This dissertation considers the literary treatment of revenge in medieval England and Iceland. Vengeance and feud were an essential part of these cultures; far from the reckless, impulsive action that the word conjures up in modern minds, revenge was considered both a right and a duty and was legislated and regulated by social norms. It was an important tool for obtaining justice and protecting property, family, and reputation. Accordingly, many medieval literary works seem to accept revenge without question. Many, however, evince a great sensitivity to the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in an act of revenge. In my study, I consider three works that are emblematic of this responsiveness to and indeed, anxiety about revenge. Chapter one focuses on the Old English poem Beowulf; chapter two moves on to discuss Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale and Tale of Melibee from the Canterbury Tales; and chapter three examines the Old Icelandic family saga, Ljósvetninga saga. I focus in particular on the treatment of the avenger in each work. The poet or author of each work acknowledges the perspective of the avenger by allowing him to express his motivations, desires, and justifications for revenge in direct speech. Alongside this acknowledgement, however, is the author’s own reflection on the risks, rewards, and repercussions of the avenger’s intentions and actions. The resulting parallel but divergent narratives highlight the multiplicity of viewpoints found in any act of revenge or feud and reveal a fundamental ambivalence about the value, morality, and necessity of revenge. Each of the works I consider resists easy conclusions about revenge in its own context and remains incredibly current in the way it poses challenging questions about what constitutes injury, punishment, justice, and revenge in our own time.

This dissertation considers the literary treatment of revenge in medieval England and Iceland. Vengeance and feud were an essential part of these cultures; far from the reckless, impulsive action that the word conjures up in modern minds, revenge was considered both a right and a duty and was legislated and regulated by social norms. It was an important tool for obtaining justice and protecting property, family, and reputation. Accordingly, many medieval literary works seem to accept revenge without question. Many, however, evince a great sensitivity to the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in an act of revenge. In my study, I consider three works that are emblematic of this responsiveness to and indeed, anxiety about revenge. Chapter one focuses on the Old English poem Beowulf; chapter two moves on to discuss Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale and Tale of Melibee from the Canterbury Tales; and chapter three examines the Old Icelandic family saga, Ljósvetninga saga. I focus in particular on the treatment of the avenger in each work. The poet or author of each work acknowledges the perspective of the avenger by allowing him to express his motivations, desires, and justifications for revenge in direct speech. Alongside this acknowledgement, however, is the author’s own reflection on the risks, rewards, and repercussions of the avenger’s intentions and actions. The resulting parallel but divergent narratives highlight the multiplicity of viewpoints found in any act of revenge or feud and reveal a fundamental ambivalence about the value, morality, and necessity of revenge. Each of the works I consider resists easy conclusions about revenge in its own context and remains incredibly current in the way it poses challenging questions about what constitutes injury, punishment, justice, and revenge in our own time.

This dissertation is a diplomatic transcription edition and an analysis of BL Cotton Caligula Aii with emphasis on the Middle English romances in the manuscript and how the entire manuscript was compiled to teach lessons in obedience. The first section of the manuscript contains Sir Eglamour and teaches lessons in social obedience. The second section features three romances by Thomas Chestre: Octavian Imperator, Sir Launfal, and Lybeaus Desconus and teaches courtly and chivalric obedience. Section three features Emaré and teaches lessons in obedience and free will. The final section contains Sege of Jerusalem. Chevalier Assigne, and Sir Isumbras and focuses on obedience and the direct hand of God. The romances in CCAii, which have often been dismissed as overly simplistic or convention, become complex and meaningful text when they are analyzed as part of the compilation for which they were chosen and arranged.

No description available.

