| Paper 834-b | Looking at Orm Looking at Them, or, The Ormulum and Jewish Things
(Language: English)
Adrienne Williams Boyarin, Department of English, University of Victoria
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Sermons and Preaching |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
This paper will explore the idea that rhyme, far from being a neutral decorative feature, is in fact a powerful determinant of what a poet writes. Focusing on love-lyrics in English between 1300 and 1579, it will argue that once a rhyme-word is chosen, the limited rhyme resources of English render certain clusters of words almost inevitable. As a result, groups of ideas which are linked by the essentially arbitrary element of rhyme come to determine features of the experience of love in poetry. The discussion will focus on the example of the word 'pain', a key Petrarchan concept.
Paper -b:
This paper examines The Ormulum (c. 1180) for the extraordinary interpretive potential of its repetitions. I argue that its most identifiable feature - doubled consonants visible with even the briefest glance at a page - does conceptual work. Doubling is not only the orthographic but also the aesthetic and exegetical principle of The Ormulum, and one of its great successes is that this functions at both superficial and profound levels. Orm's repetitions are a way of looking at words, at the page, at the self, at scripture, and at time - and content meets form no more powerfully than wherever Orm turns his focus to Jewish models of law and ritual, and therefore to questions of what constitutes meaningful Christian repetition.
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