the world-view present in the poems. Since the reader of poetry must begin with the specific in order to avoid confusion in the general, this thesis has contended that an analysis, primarily consisting of the ubi sunt series, will both stimulate the clarity of vision necessary for poetic interpretation of, and incite further research into, these often overlooked poems.