Companion

Companion to Medieval English Literature

Some themes, motifs and conventions

Michael Murphy

and

James Clawson

Conal and Gavin Publishing

Brooklyn, New York

The material in this web-book may be freely downloaded by students, teachers and general readers for private or pedagogical use.

We will be pleased if such persons notify us by e-mail that they have used it. We will also be grateful to readers who point out any errors, big or small to E-mail address:

Length and Comprehensiveness of Treatment The web version of the Companion or Handbook is intended as a pre-print run. In print version the Companion will be small enough to be owned by students and scholars, and to be leafed through or referred to at leisure, not a heavy tome or multi‑volume treatment to be consulted only in the library. At least two large collections have been published in recent years: one is a Lexikon of the Middle Ages in German from Artemis Verlag that involves all aspects of medieval life, but also features sections on Old and Middle English that are heavily weighted towards individual works and authors, and categories such as "Monitory Works" -- matters we do not deal with. There is also now the large multi‑volume Dictionary of the Middle Ages, in English, again planned in quite a different way, and not directed exclusively toward literary interests. These volumes have much longer entries on some of the items in this book but nothing at all on most. This is largly true also of the one-volume Medieval England: An Encyclopedia (Garland, 1998).

The length of an entry in this Handbook is not the measure of its importance. The Ubi Sunt motif is perhaps of no more importance than, say, Aubade or Boast or Kenning. But it seemed meaningless without examples, some of which cannot easily be shortened. A small anthology with translations seemed in order, even though this makes this entry a good deal longer than most others. Similarly an entry like Beginnings and Endings deserves a treatment of article, chapter or book length. We have had to settle for something more like a list of ways of beginning and ending medieval poems, not a treatment of the rhetorical problems.

We hope we have found a median between the meaninglessly brief and the dauntingly long entry.

Criteria for Inclusion

There are no entries for authors, individual works, or most characters, or for categories like Devotional Writings, Satire, Lyric. Such information would have made this book inordinately long, and in any case is readily available elsewhere in Lacy's one-volume Arthurian Encyclopedia, or his shorter Handbook; Moorman's small Arthurian Dictionary, Spence's Dictionary, or a multi-volume publication like Wells's Manual (old or new) and other works of that sort. We have, however, decided to include a few of the major characters who occur in the literature and who can be said to owe much of their presentation to convention:

1. classical figures like Aristotle, Alexander and Virgil about whom medieval literary legends were common, stories that portray them very differently from the way we usually think of them.

2. biblical figures like Cain, Herod, or Pilate about whom various legends were current in the Middle Ages that are no longer well-known.

The aim has been to omit purely folkloristic motifs, though this is sometimes a difficult choice. The preferred guide in such cases has been pedagogical experience. There is not much problem about deciding to exclude whole entries for Youth, Reared in forest; Fidelity, tests of; Scullion, aristocratic Hero serves as; Hero, Magnanimity of, — entries of the kind one finds in the Motif Indexes of Stith Thompson, Aarne, and Bordman, although references to these occur in some individual entries on other topics. The Fair Unknown, for example, is sometimes an aristocratic hero who serves as a scullion, and Perceval is certainly a youth raised in a forest; such conventional narrative motifs do not have full entries but may be mentioned in passing in the course of a separate item about something else. But a topic such as Rash Promise seems to deserve a full entry, for, while it is common in folklore, it figures frequently enough in literature to warrant inclusion in the more general category of literary convention. We have, we hope, managed to abide by our own criterion, though we realize that we have not tried to provide a rigorous definition of it. Possibly a fully comprehensive treatment of medieval literary convention would include some, perhaps many, entries of this kind. For the type of work we contemplate it seems most reasonable to exclude them as separate entries, though, as we have said, some of them may figure in other entries. We hope that informed criticism of the book would help to settle this matter.

We have also decided to omit most references to theological doctrine. First, because Handbooks of Christian Theology are readily available; secondly, the sometimes subtle and arcane distinctions in matters of divinity involved are best left to these and to large Dictionnaires and Lexikons which have space for experts to deal thoroughly with such matters.

Indeed the religious conventions that occur with some frequency in medieval English literature are often less a matter of theological dogma than of pious popular belief, and derive either from apocryphal writings or from pious speculation and elaboration on genuine biblical texts. The Harrowing of Hell, for example, on which there is an entry here , was a very popular theme in medieval literature and iconography; but has no basis in the New Testament. Legends of Cain, the Earthly Paradise, Judas, Pilate, which are also treated here, have fragile bases in scripture. Like stories of Joseph of Arimathea and the Grail, they are really built on pious, even superstitious, belief, though the writers who propagated the stories were not necessarily ignorant people. These motifs are here because they recur with some frequency in the literature of medieval England, and it is helpful to have a short reference guide to them.

Similarly, notions that surfaced in the Dance of Death, Memento Mori, and Contemptus Mundi, though they were certainly congenial to the ascetic aspect of Christianity, are essentially reminders of mortality in the interests of morality ‑‑ not an exclusively Christian concern. Such notions were not really strangers to the pagan Roman world. Thus the purely religious motifs left on our list are few: Felix Culpa (The Fortunate Fall), Pater Noster (Our Father), and a few others.

This book is meant as a first attempt. If enough people find it useful, reasonable criticism of current entries and sensible suggestions for other entries could be considered for a second edition, which might be a continuous affair on the web.

All unsigned entries are by Michael Murphy; the others are signed by their named writers.

The brief bibliographical references at the end of many entries are expanded to full bibliographical information at the end of the Companion.

An asterisk * in an article means that there is a separate entry on the asterisked topic.

Michael Murphy