Essays in Medieval Studies最新文献

{"title":"Contagion, Sexual Violence, and Communal Healing in Chaucer’s The Physician’s Tale and Gower’s Confessio Amantis","authors":"Sarah Friedman","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.a903145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.a903145","url":null,"abstract":"lar body bears the entire brunt of a particular act. Instead, as Mitchell Merback notes, pain for medieval people was not “an alienating, isolating, and stigmatizing power” and instead “could be a powerful emblem of intersubjective experience; it actuated empathetic bonds between people.”1 As Merback demonstrates through his analysis of spectacles of capital punishment in the Middle Ages, medieval literary and visual culture represented pain as something that functioned within the social milieu. This paper extends what Merback and others have identified as the intersubjective nature of suffering in medieval art and literature to examine how gender identity plays a role in how medieval courtly literature represents pain and suffering in the sphere of romantic love.2 I examine The Physician’s Tale (1387– 1400) and Gower’s version of the tale of Lucretia in Confessio Amantis (1389) to showcase examples of how medieval texts that feature violence against women tend to decenter the psychological effects of violence brought to the female body. I also demonstrate how these texts, in turn, foreground how such violations physically and psychologically injure male witnesses and even male perpetrators of this violence. I begin by connecting these medieval texts to prominent theories of “lovesickness” to explain how these authors explicitly connect men’s acts of rape to their experience of bodily and mental affliction in the presence of women. I then demonstrate how these works suggest that, much like plague and illness, sexual violence and its consequences can allow communities to be cleansed of evils and made more just. While Chaucer and Gower present the act of rape as a symptom of physical injury caused by the spectacle of the female body, the violated female body also seems to facilitate communal healing and positive political change. In The Physician’s Tale, Chaucer draws on medical and even literary discourses of “lovesickness” to highlight how Virginia’s vulnerability to sexual Contagion, Sexual Violence, and Communal Healing in Chaucer’s The Physician’s Tale and Gower’s Confessio Amantis","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129449595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Laughing Matters: An Essay on Kings, Clowns and Nobles","authors":"Naseem Ashiq V","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.a903147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.a903147","url":null,"abstract":"varies according to time and space. Humour is used to laugh at a situation or to dissent. Humour in the forms of wit, satire and sarcasm could tell us many things; it has some cultural traits because humour mirrors the attitudes of society. Humour plays a role in our mental life and intimate connection between all mental happenings. It needs wounding ironic phrases, metaphors, expression, playful judgments and sense of the nonsense.1 When we think of humour it is hard not to think of a royal court. Throughout the history of courts, wit and satire had been fashioned well. For instance, the concept of Vidusaka (clown) in ancient Indian dramas2 and literary works such as Jatakas,3 Kathasaritsagara,4 Cilapadikkaram,5 and Mattavilasa Prahasana,6 have recognized the relevance of humour. The literary works of medieval Indian courtiers like Amir Khusrau,7 Tenali Raman,8 Badauni etc, derive significance because they carry so much wit within them. The royal court is like a social space where its members make relationships based on certain norms and mentalites.9 Therefore, humour is best represented among them. For instance, the Mughal court’s very composition and structure is a testimony to that. There, it worked in different ways: firstly to entertain—the Mughal emperor makes fun and in return he is made fun of; secondly, as a derision used by the Turani nobles (Turkish) to satirize the low born non-Turani nobles (Iranians, Indian Muslims and Rajputs) who were becoming beneficiaries of the court. Here, humour has become a way of getting pleasure and of expressing the emotions of fear and anger. In other words, the policy of the Mughal emperor to create a nobility of different ethnicity in order to prevent one group of the nobles, that is, the Turani nobles, from holding important administrative positions was bound to generate tensions which found expression in the humour in the imperial Laughing Matters: An Essay on Kings, Clowns and Nobles","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133608525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Communication of Trauma and Monastic Friendship","authors":"Kathryn L. Jasper","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.a903143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.a903143","url":null,"abstract":"we have all been touched by trauma, albeit to varying degrees; but academic interest, indeed, fascination with trauma has already been gaining momentum for some time.1 Trauma Studies has