Arthur’s refusal to eat: ritual and control in the romance feast

Arthur's refusal to begin feasting before he has seen a marvel or heard a tale of adventure is a recurring motif in medieval romance. Previous comment on this ritual has suggested that the source for such a taboo on eating may be found in earlier narratives in the Celtic languages. This paper argues that, although the ritual almost certainly originates in pre-chivalric society, romance authors adapted and developed it to reflect the courtly-chivalric preoccupations of their own world. Arthur's ritual gesture may be seen as a means of containing and controlling both interior moral threats and exterior physical peril, and is intimately connected to the courtly conception of the feast. This study draws on the evidence of religious writing and courtesy manuals and explores some highly-developed treatments of the motif in romance in order to suggest that literary engagements with Arthur's refusal to eat have much to say about contemporary ideas of ritual and reality as mediated through the symbolically-charged arena of the medieval feast.

A lost insular version of the romance of Octavian

This article is the first full examination of the Irish translation of the popular and influential medieval romance "Octavian". I argue that the source for this Irish translation was an insular version of the romance, probably in Middle English. I show how the Irish translator incorporated material from another romance, "Fierabras", in order to introduce the characters of Charlemagne and his vassals into the story. This is the only version of "Octavian" that gives the text a Carolingian setting. I also demonstrate that the version of the romance from which the Irish translation was produced differed in significant ways from any of the surviving versions in other languages. I suggest that the Irish translation provides our only witness to a lost variant version of "Octavian" and, as such, extends our knowledge of the corpus of insular romance in the Middle Ages.

The romance of the Stanleys: regional and national imaginings in the Percy Folio

This article investigates a body of early Tudor poetry associated with the Stanley Earls of Derby, preserved in the Percy Folio (British Library, Additional MS 27879). It argues that the Lancashire and Cheshire authors of these poems modified strategies of national address, rooted in a historical and prophetic tradition we can trace back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, to construct a clear regional identity centred on the dynastic mythology of the Stanley family. The Galfridian Stanley-ite mythology of this period presents a significant counterpart to contemporary political historical and prophetic treatments of the Tudor accession. This provides an important new literary-historical context for our understanding of the Percy Folio romance "The Turke and Sir Gawain".

Medieval romance, English

Annotated bibliography of romance from medieval England. It focuses on medieval romances in various languages written in England or translated into English before 1500.

Not just for romance: applications of speed dating in social work education

In this article we address how a contemporary adaptation of the 'speed dating' model was used for educational purposes with two cohorts of social work students. We outline the dimensions of 'speed dating' as a contemporary social phenomenon, then address how this model relates specifically to groupwork process, and can be used to facilitate social work student learning. The curriculum for two classroom group activities using the 'speed dating' model are outlined, the first to develop university level study skills, the second for debriefing field placement learning experiences. Finally we examine why the 'speed dating' metaphor was successful in provoking a playful yet constructively creative space for students to engage in groupwork process.

Building the perfect beast : scientific romance and Jewish representations 1880-1914

Various cultural mediums portrayed Jews in Britain in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Scientific romance harnessed past communicative 'discourses' such as history, folklore, theology, and mythology and was an innovative form of literature that heralded a new era in the construction of Jewish identity between 1880 to 1914.

A novel romance : conceptualising emotional attachment as a barrier to adoption

The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) aims to understand consumers’ adoption of new technologies. Some 30 years after TAM was first proposed, it is still widely used today. This paper proposes an extended version of the TAM, with the primary addition to it being the construct of consumers’ emotional attachment to an existing product. The expanded TAM, Technology Acceptance Model with Emotional Attachment (TAME), is applied to the understudied area of e-book reader technology and its adoption by consumers who read for pleasure versus for academic purposes, as has been the focus of past research on e-book readers. The extended model considers consumers’ emotional attachment to paper books (pbooks) as a likely barrier to the take up of e-book reader technology.

A novel romance : the technology acceptance model with emotional attachment

E-readers, or devices designed primarily for reading e-books, are taking the world by storm. Several papers in library studies and education have examined e-book consumption for academic reading. However, no previous marketing study has investigated consumers’ adoption of e-readers for pleasure reading. We address this gap by testing an extended version of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with emotional attachment (TAME) in this context. Consumers’ attachment to paper books is proposed as a barrier to their adoption of e-readers. This speaks to a key deficiency of the TAM, being its focus on cognition at the expense of consumer emotion. A three-phase study finds support for the TAME, with 64% of the variance explained in consumers’ intentions to adopt e-readers. Emotional attachment to paper books is found to be weakly and negatively associated with consumers’ attitude toward using e-readers. The qualitative findings suggest that e-reader adoption may not involve a binary choice between paper and e-formats.