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Articles 1 - 30 of 91
Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
John Gower: The Minor Latin Works, Robert J. Meindl, Mark T. Riley
John Gower: The Minor Latin Works, Robert J. Meindl, Mark T. Riley
Accessus
A translation, with introductions, of the minor Latin works of John Gower.
Preface To A New English Translation Of The Minor Latin Works Of John Gower, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury
Preface To A New English Translation Of The Minor Latin Works Of John Gower, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury
Accessus
The editors' preface to Robert J. Meindl and Mark T. Riley's new English translation of the Minor Latin Works of John Gower.
William Caxton's Paris And Vienne And Blanchardyn And Eglantine, Harriet Elizabeth Hudson
William Caxton's Paris And Vienne And Blanchardyn And Eglantine, Harriet Elizabeth Hudson
TEAMS Middle English Texts
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William Caxton’s Paris and Vienne and Blanchardyn and Eglantine are English versions of romances well-known in medieval and early Renaissance Europe, but outside the modern canon of early English literature. Like many of his publications, they are translations of prose works circulating at the court of Burgundy, but unlike his other romances, they do not belong to the matters of the Nine Worthies. They are independent narratives of love and adventure presenting two differing but complementary accounts of chivalry and courtly love. Following fifteenth-century fashions, they treat conventional materials with a degree of realism and imbue characters with subjectivity. Blanchardyn …
“Hol Ynowh”, Maria Bullon-Fernandez
“Hol Ynowh”, Maria Bullon-Fernandez
Accessus
This essay is a response to a series of essays on hope and healing in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. It highlights and develops a common thread found in the essays: to Gower in order to heal, we need to accept that the cure for an illness may not restore us completely to our former selves but may make us just “hol ynowh.” And by accepting, we can find peace.
Gower In Exile, Joel Fredell
Gower In Exile, Joel Fredell
Accessus
The articles in Hope and Healing reveal John Gower's interest in an inclusive approach to human suffering, but also a clear-eyed look at its suffering. The experience of Amans in the Confessio Amantis, exiled from the love court of Venus, represents a powerful vision of love-agony as a central form of human suffering, not a cliche of love poetry.
Writing Into Hope: Laughter, Sadness And Healing In John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Natalie Grinnell
Writing Into Hope: Laughter, Sadness And Healing In John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Natalie Grinnell
Accessus
This article uses the theory of the narrative creation of the self to contend that the Confessio Amantis creates a space for narrative healing within the acknowledgement of mortality. Rather than being traditionally funny or ending in amorous or military victory, Gower’s poem uses the encyclopedia knowledge of the interpolated tales to establish a healing narrative in the face of failure and loss.
The Price We Pay For Envy: A Political And Social “Maladie”, Will Rogers
The Price We Pay For Envy: A Political And Social “Maladie”, Will Rogers
Accessus
"The Travelers and the Angel" is a curious exemplum: depicting envy as almost an emotion, it depicts the seemingly hopeless worsening of the world, as the envious care more for others' pain than their own happiness. While the exemplum's moral is undoubtedly true, even for 21st century readers, we might address how Gower's particular framing of envy doesn't account for envy's potential to drive positive change.
The Unfinished Hope Of Gower's Transgender Children, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski
The Unfinished Hope Of Gower's Transgender Children, Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski
Accessus
This article examines two of Gower's tales from the Confessio Amantis that deal with trans youths: Iphis and Narcissus. Considering these two tales together, I ask the question: why does one story end with hopeful futurity for the trans masculine youth and the other end with death and the absence of futurity for the trans feminine youth. Connecting these medieval texts to premodern contexts and then with modern contexts, I map the trajectory of centuries long problems facing trans youths. In the end, I conclude that trans youth possess a healthier and more stable future when they receive trans affirming …
The Consolation Of Exempla: Gower’S Sources Of Hope And “Textual Healing” In The Confessio Amantis, Curtis Runstedler
The Consolation Of Exempla: Gower’S Sources Of Hope And “Textual Healing” In The Confessio Amantis, Curtis Runstedler
Accessus
This article examines the role of exempla as the root cause of hope and healing in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I argue that these exempla provide remedial action in the text. The exempla are sources of metaphorical healing in the text, functioning as what I have termed “textual healing,” that is the medicinal aspects of the text that helps remedy Amans (and the reader, to a certain extent) back to full health. This article also draws upon reading the Confessio Amantis as a consolatio poem, linking it to Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy in particular. I also discuss the role …
Healing, Accountability, And Community In Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Kara L. Mcshane
Healing, Accountability, And Community In Gower’S Confessio Amantis, Kara L. Mcshane
Accessus
This piece focuses on the Tale of Lucrece and the Tale of Mundus and Paulina in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I examine how these two quite distinct narratives of sexual assault emphasize key themes in community response to trauma. In these two tales, Gower emphasizes the extent to which interpersonal violence is also social violence; further, community demands for accountability are essential to social healing in both cases. These two models demonstrate the extent to which contemporary society, too, struggles to hold authority accountable and address social wrongs.
