English 241 Midterm Exam 1

Parchment (vellum)

Animal skin (usually sheep or calf) used for handwritten books before printing

Through the late 1300s, all writing was done by hand on parchment, which made books labor-intensive, rare, and valuable.

Manuscript (etymology)

Latin manus (hand) + scriptus (written)

Scribal culture: texts were written by hand, sometimes by professionals called scribes (Latin: scrivere, 'to write').

Shelfmark (e.g., Cotton Nero A.x)

The archival version of a call number: where the book sits in the archive

Sir Robert Cotton shelved books under busts of Roman emperors, so Cotton Nero A.x = under Nero, shelf 10. The Gawain manuscript was damaged in the 1731 'Cotton Fire.'

Romanz

The vernacular (not Latin), esp. Old French, and the genre written in it

A medieval romance is NOT necessarily about romantic love. Romanz = vernacular, spoken by the aristocracy; Anglo-Norman is Old French made English.

Chivalry vs. courtesy

Chivalry = proper conduct of knights outdoors (adventure/prowess); courtesy = indoor conduct, esp. male-female relations (courtly love)

Gawain's problem: at Bertilak's castle, he is called on by both codes at once (loyalty to his host vs. giving the lady what she wants) and can't satisfy both.

Troy in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

A cycle of origins: Troy → Rome → France/England; empires rise because earlier ones fall

The poem opens and closes with the fall of Troy (lines 1 and 2525), raising the question of whether Arthur’s kingdom will fall too. Origin myths like this are also exploited by white supremacists

The Beheading Game vs. the Exchange of Winnings

Arthur's court and the Green Chapel

The castle (hunts for kisses)

The poem is highly patterned: 2 New Years, 2 beheadings, 2 courts; 3 temptations, 3 hunts, 3 kisses, 3 axe strokes. Also tied to a commercial economy (bargain, profit, contract, owe).

Pentangle vs. girdle

Pentangle = transparent sign of Gawain's success/identity; girdle = protection, then sign of sin/fault, open to reinterpretation

Both are kinds of knots. The girdle is less rigid, literally and figuratively; it can be untied and reinterpreted by the wearer and viewer, leaving the reader with interpretive difficulty: a 'knot.'

Knot (in Gawain)

A metaphor for a problem; the poem ends in interpretive difficulty

Pentangle = 'endless knot' (line 630); the girdle is also a knot. Is Gawain right about it, or the court?

'Anglo-Saxon' vs. Old English / Early English

Anglo-Saxon is a made-up, problematic, obsolete (racist) term; use Old English for the language and Early English for the culture

Old English c. 600-1150; Middle English c. 1150-1500 (Gawain, Chaucer, Kempe). Middle English = Latin + French (Anglo-Norman) + Old English.

Cædmon’s Hymn (in Bede's Ecclesiastical History, 731)

The earliest surviving piece of literature we can call English: a conversion story and a poem about God as shaper

Alliterative, appositional style (many names for God). Cædmon, a cowherd who avoided singing, is visited by an angel (‘sculon’ = we must praise). His conversion mirrors England’s conversion

Scop (old English)

A poet, literally a ‘shaper’ (from scieppan, ‘to shape’)

Cædmon’s Hymn is about divine making, and the poet-as-shaper parallels God as shaper

Wyrd

Old English for fate: a powerful but non-personified force; ‘what happens’ (usually negative); linked to God’s will

Seen in The Ruin (‘wyrde gebaecon,’ broken by fate) and The Wanderer

Elegy (Old English)

A short monologue about exile, longing, or loss, stressing the transitory world (e.g., The Wanderer, The Ruin)

Broadest description: ‘people are sad about something.’ Often read as offering Christian consolation (Heaven as the fortress), though the ending is ambiguous

Ubi sunt

Latin ‘where are…?: a motif asking where the people/things of the past have gone

Appears in The Wanderer and The Ruin

The Ruin: key ideas

A speaker views ruined Roman baths (‘works of giants’), meditating on less, fate (wyrd), and ubiquitous sunt; the poem is itself a material ruin

The Roman baths connect to the town of Bath. The elegiac asks: what is the function of loss?

