Research Day in Medieval English Studies
University of Warwick, 8 May 2015
Humanities Building, Room H545
Organiser: Christiania Whitehead (Warwick). Co-organisers: Tamas Karath (Budapest),
Alessandra Petrina (Padua), Denis Renevey (Lausanne)
9.00-9.30am
Welcome in Room H545 (5th floor, English dept)
(please pick up a tea/coffee/pastry at the Humanities cafe on the
ground floor, on your way up to the 5th floor, if you would like one)
Session 1: Mystical and Devotional Reception and Compilation in the later Middle Ages
9.30-10.10am
10.10-10.50am
Tamas Karáth (Budapest): ‘Fifteenth-Century Rolle’
Diana Denissen (Lausanne): ‘The Pore Caitif and its manuscript
contexts’
10.50-11.20am
Tea/coffee break (in Room H543)
Session 2: English and French Courtly and Allegorical Poetics
12.00-12.40pm
Lewis Beer (Warwick): ‘‘Reading for the Moral’ in Late-Medieval
Love Poetry: Some Trends in Recent Scholarship’
Marco Nievergelt (Lausanne): ‘Langland reads Deguileville’
12.40-2.00pm
Lunch in Le Gusta pizza restaurant in Warwick Arts Centre
11.20-12.00noon
Session 3: The Translation and Circulation of Neo-Latin in Early Modern England,
Scotland, and Medieval Iceland
2.00-2.40pm
2.40-3.20pm
3.20-4.00pm
4-4.30pm
Allison Steenson (Padua): ‘Hawthornden 2063-2065 and Latin Verse
Exchange in Manuscript: Preliminary Results and Some Initial Issues’
Alessandra Petrina (Padua): ‘Translating Machiavelli’s Prince in Early
Modern England: New Manuscript Evidence’
Sarah Baccianti (Lausanne): ‘The Revelatio Esdrae in Medieval
Nordic Culture’
Tea break (tea is available from the Humanities Cafe on the ground
floor)
Session 4: Devotional Imagery and Carmelite Spirituality in Late Medieval England
4.30-5.10pm
5.10-5.50pm
7.00pm onwards
Hetta Howes (Queen Mary, UL): ‘Water Imagery in Late Medieval
Devotional Writing by/for Women’
Johan Bergstrom-Allen (Lausanne): The Carmelite Order in England
RDMES dinner in Harringtons on the Hill Restaurant (pay-as-you-go)
42, Castle Hill, Kenilworth CV8 1ND
Presentation Abstracts (alphabetically ordered)
Sarah Baccianti (Première assistante, Lausanne)
The Revelatio Esdrae in Medieval Nordic Culture
During my presentation at RDMES, I would like to discuss my research proposal, which I
would circulate in its entirety to the rest of the group a few days before our meeting.
The purpose of this project is to investigate the reception of the Revelatio Esdrae in
Old Norse-Icelandic literature, comparing it to the textual tradition in medieval England. The
Revelatio Esdrae are a type of prognostics on the day of the week on which Christmas Day
and the kalendae ianuariae fall, making predictions about weather and natural phenomena for
the year, but also extending them to human affairs. According to M. Cesario, L. S.
Chardonnes and R. M. Liuzza, the presence of these prognostics in English manuscripts
(10th-12th centuries) is quite striking, and even though in the past it was often labelled as
folklore, it is now often associated to religious and scientific compilations. Further, some of
the surviving versions in English manuscripts are often attributed to Bede and Abbo of
Fleury, belonging thus to the field of natural astrology.
Working on Hauksbók, an Icelandic manuscript of the early 14th century, I noticed
that the nonrubricated Latin text at the end of fragment AM 544 4to, often classified as a
"fortune-telling" text, is indeed the Revelatio Esdrae recorded in Bede's Prognostica
Temporum. It is followed by other texts: 1- in Latin; 2- in Old Norse-Icelandic and Latin on
dreams affected by the age of the moon. The presence of these texts in Hauksbók, which I
discuss in the research proposal, is interesting as it can be compared to other compilations in
Scandinavia, but more interestingly in England.
