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To Download the PDF File Textual Transformations and the Challenges of Self-Narration in Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick by Alicia Haniford A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2020, Alicia Haniford ii Abstract This thesis studies the narrative challenges presented to individual subjectivity over time in two Middle English romances, Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick. These long, episodic texts put pressure on the social, cultural, national, religious, and personal identities of their heroes, testing their capacity and willingness to perform the personal memory work necessary to maintain a coherent identity over time. Combining an historicist interest in medieval models of autobiographical memory with New Philological attention to the social and cultural implications of manuscript variance, I argue that the variation in the manuscript traditions of Bevis and Guy points to a persistent textual interest in the portrayal of romance heroes as engaged in the critical cognitive work of personal reflection and subjective cohesion. This was a particularly important function in relation to the capacity of these texts to provide moral and spiritual models of Christian selfhood for both knights and laypeople. iii Acknowledgements I would like to begin by thanking my supervisor, Professor Siobhain Bly Calkin, for her support and direction throughout the duration my research and writing. She urged me to expand my research interests when I entered the M.A. program, and she has provided encouragement during the most challenging stages of my work as well as incredibly valuable instruction and guidance in strengthening and developing my research. I would like to thank my thesis examiners for their time and attention to my work, and for their thought-provoking questions during my defence: Professor Robin Norris (internal examiner) and Professor Marc Saurette (external examiner). I am also grateful for the support of the Carleton English Department, and in particular to graduate administrator Priya Kumar and graduate supervisors Professor Julie Murray and Professor Travis DeCook. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) program in the completion of my work. Finally, I would like to thank my sister Laura Haniford for sitting through many writing sessions with me, and my partner Jen Halsall for her constant support. iv Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………iii Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………...iv Introduction: Memory, Identity, and the Romance Subject………………………………1 Chapter 1: Bevis of Hampton and the Cultural Coherence of the Subject in Time……...24 Chapter 2: Chivalry, Forgetfulness, and Penitential Reflection in Guy of Warwick…….83 Conclusion: Rewriting Text and Self in Middle English Romance…………………….139 Works Cited and Consulted……………………………………………………………..142 1 Introduction: Memory, Identity, and the Romance Subject This thesis began out of an interest in the analytical challenges and opportunities presented by texts with a history of significant manuscript revision and variation. Medieval manuscript variation, combined with the absence of an identifiable author or authorial version, confounds conventional literary practices of close reading. Variation forces literary scholars to begin their work with difficult questions that the nature of modern print culture largely obscures: when we have been trained to read in detail, how do we approach texts where word choice and sometimes even narrative structure are variable? Where is variation a result of deliberate editorial intervention, and where is it unintentional, the result of a scribal mistake or a damaged exemplar? When does variation become so extreme that it produces a new text? What can we learn from sameness versus difference? When and why did variation occur, and what results did it produce? All of these questions apply to the Middle English romances Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick, which are the focus of this thesis—and, with some minor adjustments, these questions apply equally to the heroes of these texts, whose subjective coherence as characters is often stretched to its limits over the compounding of narrative episodes, cultural influences, and editorial revisions. Every time Bevis or Guy was copied anew provided an opportunity for change and editorial intervention in a popular narrative that its authors strove to make recognizable; continuities and divergences both represent active editorial choices. Similarly, every time Bevis or Guy moves from one adventure to the next within these narratives, they face the same “editorial” choices in shaping their own self-narratives: reinventing, recalling, forgetting, cohering. Behind the ways in which these romance heroes articulate their senses of their own identities lie the choices of textual editors, communicating their own concerns about the way a character or a text expresses who or what it is. 2 Much of the existing scholarship on Bevis and Guy discusses these two romances alongside other Middle English romances, focusing on high-level matters such as how medieval audiences would have understood romance as a genre1 or on how these romances contributed to the construction of a sense of English identity.2 Scholarship that does focus exclusively on the issues presented in these two romances tends to take a single-manuscript approach that addresses one manuscript’s particular vision of the text,3 or else a textual survey approach concerned with the general mapping and characterizing of major points of variation between manuscript versions.4 The sheer length of Bevis and Guy and the variety presented in their respective manuscript traditions pose natural challenges to efforts to address the full breadth of readings presented by each of these texts. On the topic of memory, with which my project is particularly 1 See, for instance, Melissa Furrows, Expectations of Romance: The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England, D.S. Brewer, 2009; Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton (eds), A Companion to Popular Romance, D.S. Brewer, 2009; Rhiannon Purdie, Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature. D.S. Brewer, 2008; Carol Fewster, Traditionality and Genre in Middle English Romance. D.S. Brewer, 1987. 2 See, for instance, Siobhain Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck Manuscript, Routledge, 2005; Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance, D.S. Brewer, 2005; and Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340, Clarendon Press, 1996. 3 For the most comprehensive overview of current scholarship specific to Bevis and Guy, see Ivanna Djordjević and Jennifer Fellows (eds), Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, D.S. Brewer, 2008; and Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field, Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, D.S. Brewer, 2014. 4 Jennifer Fellows and Alison Wiggins have made particularly foundational contributions here on Bevis and Guy respectively, characterizing each manuscript version for both of these texts, tracing the textual history of each manuscript copy, and noting the effects of and contexts for some of the key variations between versions. In particular, see Jennifer Fellows, “Introduction,” in Sir Bevis of Hampton, Oxford University Press, 2017, pp. xv- lxxix; Jennifer Fellows, “The Middle English and Renaissance Bevis: A Textual Survey,” in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, edited by Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević, D.S. Brewer, 2008, pp. 80-113; and Alison Wiggins, “The Manuscripts and Texts of the Middle English Guy of Warwick,” in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, edited by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field, D.S. Brewer, 2007, pp. 61-80. Additionally, scholars such as Siobhain Bly Calkin and Robert Allen Rouse have used the diversity of the Bevis tradition specifically to drive their discussions of depictions of Christian-Saracen interactions (Calkin and Rouse), national identity (Calkin and Rouse), and national/regional tensions in England (Rouse). See Siobhain Bly Calkin, “Defining Christian Knighthood in a Saracen World: Changing Depictions of the Protagonist in Sir Bevis of Hampton,” in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, edited by Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević. D.S. Brewer, 2008, pp. 127-144; and Robert Allen Rouse, “For King and Country? The Tension between National and Regional Identities in Sir Bevis of Hampton,” in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, edited by Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević. D.S. Brewer, 2008, pp. 114-126. 3 concerned, Jamie McKinstry has addressed the function and presentation of memory in Middle English romance,5 including Bevis and Guy; his focus, however, is on the trends and issues raised across the corpus of extant Middle English romance in general, and his approach is not philological, tending to involve the single-text reading of Bevis and Guy described above. My work analyses the ways in which the complex manuscript traditions of these two romances are deeply involved with the memory-work and memorial themes to which McKinstry directs attention. My approach in this thesis combines historicist attention to medieval models of autobiographical memory with New Philological attention to the ways that manuscript variance signals social
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