Middle Ages & Renaissance Prose & Verse

Question 1

Medieval catalogue

Answer 1

Vital to oral performance, easy to follow and remember; often ordered in significant, even problematic ways, as in Sir Orfeo the Breton Lay, in which the living dead in fairyland signify different things depending on how we group them in the list.

Question 2

Medieval borrowing in oral literature

Answer 2

Happens constantly though it’s no longer believed that the works were actually composed by the “folk” rather than individual authors

Question 3

What elements found in Gawain are also present (as parody) in Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas?

Answer 3

The alliterative tradition then being “revived” (it probably hadn’t disappeared) in 14th-c. romance

Question 4

Medieval romance might include what types of sub-genres?

Answer 4

Sprawling chronicles or chronicle-romances (Layamon’s Brut), near-epics (14th-c alliterative Morte Arthure), short romances or lais (a possible precursor to the short story)

Question 5

Medieval romance: values and orientation

Answer 5

Court values, French in orientation if not actually drawn from French originals

Question 6

Medieval romance: interlace

Answer 6

Loose ends; separate themes and adventures interweave so as to preclude overview from any single perspective. No section is self contained. Analogies between threads can highlight values. Just invested in pure story? Impression of unsearchability? Post-Renaissance we see fault these for lack of unity.

Question 7

Describe Chaucer’s attitude toward the interlaced quality of many romances

Answer 7

Chaucer favored single-action romance like the Knight’s Tale, satirizing interlace in the Squire’s Tale

Question 8

What part of Malory’s Morte Darthur appears in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land?

Answer 8

Book xiv resumes the story of Sir Percival. In chapter 1 he consults a recluse and finds her to be his aunt, Queen of the Waste Lands.

Question 9

Medieval romance: details

Answer 9

Few novelistic details, and those few (like Gawain’s love of apples of pears) always serve a necessary purpose. Value of the story lies in analogies or other connections between its interwoven episodes.

Question 10

Medieval romance: series

Answer 10

Graded series occur often (Gawain, Tor, and Pellinor each have a quest that leads to death, but under different moral circumstances (by chance, by obligation, by being bad))

Question 11

Are the quests in Malory A) moral achievements, or B) realizations/revelations of an already existing moral nature?

Answer 11

B

Question 12

Malory’s style is paratactic or hypotactic?

Answer 12

Paratactic

Question 13

Name the other key formal principle of medieval lit, alongside interlace

Answer 13

Framing

Question 14

When did dream poems become popular in the middle ages?

Answer 14

After the 13th-c. French Roman de la rose (trans. in part by Chaucer)

Question 15

What might have made framed dream narratives desirable to medieval writers?

Answer 15

Enjoys freedom of imaginative status and the advantages of a distancing perspective. (Seems to naturally set up an interpretive relationship, too.)

Question 16

Medieval: Compare the way analogies are made in interlaced stories versus framed stories

Answer 16

Interlaced: analogies between the various strands. Framed: analogies between frame and content

Question 17

The Canterbury Tales’ framing narrative, with its prologues and endlinks, can be read as a symbolic pilgrimage of life. What do the tales do, within this didactic setting?

Answer 17

Each tale contributes its particular import to the “ordering of parts” by Chaucer the compiler. But the order of each tale becomes relational, or relative to the other tales.

Question 18

How do the Canterbury Tales imply a kind of skeptical attitude?

Answer 18

The tales being in dialogue means human conclusions will always be undercut: “always the ultimate outcome of the storytelling seems to be contemptus mundi, otherwordliness.” (Literally, a new world always waiting to be introduced).

Question 19

Chaucer need not always be ironic. In the Canterbury Tales, who are the three ideal representatives of their respective “estates”?

Answer 19

Knight, Parson, and the Ploughman his brother (the rest are mocked)

Question 20

Discuss Chaucer the fictional character and his relationship to the writer Chaucer.

Answer 20

They needn’t be entirely distinct figures. Chaucer may rather adopt a faux-naivete, or speak in a distinct persona–a recognized strategy in medieval literary theory. There may be a single, poised tone of voice rather than two voices. This is a common ambiguity in half-oral literature.

Question 21

What is Chaucer’s favorite meter?

Answer 21

The heroic couplet

Question 22

Medieval preachers and storytellers were accustomed to allegorize not just Bible verse, but Ovid stories. What is this called, and what is its relationship to Christian literature?

