Violence in Later Middle English Arthurian Romance

Violence in Later Middle English Arthurian Romance Michele Poellinger Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Leeds School of English July 2013 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. ©2013 The University of Leeds and Michele Poellinger Acknowledgements I am greatly indebted to Dr. Catherine Batt for her support and guidance throughout the writing of this thesis, and for constantly challenging me to push the boundaries of my research. I am very grateful to Dr. Mark Stansbury for his encouragement, wisdom and patience over the years, and to Dr. Michael Johnston for providing advice and information about Robert Thornton and his manuscripts. Thank you to my family and friends both far and near, for never doubting my decision to undertake this journey and for supporting me across the many miles. Finally, thank you, Sam, for listening to all of my academic dilemmas and discoveries; without your sympathetic ear, I may never have completed this work. Abstract Understanding the representations of violence in Middle English romance is key to understanding the texts themselves; the authors were aware of the cultural and spiritual resonances of violent language, and they often utilised their potential to direct their own meaning. This thesis explores the language of these representations in Middle English literature, from British chronicles to affective Passion narratives, in order to analyse the combat and warfare of Arthurian romances in their literary and social context. In particular, I study the borrowing of violent language between literatures, and its impact on the meaning and generic tone of the texts. If a romance invokes the Passion of Christ in the wounds of secular battle, what is the nature of its chivalric protagonists? Can a romance be said to express “national” interests in its depiction of warfare? How does violence reaffirm and discuss the behaviour of chivalric “individuals”? My research looks specifically at how Arthurian romances such as the alliterative Morte Arthure and Lancelot of the Laik are shaped by the culture of chivalry and an awareness of the ways in which religious, historical and romance texts express pain and injuring. The analysis of the language of violence can both invoke the maintenance of broader chivalric norms and revise associations of genre-specific vocabulary. Contents Introduction 1 I Defining and Defying Genre by Means of Chivalric Violence: the 19 Case of Middle English Romance The Boundaries of Romance 22 Ipomadon 30 Bevis of Hampton 40 Guy of Warwick 48 II Defining and Defying Genre by Means of Chivalric Violence: the 60 British Chronicle The Prose Brut 65 The Anonimalle Chronicle 71 Warkworth’s Chronicle 76 Andrew of Wyntoun’s Original Chronicle 79 III The King and His Knight: the Individual in Golagros and Gawane, 89 The Awntyrs off Arthure and the stanzaic Morte Arthur Political Independence and Thematic Unity in Golagros and Awntyrs 90 Combat Violence in Golagros and Awntyrs 99 The Stanzaic Morte Arthur 105 The Ideal Knight: Prowess, Courage and Courtesy 107 The Ideal and the Flawed Knight: Effects on the Presentation of Violence 113 IV The Language of the Passion in the Alliterative Morte Arthure: 119 Literary and Manuscript Context Robert Thornton and the Compilation of the Thornton MS 119 Richard Rolle in the Thornton MS 129 Medical Literature and the Body 136 Violence to the Body in Passion Narratives 138 Violence and Injury in the Morte Arthure 147 V Finding the “Scottish” in Lancelot of the Laik: History and Legend 156 The Dream Vision and Advice Literature in Late-Medieval Scottish Texts 157 Battle Descriptions in Lancelot of the Laik 162 Blind Hary’s Wallace and John Barbour’s Bruce 175 VI Conclusion: Chivalry and Violence in the Alliterative Morte Arthure 187 Violence as Social Commentary: Physicality and Homosocial Relations 187 Violence as a Reference to Chronicle and Historical Writing 200 Violence as Allusion to Romance and/or Spiritual Literature 204 Bibliography 214 Appendix: Table of Violence in the Alliterative Morte Arthure 233 1 Introduction The observer regards pain as a phenomenon fraught with meanings, and perhaps most central of those meanings is that pain is a sign, waiting to be interpreted and understood before it is managed. (Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream, 145) War is relentless in taking for its own interior content the interior content of the wounded and open human body. (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 81) The authors of Middle English chivalric texts, narrating tales of knightly warfare, provide their readers with a variety of descriptions of physical violence and the pain that results from it. As Esther Cohen observes, the written graphic image is “waiting to be interpreted” by the audience; violence and pain become signals of greater meaning. The