emerged as a field connecting researchers across multiple disciplines, though examinations of trauma are often connected to the history of emotions. Barbara Rosenwein’s continued (and impressively prolific) work on emotions, such as her latest book on anger, proves we have uncovered a rich field of study.2 This essay will consider the relationship between pain and emotions in the context of monastic communities in the Age of Reform (ca. 1049–1122). Monks experienced what Alison Beach has called “communal stress” in the tumultuous years of the eleventh century.3 Not all monasteries welcomed reform when it came, and its imposition brought very real shock and anguish. How could it not? Reformers attacked established traditions that upended monastic life in each community. But is trauma the appropriate word to describe their pain and painful experiences? To answer that question, this essay focuses on the communication of pain. Emotions like sympathy or empathy are typically modern responses to someone’s pain; but how were condolences and comfort expressed among medieval monks, religious figures who, by definition, welcomed suffering? And how did individual monks discuss emotions associated with their own torment? Epistolary collections have proved invaluable in reconstructing emotional communities because letters include “emotion words” and capture conversations between friends that might otherwise be lost.4 Rarely do such complete collections come from earlier periods, making it difficult, but not impossible, to visualize relationships. The Paston Letters remain the example par excellence for medievalists for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the collection truly reflects a network since letters from both senders and recipients survive. There are, of course, The Communication of Trauma and Monastic Friendship","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121492326","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From the Foothills of Snowdonia to Shrewsbury and Beyond: The Transition of St. Winefride from Child to Great Saint","authors":"Evelyn Nicholson-Jenkins","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.a903141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.a903141","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"22 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125688266","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Transforming Space through Performing Place and Identity in the Towneley Shepherds Pageants","authors":"W. Hodapp","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.a903142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.a903142","url":null,"abstract":"contains a set of 32 pageants composed by anonymous playwrights to dramatize events of Christian salvation history from Creation to Final Judgment with particular focus on the first advent, the passion and death, and the future, or second, advent of Jesus of Nazareth: what C.S. Lewis echoing John Donne termed “the world’s last night.”1 This set of pageants, known as the Towneley Plays in reference to the manuscript’s first known owner, illustrate a late medieval English phenomenon with which most early English studies scholars and teachers are familiar: the impulse to stage a cycle of pageants as part of communal, festival life in certain locations and on or near particular days in the Church calendar—Pentecost, for instance, or Corpus Christi.2 In addition to the four extant cycles of biblical plays—Chester, York, N-Town, and Towneley—evidence of production from civic records, single surviving pageants from towns like Coventry and Newcastle-uponTyne, the Beverley list of pageants, and textual references like Chaucer’s randy clerk Absolon playing “Herodes on a scaffold hye” from the Miller’s Tale hint at what was a vibrant part of late medieval and early modern English culture for some 200 years.3 Yet, unlike the manuscripts of the other three surviving cycles, which tend to show evidence of how the given cycle was staged—processionally on wagons and in the street, for instance, at Chester and York—Huntington Library HM 1 reveals little about overall staging. Its single scribal hand writing a clear Anglicana script, intentional decorative plan, flow from pageant to pageant, and limited amount of staging notation or revision, for instance, indicate that the manuscript, as its Early English Text Society editors A.C. Cawley and Martin Stevens note, was “clearly meant to be admired as a book in itself.”4 Though Huntington Library HM 1 may have been a presentation copy of the pageants to a civic or religious leader, a copy intended for a wealthy patron’s private reading, or Transforming Space through Performing Place and Identity in the Towneley Shepherds Pageants","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114798750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Postpandemic Trauma in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale","authors":"Lorenz Hindrichen","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.a903144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.a903144","url":null,"abstract":"Plague Pandemic (1348–50), popularly known as the “Black Death,” represented a cataclysmic event that reshaped late medieval society