abstract: As a contribution to what has emerged categorically in medieval scholarship as gentry studies, this dissertation looks at the impact the development of obligatory taxation beyond customary dues and fees had on late medieval English society with particular emphasis given to the emergent view of the medieval subject as a commercial-legal entity. Focusing on Middle English popular romance and drawing on the tenets of practice theory, I demonstrate the merger of commerce and law as a point of identification in the process of meaning and value making for late medieval gentry society. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the historical development of taxation and the emergence of royal authority as an institutionalized form of public welfare, or a state. The second chapter examines the use of contractual language in Sir Amadace to highlight the presence of the state as an extra-legal authority able to enforce contractual agreements. The attention paid to the consequences of economic insolvency stage a gentry identity circumscribed by its position in a network of credit and debt that links the individual to neighbor, state, and God. The third chapter explores conservative responses to economic innovation during the period and the failure of the state to protect the proprietary rights of landowners in Sir Cleges. Specifically, the chapter examines the strain the gradual re-definition of land as a movable property put on the proprietary rights of landowners and challenged the traditional manorial organization of feudal society by subjecting large estates to morcellation in the commercial market. The fourth chapter examines the socioeconomic foundations of late medieval English sovereignty in Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle. By dismissing the cultural fantasies of power and authority bound up in the Arthurian narrative, the author reveals the practical economic mechanisms of exchange that sustain and legitimize sociopolitical authority, resulting in a corporate vision of English society. Collectively, the analyses demonstrate the influence the socioeconomic circumstances of gentry society exerted on the production and consumption of Middle English popular romance and the importance of commerce, law, and taxation in the formation of a sense of self in late medieval England. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2015

The Land of Cokaygne may be interpreted as a burlesque of the paradise legend of the saints’ abode in the Eden of the blessed. Or it may be taken as a poor folk's Utopia, expressing the desire of the common people for a life of abundance and ease. The essay is therefore divided into two parts. The first concerns the poem as burlesque. What beliefs and conventions are being parodied and what can be learned of the satirist? To answer the first question I offer as a frame of reference a resume of conventional paradise motifs as illustrated in certain paradise legends which were widely known in medieval England. To answer the second question I find analogies to the poem in Greek and Celtic literature and discover the sceptical and satirical spirit in which they were written. The Celtic analogue invites comparison of the Cokaygne poet with the wandering scholar of the Middle Ages. It is possible that the Cokaygne poet with his sceptical spirit and delight in the sensual pleasures was a goliardic clerk. Turning to the poem itself, I set forth those passages of the poem which burlesque the conventional paradise motifs--the list of negative joys, the rivers, the abode of holy men, the garden, well and tree, the catalogue of precious stones and, finally, the barrier. The poet's method is to improvise freely, introducing foreign elements into a familiar series and thus making an exalted theme ludicrous. The Cokaygne motifs--the cloister roofed with cakes, the roast goose, the well-seasoned larks--are used in this way. But the poem may be taken out of its Middle English context and given a larger literary relationship. Structurally, it may be classed as a satiric utopia, for in his burlesque the poet has created a topsy-turvy land as a vehicle for breaking down existing ideas about paradise and for criticizing the religious orders for their immorality. The second part of the essay concerns the poem as a utopia. The Cokaygne fantasy has its origins in primitive agrarian rites and its themes are abundance without toil, general license and inversion of status. The acting out by the folk of these themes in the medieval folk festivals may be taken as a projection of the world as they would like it to be. Around the Cokaygne fantasy the utopia of the folk takes shape. The poet uses the roast goose motif to burlesque the saints’ paradise. But he also uses it as a symbol of the good life without fear of want. His poem takes up the Cokaygne theme of abundance without toil, and communicates as well a sense of the injustice suffered by the poor. Two hundred years later, Thomas More also speaks for the poor and oppressed in his Utopia, and it is his conviction of social injustice which gives emotional force to the theme he shares with