act of injuring and the injured body provide images which had their own set of vocabulary in Middle English; this language, formulated for categories of knowledge such as medicine, romance and devotional texts, was often shared between texts. The significance of the “wounded and open human body” is inexorably linked with the meaning of the narrative itself. Jody Enders argues that rhetoric – and its mnemonic imagery – depends on violence, and that “forensic rhetors had generated their mnemonic images in order to ensure justice, to punish criminals, and to protect society from the very acts of violence now represented iconically and discursively before judge, jury or audiences” (31). She discusses how, in its re-imagination of destructive violence, rhetorical literature (or performance) attempts to neutralise its violence through its good intentions to reform behaviour; that is, violent mnemonic images teach and discipline the audience (32, 45). Rita Copeland considers the didactic function of metaphorically violent rhetoric, showing how Chaucer’s Pardoner highlights its disciplinary nature by exposing rhetoric’s excesses when used for the wrong purpose; the Pardoner, revealing the rhetorical art he uses to sell his false relics, is physically threatened by the Host for his moral transgressions (150-53). Both discussions of rhetoric rightly connect violence to the human body with moral and didactic ramifications. The use of violent rhetoric in medieval literature, however, does more than discipline those who use it incorrectly; Middle English authors exploit its images and vocabulary for a variety of discursive purposes, manipulating the emotional and literary knowledge of the medieval reader. 2 This thesis will analyse the representation and function of violent images in Middle English romance; in particular, I will focus on Arthurian narratives, as their familiar cast of characters is ideal for teasing out how warfare is reinterpreted by medieval authors for their own purposes. I also chose to centre my analysis of violence on Arthurian literature because it is the narrative of the two texts at the heart of my argument, the alliterative Morte Arthure and Lancelot of the Laik; the limitations of this thesis do not allow me to explore far beyond these texts, but it is only a small corner of the research that has and can be done on violence in Middle English romances. My discussion will also avoid texts such as Havelok the Dane, Richard Coeur de Lyon, and Gamelyn, as plenty of scholarly work has already been done on the combat of these pieces.1 The Morte Arthure and Lancelot of the Laik were chosen as my focal texts because of the prevalence of violence in both narratives – both revolving on one of Arthur’s wars – and the unique way in which it is presented, as will become evident as the thesis progresses. For the purposes of the thesis, the violence discussed will also be restricted to human-to-human violence in warfare situations (combat and military attacks), setting aside the killing of animals and domestic violence. As a foundation for understanding how this vocabulary was used in Middle English Arthurian romance – and to what effect – I will first explore how a number of modern commentators discuss violence: Esther Cohen (The Modulated Scream), René Girard (Violence and the Sacred), Elizabeth Scarry (The Body in Pain) and Richard Kaeuper (Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe). Cohen and Scarry have both initiated investigations into how humans express pain in writing; Girard and Kaeuper have explored how violence works in secular and spiritual social communities. 1 For further reading on this research, see Rodger Wilkie, “Re-capitating the Body Politic: the Overthrow of Tyrants in Havelok the Dane”, Neophilologus 94.1 (2010): 139-50; Scott Kleinman, “Animal Imagery and Oral Discourse in Havelok’s First Fight”, Viator 35 (2004): 311-27; Graham Drake, “Not Safe Even in Their Own Castles. Reading Domestic Violence Against Children in Four Middle English Romances”, Domestic Violence in Medieval Texts, ed. Eve Salisbury, Georgiana Donavin and Merrell Llewelyn Price (Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 2002) 139-63; M. Mills, “Havelok and the Brutal Fisherman”, Medium Aevum 36 (1967): 219-30; Richard Kaeuper, “A Historian’s Reading of The Tale of Gamelyn”, Medium Aevum 52.1 (1983): 51-62; John Scattergood, “The Tale of Gamelyn: The Noble Robber as Provincial Hero”, Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994) 159-94; Nicola McDonald, “Eating People and the Alimentary Logic of Richard Coeur de Lion”, Pulp Fictions in Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004) 124-50; Geraldine Heng, “The Romance of England: Richard Coer de Lyon, Saracens, Jews and the Politics of Race and Nation”, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed.

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