Lewis Beer (Senior Teaching Fellow, Warwick)
‘Reading for the Moral’ in Late-Medieval Love Poetry: Some Trends in Recent
Scholarship
My research engages primarily with the poetry of Guillaume de Machaut and John Gower,
with a special focus on their use of Boethius. In this paper, I would like to discuss two recent
scholarly trends. The first is a tendency to ‘problematise’, evidenced in the claim (made by
some scholars) that the Consolation of Philosophy fails to console because of its evasive
attitude towards human passions. Similarly, Machaut’s and especially Gower’s poems are
widely thought to resist moral coherence, and to reflect the fundamental instability of
existence. The second tendency emphasises the playful, secular pleasures to be derived from
these texts, arguing that medieval poets drew upon Boethius less for his austere moralising
than for his ‘human’ qualities, his beautiful verses and sympathetic depiction of suffering.
The first tendency reads the texts in question as failing to promote orthodox Christian
morality; the second reads them as actively resisting orthodox Christian morality, and is the
more dominant of the two. Both groups of critics see medieval poets as redeeming and
celebrating the literary and/or the erotic, whether by affirming the primacy of disordered
bodily impulses over the oppressive force of divine providence, or by attributing a quasidivine status to love and poetry.
Much of this work stems from earlier critiques of the so-called ‘Robertsonian’ school
of critics, who were (and are) widely perceived as homogenising the Christian medieval
readership, and as presuming too much about how poems ‘must have been understood’ in
their own time. However, some recent scholars have shown how the didactic elements in
medieval love poetry can be analysed sympathetically without sacrificing complexity or
subtlety. My own work aims to build on these examples. Elizabeth Eva Leach has
commented, in her 2011 book on Machaut, on the ways in which a scholar’s religious and
political beliefs may determine their approach to a medieval poem’s didactic content. As a
liberal and an atheist, I feel that Leach’s otherwise excellent study perpetuates an unfortunate
assumption when it suggests that ‘Christianising’ readings may be enjoying a renaissance due
to the re-vitalisation of the religious right in post-9/11 America. There is much to be gained
from ‘secularising’ approaches to the interpretation of medieval poems, but there is also a
danger in automatically labelling the opposite approach ‘conservative’ or in assuming that
Christian commentators are the only ones likely to advance Christian readings of medieval
texts. My sense of these issues, and of how my own work will respond to them, is still in a
formative state, but I look forward to discussing them with my fellow attendees at the
Research Day.
Johan Bergstrom-Allen (PhD candidate, Lausanne)
Title and abstract to follow
Diana Denissen (PhD candidate, Devotional Compilations project, Lausanne)
The Middle English Pore Caitif and its Manuscript Contexts
My doctoral research focuses on the kinds of strategies compilers of late medieval devotional
compilations in Middle English employed in the composition of their texts. The scholastic
framework of compilatio – the collection of authoritative quotations – gave meaning to late
medieval ideas about compiling, but its changing role in the late medieval period also
provides insight into how systems of academic discourse were redefined in a non-academic
late medieval context. I define a ‘compilation’ as: ‘a series of texts or extracts of texts that
have intentionally been put together to constitute a new single and unified text’. Two
elements of this definition are especially important: ‘intentionality’ – the idea that compiling
was a planned process – and ‘unity’ – the idea that a compilation has a distinct beginning and
end. The fifteenth-century Pore Caitif manuscript MS Bodley 938 challenges my definition
of a compilation, because in this manuscript the tracts of the Pore Caitif are mixed with
heterodox material in order to address an audience with Lollard sympathies, while at the
same time acknowledging the devotional compilation as a unity in its (seemingly somewhat
improvised) rubrication. Even though the intention and unity of the Pore Caitif are
transformed in Bodley 938, they are kept intact in a different shape. This illustrates the
fluidity of the Pore Caitif text as well a certain tension between the textual and physical
motivation behind the compilation process. Together with you, I’d like to think some more
about an approach to my source material that accepts this fluidity without dismissing the
intentionality behind compiling styles and strategies altogether.