In Modern English, EACH OTHER and ONE ANOTHER are morphologically fixed as reciprocal compound pronouns. The reciprocal construction has been developed and used in every period of the English language. The main purpose of this study, nevertheless, was to investigate the ways to express the notion of reciprocity in Middle English and Early Modern English.The morphological analyses of the citations demonstrate that Middle English employed a great variety of head words and phrases than does Modern English in reciprocal structures. EACH, EITHER, EVERY, and ONE most frequently appear as head words of Middle English reciprocal construction, and OTHER usually occurs as a subsequent elements. OTHER, however, may also serve as the head word. Middle English also permits EACH MAN, ILLC MANN, EACH ONE, ILLC ONE, EVERY MAN, EVERY ONE, and THE ONE to function as head phrases. In Early Modem English, Malory employs various structures in his writings, but he prefers EITHER, EITHER OF (US, YOU, THEM) as the head of reciprocal patterns. Shakespeare, nevertheless, more frequently uses ONE as the head word.In Middle English, according to the data, the reciprocal sequence (EACH, EITHER, ONE) / OTHER stands in subject position in twenty examples between c. 1200 - c.1450. Rarely, however, do the pronouns function as a compound subject (subject / complement). The underlying structure of the sentence pattern SOV, nevertheless, is SVO. The need to rhyme, therefore, may cause the change of the word order in the period.(EACH, EITHER, EVERY, ONE, OTHER) may be compounded with the pronoun OTHER in forty examples between c. 1285 - c.1513, but the sequence most frequentlyoccur as direct / indirect object. (EACH, EITHER, EVERY, ONE, OTHER) + OTHER functions as object of preposition in four examples between c.1328 - c.1440.The modem usage of EACH OTHER as a compound object is established in Early Modern English learned, imaginative texts, and the use of ONE ANOTHER as the compound direct object and object of preposition are being established in that period.Since the rules for compounding reciprocal pronouns and for their morpho-syntatic features were not restrictly established before the time of Shakespeare, OTHER could function as an uninflected, separable pronoun in Middle English. In position except modification. the development of OTHER as a nominal occured after Middle English except where the head word is ONE. In Modem English, OTHER must be used as a nominal if the reciprocal pronouns are not compounded. / Department of English

This dissertation is a diplomatic transcription edition and an analysis of BL Cotton Caligula Aii with emphasis on the Middle English romances in the manuscript and how the entire manuscript was compiled to teach lessons in obedience. The first section of the manuscript contains Sir Eglamour and teaches lessons in social obedience. The second section features three romances by Thomas Chestre: Octavian Imperator, Sir Launfal, and Lybeaus Desconus and teaches courtly and chivalric obedience. Section three features Emaré and teaches lessons in obedience and free will. The final section contains Sege of Jerusalem. Chevalier Assigne, and Sir Isumbras and focuses on obedience and the direct hand of God. The romances in CCAii, which have often been dismissed as overly simplistic or convention, become complex and meaningful text when they are analyzed as part of the compilation for which they were chosen and arranged.

Four Middle English Charlemagne Romances are examined with the intention of disproving conventional claims that English romances of the 'Matter of France' are typically undistinguished. The manuscript of the Ashmole Sir Ferumbras is a holograph; preserved with it, on sheets which originally formed the binding, is a portion of the poem's rough draft. Comparison of the draft with the fair copy reveals something of the romancer's translational and compositional method, and illustrates well his enthusiasm for, and ability occasionally to improve upon, his French source. The fragment of The Song of Roland displays some sensitivity to the heroic essence of its famous French model. The poem also displays, however, a free, sensitive, sometimes eloquent and technically complex, adaptation of notable features of that model. The Sege of Melayne has been recognized for its energy; but extensive studies of the poem appear to have been prevented by an inability to account for the poem's lack of known sources and its use of extraordinary episodes and unusual narrative techniques. Analogues and possible influences do, however, exist; and most reveal the poem's remarkable affinity with propagandistic crusading literature. This affinity goes some way toward explaining, and allowing us to appreciate, the poem's unusual features. Rauf Coilyear is unusually described as a competent and straightforwardly humorous tale similar in spirit to its analogues. A closer look, however, shows the humour to be complicated by the seriousness of a social critique; at times the hero's experiences is far from laughable. There is, in fact, some similarity, both of incident and theme, with the best poems of the 'Gawain-group'. That a comparison with such poems (and, indeed, with 'serious' elements in the other Charlemagne romances) can convincingly be made suggests that our expectations of the poem's literary significance should be revised accordingly.

