DOCSLIB.ORG

Answering the Riddle of the Cooks Tale

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Answering the Riddle of the Cooks Tale Chapter 7 Answering the Riddle of the Cooks Tale The murky case of the Cook s Tale presents a panoply of various issues relevant to the discussion of the Canterbury Tales as a textually dynamic work with a history ofinteraction. However, unlike the other cases discussed in the first several chapters, the fragmented state of the tale, the cloudiness of Chaucer's role and intentions, and the sheer variety of reader responses to the fragmented tale, both in the criticism and in the textual history of the Canterbury Tales, make the case of the Cook:~ Tale unique in many ways. No other fragmented part ofthe Tales resulted in quite the range and number of responses as the Cooks Tale. For instance, the "spurious links" are only in a small number of manuscripts, which are all from the fifteenth century. Written around 1422, Lydgate's Siege ofThebes and its Prologue are in only five manuscripts ofthe Canterbury Tales. The Canterbury Interlude and the Tale of8eryn are only in the Northumberland manuscript. The fifteenth-century orthodox Ploughman s Tale is only in Christ Church 152. The sixteenth-century proto-Protestant Plowman sTale is not found in any medieval manuscript but in one early modern manuscript and several printed editions. However, all but eight ofthe fifty or so complete manuscripts ofthe Canterbury Tales have something to say about the Cook s Tale. What is more, the scribes of 33 of the manuscripts interact in some explicit way, either through paratextual glossing or additional text, with the fragmented tale, imaginatively reshaping the path of the CookS Tale. l Recalling the challenge and contestation of text-based games such as a riddle, David Lorenzo Boyd states, "the narrative [of the Cooks Tale] was the focus ofmuch fifteenth-century editorial creativity, for it presented a gap, an irresistible challenge with which the book industry then had to contend."2 The challenge the narrative gap poses remains, and to this day readers continue to fill in the gaps in narratively and textually unique ways. At the end of the first fragment or tale group "a" in the Canterbury Tales, the Cook promises in his Prologue to tell a "litel jape" (I. 4329) in the same manner as the Reeve and the Miller. However, he only begins to tell his tale. The canonical text ofthe Cook s Tale begins by introducing the raucous and unsavory apprentice victualer known as Perkyn the Revel our, the prototypical party animal and wedding crasher, who "haunteth dys, riot, or paramour" (I. 4392). Perkyn shirks most of [n addition to all the cases in which the scribe explicitly writes something that interacts with the text, I also include the Ellesmere manuscript in which the scribe makes no comment but leaves part of a page and a whole leaf blank before the next tale. 2 David Lorenzo Boyd, "Social Texts: Bodley 686 and the Politics of the Cook's Tale," in Reading From the Margins: Textual Studies, Chaucer, and Medieval Literature, ed. Seth Lerer (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1996),85. 142 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle o/the Cook's Tale 143 his apprenticeship duties and should never have been given his "acquitance" to the fragmented tale and the narratives of explanation that seek to answer the (i.e., certificate of successful apprenticeship completion) by the master victualer, unanswerable question: why does the Cook's Tale end the way it does? The CookS but the master decides to send Perkyn on his way so he doesn't rub off on the rest Tale, for the past 600 years, has been an undecipherable riddle that many have of the servants in the household. The master bids Perkyn to go with "sorwe and tried to answer. with mischance" (1. 4412), and Perkyn leaves to take up residence with a friend of If it was indeed supposed to have an ending, two endings seem realistically his in what seems to be a brothel. With that, the tale ends abruptly right as it begins possible based on the potential narrative: either Perkyn continues his "riotous" and to head down a rather seedy path with the lines, rebellious ways in a comedy, or something will happen to Perkyn that will bring the tale to a didactic and moralized conclusion. Regardless of where the tale was Anon he sente his bed and his array supposed to go, various "involved " as Rust might describe them, have Unto a compeer ofhis owene sort, resolved the abrupt ending in