Rood and the Ruthwell Cross/monument

Rood = Old English for Cross; Ruthwell monument carries carved scenes of Chstist’s life and runic Old English matching Dream of the Rood

The physical location of a written work matters (early English multimedia). The cross is a torture instrument and a treasure, blood and jewels: terror and wonder

Old English riddles (Exeter Book)

Puzzles using personification that defamiliarize the world; Riddle 2 is the first-person story of a book (animal skin → Bible)

About 95 riddles survive, all in the Exeter Book

Person vs. persona (Chaucer)

Chaucer the historical man (merchant-class civil servant, customs official), vs. the narrator/chacter he creates in the poem

Poetry was Chaucer’s side hustle. The relationship between life and literary work is a game he plays with the readers

Frame tale and links

The pilgrimage structure that frames the tales; the links are the ‘roadside drama’ between tales

The Miller’s interruption is the politics of the links: he disrupts both the literary and the social order. The tale-telling contest is the frame

Estates satire

A work sterotyping/making fun of people by social estate; Chaucer breaks the expected top-down order

The disorder suggests the world is not so easily organized

Transgression

Latin transgradere, ‘to cross over’; the Wife of Bath is an expert

The Wife is a professional pilgrim who crosses social, sexual, and textual boundaries

Errare/error

Latin: ‘to wander’; wandering physically or through texts can lead to error

The ‘crooked way’ (Pardoner’s Tale). That which wanders is an error; it needs to be set back on a straight path

Texere / textus

Latin ‘to weave’ / ‘woven’; links text and textile (the Wife is a weaver of cloth and words)

A veil of fiction is also a textus, a woven thing covering truth. The Wife’s gift of ‘spinning’ ties to her profession

Corpus

Latin ‘body’ (also body of work); medieval books are made of animal bodies, and people can be read as texts

Body parts and fragmentation recur: the Miller’s hell-mouth, the Wife’s gap tooth, the Pardoner’s dismembering of himself in language

Fragments; Ellesmere MS and Hengwrt MS

Two famous Canterbury Tales manuscripts that order the tale-fragments differently; Chaucer left no finished text

Shows medieval ideas of ‘book.’ Parallels the problem of representing fragments of experience

Dulce et utile (GP 798, 'sentence and solaas')

Horace’s idea that poetry should be sweet and useful; Chaucer translates it as wisdom and pleasure

Raises questions of literary value. The useful is ‘clothed’ in the sweet; the reader’s job is to find the useful

Canterbury and St. Thomas Becket

The pilgrims’ destination: the shrine of the ‘holy blissful martyr’ Becket (GP opening)

The Rising of 1381 and the Miller

A peasant revolt against taxation; the Millers were on both sides; the Millers’ interruption may echo it as social ‘payback’

Rebels burned palaces, destroyed documents, and killed officials. Literature as a kind of payback

Quiting (quite)

Payback: tellers repay or outdo one another (Miller quites the Knight)

Literature as contest: ‘anxiety of influence.’ The Wife uses ‘quitte’ too: “I give as good as I get’

Pryvetee (privacy) in the Miller's Tale

Both ‘God’s privacy’ and bodily privates: locked doors and open windows show private things becoming uncomfortably public

Privacy as a valuable commodity: the clerk (Nicholas) vs. the carpenter (John); door broken down

Res and verbum

Thing and word: before the Fall, they were unified; after the Fall (and Babel), words no longer equal things

Chaucer loves ‘the gap’ (e.g., ‘queynte’, the fart: where do you draw the line between word and noise?) Babel: Genesis 11:

Eschatology vs. scatology

The study of the end of the world;

The study of excrement. Miller’s Tale ends in both (Noah’s flood, the fart)

‘And down gooth all’: a funny ending about serious fall themes (Eden, Babel, Noah’s flood; the ark/nave as an image of the church

