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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Valiant Welshman, The Scottish James, And The Formation Of Great Britain, Megan Lloyd
The Valiant Welshman, The Scottish James, And The Formation Of Great Britain, Megan Lloyd
Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
When James VI of Scotland and I of England proclaimed himself King of Great Britain, he proposed a merger of the English and Scottish parliaments, and he looked to Henry VIII’s Acts of Union of England and Wales (1536/43) as an example for English Scottish union under one king. On the London stage after 1603 many plays paid tribute to the new king and provided a predominantly English audience a means of accepting the not so palatable ideas of Scottish power, assimilation and unity. The Valiant Welshman is distinctive among these works, as no other extant early modern English drama …
The Gawain-Poet And The Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition, Ethan Campbell
The Gawain-Poet And The Fourteenth-Century English Anticlerical Tradition, Ethan Campbell
Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
In this fresh reading of the Gawain-poet's Middle English works (Cleanness, Patience, Pearl, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), Ethan Campbell argues that a central feature of their moral rhetoric is anticlerical critique. Written in an era when clerical corruption was a key concern for polemicists such as Richard FitzRalph and John Wyclif, as well as satirical poets such as John Gower, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer, the Gawain poems feature an explicit attack on hypocritical priests in the opening lines of Cleanness as well as more subtle critiques embedded within depictions of …