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Grief, Emotional Communities and Anglo-French Rivalry in Late-Medieval English and French Literature

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Grief, Emotional Communities and Anglo-French Rivalry in Late-Medieval English and French Literature Grief, Emotional Communities and Anglo-French Rivalry in Late-Medieval English and French Literature Julia O’Connell A dissertation submitted to the School of English at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2021 Table of Contents Summary ............................................................................................................................. 3 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 7 Loss, Grief and Anglo-French Communities in Late-Medieval Literature ........................... 7 The History of Emotions and Grief in Late Medieval Literature ......................................................... 19 Summary of Chapters ........................................................................................................................... 25 Chapter One ...................................................................................................................... 28 Emotional Communities in Pearl: Fathers, Families and Visions of Heaven ...................... 28 The Narrator’s Isolation and Loss of the Family Community .............................................................. 36 French Emotions and Visions of Heaven ............................................................................................. 59 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 86 Chapter Two ...................................................................................................................... 88 Reading Grief in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess .................................................................. 88 Chaucer’s Suffering Narrator and Emotions of French Texts .............................................................. 93 Reading the Man in Black’s Grief ...................................................................................................... 113 Discourse and Emotion Transactions in English and French Medieval Texts ................................... 123 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 143 Chapter Three ................................................................................................................. 145 Agincourt’s Communities of Grief: Charles d’Orléans’ Fortunes Stabilnes and Christine de Pizan’s Epistre de la prison de vie humaine ...................................................................... 145 Historical Context: France’s Civil War and the Battle of Agincourt ................................................. 151 Charles d’Orléans: Living between two Languages; Living between two Communities .................. 156 Fortunes Stabilnes: An English Subjectivity for an English Emotional Community ........................ 166 Performing Grief in Fortunes Stabilnes ............................................................................................. 177 Agincourt’s Community of Grief in Christine de Pizan’s Epistre de la prison de vie humaine ........ 183 Emotional Authority in the Epistre de la prison de vie humaine ....................................................... 194 Joan of Arc: The Fulfilment of Christine’s Vision? ........................................................................... 200 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 204 Chapter Four ................................................................................................................... 206 Grief for the Bureaucratic Community and Lancastrian Masculinity in Thomas Hoccleve’s ‘Compleinte’ and ‘Dialogue’ ............................................................................... 206 Misunderstanding, Translation and Gendered Authority in Christine de Pizan’s L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours and Hoccleve’s Letter of Cupid ......................................................................................... 211 Hoccleve as a Living Revenant in the ‘Compleinte’ .......................................................................... 220 Resolution and Return in the ‘Dialogue’ ............................................................................................ 238 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 249 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 251 Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 256 2 Summary This thesis provides the first extended study of the representation of grief in late-medieval English and French literature. It examines a range of medieval emotional communities in which grief is expressed in a specific way, through shared emotional vocabularies and distinct emotional regimes. Written in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the range of texts included in this study combine the themes of grief and community to respond to the cultural rivalry and military conflict between England and France. In the first chapter I examine the anonymous fourteenth-century dream-vision, Pearl. I demonstrate how the narrator and Pearl-Maiden form an emotional community of the family. With the loss of the pearl, parental loss and longing are placed in dialogue with the desire of French marguerite poetry to examine the limits of human emotion in the heavenly space. Chapter two concentrates on Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, in which the narrator addresses the grief of a member of the noble, courtly community. Chaucer’s text examines how French literary tradition generates emotions in members of different emotional communities, some are authentically expressed, and others artificially performed. Ultimately, the narrator’s misunderstanding of the knight’s grief allows the nobleman to move from a state of isolated grief to a return to his emotional community. Chapter three focuses on two texts written after the battle of Agincourt: Charles d’Orleans’ English Fortunes Stabilnes and Christine de Pizan’s Epistre de la prison de vie humaine. This chapter argues that grief plays an essential role in the formation of new emotional communities within the noble, courtly class; in Charles’ text a community with his English captors and in Christine’s text a female community of grieving noblewomen. Chapter four concentrates on the first two texts in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series, the ‘Compleinte’ and ‘Dialogue’. In this chapter I argue that these texts script Hoccleve’s 3 grief over the loss of his emotional community of fellow clerks and bureaucrats. Written in a period of Lancastrian dominance in France, Hoccleve also explores the roles of masculine communities in the maintenance of English power at home and abroad. 4 Acknowledgments My first thanks are to my supervisor, Dr Brendan O’Connell who has supervised this thesis with patience, generosity, and good humour. I am immensely grateful for his advice, knowledge, and example; without his support and encouragement I would have been unable to complete this thesis. I am keenly aware that this research would not have been possible without financial support, and I would like to acknowledge the support of the Trinity College Dublin Studentship Award (2016-2019) and the Irish Research Council, who awarded me a Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship (2019). I have also had the privilege to work in some wonderful libraries, and I would like to thank the staff of the Library, Trinity College Dublin and the British Library for their assistance during this project. I am grateful to Trinity College, Dublin, particularly to the academic and administrative staff of the School of English. My confirmation examiners, Dr Alice Jorgensen and Dr Philip Coleman provided me with excellent feedback in the project’s early stages. I am also grateful to Diane Sadler and Brenda Brooks for all their help and support. I have been lucky enough to make some wonderful friends over the past four years in Dublin. Thank you to James Hussey, Dearbhaile Houston, Alex Jones, Moonyoung Hong and Lara O’Muirithe who have all made my time at Trinity such a special part of my life. I have also received unfailing encouragement and support from friends at home. To Donal Keenan, Isabel Otter-Barry Ross, Charlotte Almond, Ailish Coghlan and Mae Chester-Jones, thank you for keeping me strong throughout this whole process and giving 5 me some much-needed perspective when I needed it. My eternal gratitude goes to my family, thank you for all your generous encouragement. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Ken and Colette, for their unconditional love, support and generosity. I could not have done this without you. This thesis is dedicated to you. 6 Introduction Loss, Grief and Anglo-French Communities in Late-Medieval Literature On 7th June 1394, Anne of Bohemia, queen of England and first wife of Richard II, died suddenly at the age of twenty-seven. Her funeral – which took place nearly two months after her death on the
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