| Paper 309-c | 'As longeth to this leyghttone, the lawe wol I doo': The Role of Landscape Description in the Social Environment Presented in Mum and the Sothsegger
(Language: English)
Valerie B. Johnson, Department of English, University of Maryland, College Park
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Politics and Diplomacy |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Saracens attack the young prince Horn's kingdom, killing his father and enslaving his mother because the family will not convert. Horn is set out to sea by the Saracens because he is too beautiful to kill. What is the relationship between Saracens (as an English poet would conceive them) and medieval concepts of beauty? Later Horn meets giants who turn out to be (as the poet explains) Saracens who attacked his father's kingdom. This paper seeks to make connections and explore 'otherness' and beauty in the context of early medieval England, Islam, as it can be glimpsed in this 12th century romance.
Paper -b:
In his cycle of Anglo-French love lyrics, the Cinkante Balades, John Gower uses birds and beasts as figures for his male and female speakers. A menagerie of animals ranging from domesticated to wild to fabulous emerges, including, among others, the lamb, falcon, popinjay, lion, chameleon, caladrius, phoenix, and halcyon. Gower freights these creatures with erotic significance; his lyric bestiary embodies the paradoxical nature of fin amour, the refined and refining love at the heart of the cycle's semi-narrative histoire. Finally, Gower may also use avian and bestial figures to evoke Henry IV and Agnes Groundolf, his king and wife, and his own extra-textual 'ennoblers'. Ultimately, through its animal imagery, the Cinkante Balades implies that fin amour humanizes lovers even as it makes them beasts of love.
Paper -c:
'Mum' presents a dream vision of England's monarch tending vegetation and bees. In the prior one hundred lines of landscape description, no human appears though the work of his hands is evident in the managed environments the poem describes. These elements establish the economy of culture as naturally centralized. This paper argues that the landscape shapes interpretation of the gardener's actions, forcing an obfuscation of boundaries between rich and poor while magnifying those differences in the figure of the truth-teller. The social concerns of the narrative cannot be understood without understanding the links between realm and sovereign, land and people.
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