Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-278).

British Library MS Harley 2253 is a unique fourteenth-century miscellany consisting of 140 folios and containing 116 different texts, including lyrics, political poems, fabliaux and other secular and religious texts in verse and prose, Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. While the so-called “Harley Lyrics” popularized by Brook’s edition may have registered widely on scholarly radar, many of the non-English texts in the collection have failed to elicit critical attention. However, these texts are vital points in the narrative of English literary history. In particular, the four Anglo-Norman fabliaux included in Harley 2253 constitute a majority of the extant pre-Chaucerian fabliaux produced on the English isles, and of these, Le Dit de la Gageure and Du Chevalier a La Corbeille have no Old French analogues. This report explores the Anglo-Norman fabliaux in this manuscript, their relationship to the continental French tradition and to the subsequent English (ie. Chaucerian) fabliaux incarnations. Specifically, I argue that representations of female desire – figured as an opposition between “stillness” and doing one’s “will” – surface in these obscene misogynist stories that simultaneously objectify and colonize the female body. “De Clerico et Puella”, Le Dit de la Gageure and Le Chevalier qui fist Les Cuns Parler all include an unmarried female who articulates her sexual desire freely, a sharp contrast to the traditional cuckoldry plot of Old French fabliaux which revolves around a married woman’s illicit affairs. Indeed, the grotesque images of sexual violence and the pornographic images of sexual fulfillment in these pre-Chaucerian fabliaux are not contained by the ecclesiastic context from which these texts originate, but rather they linger and are transformed by the female characters, patrons, readers and hearers of the medieval manuscripts in their domestic contexts. / text

The alliterating poems written during the Alliterative Revival have mistakenly been grouped together metrically, when in fact they represent a diversity of meters. They mainly use the same phonology, however, which was also current in Chaucer and Gower's poetic dialects. In detailing the diverse meters, this study argues that the meter is simple and learnable both in the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter 1 establishes the current intractability of Middle English metrical studies, defines the English context in which these poems were written, and challenges the traditional bifurcation of English poetry into accentual and syllable-stress. The largest group of poems shares a common meter based on long unrhymed alliterating lines that use historical final --e and asymmetrical half-lines as structuring devices. Chapter 2 adds elision to Thomas Cable's metrical system to demonstrate that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman are both regular, and they belong to the same metrical tradition despite the usual move by metrists to set Piers Plowman to one side. Chapter 3 compares the meter of The Destruction of Troy with the alliterative meter described in Chapter 2 and finds that Troy uses a meter that only superficially resembles the alliterative meter because the poet does not employ half-line dissimilation. Chapter 4 compares the Gawain-poet's Pearl and the bobs and wheels from Gawain to reveal that their meters belong to neither of the two traditional schools of poetry, but is instead a medieval dolnik. Chapter 5 concludes on several of the Harley Lyrics, further problematizes the binary of native and non-native meters, and hypothesizes that the medieval audience expected a diversity of metrical experiments combining these traditions in various ways.

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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.

Courtly love lyrics, like other courtly genres, are dominated by male-voiced texts that privilege male perspectives. In conventional courtly love lyrics, women are silenced and objectified by the male speaker. Still, a handful of women-voiced lyrics--"women's songs"--exist in the courtly love lyrical tradition. This thesis studies women's songs in Middle English and their role in the androcentric courtly love tradition. / In the first chapter, I discuss critical perspectives on conventional courtly representations of women. In the second chapter, I locate Middle English women's songs in literary contexts other than courtly love: the Middle English lyrical tradition, the cross-cultural phenomenon of medieval women's songs, and the manuscript contexts of Middle English women's songs. In Chapter Three, I discuss the individual songs themselves and examine the range of perspectives found in woman-voiced lyrics. / My discussion of Middle English women's songs includes texts not previously admitted to the genre. This expanded collection of women's songs creates an alternative courtly discourse privileging female perspectives. Middle English women's songs create a space for women's voices in courtly love.

The extent to which translation moulded Middle English romance as an emerging genre remains largely unexamined. In this dissertation I identify the principal methodological difficulties that have prevented scholars from giving due attention to this problem, and offer a case study in which I look at how translational procedures shaped the romance of Sir Beves of Hampton, a translation of the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone . / Having outlined the practical difficulties posed by the intricate textual tradition of Boeve and Beves, the multilingualism of medieval England, and the scarcity of concrete evidence regarding the audience for Middle English romance, I focus on methodological issues: the inability of equivalence-based definitions of translation to accommodate medieval translation practice, the futility of attempts to demarcate translation from adaptation, and the difficulty of integrating different textual levels in the study of translations. / In the first two analytical chapters of the dissertation I concentrate on those aspects of Beves that can best highlight the importance of translation processes in the constitution of the genre. I begin by examining the way in which the translator dealt with the most important translational constraints, some of which, like language, were beyond his control, while others, such as versification, were partly self-imposed. I then proceed to study the workings of the so-called laws of translation (explicitation, simplification, and repertorization) in the process whereby Boeve became Beves. The analyses carried out in these two chapters allow me to contest the received opinion according to which the author of Beves treated his original very freely. I show that, on the contrary, the distinctive features of the Middle English text result from a constant productive tension between source and target. / My study ends with an analysis of what happens when the translator's impulse to be faithful to his source is frustrated by the inaccessibility of the socio-historical context of the original. I examine the most closely translated sections of the poem to show how unrecognized topical references are flattened into literary cliches, which bring into the text their own generic connotations and disassemble some of the carefully constructed thematic parallels and analogies of the Anglo-Norman romance.

