Research Day in Medieval English Studies
University of Warwick, 8 May 2015
Humanities Building, Room H545
Organiser: Christiania Whitehead (Warwick). Co-organisers: Tamas Karath (Budapest), Alessandra Petrina (Padua), Denis Renevey (Lausanne)
9.00-9.30am Welcome in Room H545 (5th floor, English dept)
(please pick up a tea/coffee/pastry at the Humanities cafe on the ground floor, on your way up to the 5th floor, if you would like one)
Session 1: Mystical and Devotional Reception and Compilation in the later Middle Ages
9.30-10.10am Tamas Karáth (Budapest): ‘Fifteenth-Century Rolle’
10.10-10.50am Diana Denissen (Lausanne): ‘The Pore Caitif and its manuscript contexts’
10.50-11.20am Tea/coffee break (in Room H543)
Session 2: English and French Courtly and Allegorical Poetics
11.20-12.00noon Lewis Beer (Warwick): ‘‘Reading for the Moral’ in Late-Medieval Love Poetry: Some Trends in Recent Scholarship’
12.00-12.40pm Marco Nievergelt (Lausanne): ‘Langland reads Deguileville’
12.40-2.00pm Lunch in Le Gusta pizza restaurant in Warwick Arts Centre
Session 3: The Translation and Circulation of Neo-Latin in Early Modern England, Scotland, and Medieval Iceland
2.00-2.40pm Allison Steenson (Padua): ‘Hawthornden 2063-2065 and Latin Verse Exchange in Manuscript: Preliminary Results and Some Initial Issues’
2.40-3.20pm Alessandra Petrina (Padua): ‘Translating Machiavelli’s Prince in Early Modern England: New Manuscript Evidence’
3.20-4.00pm Sarah Baccianti (Lausanne): ‘The Revelatio Esdrae in Medieval Nordic Culture’
4-4.30pm Tea break (tea is available from the Humanities Cafe on the ground floor)
Session 4: Devotional Imagery and Carmelite Spirituality in Late Medieval England
4.30-5.10pm Hetta Howes (Queen Mary, UL): ‘Water Imagery in Late Medieval Devotional Writing by/for Women’
5.10-5.50pm Johan Bergstrom-Allen (Lausanne): The Carmelite Order in England
7.00pm onwards RDMES dinner in Harringtons on the Hill Restaurant (pay-as-you-go)
42, Castle Hill, Kenilworth CV8 1ND
Presentation Abstracts (alphabetically ordered)
Sarah Baccianti (Première assistante, Lausanne)
The Revelatio Esdrae in Medieval Nordic Culture
During my presentation at RDMES, I would like to discuss my research proposal, which I would circulate in its entirety to the rest of the group a few days before our meeting.
The purpose of this project is to investigate the reception of the Revelatio Esdrae in Old Norse-Icelandic literature, comparing it to the textual tradition in medieval England. The Revelatio Esdrae are a type of prognostics on the day of the week on which Christmas Day and the kalendae ianuariae fall, making predictions about weather and natural phenomena for the year, but also extending them to human affairs. According to M. Cesario, L. S. Chardonnes and R. M. Liuzza, the presence of these prognostics in English manuscripts (10th-12th centuries) is quite striking, and even though in the past it was often labelled as folklore, it is now often associated to religious and scientific compilations. Further, some of the surviving versions in English manuscripts are often attributed to Bede and Abbo of Fleury, belonging thus to the field of natural astrology.
Working on Hauksbók, an Icelandic manuscript of the early 14th century, I noticed that the nonrubricated Latin text at the end of fragment AM 544 4to, often classified as a "fortune-telling" text, is indeed the Revelatio Esdrae recorded in Bede's Prognostica Temporum. It is followed by other texts: 1- in Latin; 2- in Old Norse-Icelandic and Latin on dreams affected by the age of the moon. The presence of these texts in Hauksbók, which I discuss in the research proposal, is interesting as it can be compared to other compilations in Scandinavia, but more interestingly in England.
