Otherworlds: fantasy and history in medieval literature

This book offers a new perspective on the otherworlds of medieval literature. These fantastical realms are among the most memorable places in medieval writing, by turns beautiful and monstrous, alluring and terrifying. Passing over a river or sea, or entering into a hollow hill, heroes come upon strange and magical realms. These places are often very beautiful, filled with sweet music and adorned with precious stones and rich materials. There is often no darkness, time may pass at a different pace, and the people who dwell there are usually supernatural. Sometimes such a place is exactly what it appears to be-the land of heart's desire-but, the otherworld can also have a sinister side, trapping humans and keeping them there against their will. Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature takes a fresh look at how medieval writers understood these places and why they found them so compelling. It focuses on texts from England, but places this material in the broader context of literary production in medieval Britain and Ireland. The narratives examined in this book tell a rather surprising story about medieval notions of these fantastical places. Otherworlds are actually a lot less 'other' than they might initially seem. Authors often use the idea of the otherworld to comment on very serious topics. It is not unusual for otherworld depictions to address political issues in the historical world. Most intriguing of all are those texts where locations in the real world are re-imagined as otherworlds. The regions on which this book focuses, Britain, Ireland and the surrounding islands, prove particularly susceptible to this characterization.

Chaucer and the Disconsolations of Philosophy: Boethius, Agency, and Literary Form in Late Medieval Literature

This study argues that Chaucer's poetry belongs to a far-reaching conversation about the forms of consolation (philosophical, theological, and poetic) that are available to human persons. Chaucer's entry point to this conversation was Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, a sixth-century dialogue that tried to show how the Stoic ideals of autonomy and self-possession are not simply normative for human beings but remain within the grasp of every individual. Drawing on biblical commentary, consolation literature, and political theory, this study contends that Chaucer's interrogation of the moral and intellectual ideals of the Consolation took the form of philosophical disconsolations: scenes of profound poetic rupture in which a character, sometimes even Chaucer himself, turns to philosophy for solace and yet fails to be consoled. Indeed, philosophy itself becomes a source of despair. In staging these disconsolations, I contend that Chaucer asks his readers to consider the moral dimensions of the aspirations internal to ancient philosophy and the assumptions about the self that must be true if its insights are to console and instruct. For Chaucer, the self must be seen as a gift that flowers through reciprocity (both human and divine) and not as an object to be disciplined and regulated.

Chapter one focuses on the Consolation of Philosophy. I argue that recent attempts to characterize Chaucer's relationship to this text as skeptical fail to engage the Consolation on its own terms. The allegory of Lady Philosophy's revelation to a disconsolate Boethius enables philosophy to become both an agent and an object of inquiry. I argue that Boethius's initial skepticism about the pretentions of philosophy is in part what Philosophy's therapies are meant to respond to. The pressures that Chaucer's poetry exerts on the ideals of autonomy and self-possession sharpen one of the major absences of the Consolation: viz., the unanswered question of whether Philosophy's therapies have actually consoled Boethius. Chapter two considers one of the Consolation's fascinating and paradoxical afterlives: Robert Holcot's Postilla super librum sapientiae (1340-43). I argue that Holcot's Stoic conception of wisdom, a conception he explicitly links with Boethius's Consolation, relies on a model of agency that is strikingly similar to the powers of self-knowledge that Philosophy argues Boethius to posses. Chapter three examines Chaucer's fullest exploration of the Boethian model of selfhood and his ultimate rejection of it in Troilus and Criseyde. The poem, which Chaucer called his "tragedy," belonged to a genre of classical writing he knew of only from Philosophy's brief mention of it in the Consolation. Chaucer appropriates the genre to explore and recover mourning as a meaningful act. In Chapter four, I turn to Dante and the House of Fame to consider Chaucer's self-reflections about his ambitions as a poet and the demands of truth-telling.

Echoes of Greek Tragedy in Medieval Literature: The Case of Oedipus

In approaching this issue, it will be helpful to use two analytically distinct methods, to wit, the diachronic, which allows us to speculate about how the myth reached the hands of Lydgate (Guerin 2005, 183–191); and the synchronic, to clarify the similarities and differences between the two authors. Thus, approaching the subject diachronically, the first pages of this paper will attempt to delineate the main milestones in the long tradition of the myth of Oedipus, beginning from the time of Ancient Rome; and, afterwards, a synchronic analysis will examine various motifs as they have survived, disappeared or been transformed in the medieval poem. The final part will explore the possible reasons for these changes.

Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900-1200

Review of Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200 by Elizabeth van Houts (Toronto UP, 1999).

El proceso de deshumanización del morir en la literatura hispánica medieval

354 p.

Hagiografía hispanolatina visigótica y medieval (s. VII-XII)

Coordinador de las actas: Maurilio Pérez González

Medieval Women's Writing

Watt, P., Medieval Women's Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007) RAE2008

Cultura popular y poesía narrativa medieval: contactos productivos

El presente artículo propone focalizar la pertinencia de la configuración teórica del concepto de literatura y cultura popular para el estudio de la poesía narrativa medieval en su pasaje del universo de la oralidad al de la escritura, y de la escritura manuscrita a la imprenta. Los ejemplos serán aportados a su vez por los géneros narrativos paradigmáticos medievales, la épica y el romancero, en el dominio lingüístico específico del castellano.