This thesis examines the heroines in Middle English romances and argues that, like the noblewomen who lived in England during the Plantagenet period, they are not helpless princesses simply waiting to be rescued by the brave, strong hero. In fact, these heroines show an enormous amount of intelligence, ingenuity, perseverance, and strength of character. Many play a pivotal role in the hero's success in his quest by giving him a token, providing knowledge, or teaching him a lesson. Also, it is the heroines who provide the heroes with rewards after the quests are completed. The present thesis offers a contribution to the study of Medieval English Romances in providing a revision of standard feminist analyses. In many of these studies there seems to be a lack of appreciation for the role of female characters and their relation to the outcome of the hero's quest. Even studies written from a feminist perspective tend to overlook the strength of the heroine's character, the attainment of her goals, and the fact that she is often a powerful figure who is of much higher status than her suitor. In these romances the female characters wield a substantial amount of both private and public power, an aspect of the genre which has often been ignored.

In Middle English and Scots, instances of gan and can behave differently from etymologically related beginnen in that they are mainly, or exclusively, found with the plain infinitive and with a non-ingressive meaning. They also occur in narrative verse (rhymed and non-alliterative), where they have a metrical, intensive-descriptive or textual function. All of this suggests that gan and can are more advanced in the divergence of their development towards auxiliation than the verb beginnen. Earlier studies mainly concentrate on the meaning and/or function of gan and can in verse (Wuth 1915, Beschorner 1920, Funke 1922, Mustanoja 1960, Kerkhof 1966, Visser 1969 and Brinton 1981; 1983; 1988 amongst others), whereas investigations by Brinton (1981; 1988; 1996), Ogura (1997; 1998; 2013) and Sims (2008; 2014) address the divergence in the development of this verb and its variant in terms of grammaticalization, but with references to Middle English in general. Studies by Los (2000; 2005), on the other hand, deal with the grammaticalization of onginnan and beginnan with the plain infinitive in Ælfric’s works. However, no studies have been carried out on whether gan and can, as well as beginnen develop differently in terms of grammaticalization in the ‘English’ of the six northern counties of England and of Scotland in the late 14th and the 15th centuries, conventionally referred to as Northern Middle English and Early Scots, respectively. With the aid of Northern Middle English and Early Scots texts from computerised corpora (The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, The Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose and The Teaching Association for Medieval Studies, as well as The Helsinki Corpus of Older Scots and A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots), this study looks into whether: a) gan and can, as well as beginnen differ with respect to their morphological paradigms, in view of what we know about grammaticalization and the development of invariant forms? b) these verbs differ with respect to their complements, in view of claims in the literature that the more grammaticalized variant takes the plain infinitive; and c) gan and can are a development from onginnan and aginnan, originally expressing ingression but shown in the literature to have undergone semantic bleaching in Old English and in early Middle English period? This study shows that in Northern Middle English and Early Scots, gan and can display characteristics of grammaticalization, while beginnen participates in global language changes affecting the category of the verb in ME and Scots.

Without seeking to reify a category of 'political romances', this study explores the participation of five Middle English poems (Havelok, The Tale of Gamelyn, Sir Orfeo, Sir Gowther, Robert of cisyle), normally classed among the romances, in the cultural process of constructing and regulating contemporary understandings of good kingship, tyranny, and community. In their participation in this discourse these romances cross generic boundaries, interacting with textual traditions (including historiography, hagiography, folk tale, and the literature of complaint), inscribing ideologies contesting romance's world-view. This study attempts to trace the ideological impact of these generic interactions on romance models of rule, investigating whether these romances cross generic boundaries in search of an idiom in which to critique dominant models of power relations, or whether, in attempting to appropriate the discourse of other genres, they seek to bolster dominant ideology by containing the subversive energies of its textual opponents. If these romances are identified as cultural products of a dominant ideology striving to perpetuate its own ascendancy, then it is a dominant ideology in the process of adapting itself in response to changing pressures, the nature of which I attempt to recover by attending to these texts' constructions and reconstructions of the hero's identity. I approach these romances not so much as the expression of the ideology of the dominant stratum, but part of the production of that ideology, called forth in a continuing dynamic response to contending discourses. I conclude that the energies of the genres with which these romances interact refuse appropriation, challenging the monologism of romance and continuing in their new narrative environment to propose their own political solutions. The resulting dialogization of romance indicates romance's diminishing ability to provide convincing resolutions to the contradictions of a changing society and to address the aspirations of a changing audience, In the ideological adjustments made by these romances in the process of interacting with other genres can be glimpsed the end of romance's insistence on heroic, and hence kingly, autonomy, and the replacement of heroic autonomy by community as the subject of romance.