Further Explorations in Medieval Literature Second Assessed Essay Questions 2016-17
All students taking this module: please submit a 5000 word essay by 12 noon, Tuesday 25th April 2017 (week 1, term 3).
Students taking the module 50/50 should choose an essay question from the complete list of questions.
Students taking the module as fully assessed should choose an essay question from nos. 12-24.
1. Explore Sir Orfeo and Sir Degare as reworkings of classical myth.
2. To what extent do Christian values coalesce with chivalric values in the Middle English romances? Answer with reference to at least two romances.
3. Examine the role of appetite and consumption in Sir Gowther and Havelok the Dane.
4. ‘The Middle English Breton lays replace exposition with elegant symbolism’ (Furnish, adapted). What is the function of the concrete symbols (harp, falchion, gloves etc.) at the centre of these lays?
5. ‘Romances are uniquely able to open up a discursive space for the expression of England as a nation’ (Faletra, adapted). Discuss with reference to Havelok the Dane.
6. What is the purpose of the confrontation between the familiar court and faerie Otherworld? Answer with reference to two or more romances.
7. Explore Chaucer’s use of space and setting in Troilus and Criseyde.
8. Discuss the theme of fortune OR of ‘trouthe’ in Troilus and Criseyde.
9. Discuss attitudes towards books and authorities in Troilus and Criseyde.
10. ‘The double sorrow is a formal and thematic design which presents the story by means of a structure of correspondences between later and earlier books, so that the remembering reader perceives patterns forming and developing in time’ (Windeatt). Write an essay exploring the use of patterns in Troilus and Criseyde.
11. Explore EITHER Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid as a response to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde OR Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde as a response to Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato.
12. Explore the role of books in any dream vision poem or poems.
13. Compare the treatment of love in at least TWO dream vision poems.
14. ‘[T]he dream-poem becomes a device for expressing the poet’s consciousness of himself as poet and for making his work reflexive’ (A. C. Spearing). Discuss any dream vision poem or poems in the light of this statement.
15. Discuss misreading and/or misinterpretation in any dream vision poem or poems.
16. In what ways, and to what extent, do poets writing in Scotland offer a novel response to Chaucer’s dream-poetry? You may write on either James I or Gavin Douglas or both.
17. ‘Womb, tomb, castle, love-bower’. Explore spatial and architectural metaphors of the anchorhold and the anchoritic body, and the ways in which they effect the construction of female anchoritism in Ancrene Wisse.
18. Compare the attitude adopted toward the act of seeing in Ancrene Wisse and Julian’s Revelations.
19. Compare the presentation of human sin OR divine love in Ancrene Wisse and Julian’s Revelations.
20. How do Julian AND/OR Margery Kempe negotiate the relation between their religious experiences and orthodox church teaching in their respective texts?
21. ’While Margery’s meditations [on the life of Christ] are theatrical, often involving her in action, Julian’s are painterly’ (Denise Baker). Discuss the role of imaginative visualisation and performance in late medieval religious women’s writing.
22. To what extent is Margery Kempe’s Book an attempt to construct her life as a saintly vita?
23. Explore the construction of sexuality in two or more female saints’ lives.
24. Explore the representation of female teaching in two or more of the texts studied in this module unit.