ELMES, MELISSA RIDLEY, Phd. Negotiating Violence at the Feast in Medieval British Texts

ELMES, MELISSA RIDLEY, PhD. Negotiating Violence at the Feast in Medieval British Texts. (2016) Directed by Dr. Amy N. Vines. 333 pp. The medieval period has been viewed historically as a time of excessive and senseless violence. This project participates in the ongoing field reassessment of violence in medieval literature as being culturally meaningful, rather than senseless and excessive, by advocating for greater attention to the ways in which medieval writers critiqued violence in their narratives and, by extension, their communities. While scholars readily read the tournaments and battles in medieval texts for such critique, I argue that feast scenes actually provide a clearer view of the ways in which violence is used narratively as a productive interventional force, particularly when latent conflicts that have been obscured by adherence to rigid social systems threaten to destabilize a community. Medieval chivalric and etiquette codes suggest that violence stems from those living outside of their jurisdiction; but the violence in feast halls, ungovernable by those codes, shows that conflict from within the community offers the greatest threat to its stability and must be redressed by meaningful action rather than through a prescribed ritualistic response. Making use of theoretical underpinnings from anthropology and history that characterize the feast as a culturally essential event and medieval violence as a rational and strategically-employed tool of constraint, coercion, and manipulation, I convert the essentially historical question of the cultural importance of feasts into a literary one by close reading feasting scenes and their aftermath in order to consider how the writers in medieval England used the motif of violence at or following the feast to illuminate, critique, and offer correction to social, political, and religious issues tied to the specific concerns of justice, loyalty, and treason within a community. Looking at texts ranging from the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, the Welsh Mabinogion, and Latin Historia Regum Britanniae to chronicle-based works by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, the Middle English Arthurian romances Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the Old Norse Clari’s Saga, and outlaw tales of Robin Hood, Gamelyn, and Hereward the Wake, I demonstrate through a comparative approach centered on interpretation and analysis supported with contextual historical evidence that violence associated with the feast is typically presented according to genre expectations and mirrors cultural anxieties that are specific to the community in which and for which a given text was produced. The use of the feast for such a purpose is possible precisely because of its essential quality in a given culture; everyone reading the text knows what the feast is supposed to be, and this common understanding of what a feast is permits the disruptions and violent altercations, rather than the event, to become the narrative focus when they occur. Because medieval society viewed it as a tool to be used, rather than simply a passionate outburst, when violence erupts unexpectedly during or after a feast it is being intentionally performed; since the codes of conduct and etiquette that govern the feast make no accommodation for dealing with that violence, there is no communal sense of how to address it; and so, instances of violence at the feast must be handled in the immediate sense on an individual level. This unscripted response to the violence forces a community in its wake to consider what led to the violence, who was involved, how it was handled, and what to do in its aftermath to try to rectify the issues that led to the violent altercation and determine how to avoid or address further potentially violent conflicts. Ultimately, I argue that while all of the instances of violence at the feast examined in this study are differentiated by genre expectations and culturally specific anxieties, together they reveal a continuous preoccupation on the part of writers in medieval England with the limitations of behavioral standards like the chivalric and conduct codes to control violence effectively. I challenge the idea that simply upholding the standards of conduct set forth by prescriptive manuals is enough to stave off social unrest by demonstrating that in fact, social unrest comes not from misbehavior but from the limitations of codes of behavior to account for interpersonal strife. Since the codes of conduct that prescribe how to behave at events like the feast do not address how to deal with latent conflict, when violence does erupt it can become a productive force for meaningful change, because it reveals interpersonal issues that the codes seek to repress and forces the community to deal with them. NEGOTIATING VIOLENCE AT THE FEAST IN MEDIEVAL BRITISH TEXTS by Melissa Ridley Elmes A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 2016 Approved by Amy N. Vines_____________________ Committee Chair APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation written by MELISSA RIDLEY ELMES has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Committee Chair ___________________________________ Amy N. Vines Committee Members ___________________________________ Denise Baker ___________________________________ Jennifer Feather ______March 1, 2016__________ Date of Acceptance by Committee ______March 1, 2016_______ Date of Final Oral Examination ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have benefited enormously from the support, mentorship, patronage, and friendship of many people in the preparation of this study, and I am delighted to be able to acknowledge here my debts of gratitude for such kindnesses, both directly and indirectly given. I owe the greatest debt of professional gratitude to my dissertation committee chair, Amy Vines, whose unfailing encouragement, sharp-eyed criticism, and detailed readings of every chapter draft helped me to convert a broadly-conceived scholarly interest into a formal critical study. I have (for the most part) happily “chop- chopped” my interminably long sentences at her request, and thank her especially for helping me to develop a stronger understanding of myself as a writer. She is the embodiment of all four of the pillars that have sustained me throughout this project: support, mentorship, patronage, and friendship; and I could not have asked for a wiser, more generous, more enthusiastic advisor to see me through this process. (The next sheet mask is on me!) My gratitude also goes out to the other members of my committee, Denise Baker and Jennifer Feather, who provided important insights during the developmental stages of my project and read each chapter patiently, kindly, and with the kind of critical acumen that I am still learning to develop. Their generous scholarship and mentoring over these past several years have served as significant factors in my professional development, and I can only hope to carry forth their positive influence in my own career. In addition, I wish to express my thanks to the many professors with whom I was fortunate to work in graduate school, both in coursework and on various iii department initiatives: Risa Applegarth, Michelle Dowd, Christopher Hodgkins, Jennifer Keith, Alexandra Moore, Nancy Myers, Mark Rifkin, Hepzibah Roskelley, and Anne Wallace at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and at Longwood University, Chene Heady, Shawn Smith, Esther Godfrey, Hood Frasier, and most especially Kat Tracy, whose friendship and advice continue to be invaluable to me. Various other scholars have assisted me throughout my graduate career by providing feedback on presentations derived from this dissertation, reading portions of it in draft form, offering encouragement, fellowship, and advice on the profession, and discussing interesting ideas at conferences, in coffee shops and tea rooms, on social media, and at sundry professional gatherings. They include: Lynn Arner, Alan Baragona, Pete Beidler, Tina Boyer, Brantley Bryant, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Jennifer Edwards, Stefanie Goyette, my “Zoomie” Ana Grinberg, Natalie Grinnell, Alison Gulley, Kevin Harty, Julie Hoffman, Mary Kate Hurley, Steven Isaac, David Johnson, Maire Johnson, Valerie Johnson, Eileen Joy, Alex Kaufman, Deva Fall Kemmis, Dorothy Kim, Jo Koster, Vickie Larsen, Mary Leech, Emily Leverett, Roy Liuzza, Sally Livingston, Jeff Massey, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Asa Simon Mittman, Daniel O’Sullivan, Elizabeth Rambo, Meredith Reynolds, Michelle Sauer, Angie Bennett Segler, Lorraine Stock, Jeff Stoyanoff , Larry Swain, Thea Thomaini, Elaine Treharne, Misty Urban, Mary Valante, Rene Ward, Bonnie Wheeler—and, as always, Tom Hanks, whose kind and influential intervention at the earliest point in my career set the stage for me to be able to claim such a band of generous scholars as “my tribe.” iv I also want to acknowledge the many graduate student friends and colleagues both at UNCG and elsewhere who have been so important during my formative years, and with whom I look forward to many collaborations and conversations in the years to come: first and foremost, my academic wonder twin and constant source of support and friendship, Matt Carter; and also: Tina Romanelli, Lauren Shook, Jessica Ward Coffman, Neal Buck, Amy Berrier, Brenta Blevins, Jenny Bledsoe, Paul Anthony, Anna Beskin, Louis

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