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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Medieval and Early Modern Literature

  
 
Blake Head
17:33 / 16.06.06
Not being aware of anything else on Barbelith on the subject already, a general thread for discussing Medieval and Early Modern literature in English (should there be the desire), and in particular for hosting a few questions of my own on the matter (with apologies for the long opening post in advance).

Having read a fair bit of Medieval and Early Modern as an undergraduate, mainly some of the romances in Middle English, the Gawain / Pearl poet, bits of Chaucer, Sidney and Spencer, eventually getting on to Shakespeare, I’m curious about the extended period without exactly being confident about it, and I’m sure I could get by quite happily in life with only occasional nagging urges to get down Piers Plowman from the bookshelf and actually finish it. But following an article on plasticbag.org a while back about the purpose behind doing postgraduate work, I’ve increasingly been moving from an essentially creative framework for any future postgraduate study (i.e. singular, original, magnum opus like creation) towards a vocational, one, that is, actually using my degree to obtain employment, and taking on a course of study where I’m not studying things I’m naturally inclined to and actually learning in detail about a period that I wouldn’t say I have in-depth knowledge of or preparation for.

As such I’ve been considering shifting towards studying in the above period, particularly between the 14th and 16th centuries (and away from what I’m maybe more interested / knowledgeable about: the poetic imagination in the long eighteenth century, visionary poetry, the English Gothic, Blake, the relationship between word and image), in order to a) be more likely to attract funding for further study, and b) upon completing that study, potentially be in a much better position for an academic post with regards to having an identifiable “field of study” that could be used in a variety of courses rather than a more convoluted “I’m interested in the use of images as a form of textual criticism, with particular regard to one author”. Sort of thing.

So here’s where I confess my shortcomings: I’ve no Latin or Greek, minimal French, patchy knowledge of the Big C Classics, and (like most people I imagine) my manner of reading is essentially novelistic and I struggle to appreciate complex poetic forms immediately. Perhaps beyond this I don’t actually feel I have that much facility for other languages (all a product of poor early schooling I’m sure) and depending on whether you’re reading earlier or later literature in these periods, and where it’s from regionally, the type of English it’s written in can be very daunting (at least to me). On top of that, I feel that, particular knowledge of some of the texts mentioned above aside, my awareness of the history and the general literature of the period could be a lot broader. Bluntly, I think that the success I had as an undergraduate in this area came down to basic comprehension of the texts and being able construct intelligent arguments around that – which I’m afraid that as a postgraduate and potentially in teaching the subject would be transparently insufficient. I’d like to think that I knew enough to realise that this period needs to be approached with respect to its differences from our own, and that those differences are considerable and preclude certain readings (e.g. strong martial women like Britomart cannot be read - without some difficulty at least - as evidence of a form of sixteenth century proto-feminism) and demand an understanding of how those differences are structured (which I’m not sure I have, not fully at any rate) which is usually far more restrictive and codified than in contemporary literature. So... I’d like to ask if there are one or two people out there in Barbelith land with experience in this field, or study in literature / the Humanities generally, how feasible they think study of this period would be with the above foundations of knowledge, whether it’s reasonable to expect to gain that broader knowledge through further study or whether, with quite a deficiency in the basic understanding of the languages that this literature is written in and alludes to, I should just forget the whole idea.

More generally, I thought it would be a space for people to recommend texts that they’ve enjoyed, traits they’ve noticed, and a place where I/we could kick around ideas for research proposals. One of the things I found most interesting was the use, in The Faerie Queen, and Gawain and the Green Knight particularly, of numerical patterns in their poetic structure and symbolism (I think Alastair Fowler has written quite heavily on this) and obviously religion plays a considerable role in this era and is something that as far as literature is concerned I’m quite interested in, so I’m thinking about some combination of the two as a research topic. It’s very early stages at the moment, as I’m still not convinced that I have the necessary motivation or background knowledge for this type of study, but I’d certainly appreciate recommendations of readers, anthologies or companions that people have found useful, as I’d be prepared to do a fair bit of preparatory reading beforehand; additionally, suggestions of critics that use current theory to analyse Medieval / Early Modern texts appropriately would be invaluable.

