Satire and counsel recur together in the secular literature of the High and Late
Middle Ages. I analyze their collocation in Latin, Old Occitan, and Middle English texts
from the twelfth to the fifteenth century in works by Walter Map, Alan of Lille, John of
Salisbury, Daniel of Beccles, John Gower, William of Poitiers, Thomas Hoccleve, and
John Skelton. As types of discourse, satire and counsel resemble each other in the way
they reproduce scenarios of social interaction. Authors combine satire and counsel to
reproduce these scenarios according to the protocols of real-life social interaction.
Informed by linguistic pragmatics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and cultural
anthropology, I examine the relational rhetoric of these texts to uncover a sometimes
complex and reflective ethical discourse on power which sometimes implicates itself in
the practices it condemns. The dissertation draws throughout on sociolinguistic methods
for examining verbal interaction between unequals, and assesses what this focus can
contribute to recent scholarly debates on the interrelation of social and literary practices
in the later Middle Ages.
In the first chapter I introduce the concepts and methodologies that inform this
dissertation through a detailed consideration of Distinction One of Walter Map’s De
nugis curialium . While looking at how Walter Map combines discourses of satire and
counsel to negotiate a new social role for the learned cleric at court, I advocate treating
satire as a mode of expression more general than ‘literary’ genre and introduce the
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theories and methods that inform my treatment of literary texts as social interaction,
considering also how these approaches can complement new historicist interpretation.
Chapter two looks at how twelfth-century authors of didactic poetry appropriate
relational discourses from school and household to claim the authoritative roles of teacher
and father. In the third chapter, I focus on texts that depict relations between princes and
courtiers, especially the Prologue of the Confessio Amantis which idealizes its author
John Gower as an honest counselor and depicts King Richard II (in its first recension) as
receptive to honest counsel. The fourth chapter turns to poets with the uncertain social
identities of literate functionaries at court. Articulating their alienation and satirizing the
ploys of courtiers—including even satire itself—Thomas Hoccleve in the Regement of
Princes and John Skelton in The Bowge of Court undermine the satirist-counselor’s claim
to authenticity. In concluding, I consider how this study revises understanding of the
genre of satire in the Middle Ages and what such an approach might contribute to the
study of Jean de Meun and Geoffrey Chaucer.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/16806 |
| Date | 20 January 2009 |
| Creators | Newman, Jonathan M. |
| Contributors | Townsend, David |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1989816 bytes, application/pdf |
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