Gower's "Herte-Thoght": Thinking, Feeling, Healing, Eve Salisbury
Gower's "Herte-Thoght": Thinking, Feeling, Healing, Eve Salisbury
Accessus
While much has been said about the ethical principles of Gower's poetry, less has been said about his understanding of the body, its principal organs, and its relation to the medical discourse of the time. This short paper, presented initially as part of the "Hope and Healing Symposium" sponsored by The Gower Project, approaches the poet's work from a more medically inflected point of view, one that suggests a stronger kinship between the material body and its use as a metaphor for the body politic. Gower appears to be situated within a continuing debate launched by Aristotle and taken up …
Hope And Healing In Gower: A Special Issue, Georgiana Donavin
Hope And Healing In Gower: A Special Issue, Georgiana Donavin
Accessus
"Hope and Healing in Gower: A Special Issue" is the editor's short introduction to Accessus 7.1.
The Gaelic Background Of Old English Poetry Before Bede, Colin A. Ireland
The Gaelic Background Of Old English Poetry Before Bede, Colin A. Ireland
Richard Rawlinson Center Series
Seventh-century Gaelic law-tracts delineate professional poets (filid) who earned high social status through formal training. These poets cooperated with the Church to create an innovative bilingual intellectual culture in Old Gaelic and Latin. Bede described Anglo-Saxon students who availed themselves of free education in Ireland at this culturally dynamic time. Gaelic scholars called sapientes (“wise ones”) produced texts in Old Gaelic and Latin that demonstrate how Anglo-Saxon students were influenced by contact with Gaelic ecclesiastical and secular scholarship. Seventh-century Northumbria was ruled for over 50 years by Gaelic-speaking kings who could access Gaelic traditions. Gaelic literary traditions provide …
The Owl And The Nightingale And The English Poems Of Jesus College Ms 29 (Ii), Susanna Fein
The Owl And The Nightingale And The English Poems Of Jesus College Ms 29 (Ii), Susanna Fein
TEAMS Middle English Texts
An edition of the early Middle English verse sequence contained in the thirteenth-century Oxford Jesus College MS 29 (II) with accompanying translations in Modern English and scholarly introduction and apparatus. The sequence is varied in subject, with poems of religious exhortation set beside others of secular pragmatism. Included are: The Owl and the Nightingale, Poema Morale, The Proverbs of Alfred, Thomas of Hales’s Love Rune, The Eleven Pains of Hell, the prose Shires and Hundreds of England, the lengthy Passion of Jesus Christ in English, and twenty-one additional lyrics, most of them uniquely …
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
Women’S Acts Of Childbirth And Conquest In English Historical Writing, Emma O. Bérat
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of …
“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler
“Writing History, Writing Trauma” : The Rape Of Igerna In The Medieval Brut Narratives, Gillian Adler
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
In the Brut narratives of medieval historiography, male heroic success and specifically the birth of Arthur are predicated upon the rape of Igerna. A comparative approach to the Tintagel episode across several of these narratives reveals how the emphasis on romance, magic, and nation-building function to validate sexual assault and elide Igerna’s experience. Ultimately, the repetition entailed in translatio studii, specifically the transfer that takes place within history-writing, reinforces the silencing of the survivor’s voice. This repetition lends trauma to the reading experience or creates the risk that readers become inured to the rape.
