IMC 2024: Sessions
Session 1025: Late Medieval Identities in Crisis, I
Wednesday 3 July 2024, 09:00-10:30
| Organiser: | IMC Programming Committee, |
|---|---|
| Moderator/Chair: | MaryEllen Linnehan, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge |
| Paper 1025-a | Crisis of Truth and Authenticity in Tristan Verse Romances, c. 1155-1340 (Language: English) Index terms: Language and Literature - Comparative, Literacy and Orality and Manuscripts and Palaeography |
| Paper 1025-b | The Moulton encomium and a Chivalric Identity Crisis (Language: English) Index terms: Genealogy and Prosopography, Language and Literature - Middle English and Local History |
| Paper 1025-c | Identity Crisis: Chaucer, His Sources, and Northumbria (Language: English) Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Historiography - Medieval and Language and Literature - Middle English |
| Abstract | This session has been grouped by the IMC Programming Committee from individually submitted paper proposals. Paper a: The casual ways in which Chaucer and Gower refer to him in their works, indicate that Tristan was once popular, but his story, particularly its early verse renditions, came down to us in fragmentary and mutilated forms. My paper uses the fragmentary nature of the Tristan verse romance as a lens through which to examine the crisis of truth and authenticity implicit in the various versions of the narrative. I explore a way of appreciating their fragmentariness. Paper b: My paper argues that the Lincolnshire interpolation in the Middle English romance Richard Coer de Lyon is an example of Moulton encomium rather than an imitation of the Warwick ‘ancestral’ romance as proposed by John Finlayson - a work of familial praise and not the creation of legendary origins. A 14th-century Thomas de Moulton and several of his close relatives had notable military reputations that stood to benefit from popular praise. The family’s possible affiliation with Edward II may have tarnished its chivalrous image, providing a need for a remedial composition to fabricate a connection between Thomas and Richard the Lionhearted. Paper c: This paper addresses the cultural descriptions and the geographic focus on North England in The Man of Law’s Tale. I will explore Chaucer’s circumstances in 14th-century London that led him to make Northumbria, of approximately the 6th century, the seat of Roman christianity in England. I will pay particular attention to the Britons and the role of their ethnicity as the recipients of that religion. This paper seeks to explain how Chaucer diverges from his sources, Nicholas Trevet’s Les Chroniques and John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and portrays a homogeneous Northumbrian society. This homogeneity is evident in the absence of Saxon language and people, that which Chaucer replaces with the Britons, without a named language. I suggest that this reveals an English history and identity crisis for Chaucer that necessitated fictional history-making to ease, based upon Northumbria and the Britons. |