several unique ways. As a riddle, a text-based game That lovede and revel, and disport, of sorts, the hasty ending of the tale similarly demands solution. Since scribes And hadde a wyf that heeld for contenance began copying the Tales, such sudden stops to tales have caused readers to react in 1\ shoooe. and for hir sustenance. (I. a variety of different ways ranging from silence, to invented interruptions, to the after the introduction of this "wyf' and her career as a prostitute, the utter revision of the tale through user-created input. Some of these user-created tale simply ends without a sense of closure, making it unpalatable to our modern inputs were original; some were appropriated from other, often unknown, sources sense of an ending, but also apparently insufficient for a number of late medieval and added to the Canterbury story canon. writerly readers. New-media theorist Nick Montfort cites the riddle as the ancestor to The tale quite clearly ends with the potential for much more narrative and no contemporary forms of interactive fiction. He states, "the riddle is not only the sense ofcompleteness, but it is not particularly evident why it ends where it does. most important early ancestor of interactive fiction but also an extremely valuable Why leave a tale like the Cook's so clearly unfinished? There has been no shortage figure for understanding it, perhaps the most directly useful figure in considering of explanations. It is possible that it was getting too dirty, so either Chaucer or the aesthetics and poetics ofform today."5 Riddles are by definition unfinished texts some censoring scribe stopped the tale in its tracks. It could be too that Chaucer that demand interaction and subsequently completion. They propose questions changed his mind after he had already begun composing the tale, deciding that that readers then answer. I propose that the following riddle-like questions are in there was already too much raucous, bawdy comedy with the Miller and Reeve play with the unfinished Cook:s Tale: For the critics, the question is what would preceding the Cook and not enough serious didacticism. He would have rewritten Chaucer want? For the early scribes, the question was how do we deal with this a new tale, but he never got around to it. It is also possible that Chaucer never got incomplete text? For the present discussion, the question is how have scribes and around to writing the ending of the tale because he had not yet decided whether critics interacted with and reacted to Chaucer:S potential narrative with new texts, to continue down the seedy path of revelry, drunkenness, and prostitution or bring imaginative explanations, or different contexts? In the following sections, I explore the tale and its main character to a moral end for the edification of the reader. Of the variety of interactive responses and solutions to the potential narrative of the course, the Cook's promise of a "jape that fil in oure citee" might indicate that the Cook s Tale, including the range ofscribal actions that negotiated the narrative gap tale will be a fabliau because the Cook uses the same terms when he describes and the critics' own narratives explaining Chaucer's silence, and the tenuous place the events of the Reeve s Tale as a "jape of malice in the derk" (I. 4343, 4338). inside and outside the Chaucer canon ofthe seemingly ubiquitous Tale ofGamelyn However, as A.C. Spearing points out, Chaucer's plans for his narrative seem to as the conclusion to the Cook's Tale. have been in a constant state offlux in all ofhis literary works.3 Because Chaucer's VA. Kolve, discussing the Cook:5 Tale in Chaucer and the Imagery of intentions remain in flux, so too must the Cook's. On the other hand, Chaucer 'rative, states, "[w]e cannot hope to finish what Chaucer left incomplete, or might have had an ending in mind but stopped because of some interrupting life to resolve the problems he had not yet solved."6 Yet we have been doing just that events such as sickness or death. There is also the proto-postmodern possibility kind of interactive solving and narrative shaping for centuries through involved, that, though it ends fragmented, it ends exactly how Chaucer wanted it to end. ergodic textual experiences first in the Tales' transmission and now in the criticism Yet these are all only imaginative conjectures with little basis in the discernable that imagines what became of Chaucer's lost tale. Beginning with the earliest evidence of the manuscripts. They are all possible, but none proves particularly examples, in the manuscripts containing the Cook :\. Tale there are at least four more likely than the other. However, this plethora of potential explanations for the tale ends fragmented fuels the new narratives that have been attached Rust, Imaginary Worlds, 9. Montfort, 1Wisry Little Passages, 37. Spearing, "Afterlife of the Canterbury Tales." See Chapter 4. VA. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery o/Narrative (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1984),257. 144 Playing the Canterbury Tales Answering the Riddle ofthe Cook's Tale 145 types of scribal responses to the fragmented tale with some variation: 1) Silence.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Outlaw: Wilderness and Exile in Old and Middle
    THE ‘BESTLI’ OUTLAW: WILDERNESS AND EXILE IN OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sarah Michelle Haughey August 2011 © 2011 Sarah Michelle Haughey THE ‘BESTLI’ OUTLAW: WILDERNESS AND EXILE IN OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE Sarah Michelle Haughey, Ph. D. Cornell University 2011 This dissertation, The ‘Bestli’ Outlaw: Wilderness and Exile in Old and Middle English Literature explores the reasons for the survival of the beast-like outlaw, a transgressive figure who highlights tensions in normative definitions of human and natural, which came to represent both the fears and the desires of a people in a state of constant negotiation with the land they inhabited. Although the outlaw’s shelter in the wilderness changed dramatically from the dense and menacing forests of Anglo-Saxon England to the bright, known, and mapped greenwood of the late outlaw romances and ballads, the outlaw remained strongly animalistic, other, and liminal, in strong contrast to premodern notions of what it meant to be human and civilized. I argue that outlaw narratives become particularly popular and poignant at moments of national political and ecological crisis—as they did during the Viking attacks of the Anglo-Saxon period, the epoch of intense natural change following the Norman Conquest, and the beginning of the market revolution at the end of the Middle Ages. Figures like the Anglo-Saxon resistance fighter Hereward, the exiled Marcher lord Fulk Fitz Waryn, and the brutal yet courtly Gamelyn and Robin Hood, represent a lost England imagined as pristine and forested.
    [Show full text]
  • Title a Bibliographical Note on the Canterbury Tales
    Title A Bibliographical Note on the Canterbury Tales (1498) Sub Title ドゥ・ウォード版『カンタベリー物語』に関する書誌学的考察 Author 徳永, 聡子(Tokunaga, Satoko) Publisher 慶應義塾大学藝文学会 Publication year 2002 Jtitle 藝文研究 (The geibun-kenkyu : journal of arts and letters). Vol.82, (2002. 6) ,p.243(126)- 257(112) Abstract Notes Genre Journal Article URL https://koara.lib.keio.ac.jp/xoonips/modules/xoonips/detail.php?koara_id=AN00072643-0082000 1-0257 慶應義塾大学学術情報リポジトリ(KOARA)に掲載されているコンテンツの著作権は、それぞれの著作者、学会または出版社/発行者に帰属し、その権利は著作権法によって 保護されています。引用にあたっては、著作権法を遵守してご利用ください。 The copyrights of content available on the KeiO Associated Repository of Academic resources (KOARA) belong to the respective authors, academic societies, or publishers/issuers, and these rights are protected by the Japanese Copyright Act. When quoting the content, please follow the Japanese copyright act. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) A Bibliographical Note on the Canterbury Tales (1498) Satoko TOKUNAGA Before William Thynne's collected edition of Chaucerian works appeared in 1532, Chaucer's text was published in a single volume by three major printers-William Caxton, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de W orde, who commanded the market of printing in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century England. There have survived at least sixteen editions published before the appearance of Thynne's, which includes the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, House of Fame, Parliament of Fowls and several other works.<ll Among them, the Canterbury Tales was so popular that as many as five editions were published. Shortly after he set up the first printing shop in England, Caxton published his first edition c. 1476 (STC 5082) and consequently, around 1483, his 2 second edition (STC 5083) .< > Those who work on English incunabula have accepted that Caxton revised the text of his first edition, though 3 partially, with a manuscript source.< > Following Caxton's death in 1491, Richard Pynson published it in 1492 (STC 5084) and afterwards in 1526 (STC 5086).
