Reading Landscapes in Medieval British Romance
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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. Beaches, too, serve as stages upon which the romances act out their anxieties over the ii consequences of human economic endeavor, with scenes where shipwrecks are configured as opportunities for financial gain for scavengers and as mortal peril for sailors. In my third section, I move beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of foreign lands in medieval British romance, focusing in particular on representations of Divine will manifested through landscape features and dramatic weather in the Holy Land of Titus and Vespasian and the Far East of Kyng Alisaunder. Finally, my concluding section returns to literary descriptions of medieval Britain, but this time to examine the idea of the “foreign at home.” I discuss here how romances of Scotland and the Anglo-Scottish border such as Sir Colling, Eger and Grime, and Thomas of Erceldoune cast the Border landscape as one defined by rugged topography, extreme weather, and an innate sense of independence, while also emphasizing its proximity to the Otherworlds of Fairy and Hell. I then trace how these topics get developed later, in the early modern ballads that are based on some of these romances, explaining how song-texts persist in communicating some of these same ideas regarding Scottish and northern English landscapes. Many of these issues remain pertinent to modern discourses across a variety of disciplines, and thus invite an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary criticism with environmental history and cultural geography. Through historical and cultural analyses of these textual landscapes, I explain how romances not only reflect concerns of their medieval audience, but also provide some enduring motifs that appear in the popular literature of later periods. iii DEDICATION For my parents, Connie and Jim Amor sine dubio iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I wish to thank my adviser, Dr. Lisa J. Kiser, for her unflagging support and intellectual acumen throughout my composition of this dissertation. Her patient feedback on multiple drafts of each element of this project was always insightful, and her enthusiasm for the source material forever encouraging. I cannot imagine this project existing in any state without her efforts to push the boundaries of my interpretations ever further, or without the motivating context of our discussions regarding medieval and modern human relationships with the natural world. I also wish to express my gratitude to Dr. Richard Firth Green, Dr. Ethan Knapp, and Dr. Karen Winstead for their regular feedback on dissertation chapters and related projects. Our conversations always introduced me to new sources and interpretations, and kept me regularly aware of the diverse array of perspectives that composes any medieval text. I thank the OSU Graduate School, the Department of English, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the English Graduate Organization, the Medieval Academy of America, and the New Chaucer Society for their generous financial support in the form of fellowships and travel grants. These awards provided me with time off from teaching to complete this project, numerous opportunities to share my work with v fellow scholars at international conferences, and the ability to study medieval manuscripts and landscape remains in situ. Additionally, I am indebted to Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht for allowing me to reprint my work from the second section of Chapter 3, which originally appeared as “’The broken schippus he ther fonde’: Shipwrecks and the Human Costs of Investment Capital in Middle English Romance” in the journal Neophilologus. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11061-014-9423-3. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my debt and gratitude to Erin Wagner, who has been a source of great support throughout my years of research and writing, and who has cheerfully and helpfully read through more of my drafts, listened to more of my conference papers, and discussed more of my project ideas than anyone should have to experience. On that note, I also thank my fellow graduate students at OSU for creating and maintaining such an atmosphere of collegiality and genuine camaraderie across boundaries of discipline and department, and my sister, Jamie, for giving a scientist’s opinion on many of my readings. The responsibility for any errors that remain is entirely my own. vi VITA 2010…………………………………………M. Phil. Medieval and Renaissance Literature, University of Cambridge 2009…………………………………………B. A. English, University of Massachusetts Amherst 2014-2015…………………………………..Presidential Fellow, The Ohio State University 2010-2014…………………………………...Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University Publications “‘The broken schippus he ther fonde’: Shipwrecks and the Human Costs of Investment Capital in Middle English Romance.” Neophilologus 99.2 (2015): 315-333. “Black as the Crow” [coauthored with Travis Neel]. In Dark Chaucer: An Assortment, eds. Myra Seaman, Eileen A. Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012. 101-114. “Of Heroes and Crowns: The Roles of Norwegian Royalty in Icelandic Family Sagas.” Sententiae: Harvard Undergraduate Journal of Medieval Studies 1 (2008/2009): 53-63. vii Fields of Study Major Field: English Medieval Studies Environmental Studies viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iv Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………..…..v Vita………………………………………………………………………………………vii Abbreviations……………………………………………………………………………...x Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 2: A (Disappearing?) World of Opportunity: Social Topography, Ecological Economics, and Landscape Change in Middle English Romance…...18 Chapter 3: Chasing the Surf: Pleasure, Identity, and Economic Opportunism on the Seashores of Middle English Romance…………………………………..88 Chapter 4: Across the Sea: Eastern Reflections of England in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud Misc. 622…………………………………………………….152 Chapter 5: The Foreign at Home: Landscape in the Ballad Romances of Scotland and the Anglo-Scottish Border………………………………………………….220 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………292 ix ABBREVIATIONS DSL Dictionary of the Scots Language EETS Early English Text Society (o.s.) Original Series (e.s.) Extra Series (s.s.) Supplementary Series JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology MED Middle English Dictionary OED Oxford English Dictionary x CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION The natural world was a daily, material presence in the lives of medieval people. Many of them slept in halls that doubled as stables; they shared (and squabbled over) strips of communal farmland and saw their inherited field-plots enclosed by land- grabbing sheep farmers; they harvested and sold necessary resources like metal ore, charcoal, wood, and peat; they participated in traditional excursions into the local landscape, such as the annual processions charting villages’ religious and secular boundaries, which reaffirmed communal identities; and they enjoyed leisure activities such as hunting, fishing, swimming, and – for the wealthy – estate design, endeavors which consisted of a close, active relationship with a variety of different biomes. Both the authors and audiences of medieval British romance – a genre explicitly concerned with the fantastic exploits of heroic knights – experienced their geological, topographical, and organic surroundings through perspectives shaped by physiology, culture, and religion. Reflecting a fascination with their home environments, Anglo-Norman, Middle English, and Old/Middle Scots