demographically, socioeconomically, politically, and culturally, with major repercussions on mental health.1 Many historical sources hint at the hurt and anguish survivors must have felt as a result of losing family and large parts of their communities. Assessing the mental health impact of these experiences is compromised, though, by the scarcity of relevant source material. Most chronicles, letters, and ordinances that deal with the pandemic are etiological, didactic, or legislative in nature, and aim to diagnose an outbreak, suggest preventive measures, or mitigate socio-economic and political repercussions rather than reflect on mental health.2 The few sources that do address the pandemic’s psychological fallout often speak figuratively or elliptically, and elicit rather than verbalize pandemic experience. The Irish chronicler John Clynn, for example, ends his entries for 1348 by providing empty pages for later scribes “in case anyone should still be alive in the future,” poignantly capturing the desperation he must have felt without openly sharing his hurt.3 A late fourteenth-century literary author representing trauma in more explicit yet highly coded language is Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400), whose texts are increasingly read through a pandemic lens. Chaucer is traditionally viewed as a post-pandemic writer who looks back on the horrors of the Black Death in The Pardoner’s Tale,4 possibly to process a childhood trauma.5 Given that he experienced many more epidemic waves throughout his late adolescence (Second Pestilence, 1361–62) and adult life (Third, Fourth and Fifth Pestilence (1368–69, 1374–79, 1390–93)),6 he is better thought of as a postpandemic voice who acknowledges the continuity of epidemic threats and their repercussions while attempting to Postpandemic Trauma in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"2004 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131383978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Laughing in the Face of Danger: Humorous Coping in MS Harley 913","authors":"Michael W. Hollis-George","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.a903146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.a903146","url":null,"abstract":"tains works in Latin, French, and Anglo-Irish. A number of these works have been more or less universally recognized as humorous. In addition to its most famous work, The Land of Cokaygne, the manuscript also contains a number of satirical and parodic pieces, several of which seem to react to the historical circumstances surrounding the poems’ and manuscript’s production. My main focus here will be on The Land of Cokaygne, with some excursions into other works in the manuscript. The early fourteenth century experienced severe weather which, between 1315–1317, caused what has become known as the Great Famine, the effects of which lasted well into the 1320s. Most scholars of these works consider them satire, with others seeing prominent elements of parody in them. Although those two genres are definitely present, I argue that The Land of Cokaygne and its kin are also a mode of humorous coping with the trauma that events such as the Great Famine (and Black Death afterwards) caused. In doing this, I will draw upon contemporary humor theory, providing a modified relief theory, working in conjunction with the popular incongruity theory, to argue that the humor can function as compensation for trauma. I argue that, although poems such as The Land of Cokaygne exist within a satiric and parodic tradition, they also could have a social function—relief from the hardships of everyday life. Scholarly treatment of the poem has touched upon these issues, but no indepth study of the poem in relation to its historical circumstances or using humor theory has yet appeared. Hal Rammel seems to be on the right track in seeing The Land of Cokaygne as part of a tradition that he calls comic utopia, which also includes “Schlaraffenland, Lubberland, Oleana, and Ditty Wah Ditty”1 but also has links to the Roman Saturnalia, Carnival, travel narratives, and even tall-tale post cards, which present pictures of vegetables larger than the farmers who raise Laughing in the Face of Danger: Humorous Coping in MS Harley 913","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"141 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134387109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Memory and Mystical Detachment in Paul Celan's Eckhart-Poems","authors":"I. Moore","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114646135","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Building Community in Times of Disaster: Medieval and Modern Responses","authors":"J. Bird","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115098721","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Marie's Lais and the Movement from Romantic to Religious Space","authors":"E. Risden","doi":"10.1353/ems.2022.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/ems.2022.0007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":248671,"journal":{"name":"Essays in Medieval Studies","volume":"53 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127541768","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}