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    NOTES Introduction 1. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959). 2. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Bandits, rev. ed. (1961; New York: Pantheon, 1981), p. 23. 3. Ibid., p. 17. 4. Ibid., pp. 22–28. 5. Anton Blok, “The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 1:4 (1972), 494–503. See also Richard W. Slatta, ed., Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987). 6. See the summary by Richard W. Slatta, “Eric J. Hobsbawm’s Social Bandit: A Critique and Revision,” A Contracorriente 1:2 (2004), 22–30. 7. Paul Kooistra, Criminals as Heroes: Structure, Power, and Identity (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989), p. 29. 8. See Steven Knight’s Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 9. Mary Grace Duncan, Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: the Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 61. 10. Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London, 1841). 11. See, for instance, Kenneth Munden, “A Contribution to the Psychological Understanding of the Cowboy and His Myth,” American Imago Summer (1958), 103–48. 12. William Settle, for instance, makes the argument in the introduction to his Jesse James Was His Name (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966). 13. Hobsbawm, Bandits, pp. 40–56. 14. Joseph Ritson, ed., Robin Hood: A Collection of all the Ancient Poems, Songs, and Ballads, now Extant Relative to that Celebrated English Outlaw, 2 vols (London: Egerton and Johnson, 1795; rpt.
    [Show full text]
  • Reading Landscapes in Medieval British Romance
    READING LANDSCAPES IN MEDIEVAL BRITISH ROMANCE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Andrew Murray Richmond, M. Phil. Graduate Program in English The Ohio State University 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Lisa J. Kiser, Adviser Dr. Richard Firth Green Dr. Ethan Knapp Dr. Karen Winstead Copyright by Andrew Murray Richmond 2015 ABSTRACT My dissertation establishes a new framework with which to interpret the textual landscapes and ecological details that permeate late-medieval British romances from the period of c.1300 – c. 1500, focusing on the ways in which such landscapes reflect the diverse experiences of medieval readers and writers. In particular, I identify and explain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English and Scottish conceptions of the relationships between literary worlds and “real-world” locations. In my first section, I analyze the role of topography and the management of natural resources in constructing a sense of community in Sir Isumbras, William of Palerne, and Havelok the Dane, and explain how abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in Sir Degrevant and the Tale of Gamelyn betray anxieties about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the Black Death, and the Little Ice Age. My next section examines seashores and waterscapes in Sir Amadace, Emaré, Sir Eglamour of Artois, the Awntyrs off Arthure, and the Constance romances of Chaucer and Gower. Specifically, I explain how a number of romances present the seaside as a simultaneously inviting and threatening space whose multifaceted nature as a geographical, political, and social boundary embodies the complex range of meanings embedded in the Middle English concept of “play” – a word that these texts often link with the seashore.
    [Show full text]
  • 52Nd International Congress on Medieval Studies
    52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies May 11–14, 2017 Medieval Institute College of Arts and Sciences Western Michigan University 1903 W. Michigan Ave. Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5432 wmich.edu/medieval 2017 i Table of Contents Welcome Letter iii Registration iv-v On-Campus Housing vi Off-Campus Accommodations vii Travel viii Driving and Parking ix Food x-xi Logistics and Amenities xii-xiii Varia xiv Mailings xv Hotel Shuttle Routes xvi Hotel Shuttle Schedules xvii Campus Shuttles xviii Motown the Musical xix Exhibits Hall xx Exhibitors xxi Guide to Acronyms xxii Plenary Lectures xxiii Mostly Medieval Theatre Festival xxiv-xxv Advance Notice—2018 Congress xxvi The Congress: How It Works xxvii Travel Awards xxviii Medieval Institute Research Centers xxix M.A. Program in Medieval Studies xxx Medieval Institute Affiliated Faculty xxxi Careers xxxii Loew Lectures in Medieval Studies xxxiii Medieval Institute Publications xxxiv-xxxv About Western Michigan University xxxvi The Otto Gründler Book Prize xxxvii Endowment and Gift Funds xxxviii 2017 Congress Schedule of Events 1–184 Index of Sponsoring Organizations 185–190 Index of Participants 191–211 Index of Honorees 212 Maps M-1 – M-9 List of Advertisers Advertising A-1 – A-42 ii Dear colleagues, It’s a rainy January evening as I write this year’s welcome to Kalamazoo, so it’s rather difficult to imagine the coming of spring. Yet I take heart—even though my office is cold—because I do know that spring will come and so too the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Some things do not change. Having said that, though, change is coming to the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies.
