IMC 2006: Sessions
Session 706: Remoulding Romance and Lay
Tuesday 11 July 2006, 14.15-15.45
| Moderator/Chair: | James Weldon, Department of English & Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario |
|---|---|
| Paper 706-a | Apocryphal Fairies in Middle English (Language: English) Index terms: Folk Studies, Language and Literature - Middle English |
| Paper 706-b | Thomas’s Tripartite Soul and Theseus’s Horse: Scholastic and Chaucerian Images of Anger and of Movement (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Theology |
| Paper 706-c | Swords in Middle English Romance: Uses and Symbolism (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Military History |
| Abstract | Abstract paper -a: Critics have recently categorized fairies with the 'secular supernatural' of the later Middle Ages, aligning them with a number of other exotic or otherwise monstrous creatures. But in many later medieval texts, as this paper aims to illustrate, fairies were presented as neither wholly secular nor necessarily supernatural. Accordingly, this study seeks to examine the relationship between Christianity and fairy traditions in later medieval England. It intends to look broadly at a number of Middle English texts in an attempt to locate spaces where these two belief systems intersected, asking both how and why this amalgamation occurred. Abstract paper -b: In the Knight’s Tale, Chaucer renders Aquinas’s abstract account of anger’s interior spiritual motion with more concrete images of exterior physical movement, and with pointed images of lack of movement and change. His observation of Theseus’s movement explores the liminal character of anger, which tests the ability of the individual and the community to change and to move forward. The tale also considers the problem of how to interpret and to evaluate angry gestures and movements, in a world where expressions of just and unjust anger often take the same verbal, physical, and narrative form. Abstract paper -c: In Norse sagas and the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, the warrior’s sword is afforded particular attention, being given a name, provenance, and detailed physical description. The Middle English romance much more rarely gives a name or provenance to knights’ swords, and, when it does, the sword is almost never physically described unless it is broken. In spite of this apparent reduction of the sword’s role in romance, this paper will argue that it is not a meaningless remnant of an older tradition (signifier stripped of signified); rather, by exploring sword-symbolism current in the Middle Ages (eg. the ceremony of making a knight), I will demonstrate that the sword required less emphasis because it was an object with an established rule of interpretation. |