Hetta Howes (PhD candidate, Queen Mary, UL)
In Search of Clearer Water: An Exploration of Imagery in Late Medieval Devotional
Prose by and for Women
This paper will begin with a brief overview of my thesis, which is an exploration of water as
a literary metaphor in devotional prose written by and for women in the late Middle Ages.
The thesis opens with an analysis of some neglected sources for the literary usage of water in
works such as A Rule of Life for a Recluse and The Orcherd of Syon, in particular and most
notably medieval encyclopedias, such as John Trevisa’s On the Properties of Things. It
argues that many of these texts seem to draw heavily on descriptions of water in Trevisa’s
text, creating a conception of water as an all-purpose metaphor. The following chapters build
on this initial research by giving focused attention to specific watery topoi, demonstrating
how this conception of water effects specific metaphors and allegories: domestic watery
labour (such as laundry), blood and water (with specific reference to the wound in Christ’s
side) and finally various proximities to water (being beside or immersed in the fluid) are all
considered.
The second part of this paper will offer a snapshot of one of my chapters, entitled
‘Blood and Water: An Economy of Fluids and a Participatory Sacrifice.’ It will explore the
extent to which water figures not only in Gospel accounts of the Passion but also in Passion
meditations from late medieval devotional prose. Using a close reading of Aelred of
Rievaulx’s A Rule of Life for a Recluse I will suggest that both water and blood need to be
considered alongside one another, each fluid given equal priority, if readers wish to untangle
the weighty layers of meaning in such works. It has been argued that blood piety was, in part,
a response to an act of salvation which excluded those it saved; Christ shouldered the burden
of the faithful, and so their role in their own salvation was dramatically reduced. This paper
will ultimately build on these arguments, putting forward that it was through both water and
blood that devoted Christians of the later Middle Ages could participate more fully in the act
of their own salvation. Watery offerings, more accessible to the laity than blood, could be
given in exchange for the blood shed on the cross.
Tamas Karáth (Lecturer in Medieval English Literature, Peter Pazmany Catholic University,
Budapest)
Fifteenth-century Rolle: Presentation of a book project
Having reached the final stage of my research project on 15th-century translations of Richard
Rolle’s writings, I will present members of the Warwick RDMES the overall plan of the
monograph which I plan to publish at Brepols. (Their first answer to the proposal was
positive.) At the moment of submitting this abstract, the first three out of five chapters (not
including the Introduction and Conclusion) have been written, and most of the study of
manuscripts and textual analysis has been done for Chapter 4.
Fifteenth-century Rolle is an extensive discussion of all the works of the mystic that
were translated by late medieval translators, with a consideration of the manuscript context
and probable readers. The focus of the book is the transformation of the mystic’s authority
and the reinterpretations of Rolle’s mystical experience by his translators. Two major
tendencies emerge from the translations of Rollean writings: a group of texts (the Latin
translation of Ego dormio and two independent English versions of Emendatio vite) contain
interpolations reflecting on the heterodoxy of universal salvation in a polemical vein.
Secondly, most translations of Rolle’s self-revelatory accounts covertly censure the
emotionally eccentric qualities of Rolle’s sensory mysticism and adjust Rolle’s legacy to new
devotional models. In this process, translators also shift the major concerns of the late 14thcentury discourse of mysticism.
The monograph is planned to present its contents in the following breakdown of
chapters: Introduction, (1) Rolle in Hindsight: Legacy and Translations, (2) The Latin
Translation of Ego dormio, (3) Richard Misyn’s Translation of Incendium amoris, (4) The
English Translations of Emendatio vite, (5) Translated Fragments: Oleum effusum, Passion
Meditations, and “The Bee”; Conclusion, Appendices and Bibliography.