So: What have people read, what do people find interesting, where in the field is the most challenging work being done, and where does work need to be done? Also, as more of a general question, why, especially outside the UK, do people still read and study literature which on the surface has a language, structure and set of dominant themes significantly different to those of contemporary literature and society?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
19:26 / 16.06.06
Will come back to this, but here's a tip: read the old English out loud. Where a word seems bizarre on paper, reading out will force you to work out the sound and often the whole thing becomes much clearer then as words reveal themselves to be grandmother or uncle to modern words.

For obscure references, Wikipedia is always helpful. Keep it open while you read, or have multiple bookmarks in your book to mark bits you want to come back to if you don't want to keep stopping and starting.
 
 
Blake Head
19:40 / 24.06.06
Thanks for the tips Legba. I'd heard about reading it out loud before, and it does help, I'm just a bit concerned it would slow down my reading speed to the point where I'd be struggling to finish things. Any more thoughts much appreciated.
 
 
grant
02:27 / 25.06.06
I was just discussing medieval lit with someone I met via Barbelith but who isn't around much any more. She was saying that it's interesting that it's one of the few places in academic English departments where you can still get away with discussing religion. And also saying that it seems to be one of the better specializations because every department seems to like having a medievalist around.

It came up because we were discussing my trip through grad school, where I whammed my head against a theory wall but quite enjoyed my one class in Middle English (which was maybe odd, maybe not, considering my undergraduate degree was in hermeneutics, not English per se).

At any rate, I remember really liking the teacher, who stood out as being not just into ideas about literature, but into technology for dealing with literature -- the first teacher to talk about these weird new things called CD-ROMs and the Internet. I also fell madly in love with Malory and could have goofed up badly in the class because I skipped assigned readings to read outside the assigned sections of Le Morte D'Arthur. That Tristram story's a corker.

The professor's name was R.A. Shoaf -- (and check out the fifth citation down). He seems to have written up your alley, to some degree. He didn't talk much about his academic research in the intro class I took, but was very proud of his readings. His voice, a booming baritone, was featured on a few CDs of medieval poetry -- keying in to what Legba said above about the orality of the literature, but also what I was saying about his love of technology and apparent sense of what a book is (as being both a little more plastic and conscious-of-embodiment than the idea of "text" as presented in other, more ostensibly post-modern classes, ironically enough).

Google tells me he's also founded a Journal of Theory in Medieval Studies.
 
 
grant
02:36 / 25.06.06
Oh, and: Also, as more of a general question, why, especially outside the UK, do people still read and study literature which on the surface has a language, structure and set of dominant themes significantly different to those of contemporary literature and society?

His reading of Malory was very, very contemporary -- it's a book filled with hologrammatic structures and grappling with most of the same themes you'll find in 21st century authors. Virtue, meaning, desire, authority, ethics, corruption, madness... it's all in there.
The language is different (we used the Penguin semi-translation, with the extensive glossary), but nothing else.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
08:45 / 25.06.06
On that note; I'd be wary, personally of reading either too much or too little into an old text. Although writers in the Middle Ages, or earlier, were of course potentially as cunning as any writer today, they were working in a medium which was vastly less developed, in terms of audience and volume of works. I'd say treat 'em all as Clive Cussler - entertaining, maybe, but hardly deep - until proven otherwise. A storm need not be a metaphor for general doom and gloom, a cigar is just... well, ok there's probably not many cigars.

That being said, although the written tradition was (I would say fairly inarguably) less developed, the oral tradition of storytelling was (probably) much better developed by comparison with today; stories today are broadcast, not repeated, and certainly not changed slightly with every new teller and audience. It's easy to find extreme complexity in (written accounts derived from) oral storytelling sources, although again, that complexity need not necessarily be in the form of deep meanings, but in the form of style and delivery; I'm thinking particularly of Northern European use of kennings here, fantastically complex, and carrying hidden meanings, but not especially thematic hidden meanings.

That make sense?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:04 / 25.06.06
working in a medium which was vastly less developed, in terms of audience and volume of works.

You mean there were less people capable of acessing the work?
 