Cultura popular y poesía narrativa medieval: contactos productivos

El presente artículo propone focalizar la pertinencia de la configuración teórica del concepto de literatura y cultura popular para el estudio de la poesía narrativa medieval en su pasaje del universo de la oralidad al de la escritura, y de la escritura manuscrita a la imprenta. Los ejemplos serán aportados a su vez por los géneros narrativos paradigmáticos medievales, la épica y el romancero, en el dominio lingüístico específico del castellano.

Cultura popular y poesía narrativa medieval: contactos productivos

El presente artículo propone focalizar la pertinencia de la configuración teórica del concepto de literatura y cultura popular para el estudio de la poesía narrativa medieval en su pasaje del universo de la oralidad al de la escritura, y de la escritura manuscrita a la imprenta. Los ejemplos serán aportados a su vez por los géneros narrativos paradigmáticos medievales, la épica y el romancero, en el dominio lingüístico específico del castellano.

Notes of four lectures on the literature and philosophy of the middle ages,

Mode of access: Internet.

From the genius of man to the man of genius, part two: Inheriting (ideas about) genius

In Part One of ʻFrom the Genius of the Man to the Man of Geniusʼ I argued that classical and medieval inscriptions of genius figures suggest a coevalence between characters in their respective cosmologies, making it relatively more difficult to delineate Man from “spirits” and “other organisms”. The labour that genii performed flowed around two significant tropes of production and reproduction whose specificities were inflected in and across sources. In medieval poetry, for instance, genius figures took up a new role in regard to the reproduction trope, as promoter of virtue (in the form of censuring the seven deadly sins) and condemner of vice (in the form of prohibition against same sex intercourse). The sedimentation (complex processes of character-formation), directionality (patterns of descent) and sexual ecology (emergence of a field of ethics) that the medieval literature embodies also indexes an opening disarticulation of Man from universe and the possibility of grounding “morality” in and as His love choices. Through a series of narrative structures, binary concepts and new sources of authority under Christianity the figure now referred to in philosophy as “the subject” is given early grounds upon which to form in the medieval poems.

The North in the Old English Orosius : A Geographical Narrative in Context

This doctoral dissertation examines the description of the North as it appears in the Old English Orosius (OE Or.) in the form of the travel accounts by Ohthere and Wulfstan and a catalogue of peoples of Germania. The description is discussed in the context of ancient and early medieval textual and cartographic descriptions of the North, with a special emphasis on Anglo-Saxon sources and the intellectual context of the reign of King Alfred (871-899). This is the first time that these sources, a multidisciplinary approach and secondary literature, also from Scandinavia and Finland, have been brought together. The discussion is source-based, and archaeological theories and geographical ideas are used to support the primary evidence. This study belongs to the disciplines of early medieval literature and (cultural) history, Anglo-Saxon studies, English philology, and historical geography. The OE Or. was probably part of Alfred s educational campaign, which conveyed royal ideology to the contemporary elite. The accounts and catalogue are original interpolations which represent a unique historical source for the Viking Age. They contain unparalleled information about peoples and places in Fennoscandia and the southern Baltic and sailing voyages to the White Sea, the Danish lands, and the Lower Vistula. The historical-philological analysis reveals an emphasis on wealth and property, rank, luxury goods, settlement patterns, and territorial divisions. Trade is strongly implied by the mentions of central places and northern products, such as walrus ivory. The references to such peoples as the Finnas, the Cwenas, and the Beormas appear in connection with information about geography and subsistence in the far North. Many of the topics in the accounts relate to Anglo-Saxon aristocratic culture and interests. The accounts focus on the areas associated with the Northmen, the Danes and the Este. These areas resonated in the Anglo-Saxon geographical imagination: they were curious about the northern margin of the world, their own continental ancestry and the geography of their homeland of Angeln, and they had an interest in the Goths and their connection with the southern Baltic in mythogeography. The non-judgemental representation of the North as generally peaceful and relatively normal place is related to Alfredian and Orosian ideas about the unity and spreading of Christendom, and to desires for unity among the Germani and for peace with the Vikings, who were settling in England. These intellectual contexts reflect the innovative and organizational forces of Alfred s reign. The description of the North in the OE Or. can be located in the context of the Anglo-Saxon worldview and geographical mindset. It mirrors the geographical curiosity expressed in other Anglo-Saxon sources, such as the poem Widsith and the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi. The northern section of this early eleventh-century world map is analyzed in detail here for the first time. It is suggested that the section depicts the North Atlantic and the Scandinavian Peninsula. The survey of ancient and early medieval sources provides a comparative context for the OE Or. In this material, produced by such authors as Strabo, Pliny, Tacitus, Jordanes, and Rimbert, the significance of the North was related to the search for and definition of the northern edge of the world, universal accounts of the world, the northern homeland in the origin stories of the gentes, and Carolingian expansion and missionary activity. These frameworks were transmitted to Anglo-Saxon literary culture, where the North occurs in the context of the definition of Britain s place in the world.