the Cokaygne poet of abundance without toil. Other Utopians have in some way given expression to this theme, but only William Morris in News from Nowhere has captured that sense of freedom and of delight in the abundant earth which pervades the Middle English poem. The Utopian element in the poem may also be measured by contrasting it with the anti-utopia. Swift, Huxley and Orwell create wonderlands in the spirit of anti-Cokaygne. They mistrust the idea of abundance without toil and take a gloomy view of the perfectibility of man. They have never been inspired by the vision of the wonderful tree, symbolic of Utopian dreams, or else they have rejected it out of concern for our minds and spirits. The burlesque utopia of the Cokaygne poet lives on in North American folk literature of the twentieth century. It is best known in that well-loved Cokaygne song. The Big Rock Candy Mountains. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis must be regarded as an outline, rather than an exhaustive study, of the inter-relationship of music and poetry during the Middle Ages (that is, from the middle of the twelfth to the end of the fifteenth century). It is always difficult to set limits for creative movements and, when they have been set, to justify them and to work consistently within them, for one cannot make definite divisions between movements, nor confine trends of thought and creative impulse within the boundaries of a definite space of time. The year 1150 was chosen as the first limit of this essay because little in English has come down to us from the first half of the century, and the small amount that has, belongs to the Old English rather than the Middle English tradition. Since medieval and renaissance trends overlapped each other throughout the entire fifteenth century the terminal limit (1500) had to be chosen arbitrarily. The adoption of 1500 has more than the convenience of a round number to recommend it, however, for most of the literature of the fifteenth century belongs to the Middle English tradition; even those developments at the end of the century which look forward to the renaissance are not of such a revolutionary character that they cannot he considered as still part of medieval literature. While music shows some analogies with all its sister arts, it is the art of poetry that it resembles most. The present work, therefore, deals primarily with the characteristics of the form and style of medieval music (special emphasis being given to the music of the church) and its influence on poetic forms like the lyric and liturgical drama. The main contention of the thesis is that, during the monodic period of music, the two arts were completely dependent on one another. With the development of polyphony, however, music became so intricate that it could no longer be used as a vehicle for words. The old union of poetry and music was gone, never to return in quite the same way again. Although it is true that music and poetry came together for a brief period in the Elizabethan Age it was not the same kind of unity. In the renaissance, music and poetry were two mature arts that enhanced one another; either one could be enjoyed without the other, but, in the Middle Ages, (that is, the period in which monodic music flourished) neither the music nor the poetry was complete in itself — they were created for one another. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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“Fictions of Discernment in Late Medieval England” argues that secular modes of social vigilance and pastoral practices of the discernment of spirits (discretio spirituum) come together to form a broader epistemic culture of interpersonal watchfulness, one that takes bodily demeanor as its main material of analysis. My work reconfigures current critical conversations around the late medieval “interior turn” by reading the period’s complex meditations on interiority as literary artifacts of social interplay rather than as correlates of introspective practices. Middle English texts as varied as penitential manuals, contemplative treatises, and works of epic and chivalric romance abound with imaginative scenarios in which contenaunce, chere, and other forms of outward comportment are scrutinized for what they reveal about the person. These ubiquitous scenarios, what I call “discernment fictions,” test out methods of extracting knowledge about the human interior from bodily demeanor, envisioned as a fertile but uniquely challenging object of intellectual inquiry. These skills of discernment are incorporated into self-reflective practices through a refractive process, as one comes to understand that one’s own body is also an interpretive object available to others. It is in quotidian accounts of intersubjective scrutiny that some of the medieval period’s most dynamic experimental thinking on the problem of other minds takes place. I suggest that the explosive production of Middle English narrative literature in the late fourteenth century is powered by these depictions of interpersonal diagnosis, and by the epistemological interests from which they spring.