    [Show full text]
  • CHRIST CHURCH LIBRARY NEWSLETTER Volume 5, Issue 2 Hilary 2009
    CHRIST CHURCH LIBRARY NEWSLETTER Volume 5, Issue 2 Hilary 2009 ISSN 1756-6797 (Print), ISSN 1756-6800 (Online) Martin Llewellyn's Atlas of the History Channel & the Experiments East: a mystery partly unravelled with Walter de Milemete’s Kite Bomb In 1969, I visited Christ Church hoping that, given its Walter De Milemete’s De Nobilitatibus, Sapientiis, et size and prominence, the library might contain some Prudentiis Regum (Christ Church Library, MS 92) unusual cartographic material. Intrigued by an item has always held a special fascination for me. Most described in the hand-written catalogue as, 'Maps - famously it features the earliest known depiction of a 18th century, English and Foreign', I asked to see gun – a vase shaped piece of field artillery. I have what proved to be Martin Llewellyn's atlas of the shot a replica of this and upon detonation, it flashed East. It is my contention that this volume, unknown to and thundered and jumped and reared up on its map historians for over three and a half centuries, wooden stand in a most lively fashion. I report this constitutes the earliest sea atlas by an Englishman, because, to me, it is the challenge and excitement of and that, dating from about 1598, it contains the translating the images from the page into workable earliest known English charts of the East. machines that makes this treatise so enthralling. Christ Church's Donors' Book (p.84) records the gift Prepared as a gift to the 15 year-old Edward III on of the atlas (Map O.14, West Table A 3) by the eve of his coronation, De Nobilitatibus was Llewellyn's sons, William and Martin, apparently in intended to stimulate a boy’s imagination and it 1634 [though definitely between 1632 and 1639]: continues so to do.
    [Show full text]
  • Completeness in Middle English Literature: the Case of the Cook’S Tale and the Tale of Gamelyn
    Manuscript Studies Volume 1 Issue 1 Spring 2017 Article 7 2017 (In)Completeness in Middle English Literature: The Case of the Cook’s Tale and the Tale of Gamelyn Timothy Stinson North Carolina State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/mss_sims Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, and the Medieval Studies Commons Recommended Citation Stinson, Timothy (2017) "(In)Completeness in Middle English Literature: The Case of the Cook’s Tale and the Tale of Gamelyn," Manuscript Studies: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1 , Article 7. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/mss_sims/vol1/iss1/7 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/mss_sims/vol1/iss1/7 For more information, please contact [email protected]. (In)Completeness in Middle English Literature: The Case of the Cook’s Tale and the Tale of Gamelyn Abstract This essay considers the ways in which incompleteness – the de facto status of virtually all of Middle English literature – is both a type of failure and a special characteristic of this literature. The discussion is framed around the incomplete Cook's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and the Tale of Gamelyn, a romance frequently misattributed to Chaucer that circulated with the Canterbury Tales, often to fill the gap left by the incomplete Cook's Tale. Keywords manuscript studies, Middle English, Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Cook's Tale, Tale of Gamelyn, textual criticism, incompleteness, failure, material text This article is available in Manuscript Studies: https://repository.upenn.edu/mss_sims/vol1/iss1/7 Stinson: (In)Completeness in Middle English Literature M anuscript S tudies A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies volume 1, number 1 (Spring 2016) Manuscri�t Studies (issn 2381-5329) is published semiannually by the University of Pennsylvania Press Published by ScholarlyCommons, 2017 1 Manuscript Studies, Vol.
