Bodies, Saracen giants, and the medieval romance : transgression, difference, and assimilation

Bodies, Saracen Giants, and the Medieval Romance: Transgression, Difference, and Assimilation explore le traitement des corps de trois géants Sarasins dans les romances de Roland and Vernagu (c. 1330), Sir Beues of Hamtoun (c. 1330), et The Taill of Rauf Coilyear (c. 1513-42).Grâce à une étude de la représentation de ces trois géants Sarasin, la signification du corps humain au Moyen Age, et des pratiques de la Chrétienté an accord avec les discours et idéologies envers le Proche-Orient qui existaient dans l’Occident médiéval, ce mémoire de maîtrise juxtapose le géant Sarasin et le héros de la romance pour indiquer une similarité apparente entre leur deux corps et leur religion respective. La romance démontre avec hésitation un désir d’assimiler le géants Sarasin dans le code héroïque ainsi que dans la religion chrétienne, mais souvent rejette avec suspicion le corps du géant par sa mort sur le champ de bataille. Malgré sa mort ou son assimilation dans le code héroïque et la Chrétienté, le corps du géant Sarasin demeure toujours important dans le contexte de la Romance, puisqu’il contribue à la construction de l’identité du héros, de sa foi, et de sa société.

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.

Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, eds. 2009: A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance. Studies in Medieval Romance 10. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. XIV + 209 pp. ISBN 9781843841920

This review is part of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. FFI 2008-02165).

A medieval romance of friendship: Eger and Grime.

Cover title and half title: Eger and Grime.

The king's champion: re-enacting Arthurian romance at the English coronation banquet

Recent scholarship has emphasised the extent to which historical events are reflected in medieval romance. This paper seeks to draw attention to an instance where that relationship appears to have been inverted and a romance motif was carefully recreated at a particularly important event in the historical world. From the fourteenth century onwards, a mounted knight ceremonially rode into the English coronation banquet and issued a challenge to all assembled. The visual detail of the ritual strikingly echoes that of the romance motif of the “intruder at the feast”. This motif crops up in numerous romances, and is particularly associated with Arthurian narratives where it usually serves as a catalyst for adventure, providing the court and the king with an opportunity to justify their authority and reputation. This paper analyses the precise nature of the historical ritual and explores how the romance resonances of the ceremony at the coronation feast could be used to underpin political authority and courtly identity. In doing so, it seeks to underscore the centrality of Arthurian romance to English monarchical self-imagining and the symbolic power which could be ascribed to the genre's themes and conventions.

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 circulation of romances from England in late-medieval Ireland

The fifteenth century saw a striking upturn in the number of texts from foreign vernaculars that were translated into Irish. Indeed, one might go so far as to speak in terms of a ‘translation trend’ in Ireland during the mid to late fifteenth century. A notable feature of this trend is that a particularly high number of these Irish translations are of romances; contextual and textual evidence suggests that the original exemplars for many of these translated texts appear to have come from England, though not all of them were necessarily in English. Irish translations of eight romances have survived to the present day: Guy of Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; La Queste de Saint Graal; Fierabras; Caxton’s Recuyell of the Histories of Troie; William of Palerne; the Seven Sages of Rome; and Octavian. This paper addresses two aspects of these texts of particular relevance to romance scholars who do not work within the sphere of Celtic studies. Firstly, it argues that certain aspects of the dissemination and reception of romance in Ireland are quite distinctive. Manuscript and textual evidence suggests that the religious orders, particularly the Franciscans, seem to have played a role in the importation and translation of these narratives. Secondly, examination of the Irish versions of romance tends to bear out an observation made by Flower many years ago, but not pursued by subsequent scholars: ‘texts of an unusual kind were current in Ireland, and it may be that interesting discoveries are to be made here’. Certain narrative features of several of these Irish translations diverge from all the surviving versions of the relevant romance in other languages and may witness to a variant exemplar that has since been lost from its own linguistic corpus.

The Devil’s Daughters and a question of translation between Occitan and Anglo-Norman French: ‘De las .vii. filhas del diable’ (British Library Add. MS 17920).

The evidence for vernacular-to-vernacular translation is hard to demonstrate in medieval Romance languages. This article analyses a hypothesis published a century ago that there is an identifiable Anglo-Norman source for an Occitan prose text. Both texts spring from a Latin exemplum in which the seven capital vices are personified as the Devil's daughters, married off to seven social categories (the clergy, knights, peasants, etc.). Although the hypothesis is disproved, it remains that the dialogue between Anglo-Norman French and Occitan has been overlooked, and deserves further exploration.

O Macrogênero drama Norte-Riograndense: uma análise de gênero e de discurso sob a perspectiva da linguística sistêmico-funcional

The focus of this qualiquantitative research is the phenomenon we are denominating Drama-of-Rio-Grande-do-Norte, which contemplates short verse texts from the oral tradition, sung and presented on stage by women in communities on the south coast of the northeastern Brazilian State, Rio Grande do Norte. This tradition harkens to the medieval romance of the Iberian Peninsula (CASCUDO, 2001; GURGEL, 1999; GALVÃO, 1993; MAGALHÃES, 1973; ROMERO,1977). The objective of this research is to: identify what characterizes the genre Drama of Rio Grande do Norte; situate this genre within a systemization of genres from the oral tradition in Rio Grande do Norte; investigate the interpersonal relationships of power and solidarity through the role of the women in the discourse, how they see themselves and others, pointing out which elements of the world they evaluate and to identify representations of the feminine in the discourse. The theory of Genre and Register of Martin and Rose (2008) and Generic Structure Potential of Hasan (1989, 1996), which has as a base the Systemic Functional Linguistics of Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), Eggins (1994) among others, offers a theoretical framework for the characterization of the genre through the identification of stages and phases configuring its typology the individual schematic structure and its topology its relation to other phenomena in the oral tradition. Other groupings were mapped of the ‗Macrogenre , from the model of Martin and Rose (2008) as a continuum on two axis: between the poles of how the genre circulates orally x in writing, and recited/individually x staged/collectively; as well as mapping the samples with relation to power using the same model, but with the poles of individual voice x collective voice on an axis between increased power and diminished power. Eleven texts described as Narratives and one Anecdote were selected for the analysis of Attitudes, and Negotiations of power. Through the quantification of semantic discursive resources in the discourse systems of Appraisal (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005) and of Negotiation (MARTIN; ROSE, 2007), as well as reflections about humor (EGGINS; SLADE, 1997) we identified the Attitudes and the Negotiations of interpersonal roles. The quantification is based on the theories of Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2010), using WordSmith Tools 5.0 (SCOTT, 2010). Our results show that the Drama-of-Rio-Grande-do-Norte is characterized as a Macrogenre in the Community of Oral Stories, in the Family of Street Theatre/Games, composed of five genre types: Narratives, Praise, Complaints, Anecdotes, and Exemplum. The Macrogenre is characterized by its being circulated orally, staged collectively and the texts analyzed configure in differing degrees of power between men and woman. In synthesis we observe that through humor, the Drama-of-Rio-Grande-do-Norte functions to offer a space for women to voice, comment, judge and orient about social conditions in their communities, such as alcoholism, domestic violence, inequalities before the law etc., as well as circulating positive appreciations of rural/coastal culture and judgments about the behavior of members of the speech community, the role of women being to establish and reinforce norms. We anticipate possible benefits of the addition of the genre analyzed in literacy projects in the schools of Rio Grande do Norte