| Abstract | Paper -a:
The late 15th-century poem The Turke and Sir Gawain, found in the heavily damaged London, British Library, Additional MS 27879 'The Percy Folio', pp. 38-46, portrays the conquest of the Isle of Man by the King of Man in a secular context replete with symbols that suggest conquest of an evil empire in spiritual terms. Although the Turke and Sir Gawain start out from and return to King Arthur's court at the end of the quest, the empire that Arthur and his knights have built is, as is often the case, deeply flawed in comparison to that which the Turke creates by physically conquering and reforming an evil pagan land. Arthur's kingdom appears limited in vision, materialistic, corrupt, and vain. Ultimately, the newly formed empire, the Isle of Man, is a state founded on and governed by Christian principles, a religio-political unity much desired during the Middle Ages, but, as the case of the Holy Roman Empire illustrates, impossible to achieve.
Paper -b:
In medieval thought, Paradise is both the first, lost home of humankind, and the last home of righteous souls in the afterlife. To the living, Paradise is closed. Yet in Sir Orfeo and Mandeville's Travels, rulers demonstrate and shore up their power by attempting to access Paradise on earth. In Sir Orfeo, the King of Faerie carries insignia of imperial power amidst a Paradise-like kingdom. But Faerie's grisly human captives undermine the illusion of Paradise, and human trickery circumvents the Faerie King's imperial power. In Mandeville's Travels, one ruler establishes his power by creating a false Paradise and deceiving his subjects; others attempt to reach, through sheer military might, the Earthly Paradise. The attempts fail, and the rulers are destroyed. Counter-traditional deployments of Paradise's iconography and traditional verbal motifs emphasize how the inaccessibility of Paradise reinforces the limits of earthly empire.
Paper -c:
This paper will juxtapose two texts in which the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia undermines a narrative of Roman triumph: Book 1 of Lucan's Pharsalia and John Lydgate's Triumphal Entry of King Henry VI into London. Lucan describes Caesar's confrontation by the female personification of Rome before besieging the capitol, suggesting with political acuity that Caesar prefers the unstable defense of Fortune. Lydgate's ten-year old Henry VI is likewise surrounded and governed by various personifications during his late-medieval recuperation of the Roman triumph tradition, including another ambivalently allegorized municipality: London. How does granting feminine agency to non-human polities work against Empire?
|
|---|
