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This dissertation comprises a study revealing the differences and similarities between late Roman and medieval Christian conceptions of tragedy and classical Greek ideas of tragedy. Representative of the Roman conception of tragedy is the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. As the legends of the martyrs and the teachings of the Fathers made their way into the Middle Ages, they brought with them the mixture of Greek, Roman, and Christian tragical motifs as well as an awareness of, and at times anxiety over, the similarity of pagan and Christian elements. Our failure to understand the Roman conception of tragedy has caused us to miss much in medieval literature that is tragical. To miss the Senecan content of Boethius, for instance, is to miss the Senecan element in medieval conceptions of tragedy. My analysis of the tragedies of Seneca, early and medieval Christian commentaries thereon, and the influence of this tradition on medieval works reveals a direct line of influence from Seneca's Latin plays, through the Consolatione de Philosophiae of Boethius, to de Meun, Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer. My study culminates in a comprehensive, detailed investigation of tragedy as it appears in various of the works of Chaucer. It is my contention that Chaucer recognized the similarity of the pagan and Christian traditions, and explored the significance of this correspondence in his writings. I find evidence, in his Monk's Tale, for example, of a fully-developed understanding of the nature of Senecan tragedy with its characteristic defiance, as well as its shortcomings in light of the Boethian-Platonic interpretation of tragedy which postulates all misfortune as a Good, i.e. a part of the workings of the inscrutable divine plan. The Chaucerian conception of tragedy, I conclude, is the philosophically and artistically inclusive playfulness by which he reveals the surprising similarities and crucial differences between classical and Christian viewpoints. Thus I attempt to reconnect the literatures and attitudes towards tragedy of these periods, by tracing continuities, literary patterns in which pleasure, transcendence, even comedy are merged with motifs that are generally considered tragical.

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This thesis provides the first account of complaint in Older Scots literature. It argues for the coherent development of a distinctively Scottish complaining voice across the fifteenth century, characterised by an interest in the relationship between amatory and ethical concerns, between stasis and narrative movement, and between male and female voices. Chapter 1 examines the literary contexts of Older Scots complaint, and identifies three paradigmatic texts for the Scottish complaint tradition: Ovid’s Heroides; Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae; and Alan of Lille’s De Planctu Naturae. Chapter 2 concentrates on the complaints in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Arch. Selden. B. 24 (c. 1489-c. 1513). It considers afresh the Scottish reception of Lydgate’s Complaint of the Black Knight and Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite, and also offers original readings of three Scottish complaints preserved uniquely in this manuscript: the Lay of Sorrow, the Lufaris Complaynt, and the Quare of Jelusy. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between complaint and narrative, arguing that the complaints included in the Buik of Alexander (c. 1438), Lancelot of the Laik (c. 1460), Hary’s Wallace (c. 1476-8), and The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour (c. 1460-99) act as catalysts for narrative movement and subvert the complaint’s traditional identity as a static form. Chapter 4 is a study of complaint in Robert Henryson’s three major works: the Morall Fabillis (c. 1480s); the Testament of Cresseid (c. 1480-92); and Orpheus and Eurydice (c. 1490-2), and argues that Henryson consistently connects the complaint form with the concept of self-knowledge as part of wider discourses on effective governance. Chapter 5 presents the evidence that a text’s identity as a complaint influenced its presentation in both manuscript and print witnesses. The witnesses under discussion date predominantly from the sixteenth century; the chapter thus also uses them to explore the complaints’ later reception history.

The concept of the unknown captivated medieval theologians, mystics, lovers, and travelers for centuries, and yet literary scholars too readily reduce this topos to a romance trope. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" reconsiders the grounds of late-medieval literary discourse by showing how canonical Middle English literary texts eschew the historical knowledges that informed them and, instead, affirm impossibility as a productive site for a literary poetics. My dissertation identifies what I call a "poetics of unknowing" as an important component of a budding late-medieval literary discourse that offers a way to discuss not only what can be known, but also that which exceeds exegetical, geographic, historical, and sensory comprehension. "Unknowing the Middle Ages" makes its argument through four chapters, each of which focuses on a narrative tradition extending at least five hundred years. Each chapter follows a figure---Herod the Great, Prester John, the Pearl, and Criseyde---from the texts that established their axiological significance to their appearances in Middle English texts, which attempt to unknow these figures. In their Middle English narratives these figures negotiate between an inherited religious ethics and an intellectual context compelled increasingly by that which eludes comprehension. In each case, material concerns regarding the unknowable infiltrate the formal composition of the text itself, and resonate at the level of a literary ethics. The "poetics of unknowing" that inhabit these texts reveal an epistemology less encumbered by the practical demands of clarity to which other modes of medieval writing are beholden, and also---perhaps of interest to scholars of modern literature and contemporary theory---refute the critical tendency to view the epistemological valorization of the unknown as a distinctly modern phenomenon. / text