    [Show full text]
  • The Evolution of the Robin Hood Legend Kathleen Rose Mulligan Providence College
    Providence College DigitalCommons@Providence History Student Papers History Spring 2012 Shooting Arrows Through Myth and History: The Evolution of the Robin Hood Legend Kathleen Rose Mulligan Providence College Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.providence.edu/history_students Part of the Cultural History Commons Mulligan, Kathleen Rose, "Shooting Arrows Through Myth and History: The vE olution of the Robin Hood Legend" (2012). History Student Papers. Paper 2. http://digitalcommons.providence.edu/history_students/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the History at DigitalCommons@Providence. It has been accepted for inclusion in History Student Papers by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Providence. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ! ! ! ! ! Shooting!Arrows!Through!Myth!and!History:! The!Evolution!of!the!Robin!Hood!Legend! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Kathleen!Rose!Mulligan! HIS!490!History!Honors!Thesis! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Department!of!History! Providence!College! Fall!2011! English Monarchs—Plantagenet through Stuart Henry II (1152-1189) Richard I (1189-1199-The “Lion Heart”) John I (1199-1216-“Lackland”) Henry III (1216-1272) Edward I (1272-1307-“Longshanks”) Edward II (1307-1327) Edward III (1327-1377) Richard II (1377-1399) Henry IV (1399-1413-“Bolingbroke”) Henry V (1413-1422) Henry VI (1422-1461) Edward IV (1461-1483) Richard III (1483-1485) Henry VII (1485-1509) Henry VIII (1509-1547) Edward V (1547-1553) Jane Grey (1553-Disputed) Mary I (1553-1558-“Bloody Mary”) Elizabeth I (1558-1603-The “Virgin Queen”) James I (1603-1625) Charles I (1625-1649) Oliver and Richard Cromwell (1649-1660-Lords Protector) Charles II (1660-1685) James II (1685-1688) House of Plantagenet House of Lancaster House of York House of Tudor House of Stuart ! ! iii! CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………..…………….1 CHAPTER 1.
    [Show full text]
  • The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Vol. 4 (The Canterbury Tales) [1899]
    The Online Library of Liberty A Project Of Liberty Fund, Inc. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 4 (The Canterbury Tales) [1899] The Online Library Of Liberty This E-Book (PDF format) is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a private, non-profit, educational foundation established in 1960 to encourage study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. 2010 was the 50th anniversary year of the founding of Liberty Fund. It is part of the Online Library of Liberty web site http://oll.libertyfund.org, which was established in 2004 in order to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. To find out more about the author or title, to use the site's powerful search engine, to see other titles in other formats (HTML, facsimile PDF), or to make use of the hundreds of essays, educational aids, and study guides, please visit the OLL web site. This title is also part of the Portable Library of Liberty DVD which contains over 1,000 books and quotes about liberty and power, and is available free of charge upon request. The cuneiform inscription that appears in the logo and serves as a design element in all Liberty Fund books and web sites is the earliest-known written appearance of the word “freedom” (amagi), or “liberty.” It is taken from a clay document written about 2300 B.C. in the Sumerian city-state of Lagash, in present day Iraq. To find out more about Liberty Fund, Inc., or the Online Library of Liberty Project, please contact the Director at [email protected].
    [Show full text]
  • Game’ in the Tale of Gamelyn
    MEDIUM ÆVUM, VOL. LXXXV, No. 1, pp. 97–117 © SSMLL, 2016 ‘GAME’ IN THE TALE OF GAMELYN It is often said that the protagonist of the fourteenth-century Tale of Gamelyn has a name that means ‘son of the old man’, deriving from the Icelandic gamalll or ‘old’.1 Th is reading speaks to Gamelyn’s status as the child of his father’s old age, and the fact that it is his position as a son among other sons that sets the narrative in motion. But Gamelyn’s name also bears a signifi cant relationship to the word ‘game’ in its multiple senses of amusement, delight, and pleasure; wild animals hunted for sport; the act of hunting them; and structured play, of the sort explored by Johan Huizinga in his classic 1938 study of ‘the play element of culture’, Homo ludens. Th ese resonances have been noted by a number of diff erent critics, but so far as I am aware no one has yet developed them into a structured account of the text.2 This article investigates the extent to which the dynamics of the Talee can be thrown into relief by inserting it into a late medieval culture of ‘game’. This engagement has a double character. In the fi rst place, game and play are characterized by rule-boundedness. ‘All play’, Huizinga argues in Homo ludens, ‘has its rules.’ Hence his comment, that play ‘creates order’ – more than that, that it ‘is order’.3 Consideration of ordered ‘game’ in Gamelyn leads towards late medieval conduct books and household manuals – books of ‘game’ and of ‘nurture’ – and their codifi cations of rules for proper behaviour.