Lewis Beer (Senior Teaching Fellow, Warwick)
‘Reading for the Moral’ in Late-Medieval Love Poetry: Some Trends in Recent Scholarship
My research engages primarily with the poetry of Guillaume de Machaut and John Gower, with a special focus on their use of Boethius. In this paper, I would like to discuss two recent scholarly trends. The first is a tendency to ‘problematise’, evidenced in the claim (made by some scholars) that the Consolation of Philosophy fails to console because of its evasive attitude towards human passions. Similarly, Machaut’s and especially Gower’s poems are widely thought to resist moral coherence, and to reflect the fundamental instability of existence. The second tendency emphasises the playful, secular pleasures to be derived from these texts, arguing that medieval poets drew upon Boethius less for his austere moralising than for his ‘human’ qualities, his beautiful verses and sympathetic depiction of suffering. The first tendency reads the texts in question as failing to promote orthodox Christian morality; the second reads them as actively resisting orthodox Christian morality, and is the more dominant of the two. Both groups of critics see medieval poets as redeeming and celebrating the literary and/or the erotic, whether by affirming the primacy of disordered bodily impulses over the oppressive force of divine providence, or by attributing a quasi-divine status to love and poetry.
Much of this work stems from earlier critiques of the so-called ‘Robertsonian’ school of critics, who were (and are) widely perceived as homogenising the Christian medieval readership, and as presuming too much about how poems ‘must have been understood’ in their own time. However, some recent scholars have shown how the didactic elements in medieval love poetry can be analysed sympathetically without sacrificing complexity or subtlety. My own work aims to build on these examples. Elizabeth Eva Leach has commented, in her 2011 book on Machaut, on the ways in which a scholar’s religious and political beliefs may determine their approach to a medieval poem’s didactic content. As a liberal and an atheist, I feel that Leach’s otherwise excellent study perpetuates an unfortunate assumption when it suggests that ‘Christianising’ readings may be enjoying a renaissance due to the re-vitalisation of the religious right in post-9/11 America. There is much to be gained from ‘secularising’ approaches to the interpretation of medieval poems, but there is also a danger in automatically labelling the opposite approach ‘conservative’ or in assuming that Christian commentators are the only ones likely to advance Christian readings of medieval texts. My sense of these issues, and of how my own work will respond to them, is still in a formative state, but I look forward to discussing them with my fellow attendees at the Research Day.
Johan Bergstrom-Allen (PhD candidate, Lausanne)
Title and abstract to follow
Diana Denissen (PhD candidate, Devotional Compilations project, Lausanne)
The Middle English Pore Caitif and its Manuscript Contexts
My doctoral research focuses on the kinds of strategies compilers of late medieval devotional compilations in Middle English employed in the composition of their texts. The scholastic framework of compilatio – the collection of authoritative quotations – gave meaning to late medieval ideas about compiling, but its changing role in the late medieval period also provides insight into how systems of academic discourse were redefined in a non-academic late medieval context. I define a ‘compilation’ as: ‘a series of texts or extracts of texts that have intentionally been put together to constitute a new single and unified text’. Two elements of this definition are especially important: ‘intentionality’ – the idea that compiling was a planned process – and ‘unity’ – the idea that a compilation has a distinct beginning and end. The fifteenth-century Pore Caitif manuscript MS Bodley 938 challenges my definition of a compilation, because in this manuscript the tracts of the Pore Caitif are mixed with heterodox material in order to address an audience with Lollard sympathies, while at the same time acknowledging the devotional compilation as a unity in its (seemingly somewhat improvised) rubrication. Even though the intention and unity of the Pore Caitif are transformed in Bodley 938, they are kept intact in a different shape. This illustrates the fluidity of the Pore Caitif text as well a certain tension between the textual and physical motivation behind the compilation process. Together with you, I’d like to think some more about an approach to my source material that accepts this fluidity without dismissing the intentionality behind compiling styles and strategies altogether.
Hetta Howes (PhD candidate, Queen Mary, UL)
In Search of Clearer Water: An Exploration of Imagery in Late Medieval Devotional Prose by and for Women
This paper will begin with a brief overview of my thesis, which is an exploration of water as a literary metaphor in devotional prose written by and for women in the late Middle Ages. The thesis opens with an analysis of some neglected sources for the literary usage of water in works such as A Rule of Life for a Recluse and The Orcherd of Syon, in particular and most notably medieval encyclopedias, such as John Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things. It argues that many of these texts seem to draw heavily on descriptions of water in Trevisa’s text, creating a conception of water as an all-purpose metaphor. The following chapters build on this initial research by giving focused attention to specific watery topoi, demonstrating how this conception of water effects specific metaphors and allegories: domestic watery labour (such as laundry), blood and water (with specific reference to the wound in Christ’s side) and finally various proximities to water (being beside or immersed in the fluid) are all considered.
