abstract: This study looks at Geoffrey Chaucer's use of the color green as it appears in regards to the settings and antagonists of three of the Canterbury Tales: the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Friar's Tale, and the Merchant's Tale. Following the allegorical approach, it argues that the color green in these tales is symbolic of Fortune, modeled upon Boethian philosophy and the allegory of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun's thirteenth century French poem, The Romance of the Rose. It suggests, furthermore, that Fortune is a potential overarching theme of the Canterbury Tales, and that the tales, in turn, should be read as a cohesive unit. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2014

<p> Late medieval English texts often represent unfinished quests for obscurely significant objects. These works create enchanted worlds where more always remains to be discovered and where questers search for an ur-text, an authoritative book that promises perfect knowledge. Rather than reaching this ur-text, however, questers confront rumor, monstrous babble, and the clamor of argument, which thwart their efforts to gather together sacred wholeness. Yet while threatening, noise also preserves the sacred by ensuring that it remains forever elsewhere, for recovering perfect knowledge would disenchant the world. Scholarship on medieval noise often focuses on class: medieval writers tend to describe threats to political authority as noisy. These unfinished quests, though, suggest that late medieval literature&rsquo;s complex investment in noise extends further and involves the very search for the sacred, a search full of opaque language and unending desire. Noise, then, becomes the sound of narrative itself.</p><p> While romance foregrounds questing most clearly, these ideas appear in a variety of genres. Chapter 1 shows that in the <i>House of Fame</i> rumor both perpetuates and undermines knowledge, so sacred authority must remain beyond the poem&rsquo;s frame. Chapter 2 juxtaposes the <i>Parliament of Fowls</i> and the <i>Canon&rsquo;s Yeoman&rsquo;s Tale</i>, in which lists replace missing quest-objects, the philosopher&rsquo;s stone and certainty about love. Chapter 3 centers on <i>Piers Plowman</i>, which becomes encyclopedic as one attempt to &ldquo;preve what is Dowel&rdquo; leads to another, and Will never definitively learns how to save his soul, the knowledge he most wants. Chapter 4 turns to Julian of Norwich&rsquo;s search for divine &ldquo;mening&rdquo; and her confrontation with an incoherent fiend, an anxious moment that aligns her with these less serene contemporaries. Chapter 5 argues that Thomas Malory&rsquo;s elusive, noisy Questing Beast at once bolsters and undermines chivalry. The final chapter looks ahead to Book VI of <i>The Faerie Queene</i>, where the Blatant Beast, a sixteenth-century amalgam of the fame tradition and the Questing Beast, menaces Faery Land yet, as a figure for poetry, also contributes to its enchantment. In trying to locate and maintain the sacred, these unfinished quests evoke worlds intensely anxious about &ldquo;auctoritee.&rdquo;</p>

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This thesis is an attempt to shed light on the related questions of how we should read Piers Plowman and of what kind of book its author was trying to write. In the first chapter it is argued that feminine line-endings are an important feature of Langland's metre, and consideration is given to how they affect our reading of the verse. It is suggested that the verse demands a slow and meditative reading, and that Langland's text emerges as a list of items not easily related to each other; the reader is challenged to work out connexions and thus in a sense to compose his own poem. The second chapter is an examination of the medieval conceptions and modes of thought that are associated with the word "reson". The term "reasonable" is later used to refer to these. In the last part of the chapter it is argued that Langland's aim is to make his readers seek salvation, and that he is aware of certain difficulties with the traditional, "reasonable" approaches of other moralists. His own book is "unreasonable"; its mixture of modes of thought, and hence of the thought-worlds they project, makes narrative consistency and definiteness of argument impossible. In the rest of the thesis some of the juxtapositions between modes of thought are examined. The. third chapter deals with "positive” juxtapositions, which create in the reader's mind a sense of satisfying, but nevertheless "unreasonable", illumination; the speech of Wit and the vision of the Passion and Crucifixion are discussed in detail. The fourth chapter deals with "negative" juxtapositions, which provoke a sense of bewilderment and dissatisfaction; discussion centres on Ymaginatiyf's speech in the C text, Need's speech, and the confessions of the Seven Deadly Sins,

Marginal annotation in medieval romance manuscripts| Understanding the contemporary reception of the genre

<p> This thesis investigates word order change in infinitival clauses from Object-Verb (OV) to Verb-Object (VO) in the history of Latin and Old French. By applying a variationist approach, I examine a synchronic word order variation in each stage of language change, from which I infer the character, periodization and constraints of diachronic variation. I also show that in discourse-configurational languages, such as Latin and Early Old French, it is possible to identify pragmatically neutral contexts by using information structure annotation. I further argue that by mapping pragmatic categories into a syntactic structure, we can detect how word order change unfolds. For this investigation, the data are extracted from annotated corpora spanning several centuries of Latin and Old French and from additional resources created by using computational linguistic methods. The data are then further codified for various pragmatic, semantic, syntactic and sociolinguistic factors. This study also evaluates previous factors proposed to account for word order alternation and change. I show how information structure and syntactic constraints change over time and propose a method that allows researchers to differentiate a stable word order alternation from alternation indicating a change. Finally, I present a three-stage probabilistic model of word order change, which also conforms to traditional language change patterns.</p>