    [Show full text]
  • Laughing at Knights: Representations of Humour in Sir Perceval of Galles, Sir Beues of Hamtoun, Lybeaus Desconus and Geoffrey Chaucer’S Tale of Sir Thopas
    DOI: 10.13114/MJH.2016119307 Tarihi: 31.03.2016 Mediterranean Journal of Humanities Kabul Tarihi: 20.06.2016 Geliş mjh.akdeniz.edu.tr VI/1 (2016) 309-322 Laughing at Knights: Representations of Humour in Sir Perceval of Galles, Sir Beues of Hamtoun, Lybeaus Desconus and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas Şövalyelere Gülmek: Sir Perceval of Galles, Sir Beues of Hamtoun, Lybeaus Desconus ve Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Sir Thopas’ın Hikayesi’nde Mizah Betimlemeleri Pınar TAŞDELEN∗ Abstract: Romance conventions, motifs and archetypes blend in order to appeal to the moral concerns of the romance audience. In particular, chivalric romances are heroic narratives adapted to English feudalism and the Christian faith, either to depict a knight’s moral progress or the aristocratic way of life; therefore, romance would seem to be the last place one would look for humour. Much of the humour in medieval romance is the effect of the exaggeration of heroic expressions and deeds, which then becomes mocking and ridiculous rather than heroic. This article concentrates on the representations of humour in Sir Perceval of Galles, Sir Beues of Hamtoun, Lybeaus Desconus and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas. It discusses what makes these romances humorous, how the romance heroes are presented as laughable figures, while it argues the function of humour in these romances. The romance heroes and situations are compared, and they are presented in detail with specific examples from these romances. Romance as a humorous genre is discussed as to if its use is for humour as a means of laughter, for satire or for emphasis upon the idea of chivalry.
    [Show full text]
  • THE TWENTY-FIVE PLOUGHS of SIR JOHN: the TALE of GAMELYN and the IMPLICATIONS of ACREAGE* GEERT VAN IERSEL the Tale of Gamelyn I
    THE TWENTY-FIVE PLOUGHS OF SIR JOHN: THE TALE OF GAMELYN AND THE IMPLICATIONS OF ACREAGE* GEERT VAN IERSEL The Tale of Gamelyn is an anonymous romance, probably composed between c. 1340 and c. 1370.1 It survives in twenty-five manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, in which it features as a complement to the unfinished ‘Cook’s Tale’. Various studies have looked into the legal practices reflected by the narrative, which link it closely to the historical context of later medieval England.2 In this paper, I will set out to demonstrate that the romance’s association with specific socio- historical circumstances extends to the way in which land ownership is featured in the narrative, and that this has important consequences for the interpretation of the narrative’s moral subtext. I will start with a summary of the plot: Sir John of Boundes, an aged knight, summons a number of neighbouring knights to his deathbed, so that they may aid him *I would like to thank Professor Peter Hoppenbrouwers, from whose advice this article has greatly benefited 1 Skeat dates the romance c. 1340 (Walter W. Skeat (ed.), The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed., 3 Vols, London, 1954, III, 339-400). According to Bennett it was composed “in the mid-fourteenth century” (H.S. Bennett, Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, London, 1947, 310). A later date (c. 1350-70) was proposed by Charles W. Dunn (in J. Burke Severs, ed., A Manual of the Writings in Middle English: 1050-1500, New Haven, 1967, Vol. I: The Romances, 31).
    [Show full text]