 
Not in the Face
12:49 / 26.06.06
Building on the oral vs written ideas, one of the most interesting aspects, well for me, of medieval literature is trying to seperate what was written down verbatim from the oral story and what was an actual style of writing. In my experience this often lead to disjointed pieces of work - heavy on repetition (a feature of traditional oral tales) with some literary twists. There's also a lot of debate as to how texts were used. They were unlikely to be read directly given the scarcity of paper but to be used as memory aids for story tellers. Even then its likely that they were used as templates around which narrators weaved their own version of the story

I'd agree with Kay that we should be wary of reading too deeply into medieval literature. Mainly because, as with today's literature, the quality of writing is variable . Although the principal texts that are used as introductions tend to be the best ones, and may use various literary devices, the majority of it was written for consumption by a wide audience and the intent was to tell a story that woulkd result in the teller being paid.

Much of the heroic stuff was produced for the various ranks of nobility and presents to them a mirror of what they would want themselves and their class to be. The Geste de Garin de Monglane is very much in the same vein as any airport action novel, with vast battles, over the top evil on both the enemy side and within the ranks of Christians, lots of heroics and the hero gets the girl at the end and her, literally, huge tracts of land. Then the next story throws the main character and his friends back into poverty and having to fight for it all again.

I found the Arthurian romances tend to be stronger on symbolism. When I read the story of Lancelot it was as an undergraduate and I was also reading Sons and Lovers. The similarities in both stories in how they used everyday objects as symbols of sexuality and secual activity were very strong.

Also we have to remember that some of the symbolism and hidden meaning that was used would have little, or no relevance, to us today and so easy to be missed. Remembering my lectures, probably the most common symbol used in medieval texts is the Trinity or number 3 for the obvious religous reasons. This would have been familiar to many of the audience of all backgrounds. In the Song of Roland for instance, Oliver asks Roland three times to blow his horn to call for help and is refused three times. Similarly when Roland does sound his horn, he sends three blasts.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
08:34 / 27.06.06
You mean there were less people capable of acessing the work?
Aye, that's the one. My oral technique is better than my writing.

Symbolism
Absolutely. This excerpt from Thomas the Rhymer is (I believe) intended to instantly identify who is being described, although it works just fine as a description.

"Her skirt was of the grass-green silk,
Her mantel of the velvet fine,
At ilka tett of her horse’s mane
Hung fifty silver bells and nine."

And yet the green which screams "otherworldly!" here about the Fairy Queen doesn't necessarily mean a thing about the equally otherworldly Green Knight. Go thou and figureth; the two are roughly contemporary.

And then there's all the symbolism of flowers, from Shakspar on out; most of that goes right over my head...
 
 
grant
22:44 / 28.06.06
And yet the green which screams "otherworldly!" here about the Fairy Queen doesn't necessarily mean a thing about the equally otherworldly Green Knight. Go thou and figureth; the two are roughly contemporary.


Could you elaborate on this? I'm a little confused by it.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
00:11 / 29.06.06
Don't let me talk for you, but I think Kay's making the point that the things we're trained to read as symbolic might not be symbolic when encountered in Olde Lit, while we might also miss the things in that literature that are intended to be read in this way- while at the same time taking into account that the written format was less developed than today and so less rich in ambiguity, allegory etc.

Which last part still doesn't feel quite right to me, somehow...
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
07:15 / 29.06.06
That's pretty much what I meant, yes; that something which is in one place used deliberately as a symbol (such as the colour green = otherwordly) may in another place be accidental - even when the subject could indeed be represented by that symbol, as in the case of the Green Knight.

I suppose we should also bear in mind that one symbol may represent more than one thing to the same person, or may represent different things to different people; as the colour green today!

On the subject of the development of literature, perhaps it is wrong for me to imagine that there is any such thing as an absolute 'quality' to a work; if the mindbendingly dull lists-of-names in, say, the Bible, or the Iliad, or Voluspa were interesting to their audiences, who am I to criticise? Still, I can't help but feel that mnemonic lists are not a good thing for a book; that they are a legacy structure from oral recitation and that a book which does not include them is more 'developed' than one which does. I realise these are rough examples, but I'm sure a better versed person than myself could make similar cases across the whole range of literary devices; that there is a technical progression over time. Or perhaps there is a technical progression, but it only facilitates good writing, while excellent writing transcends technical form.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:47 / 29.06.06
if the mindbendingly dull lists-of-names in, say, the Bible, or the Iliad, or Voluspa were interesting to their audiences, who am I to criticise?

