| Abstract | Paper -a:
The Middle English poem Alexander and Dindimus illustrates most impressively how different attitudes towards nature have played a key role in negotiating good governance. The 14th-century alliterative poem features a fictitious debate between Alexander the Great and Dindimus, king of the Brahmans, that addresses all aspects of 'how to live', including 'how to live with nature'. This paper argues that Alexander and Dindimus can be read as a speculum principum, both philosophically instructing a king-to-be and challenging him to practise diplomacy in his leadership. With religious, environmental, and political questions closely interlinking, the poem imagines a king seeking to balance his behaviour towards God, nature, and his fellow humans.
Paper -b:
Two poems, possibly written by the same unknown early 15th-century author, Richard the Redless and Mum and the Sothsegger, share the same task of justifying honest and truthful counsel to King Henry IV. Although thematically and stylistically complementary, the two poems differ in how they create a 'climate of opinion' from which truth might be shared. There is a metaphor in Mum that depicts Truth hiding from hailstones and residing in bare grain fields overgrown by weeds. The world is out of harmony - amisse temprid - because it is tenyd with tares. Tares might be alluding to Matthew 13:24-30, a parable that captures the interpretive dilemma of the narrator who advocates for truth in a 'climate of opinion' where fabelyng and sothsegging are intertwined.
In Richard, there is also a metaphor featuring a harsh symbolic landscape: a sunless summer, 'fresinge frost', 'wyntris wedir', and 'derke mystis'. But unlike Mum, the concept of 'kynde' also dominates in the background, consistently serving as an interpretive waypoint in an object history lesson for Henry IV.
This paper will explore how two separate 'climates of opinion' are fashioned in the poems, reflecting a different degree of confidence and anxiety in knowing and speaking truth.
Paper -c:
Mum and the Sothsegger, an early 15th-century mirror for princes, encapsulates the long term consequences of the dramatic events which occurred in the 14th century such as the Little Ice Age, the Great Famine, the Great Plague, or the Peasant Revolt, and the political turmoil. The debate between the two principal allegorical characters of Mum and the Sothsegger may be interpreted as a camouflaged discussion of the need to expose the exploitation of the poor by the higher ranks. Allegiance to the truth, understood as both veracity of facts, as well as honesty, becomes, thus, identified with the protection of the underprivileged against all forms of mishandling. The poor are shown as meriting mercy, but at the same time, they are approached with suspicion as a group posing a threat to the stability of the kingdom. By incorporating the late medieval conflicting discourses concerning poverty, the poem reflects the tensions of the world ridden with various crises and manifests the resilience of the traditional social order, defended by the ruling elites, regardless of the long term consequences, which the 14th-century dramatic events generated. The variety of implications of the Sothsegger's defence of the poor might also be attributed to multiple generic influences, which echo the rhetorical elements and the thematic concerns of not only mirrors for princes but also of complaint literature, parliamentary petitions, and allegorical dream poetry.
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