Answer 22

Allegoresis–the allegorical transformation of ancient classics; largely from this tradition that Christian literature emerges.

Question 23

Name and briefly describe the fourfold system of allegorical interpretation

Answer 23

1. Literal: the past (Jerusalem as historical city)
2. Allegorical/typological: past to present (Jerusalem as the Church)
3. Tropological/moral: present/personal (Jerusalem as the individual soul)
4. Anagogical: future (Jerusalem as the City of God)

Question 24

In the typography of medieval morality plays, the Fall of Man might be paired with…

Answer 24

Christ in the wilderness. (Cf. Paradise Lost/Regained)

Question 25

Describe the human relationship to storytelling or artistic creation as it is exemplified by the fourfold allegorical scheme of the middle ages (my theory)

Answer 25

1. Literal: God writes the story and we cannot read it
2. Allegorical: with the help of clerical instruction we are schooled in interpreting God’s story
3. Tropological/moral: we try our hand at an individual interpretation of God’s story, modeled on our interpretations on the allegorical level, and write our actions to conform with it
4. We (in the future) succeed at writing our actions into conformity with God’s story and become literal cowriters with Him–at this phase we are experiencing the literal (stage 1) in the light of God’s truth.

Question 26

In my interpretation of the fourfold creative model, sort out the following attributes: the agentive, the passive, the inert/memorial, the visionary

Answer 26

1. Literal: inert/memorial
2. Allegorical: passive
3. Tropological: agentive
4. Anagogical: visionary

Question 27

What medieval text has a famously complicated manuscript history

Answer 27

Piers Plowman

Question 28

What is the role of overall narrative/plot in (medieval) allegory?

Answer 28

Minimal. As a whole, actions are stock, and there’s little concern in the reader for a global development of plot (this is why we get some version of the argument before the different cantos or books–these aren’t spoilers). The interest is in unexpected elements of description that qualify or nuance our understanding of the subject matter (i.e. we are fascinated to find that Duessa seems full of compassion toward sansjoy, since compassion is a Christian virtue–we suspect she will not have true compassion but are unsure how the compassion will prove false; when it does, it happens in instructive ways)

Question 29

Cite a textual example to disprove the stereotype that the middle ages enjoyed the certainties of an age of faith.

Answer 29

Langland’s Piers Plowman: the poets seems everywhere to be looking for his ways in a wilderness of perplexities: when Piers receives a pardon that offers salvation to those only who (impossibly) do well, he tears it up in despair. That can be no salvation by mere good works. Long before the Reformation, Langland was grappling with the problem of Justification. See also Beowulf

Question 30

Use Piers Plowman to show that people were already prodding at the frailties of the closed cosmos well before science made it safer to venture a theory on an imperfect system.

Answer 30

For Piers, each individual allegory develops an earlier point in more detail, or turns to a related aspect of the same insight. Analogies proliferate, and it is uncertain that we ever reach the fundamental truth. The thought that every analogy is only useful for more analogizing hints at an infinite universe of relative truth.

Question 31

In the Canterbury Tales, we learn that the squire “carf biforn his fader at the table.” Is this a novelistic detail? Why, why not?

Answer 31

Yes and no. It isn’t completely random–it shows that the knight is relatively unostentatious, employing no separate carver. It serves an allegorical function. At the same time, wouldn’t the details of a novel often be said to be all illustrative or meaningful?

Question 32

Why might there be an unusual amount of physical detail in the description of Julian of Norwich’s prose?

Answer 32

She is not writing representative or illustrative art but seizes an anagogical vision. The real details of her physical experience thus reveal themselves as cosmic ornamentation, regardless of whether the ornament is ever given its allegorical explanation.

Question 33

On the foundation of Chaucerian precedent, which poet includes this highly particularized detail: when anyone would mention the act of love, “For shame I wexe as reed as is the gleede [glowing coal]”

Answer 33

Thomas Hoccleve, La Male Regle. A humorous detail and certainly helps us feel closer to the character, but very difficult to extract a moral attribute, since blushing when hearing about love making can’t really be placed on a moral heirarchy or said to represent something, even modesty.

Question 34

Medieval complaint

Answer 34

Meant to verbalize grief in a way that not only analyzed but alleviated it

Question 35

When John Lydgate adds to The Canterbury Tales, he chances upon an important medieval genre

Answer 35

The epicyclic work. Different from the cyclic work, which merely belongs to the same cycle as others. The epicyclic work attaches itself to a specific previous work and extends in imaginary world.