The second part of this paper will offer a snapshot of one of my chapters, entitled ‘Blood and Water: An Economy of Fluids and a Participatory Sacrifice.’ It will explore the extent to which water figures not only in Gospel accounts of the Passion but also in Passion meditations from late medieval devotional prose. Using a close reading of Aelred of Rievaulx’s A Rule of Life for a Recluse I will suggest that both water and blood need to be considered alongside one another, each fluid given equal priority, if readers wish to untangle the weighty layers of meaning in such works. It has been argued that blood piety was, in part, a response to an act of salvation which excluded those it saved; Christ shouldered the burden of the faithful, and so their role in their own salvation was dramatically reduced. This paper will ultimately build on these arguments, putting forward that it was through both water and blood that devoted Christians of the later Middle Ages could participate more fully in the act of their own salvation. Watery offerings, more accessible to the laity than blood, could be given in exchange for the blood shed on the cross.
Tamas Karáth (Lecturer in Medieval English Literature, Peter Pazmany Catholic University, Budapest)
Fifteenth-century Rolle: Presentation of a book project
Having reached the final stage of my research project on 15th-century translations of Richard Rolle’s writings, I will present members of the Warwick RDMES the overall plan of the monograph which I plan to publish at Brepols. (Their first answer to the proposal was positive.) At the moment of submitting this abstract, the first three out of five chapters (not including the Introduction and Conclusion) have been written, and most of the study of manuscripts and textual analysis has been done for Chapter 4.
Fifteenth-century Rolle is an extensive discussion of all the works of the mystic that were translated by late medieval translators, with a consideration of the manuscript context and probable readers. The focus of the book is the transformation of the mystic’s authority and the reinterpretations of Rolle’s mystical experience by his translators. Two major tendencies emerge from the translations of Rollean writings: a group of texts (the Latin translation of Ego dormio and two independent English versions of Emendatio vite) contain interpolations reflecting on the heterodoxy of universal salvation in a polemical vein. Secondly, most translations of Rolle’s self-revelatory accounts covertly censure the emotionally eccentric qualities of Rolle’s sensory mysticism and adjust Rolle’s legacy to new devotional models. In this process, translators also shift the major concerns of the late 14th-century discourse of mysticism.
The monograph is planned to present its contents in the following breakdown of chapters: Introduction, (1) Rolle in Hindsight: Legacy and Translations, (2) The Latin Translation of Ego dormio, (3) Richard Misyn’s Translation of Incendium amoris, (4) The English Translations of Emendatio vite, (5) Translated Fragments: Oleum effusum, Passion Meditations, and “The Bee”; Conclusion, Appendices and Bibliography.
Marco Nievergelt (SNF Research Fellow, Lausanne)
Revisionary poetics: Langland reads Deguileville
It is hard to imagine a more distinctively ‘English’ poem than Langland’s alliterative dream-vision, but in this paper I would like to make a case for Langland’s sustained and deep engagement with French allegorical poetry in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose and Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine. Both works have been suggested as ‘sources’ for individual details in Langland’s poem, but the Pèlerinage, I argue, also exercised a very different, much deeper kind of influence on the poetic method, architecture, and evolution of Langland’s dream vision in its various versions (A, B, C). Like Piers Plowman, Deguileville’s poem already exists in multiple versions, and Deguileville’s own allegorical ‘re-visions’ play a major role in inspiring Langland’s own development of what I call a ‘revisionary poetics’. This kind of dream-allegory explicitly foregrounds its own inability to attain epistemological closure, but also recognises its own multiple cognitive failures as spiritually productive, necessary experiences for its first-person subject/dreamer/ narrator. The poem’s ‘I’ finally attains an increased degree of self-knowledge precisely because the original desire for certain, definitive knowledge and certitude is repeatedly frustrated. This in turn redefines the cognitive possibilities opened up by allegorical poetry, directing it towards a very different kind of knowledge that is experiential, provisional and embodied. The experience of failure thus plays a central, but ultimately positive role, producing a kind of poetry that is both (self-)deconstructive and regenerative. In the process Langland emerges as a far more perceptive reader of the Pèlerinage than most modern critics, which invites us to reconsider the complexities of Deguileville’s own poem, its relation to scholastic accounts of cognition, and its influence on medieval readers and poets, from Langland to Chaucer, Lydgate and other anonymous readers, adapters and translators in the fifteenth century.
Alessandra Petrina (Professor of Medieval English Literature, Padua)
Translating Machiavelli’s Prince in Early Modern England: New Manuscript Evidence