Noah's Flood and the Nativity in the Miller's Tale

They are comically revisited: the carpenter’s tale evokes Joseph/Mary/baby Jesus; John is tricked into expecting Noah’s flood (‘Nowelis flood’)

Alisoun is a (profane) Marian figure; ‘Angelus ad Virginem’ is an Annunciation hymn; ‘Of a carpenter and of his wife sets expectations for the Joseph story

Dilation and deferral (Wife of Bath)

Widening out of a subject and postponing the tale itself; the Wife keeps telling her life story before her tale

Linked to her verbosity and her self-creation through language (‘I have my tale again’); her tale is a romance

Auctor and auctoritas

Latin ‘author’ and ‘authority,’ especially textual authority; the Wife says, ‘Experience, though no auctoritee…’

The Wife challenges social, intellectual, and gender hierarchy by speaking against male textual authority (the Book of Wicked Wives, a florilegium or ‘gathering of flowers’ of misogynistic excerpts)

'Who paintede the leone, tel me who?' (WBP 692)

Aesop-based: the lion’s story depends on who tells it; if women wrote the books, the stories would differ

In a world where men write the books, women must make their own texts (fictions) to survive

Fingere / fictus

Latin ‘to devise, contrive, pretend, make up’; past participle fictus gives ‘fiction’

Ovid’s Ars Amatoria III advises women to fake it (use deceit); the Wife says women must make fictions; the Wife rewrites Ovid’s advice

Midas, Apollo, and Pan (Ovid) in the Wife's Tale

Apollo punishes Midas with ass’s ears; the barber can’t keep the secret (‘out it moot’), which the Wife recasts as uncontainable female speech

In the original, Apollo wins; the Wife retells it in marriage terms

Loathly lady

Motif of an ugly (loathly) woman who transforms; romance plots hinge on magical transformation, often by women with power (cf. Morgan le Fay)

The Knight must learn what women want (answer: sovereignty). The tale already shows what women don’t want (rape); Chaucer himself was released from a charge of raptus in 1380

Revelare / apocalypsein

Latin ‘to reveal’ / Greek ‘to lift the veil’; poetry veils truth in a garment of fiction (Boccaccio)

The reader’s job is to strip the veil to reveal the useful truth. The Wife’s ‘Caste up the curtain’ invites a final revelation. Book of Revelation = the end of

Thalamos

Greek ‘marriage bed’; the curtain lifted on the marriage bed ties to the veil motif and Ovid’s advice about light

Fancy medieval beds were curtained boxes

Entente (Pardoner's Prologue)

Intention: the Pardoner’s is ‘to winne’ money, not spiritual

The Host wants mirth over ale and cake; the nobility want a moral tale. Money, cheese, wheat: commercial rather than spiritual productivity

Papal bulls, pardons (indulgences), relics

Bulls = papal documents with lead seals; pardons = payment shortening time in purgatory; relics = sacred remains (the Pardoner’s are bogus)

Indulgences were one way the Church raised money, and the Pardoner’s props are part of a performance of deception

Faux Semblant ('False Seeming')

A preacher in The Romance of the Rose; the model for the Pardoner (and the Wife of Bath)

The Pardoner admits it’s all a performance and flaunts his body, like the Wife

Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, and drunkenness

The mind seeks its good like a drunk man who can’t find the way home; drunkenness is a figure for spiritual wandering (the Pardoner’s poetics, the pilgrimage beginning at a tavern)

The Pardoner’s Tale features drunken rioters who take ‘Death’ literally, then follow the crooked way. Seven Deadly Sins (gluttony and greed)

The Tree of the Cross (Pardoner's Tale)

A tree can recall both the tree of knowledge (Eden) and the cross; the tale runs from Eden to the Crucifixion, and the rioters find Death at the tree

Medieval readers believed spiritual truth could hide under a veil of fiction; our job is to find the useful (utile/dulce)