Transmuting John Gower: Elias Ashmole’S Hermetic Reading Of Gower’S Jason And The Golden Fleece, Curtis Runstedler
Transmuting John Gower: Elias Ashmole’S Hermetic Reading Of Gower’S Jason And The Golden Fleece, Curtis Runstedler
Accessus
This article examines Elias Ashmole’s alchemical reading of John Gower’s tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece in the Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652). I argue that this tale can be read as alchemical and connects to the Renaissance humanist tradition of reading classical stories as alchemical as well as Book IV of the Confessio Amantis, in which Gower depicts alchemy as the ideal form of human labour. Jason, representing the aspiring adept in this reading, is aided by his lover Medea, who represents a master alchemist with her supernatural powers, and through his intensive labours he is successful as …
John Gower's Magical Rhetoric, Georgiana Donavin
John Gower's Magical Rhetoric, Georgiana Donavin
Accessus
In Book 6 of the Confessio Amantis, telling the “Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus,” John Gower says of the former, “He was a gret rethorien / He was a gret magicien,” thereby capturing deep connections between rhetoric and magic. The seriously flawed necromancers of Book 6 exemplify only negative connections, however. Ulysses, by embracing verbal trickery and deploying his knowledge of the liberal arts for inferior aims, fails as both hero and speaker. Worse than Ulysses is Nectanabus, whose deceitful “carectes” seem to serve as a critique against spoken enchantments. Later in Book 7, however, Gower recuperates a concept …
Magic, Religion, And Science: A Special Issue, Eve Salisbury
Magic, Religion, And Science: A Special Issue, Eve Salisbury
Accessus
Preface to a special issue of Accessus on magic, religion, and science in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period.
Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz
Fabricated Muslim Identity, Female Agency, And Cultural Complicity: The Imperial Project Of Emaré, Amy Burge, Lydia Kertz
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
Extant in only one mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, the Middle English romance Emaré has nevertheless captivated modern scholars and readers. The majority of studies have focused on the text’s material culture, centred on the description of a luxurious cloth that takes up 10% of the poem. A recent global turn in medieval studies has consistently highlighted the role of medieval Europe in defining and supporting imperial projects, simultaneously challenging the Eurocentrism of medieval studies and the supposed neutrality of medieval European culture. This article brings Emaré into conversation with material culture and postcolonial critique to investigate the imperial politics of the text. …
Poetic Style And Innovation In Old English, Old Norse, And Old Saxon, Megan E. Hartman
Poetic Style And Innovation In Old English, Old Norse, And Old Saxon, Megan E. Hartman
Richard Rawlinson Center Series
This book traces the development of hypermetric verse in Old English and compares it to the cognate traditions of Old Norse and Old Saxon. The study illustrates the inherent flexibility of the hypermetric line and shows how poets were able to manipulate this flexibility in different contexts for different practical and rhetorical purposes. This analysis shows what degree of control the poets had over the traditional alliterative line, what effects they were able to produce with various stylistic choices, and how attention to poetic style aids literary analysis.
Chaucer's Polyphony: The Modern In Medieval Poetry, Jonathan Fruoco
Chaucer's Polyphony: The Modern In Medieval Poetry, Jonathan Fruoco
Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Geoffrey Chaucer has long been considered by the critics as the father of English poetry. However, this notion not only tends to forget a huge part of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature but also to ignore the specificities of Chaucer’s style. Indeed, Chaucer’s decision to write in Middle English, in a time when the hegemony of Latin and Old French was undisputed (especially at the court of Edward III and Richard II), was consistent with an intellectual movement that was trying to give back to European vernaculars the prestige necessary to a genuine cultural production, which eventually led to the …
The Wisdom Of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies In Honor Of Patrick W. Conner, Edward J. Christie
The Wisdom Of Exeter: Anglo-Saxon Studies In Honor Of Patrick W. Conner, Edward J. Christie
Richard Rawlinson Center Series
This interdisciplinary volume collects original essays in literary criticism and literary theory, philology, codicology, metrics, and art history. Composed by prominent scholars in Anglo-Saxon studies, these essays honor the depth and breadth of Patrick W. Conner’s influence in our discipline. As a scholar, teacher, editor, administrator and innovator, Pat has contributed to Anglo-Saxon studies for four decades. It is hard to say which of his legacies is most profound.