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The purposes of this study were to formulate a definition of the "bob-wheel" stanza in which a number of Middle English and Middle Scots poems were written, to inventory and describe these works, with special attention to the structure of individual stanzas, to identify the genres, the periods, and the dialects in which they were written, and to trace their origin and development between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The dissertation includes a general introduction of the topic, chapters on the influence of Latin and Romance stanzaic structure, a chronological survey of the bob-wheel poems, and a conclusion in which theories concerning the origins, development, and decline of the form are discussed.

The Confessio Amantis, a poem completed in 1393, opens with its author's pledge to: wryte of newe som matiere essampled of these olde wyse [write anew some matter modeled on these old wise books]. Expressing a commonplace among writers of vernacular literature in late medieval England, John Gower describes authorial activity as the process of translating and assimilating pre-existing narratives. This dissertation argues that such conceptualizations of authorship were embraced by illuminators of vernacular literature in their burgeoning notion of invention before the ascendance of print: as translation and compilation provided a model of creativity founded on the alteration of models, illuminators located an ideal congenial to both the restrictions and freedoms of their own profession. The centerpiece of the study is Pierpont Morgan MS M. 126, a manuscript of the Confessio Amantis produced c.1472 and made for Edward IV and his Queen Consort, Elizabeth Woodville. Although it has been acclaimed as one of the most impressive extant manuscripts of Middle English literature, it has never been the subject of a major study. The aim of the dissertation is to recognize and restore to the illustrator the power of his position between the conception of a text and the consumption of a book. Part One focuses on the illustrator's interactions with the textual voices of the Confessio Amantis, demonstrating how the images in nineteen manuscripts of the poem, including the Morgan Confessio, address the identity of the author of the poem (Chapter One); and how miniatures in the Morgan Confessio reinterpret its Ovidian narratives (Chapter Two). Part Two shifts attention to the illustrator's confrontation with his patrons. Although their impact on the production of this manuscript appears to have been minimal, I observe how, as patrons they furnished a visual context for the Morgan Confessio from within their own library of illustrated historical manuscripts (Chapter Three) and books on science (Chapter Four). Produced just before Caxton printed his first book in Westminster in 1476 and standing at the threshold of standardization, this manuscript offers a complex glimpse into the variance that epitomized creative activity in illustrated vernacular manuscripts.

This thesis studies the interaction between language, people and culture in England in the century either side of 1300 by analysing the use of French in three Middle English texts: Laȝamon's Brut, Kyng Alisaunder, and Handlyng Synne. I explore the ways in which these texts exploit the sociocultural implications of French elements to negotiate the expression of collective identity, and consider what that suggests about the texts' audiences. This exploration also provides insights into the sociolinguistic relation between English and French. Specifically, I add to recent work on multilingualism within texts by providing a more systematic approach than has been adopted hitherto. Since this period saw the largest influx of French-derived vocabulary in English, evaluating the use of French elements requires consideration of the extent to which that vocabulary had become integrated in English. This aspect has not so far been included in studies of multilingualism in texts, and in approaching it this thesis brings together previous work on loanwords to offer a systematic methodology. Chapters 2 to 4 treat the lexis of the individual texts. Study of the broader context of the French elements in chapter 5 shows that they are distributed evenly across the texts and the majority are introduced independently of the source texts. Those that were carried over from the source texts were not adopted into Middle English more generally. Appeal to a specific register better explains the appearance of clusters. Chapter 6 concludes that the implications of the French elements in these texts centre on the negotiation of social and cultural identity. No clear support was found for the use or avoidance of French elements to express ethnic or religious identity in these texts. The style of both versions of Laȝamon's Brut was confirmed to be the result of redactors' choices and not the state of the language as a whole, since most French-derived words in either version were apparently well integrated by 1300. On a larger scale, the amount of well-integrated lexis of French origin in Handlyng Synne demonstrates the extent to which French-derived vocabulary had become accessible as early as 1300. Lastly, the atypical, specialised French elements in Kyng Alisaunder are best explained by supposing its initial audience included those with extensive knowledge of French. This supports the hypothesis of continuity of audience between French and Middle English literary culture.