Actually, the Catalogue of Ships, which I assume is what you're referring to in the Iliad, is interesting, at least to this modern reader, as are the accounts of the descent of the characters. They are interesting both as poetry and for what they tell us about the composition of the work. Obviously, it's more interesting if you can read the original, but the idea that written epic in oral tradition is made up of acts of uncritical transcription is a dangerous one.

More generally, if and specifically if you want to do a doctorate in early English literature, even in America, I'd very strongly recommend not playing the Clive Cussler card too early in the interview process.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
11:28 / 29.06.06
Actually, the Catalogue of Ships, which I assume is what you're referring to in the Iliad, is interesting, at least to this modern reader, as are the accounts of the descent of the characters.
I was thinking of the "then A killed B, and C killed D and E, and F killed G" style battle sequences in the Iliad, which if memory serves me rightly also crop up in the Ramayana. I guess a lot depends on the translation, and I'm certainly not capable of reading the original. I have heard that the original is in a particularly clever meter; I've been trying to read it, but it's all Greek to me. I'll try to find a passage I deem tedious in translation and compare it to the original.

Incidentally, all I did by mentioning Cussler was to name an obvious 'popcorn' writer and say "treat old works as popcorn until proven otherwise". My personal preference and advice is to take things at face value and be impressed if hidden depth is revealed, rather than to assume that hidden depth is always present. Where's the error in that?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:17 / 29.06.06
My suggestion was only that such a claim might not wildly impress a group of people considering you for a Ph.D in that subject.

Generally, the battle scenes in the Iliad are more like "A killed B, then killed C, then killed C and D". There's something of an absence of give and take. If you find a bit you find promising, I can try to help you with the Greek.
 
 
grant
20:35 / 29.06.06
That's pretty much what I meant, yes; that something which is in one place used deliberately as a symbol (such as the colour green = otherwordly) may in another place be accidental - even when the subject could indeed be represented by that symbol, as in the case of the Green Knight.

I think I'm having trouble with the idea of an "accidental" symbol.

On the one hand, I read as myself, not as someone else; things have significance to me. I associate "green" with a certain set of things -- it resonates that way in my mind. So I engage with a text that way to make meaning.

But I also think the meanings of "green" are fairly universal (at a really basic level) to humans. Isn't that part of why some things last and some things don't? Like, I'd have trouble thinking the Green Knight poet was trying to make the Knight symbolically linked to radiation poisoning because uranium is green -- but I also think we respond to uranium in the way we do because of a prior set of associations with greenness. (If it glowed red, we'd think of it in more violent terms, I think.) These may be neurobiological, I dunno. Maybe I'm reading the word "symbol" in a different way.
 
 
Not in the Face
07:31 / 30.06.06
But I also think the meanings of "green" are fairly universal

Really? Do you think that green today is symbolic of otherwordliness. I would say it more commonly symbolises nature and the natural world as well as safety, with white, black and gold being seen as the more otherworldly colours due to their association with the church and religous imagery.

I think that when reading medieval texts we also have to account for that fact that there was a much greater social cohesion in terms of imagery and concepts - everyone was Roman Christian, there was more adherence to a canon of set texts etc. Today theres such a diversity of meanings for symbols and interpretations of them that I think we are more likely to misinterpret what was written than not.
Not to say that that our readings are less valid, just that they are the readings of people in the 21c and that this would be quite different to the meanings taken in the 12c-14c
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
07:47 / 30.06.06
I don't know what research there has been on intuitive reactions to colour. I have been reading around the Green Knight business on't interweb, and have been horrified, or at leasy mildly bemused, to find many people saying his green is an otherworldly green. Wiki throws up the interestingly similar Al-Khidr, so if there's any link between them (and so far as I remember, there was a strong migration of stories through Islamic Spain to Christian France, so it seems likely enough) the Green Knight's colour really isn't a symbolic thing in origin. Perhaps it was a fortuitous coincidence, though, or was used because it fitted in with preexisting meanings of green.