Gower´S Queer Poetics In The Mirour De L'Omme, María Bullón-Fernández
Gower´S Queer Poetics In The Mirour De L'Omme, María Bullón-Fernández
Accessus
Gower's Queer Poetics in the Mirour de l'Omme
In the Mirour de l’Omme John Gower describes the allegorical Sins as both deceitful and “hermafrodrite” and later confesses to having engaged in queer practices in his earlier courtly poetry. Gower’s confession and his association of the Sins with intersexuality, I will argue, do not entail ultimately a rejection of queer poetics. In his Life of the Virgin Mary, the final part of the Mirour, Gower deploys a different kind of queer poetics, one that acknowledges the indeterminacies of language but still seeks to stabilize meaning, while intertwining male and female.
The Community Of The Realm: Gower's Account Of The Commons In Book V Of The Vox Clamantis, Robert J. Meindl
The Community Of The Realm: Gower's Account Of The Commons In Book V Of The Vox Clamantis, Robert J. Meindl
Accessus
Gower's stated intention at the beginning of Book III of the Vox Clamantis to survey the three degrees of the world, i.e. the clerics, knights, and farmers, is not forthcoming in exactly the manner he specifies. Instead, he delivers a lengthy critique of the clergy in Books III and IV and then an account of the secular world apart from the nobility in Book V. This book deals with the rural and urban components of late fourteenth-century English society, that is, the gentry and the bound and free agricultural workers on the one hand and the merchants, artisans, and plebs …
Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury
Foreword, Georgiana Donavin, Eve Salisbury
Accessus
Foreword for Accessus volume 6, issue 1.
Hysteria, Perversion, And Paranoia In The Canterbury Tales: "Wild" Analysis And The Symptomatic Storyteller, Becky Renee Mclaughlin
Hysteria, Perversion, And Paranoia In The Canterbury Tales: "Wild" Analysis And The Symptomatic Storyteller, Becky Renee Mclaughlin
Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Beginning with the spectacle of hysteria, moving through the perversions of fetishism, masochism, and sadism, and ending with paranoia and psychosis, this book explores the ways that conflicts with the Oedipal law erupt on the body and in language in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for Chaucer’s tales are rife with issues of mastery and control that emerge as conflicts not only between authority and experience but also between power and knowledge, word and flesh, rule books and reason, man and woman, same and other—conflicts that erupt in a macabre sprawl of broken bones, dismembered bodies, cut throats, and decapitations. Like …
Boethian Variations: Musical Thought In Sir Orfeo, Troilus And Criseyde, And Robert Henryson’S Orpheus And Eurydice, Joshua T. Parks
Boethian Variations: Musical Thought In Sir Orfeo, Troilus And Criseyde, And Robert Henryson’S Orpheus And Eurydice, Joshua T. Parks
Masters Theses
This study approaches three poems from the late medieval British Isles—the Middle English Breton lay Sir Orfeo, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice—through the lens of medieval music theory. The most important authority for medieval music theorists was the late antique philosopher Boethius, who held to a Neoplatonic philosophy of music that valued reason, theory, and contemplation of the music of the spheres. Later medieval theorists cited Boethius extensively while also adapting his thought to suit their own purposes. In particular, the early fourteenth-century French theorist Johannes de Grocheio, influenced by Aristotle, departed …
Melusine, Invisible Leadership And The Future (In The Past), Jan Shaw
Melusine, Invisible Leadership And The Future (In The Past), Jan Shaw
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
This paper considers the operation of “invisible” leadership in the figure of Melusine from the late Middle English romance Melusine. By invoking contemporary leadership theory, this paper identifies leadership maneuvers in Melusine that are similar to those often practiced by women today, but the discourses of gender identity then ultimately render Melusine’s leadership invisible, just as leadership discourses today often render female leadership invisible. By uncovering the operation of “invisible” leadership in the figure of Melusine and identifying commonalities with the leadership of women today, this paper aims to improve our understanding of the contemporary problem of the marked …
Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz
Convents And Novices In Early Modern English Dramatic Works: In Medias Res, Vanessa L. Rapatz
Late Tudor and Stuart Drama
Convents and Novices in Early Modern English Dramatic Texts: In Medias Res attends to the religious, social, and material changes in England during the century following the Reformation, specifically examining how the English came to terms with the meanings of convents and novices even after they disappeared from the physical and social landscape. In five chapters, it traces convents and novices across a range of dramatic texts that refuse easy generic classification: problem plays such as Shakespeare's Measure for Measure; Marlowe's comic tragedy The Jew of Malta; Margaret Cavendish's closet dramas The Convent of Pleasure and The Religious …