Paper -a:
John Lydgate's project in the Temple of Glas takes energy from Chaucer via one spectacular and purposeful encroachment of poetic borders: the recycling and recombination of physical and poetic materials from the House of Fame and other Chaucerian dream visions to construct the eponymous temple and refigure its importance in the overall scheme of the poem. In this paper, I examine Lydgate's Chaucerian remediations in the Temple of Glas while also attending the material record of his poem in manuscripts and print, which speaks to the ways Lydgate's blurring of poetic boundaries encouraged similar activity in his readers and scribes.
Paper -b:
This paper examines the fluid border between the material 'boke' and the abstract 'werk' in medieval dream-poetry. Building from Chaucer’s extensive autocitation in The Legend of Good Women, this paper examines later instances in which the poet-narrators of courtly, allegorical narratives are confronted by books. Focusing on Venus's command in Gavin Douglas's Palice of Honoure (c. 1501) that the poet-narrator translate Virgil's Aeneid, this paper suggests a shift from earlier, limited attempts to distinguish between'‘bok' and 'werk' in medieval dream-poetry to a more pressing distinction between the authorial work and its duplication and re-organisation in manuscript and printed books.
Paper -c:
According to A.J. Aitkin, Middle Scots alliterative verse employs many of the 'elements of poetic diction… characteristic of late Medieval English.' The paper will discuss the specific features of Middle Scots poetic diction as compared to the Middle English one on the other side of the border, analyzing the origins, history and use of poetic words in alliterative poems Golagros and Gawain, The Buke of the Howlat and Rauf Coilgear. A special focus will be placed on those units that could be regarded as 'northern' or chiefly Scottish already in the 15th century.
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