| Paper 1503-a | 'Like to the world it selfe': The Romance of Maps and Mirrors in Chaucer and Spenser
(Language: English)
Tamsin Theresa Badcoe, Centre for Renaissance & Early Modern Studies, University of York
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Learning (The Classical Inheritance), Medievalism and Antiquarianism, Science |
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| Paper 1503-b | Speaking of the Body: Words, Body, and Augustinian Language in Chaucer's Pardoner
(Language: English)
Laila Abdalla, Department of English, Central Washington University
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Philosophy, Rhetoric |
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| Paper 1503-c | Polysemy, Metatheatricality, and Affective Piety: A Study of Conceptual Blending in the York Play Crucifixion
(Language: English)
Karen Ward, University of Waterloo, Ontario
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Lay Piety, Performance Arts - Drama, Rhetoric |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
New perspectives animated by exploration posed challenges to writers of romance, a genre already notoriously difficult to navigate, in the late 16th-century. This paper looks at the speculative and spatialising fantasy of the magic mirror trope, found even in early modern scientific treatises such as William Cuningham's The Cosmographical Glasse (1559). Rewriting the mirror in Chaucer's The Squire's Tale as Merlin's 'glassy globe', Edmund Spenser's literary 'cosmographical glasse' in The Faerie Queene (1590) blurs the imaginative boundaries between map and mirror, creating a perspectival object that reflects emergent ways of making knowledge, through which the wanderings of medieval romance were called to question.
Paper -b:
The Pardoner's Tale is a story about men who go on a voyage told by a man on a voyage. It also contains a form of 'linguistic cross-travelling' that reveals, despite the Pardoner's own motives, an Augustinian sense of the ordered nature of communication. The Pardoner depicts a world in which God and human, meaning and word, signified and signifier have no relationship. But his references to the human body function, despite his intent, to refute the philosophical fissure he is seeking to expose and promote. While the Pardoner's words about relics, souls, and the Eucharist travel in one direction to prove the meaninglessness and emptiness of these concepts, his words about the body travel in the opposite direction to return this meaning. Ironically, and despite the Pardoner's own desire, his references to the material body resurrect the non-material significance of relics, souls, and the Eucharist.
Paper -c:
My paper applies Mark Turner's theory of conceptual blending to the metatheatrical humour in the York play of the Crucifixion. Conceptual blending is the joining of two distinct ideas into a third idea, which develops a new meaning as a result of the blend. Both The York Cycle and The Crucifixion often break their own mimetic frames (biblical stories) in highly metatheatrical ways, mapping the biblical stories onto medieval contemporary realities such as guild culture and civic geography. My paper explores the humour of both the polysemous words in the play and the metatheatrical hailing of medieval contemporary realities, suggesting that the conceptual blends inspired by the play's polysemy and metatheatricality integrate both edification and entertainment into the play and allow the audience to simultaneously enjoy the performance (in the vernacular, when masses were held in Latin), learn about their faith, and understand their place within Christianity.
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