[Truncated abstract] The later medieval Western European economy was shaped by a marked increase in commerce and rapid urbanisation. The commercialisation of later medieval society is the background to this research, whose focus is the ways in which later medieval Italian and English literature registers and responds to the expanding marketplace and the rise of an urban mercantile class. What began as an investigation of the representation of merchants and business in a selection of this literature has become an attempt to address broader questions about the later medieval economy in relation to literary and artistic production. This study is therefore concerned not just with merchants and their activities in literature, but also the way economic developments are manifested in narrative. Issues such as the moral position and social function of the merchant are addressed, alongside bigger economic issues such as value and exchange in literature, and to some extent, the position of the writer and artist in a commercialised economy. The study is primarily literary, but it adopts a cross-disciplinary method, drawing on economic and social history, literary criticism, art history and sociology. It begins with an assessment of the broader socio-economic context, focusing on ecclesiastical and social responses to the growth of … This chapter discusses the thirteenth-century Floris and Blauncheflur (c. 1250), and the late fourteenth-century Sir Amadace, Sir Launfal, Octavian and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in relation to the commercialised economy and with reference to late medieval thought concerning value, exchange and the role and function of merchants. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1380s) is the subject of the third and final chapter, “Narrative and Economics in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”. Chaucer treats commerce and merchants with a complexity very close to Boccaccio’s approach to commerce. Both writers are acutely aware of the corruption to which merchants are susceptible, and of the many accusations levelled at merchants and their activities, but they do not necessarily perpetuate them. Rather than discussing exclusively the tales that deal extensively with merchants and commerce, or that told by the Merchantpilgrim, this discussion of the Canterbury Tales focuses on the Knight’s Tale, the Man of Law’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale and the way they relate to broader ideas about the exchange and the production of narrative in the Canterbury Tales as a whole.

This study advances and adds detail to our history of the reading of verse in England c.1350-1500. Scholarship has established major twelfth- and thirteenth-century changes in reading, and linked these changes to manuscripts containing the modern Middle English verse canon. Historians of early modern reading have also argued for distinctive changes in their own period. But the examination of reading between these two clusters of change has been limited. This study therefore asks how later medieval Middle English verse was read. The surviving copies of The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae, two hugely successful religious instructional poems, form the primary body of evidence. This body is augmented by reference to hundreds of other manuscripts containing Middle English verse. Together, these can reveal much about what was normal and abnormal in reading. They are also an important part of the context for the reading of more canonical Middle English verse. Manuscript studies often proceeds through case studies of individual books and unusual evidence such as marginalia. This thesis turns to codicology to understand more widespread evidence for reading, combining qualitative case studies with quantitative techniques borrowed and developed from continental scholarship. The first chapter examines evidence of provenance, revealing that both The Prick of Conscience and Speculum Vitae were read by an impressive range of people and remained current into the sixteenth century. The second chapter considers the navigational aids used in copies of both poems. Reading in this period has been characterised as 'discontinuous', but it could be discontinuous in diverse ways, and readers also read continuously. The third chapter is a large-scale study of books' size and shape, showing how these features can reveal books' reading histories, sometimes in counterintuitive ways. The fourth chapter contends that readers in this period attended closely to rhyme and probably read for balanced rhyme structures. The fifth chapter uncovers the ways in which these poems were rewritten for new readers and investigates the composition of the Southern Recension of The Prick of Conscience, arguing that this new text was partly a formalist intervention. The conclusion summarises the new 'baseline' history of the reading of Middle English verse which is offered here, and gestures towards implications for our reading of the Middle English poems which are canonical today.

This thesis examines suffixation in Middle English in the periods 1200-1299 and 1300-1399. More specifically, the work is focussed on nominal coinages of native origin only, formed with the suffixes -ness, -head / -hood, -ship and -dom, where the aim is to observe their productivity in time. In the theoretical part, we explore the contribution of external (socio-political) and internal (typological and word-formational) factors to changes in the English language, including word-formation processes. Our hypothesis is that suffixation as a word-formation process will continue strongly, despite the ongoing language-internal changes and the overwhelming influx of foreign words. Data for this research was collected from The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) through Advance Search. The data retrieved for each suffix was considered from a morphological, structural and lexico-semantic perspective. The analyses were performed to detect changes in the behaviour of each suffix and to discover the realities attesting their productivity. Moreover, the analyses uncovered additional phenomena: types that had only one quotation (hapaxes) and competition occurring between the selected suffixes. The hapaxes were also investigated for their morphological, structural and semantic features so as to identify any common...