Uranium
On a complete side note, the actual colour you get from a reaction going critical, the classic radioactive evil, see it and probably die, is more of a blue glow. The green glow of, say, a radium watch dial is produced my the excitation of some other compound by the radiation, rather than being a natural property of the radium. It is curious that radioactive materials, which are generally rather dull colours, are represented by the "green glowing!" stereotype.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
08:38 / 30.06.06
Well, to sum up the whole "is it symbolic or not" argument, what you should do if you want to be sure is make two readings: read through it first as a 21st century reader and then find stuff other people have written about it afterwards.

And doesn't the Green Knight hang out in a wooded grove? If so, I'm really not seeing how the colour of his threads and the colour of his crib could be totally unrelated, TIMBAF*.


*New acronym: Though I May Be being A Fuckhead.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
10:19 / 30.06.06
TIMBAF
He hangs out in a castle; the "grene chapel" nearby, where Gawain is supposed to meet him, is a barrow or earth mound by a stream.

There is a lot of green in the poem, to be sure. Identifying someone by their colour like that wasn't all that unusual, though; a "Green Knight" is hardly exceptional. It's difficult to say for certain that the colour is definitely symbolic, though, and not just colour-coding; a green knight could be expected to live at a green chapel and hand out a green girdle, it'd almost be strange if he didn't.
 
 
grant
01:23 / 01.07.06
That Al Khidr business is kind of cool. No, it's really cool. I always thought more of Green Man/Frey things (the killing/resurrection thing is a motif in old European wood-god rituals) with the Green Knight.

Do you think that green today is symbolic of otherwordliness.

Like Little Green Men, yeah.

In a not-exactly related (but closely) vein, I was just reading a letter column in a recent Scientific American and they were talking about some anthropological research showing that certain shades identified as either blue or green in most European countries were identified as different colors in certain Asian & Oceanian groups. I think most blues were also identified as greys by Siberians, but I'm not sure. Ah, it was indigenous Mexicans who named blue and green by the same word -- the two are only one color for them. Googling for that brings up Sapir-Whorf a bit, which may or may not be relevant to the idea of universal symbolism. (It's about language determining, um, epistemology, more or less -- names for snow, etc. I'm thinking colors & images are prior to words, though.)
 
 
Blake Head
14:35 / 22.12.06
Sorry for abandoning this, I’ll probably be back again once I’ve finished some of the reading on the pile. Just to mention briefly, on the Green Knight: it’s not just the colour of his threads, but he himself that is assumed to be green:

For wonder of his hwe men hade,
Set in his semblaunt sene;
He ferde as freke were fade,
And oueral enker-grene.

There is definitely room for “an all green countenance would be ridiculous, the poet couldn’t have meant that” reading, but most of what I’ve read on the matter supports the idea that this strange, bearded giant was literally green, his skin, his hair and his great green horse. As for symbolism, there’s nothing explicitly within the poem that pins green down, but the rest of the poem supports associations with general otherworldiness and nature.

As for some of the above, I think I see the principle you’re getting at Kay, but I wouldn’t readily assume without reason that an earlier text was less complex than a modern one, and why we couldn’t just as easily assume they were interesting, multi-layered texts until we’d decided that they were little more than passing entertainments. Having read some more basic M.E. romances, some of them are far less interesting and layered than others, although they’re still worth looking at to get a sense of the narrative structures and symbolism of the genre. Gawain and the Green Knight would be the prize example of a text that in many respects has a composition more detailed and technically astute than most modern literature, and where you definitely have to take into account things like writing for an aristocratic courtly audience and in general existing within a written tradition with far more ordered conventions than our own.
 
 
Good Intentions
23:10 / 26.12.06
Well, I'm not a medievalist but I've studied some medieval texts (in translation, alas, but giving a lot of attention to the illumination). I'd also suggest against trivialising the depth of medieval texts, and getting a good grounding in Aristotle and scholastic philosophy, especially virtue ethics. Today we believe in goodness and evil that is markedly different from how the authors of the gesta and the hausbuchen did. At times the moral depth of these works can be quite spectacular, just very different from our own. Beowulf, while out of the period you're talking about, is the best example I can think of of an idea of virtue entirely at odds with our own - Beowulf basically watches his close friends be killed to enable him to defeat Grendel, quite a few steps away from what we consider heroic.
 
  
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