Scribal culture / scribes

A culture where all books were handwritten (sometimes by professional scribes), so books were rare, costly, and valuable

Through the late 1300s, all writing was done by hand on parchment. Scribe comes from Latin scrivere, ‘to write’

Anglo-Norman

Old French brought by the Normans (1066) and English-ified; one of the languages that merged into Middle English

Latin + French (Anglo-Norman) + Old English = Middle English. Roamnce/romanz is its literary world

Middle English (c. 1150-1500)

The merged language of Gawain, Chaucer, and Margery Kempe; English increasingly used in law/govvernment in the 1300s

Gawain is in the Northwest Midlands dialect, written c. 1400

Early English (culture) vs. Old English (language)

Early English = the culture/period (c. 550-1150); Old English = the language (c. 600-1150); both replace the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’

‘Anglo-Saxon is a made-up scholars’ term. Old English is a Germanic language

Alliteration

Repetition of initial sounds: the organizing principle of Old English verse and the Gawain-poet's lines

Old English poetry is alliterative; Caedmon's Hymn was originally oral poetry. Contrast French rhyme and Chaucer's rhymed iambic pentameter couplets.

Bob and wheel

The short rhymed ending of each Gawain stanza: a one-stress ‘bob’ line followed by a four-line ‘wheel’

Courtly love / courtesy

The indoor code governing male-female relations (the indoor counterpart to chivalry): Gawain must satisfy both while at the castle

The lady’s language is a weapon; Gawain can’t be loyal to his host and give the lady what she wants at once

Bede

Author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, where Caedmon’s story and hymn appear (in Latin)

The ‘Lenigrad Bede’ manuscript has the Old English version added in a different hand

Roman baths (and the town of Bath)

The ruins in The Ruin (works of giants); the town of Bath is named for them, and the Wife is ‘of Bath’ (she doesn’t take baths)

Consolation (Christian and otherwise)

Relief for loss; e.g., Heaven in The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, Boethius; the transitory world is both bad news and good news

The Wanderer’s consolation is ambiguous (‘fortress’ as Heaven)

Ovid: Ars Amatoria vs. Remedia Amoris

Art of Love (Book III, addressed to women: fake it) vs. Remedies of Love; both echoed by the Wife (‘olde dance’)

The Wife rewrites Ovid’s advice (lift the curtain)

The oral and the written

The tension between speech and text: SGGK may be the after-dinner entertainment but is written; the Tales claim oral telling yet were written to be read (‘turn the page’)

Interruption (Miller, Wife)

The Miller interrupts the planned order (literary and social); the Wife interrupts herself and male authority, more threatening because she’s a woman

The politics and poetics of interruption. The Miller’s is staged; the Wife’s is ‘significant’

Legend (Middle English)

A saint’s life

The Miller’s Tale plays with religious/biblical storylines (Joseph/Mary/Nativity, Noah, ‘Biblical legend: Noah’s Ark’)

Joseph, Mary, and the Nativity story (Miller's Tale)

‘Of a carpenter and of his wife’ evokes Joseph/Mary/baby Jesus (Matthew 1:18-19); Alisoun as a profane Marian figure; comic revisit

Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)

The fall of shared language: a collapse of unity between word and thing; compare the Miller’s Tale ending (‘no man his reason heard’)

Res/verbus before/after the Fall

Eucharist (communion)

The sacrament commemorating Christ’s sacrifice via communion; the Pardoner seems to care more about tavern jokes than this sacrament (ale and cake)

Relics and reliquaries

Relics = sacred remains (the Pardoner’s are fakes, e.g., pig bones); reliquaries = containers for them (his are ‘empty vessels’)

Aesop's fable of the lion and the man

A man and a lion argue over who is stronger; the lion points out that the statue of a man killing a lion was made by a man; history depends on who tells it

The Wife’s ‘Who paintede the leone?’: in a world where men write the books, women must make their own texts

Seven Deadly Sins

Gluttony and avarice: Pardoner’s intent is money, not spiritualty