Question 36

Is there any cosmic significance to the epicyclic work (looking at the middle ages)?

Answer 36

Returns to a world and expands on it. I might trace it back to hermeneutic readings of the Bible and mystery plays.

Question 37

The epicyclic genre we see in Lydgate’s additions to Chaucer reappears later. Name an example from the Renaissance, from postmodern British drama, and from a Canadian writer in 1998

Answer 37

Shakespeare’s continuation of Troilus and Creseyde; Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; Carson’s Autobiography of Red

Question 38

15th-c literariness could take the shape of various rhetorical refinements. One was aureation…?

Answer 38

The heightening of diction with gorgeous Latinisms, often polysyllabic.

Question 39

Should Scottish Renaissance poets be periodized as medieval?

Answer 39

No–they deal with Renaissance material in distinctively Renaissance ways long before any English poet achieved a comparable synthesis.

Question 40

What is the significance of Galvin Douglas’s Eneados (completed 1513)?

Answer 40

Invention of verse translation. Fidelity to Virgil’s Aeneid.

Question 41

Other than translate Eneados, Galvin Douglas made another innovation in English literature…

Answer 41

Wrote the first English language georgic we know of

Question 42

The chivalric ideal would take a very long time to fully die out. However, as it is being displaced throughout Europe, replaced by a new ideal centred on the peaceful life of the courtier or bureaucrat rather than the martial life of the knight, we see attempts at patterning a society based on philosophical rational. What work is this?

Answer 42

Utopia (1516)

Question 43

Thomas More had a complex personality, strongly drawn to absolute positions (primitive Christian, Platonic) yet committed to office and the practical leverage it gave. How are these different sides of his personality developed in his work?

Answer 43

Morus, the compromising statesman; Raphael Hythloday, the visionary who has lived in Utopia.

Question 44

What group is Utopia targeting?

Answer 44

No single group. It’s a mistake to try to oversystematize his skeptical satire, since it abounds in local ironies and agile changes of norm, designed to catch out different groups of readers. It is “subtle.”

Question 45

Thomas More’s opponent, the Protestant (eventual martyr) William Tyndale, takes an interesting view on the “sense” of the Bible. Paraphrase his quote?

Answer 45

“…the scripture hath but one sense, which is the literal sense. . . . And if thou leave the literal sense, thou canst not but go out of the way. Neverthelater, the scripture useth proverbs, similitudes, riddles, or allegories, as all other speeches do; but that which [these forms] signifieth, is ever the literal sense, which thous must seek out diligently . . . this literal sense is spiritual, and everlasting life unto as many as believe it.”

Question 46

Bible translations: Coverdale (1535, 37), the Great Bible (1539), the Calvinist Geneva Version (1560), the Bishop’s Bible (1568), the Romanist Rheims New Testament (1582), and the KJV (1611). This flowering of Biblical translation might be traced back to what three fountain heads?

Answer 46

Humanist: advances in Greek and Hebrew scholarship applied in such works as Erasmus’s Greek New Testament (1516) and Latin translation.
Reforming: Luther’s tendentious German trnsltn (1522) and Tyndale’s 1534 trnsltn

Question 47

Why does the Book of Common Prayer use chiasmus (abba)?

Answer 47

Self-effacing; suggests obedient responsiveness. Also, perhaps, the completeness of an Alpha and Omega.

Question 48

How did the practice of translation mold the rhetoric of Tudor prose?

Answer 48

Translators had a device of using a pair of words to straddle the meaning of a single original word, and this fostered a taste for displaying superfluous copiousness of synonyms.

Question 49

Skelton was appreciated by which English Modernist poet?

Answer 49

W.H. Auden

Question 50

It has been shown that Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) not only introduced the strict counting of syllables. But he goes further…

Answer 50

Sometimes he can be seen revising to introduce deliberate irregularity for expressiveness.

Question 51

Wyatt’s success depends on his determination, surpassing that of even his Italian models, to subordinate everything to a single dominating poetic idea or

Answer 51

conceit

Question 52

Wyatt’s pursuit of unity of rhetorical effect did much to make poetry with the __________ now taken for granted

Answer 52

compression

Question 53

Wyatt also translated parts of the Aeneid, reshaping the meter to

Answer 53

Blank verse–the first in English.

Question 54

When is blank verse first introduced into English?

Answer 54

Wyatt’s translation of parts of the Aeneid