Marco Nievergelt (SNF Research Fellow, Lausanne)
Revisionary poetics: Langland reads Deguileville
It is hard to imagine a more distinctively ‘English’ poem than Langland’s alliterative dreamvision, but in this paper I would like to make a case for Langland’s sustained and deep
engagement with French allegorical poetry in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose and
Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine. Both works have been suggested as ‘sources’ for
individual details in Langland’s poem, but the Pèlerinage, I argue, also exercised a very
different, much deeper kind of influence on the poetic method, architecture, and evolution of
Langland’s dream vision in its various versions (A, B, C). Like Piers Plowman,
Deguileville’s poem already exists in multiple versions, and Deguileville’s own allegorical
‘re-visions’ play a major role in inspiring Langland’s own development of what I call a
‘revisionary poetics’. This kind of dream-allegory explicitly foregrounds its own inability to
attain epistemological closure, but also recognises its own multiple cognitive failures as
spiritually productive, necessary experiences for its first-person subject/dreamer/ narrator.
The poem’s ‘I’ finally attains an increased degree of self-knowledge precisely because the
original desire for certain, definitive knowledge and certitude is repeatedly frustrated. This in
turn redefines the cognitive possibilities opened up by allegorical poetry, directing it towards
a very different kind of knowledge that is experiential, provisional and embodied. The
experience of failure thus plays a central, but ultimately positive role, producing a kind of
poetry that is both (self-)deconstructive and regenerative. In the process Langland emerges as
a far more perceptive reader of the Pèlerinage than most modern critics, which invites us to
reconsider the complexities of Deguileville’s own poem, its relation to scholastic accounts of
cognition, and its influence on medieval readers and poets, from Langland to Chaucer,
Lydgate and other anonymous readers, adapters and translators in the fifteenth century.
Alessandra Petrina (Professor of Medieval English Literature, Padua)
Translating Machiavelli’s Prince in Early Modern England: New Manuscript Evidence
‘All Estates and signiories wich haue had and doe beare rule ouer men, haue either byn and
are Comon weales or Monarchies’: thus begins Sion MS L40.2/E24, a small octavo preserved
in Lambeth Palace Library, London. It is written in a fairly clear anglicana, and offers a
complete translation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince. It is a welcome addition to the already
known English manuscript translations preceding Edward Dacres’ version (printed in 1640),
and it has never been examined or discussed before. The codex has no pretence at beauty or
richness, but it is extremely clear and readable, showing how the scribe paid particular
attention to the presence of historical or Biblical names, or to historical allusions in the text. It
offers a very faithful and fairly elegant translation, and the layout may offer interesting
suggestions as to the modalities of reading in early modern England. Here I will offer some
hypotheses on the manuscript’s provenance, compare this translation with four contemporary
versions (three English, one Scottish) and discuss possible hypotheses on the text used by the
translator.
Allison Steenson (PhD candidate, Padua)
Hawthornden 2063-2065 and Latin Verse Exchange in Manuscript: Preliminary Results
and Some Initial Issues
My research project focuses on the reception and circulation of neo-Latin verse among
Scottish poets between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. Specifically, I am interested
in the use of occasional neo-Latin verse for social purposes in the relatively small clique that
surrounded the Jacobean court in Edinburgh and London. Neo-Latin poetry has recently been
the object of a substantial project, carried on in Glasgow and focusing on the Delitiae
Poetarum Scotorum, an anthology of neo-Latin verse from Scotland, published in the
Netherlands in 1637. One of the purposes of this project is to complement the knowledge
accumulated by the Delitiae project, with information concerning the manuscript circulation
of Neo-Latin verse.
The starting point is represented by the last five volumes of the Hawthornden
manuscripts (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Hawthornden 2063-2067). These
volumes contain for the most part the private papers of William Fowler, Petrarchist poet and
Secretary to Queen Anne, wife of James VI and I. They are as such to be dated roughly
between 1580 and 1615.
At RDMES 2015, I will present a case-study, analysing a single leaf from the
manuscript to give a better idea of the methods I am going to use in the project, and to
highlight the potential of this research to provide information on a social context starting
form textual evidence. Secondarily, I will discuss some of the initial issues and problems that
have arisen during the preliminary stage of research, just concluded.