Middle English Beyond Chaucer

Unit four ended on Chaucer's narrator, a character whose admiration is part of the joke. This unit turns to the writers around him, and most of them have no names at all. Its governing idea follows from that: because almost every work here is anonymous, the questions ask about kinds and features more than authors, and sorting a text by its kind answers most of them. We move in three steps: romance, from the Matter of Britain and Marie de France's lais to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the alliterative revival and Malory; then the lyric and the ballad, with the guild stage of mystery and morality plays; and then two women visionaries, before a procedure for telling the genres apart.

We begin with romance, the story of knights, love and wonders, and the finest English romance of all.

First, the three great bodies of romance.

ENL 0401 Romance and the Matter of Britain

Medieval romance drew on three great bodies of story: the Matter of Rome, the Matter of France, and the Matter of Britain, mostly about King Arthur. Geoffrey of Monmouth introduced Merlin around eleven thirty-five; Wace added the Round Table, and Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot. Rome, France, and Arthur's Britain. Arthur's legend grew by additions over centuries.

One poet wrote short romances.

ENL 0402 Marie de France and the Lai

Marie de France, considered the first female French medieval poet, wrote lais, short verse romances she said came from Breton minstrels, in Anglo-Norman French. In Launfal, a neglected knight of Arthur's court wins a fairy lady's love on condition he keep it secret. Short romances from Breton tales. We know almost nothing of her life.

A green stranger interrupts a feast.

ENL 0403 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The Challenge

At Camelot's New Year feast a green giant offers a game: any knight may strike him with his axe if he can return the blow in a year and a day. Gawain, Arthur's nephew, beheads him; the Green Knight picks up his head and rides off. A beheading game at a Christmas feast. Gawain accepts to spare the king.

At a castle, Gawain is tested three times.

ENL 0404 Gawain: The Temptations and the Girdle

At a castle, the lord agrees to exchange each day's winnings with Gawain. On three days the lady tempts him; he gives the lord her kisses but keeps the green girdle she says protects life. At the Green Chapel, the third blow only nicks his neck for that concealment. Three hunts, three temptations, one secret. The nick punishes the hidden girdle.

Gawain's shield carries an emblem.

ENL 0405 Gawain: Pentangle, Bob and Wheel

Gawain's shield bears a pentangle, an endless knot whose five points stand for his virtues. The poem is in four fitts of unrhymed alliterative lines, each stanza closing with a rhymed bob and wheel. The anchor reads its frame of Troy as a warning of corruption from within. An endless knot, an alliterative stanza. The girdle marks where the knot fails.

The old Old English line came back.

ENL 0406 The Alliterative Revival and Piers Plowman

In the fourteenth century some poets revived the old unrhymed alliterative line, Gawain among them. William Langland's Piers Plowman, in that line, is an allegory told as a series of dream visions, in which the dreamer seeks figures such as Do-Well. It survives in three versions. The old line, an allegorical dream. Langland and the Gawain poet used the line, not Chaucer.

One writer gathered the whole legend.

ENL 0407 Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur

Sir Thomas Malory, probably writing in prison, compiled the Arthurian stories into one narrative, printed by Caxton in fourteen eighty-five. The anchor reads it as nostalgic and cynical about knighthood, ending with Lancelot's death, his adultery with Guinevere bringing the kingdom down. The whole legend, gathered in prison. Lancelot, not Arthur, is the tragic centre.

Now song and stage: the short lyric, the popular ballad, and the plays performed in the streets.

Some medieval poems are short songs.

ENL 0408 Middle English Lyrics

Anonymous Middle English lyrics survive from roughly the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, often song-like with refrains. The Cuckoo Song celebrates spring; others lament unanswered love, mourn the passing of the old in the "where are they" motif, or praise Christ and Mary. Short, anonymous, often sung. Religious lyrics are as common as love lyrics.

Other songs tell stories.

ENL 0409 The Popular Ballad

The popular or folk ballad is an anonymous narrative song, passed on orally and altered in transmission, centred on a dramatic event and full of repetition and refrain. Francis James Child later gathered three hundred and five English and Scottish ballads. The exam's first sample question defines it. Anonymous, sung, dramatic, repeated. Oral ballads exist in many versions.

The guilds staged the Bible.

ENL 0410 Mystery Plays and the Cycles

Mystery plays dramatized the Bible from Creation to the Last Judgment in cycles, staged on wagons by town trade guilds; "mystery" once meant guild. Four cycles survive, from twenty-five plays at Chester to forty-eight at York. In York the shipwrights played Noah. The Bible in order, staged by guilds. Mystery here means guild, not puzzle.

One mystery play mixes farce and faith.

ENL 0411 The Second Shepherds' Play

The Wakefield Master's Second Shepherds' Play sets the Nativity among poor northern shepherds. The thief Mak steals a sheep, and his wife Gill hides it in a cradle as their newborn. The farce of the false birth contrasts with the true Nativity at the end. A stolen sheep in a cradle, then the manger. Comedy and devotion share one play.

The morality play stages abstractions.

ENL 0412 Everyman and the Morality Play

A morality play dramatizes a soul's choice through allegorical figures and stands alone, unlike the cycles. In Everyman, Death summons Everyman, and Kin, Friendship, Strength and Beauty desert him in turn; only Good Deeds goes with him to the grave. Death calls; only good deeds stay. The figures are abstractions given parts.

Last, two women who recorded visions, and a method for naming any medieval kind.

First, an anchoress and her visions.

ENL 0413 Julian of Norwich

Julian, an anchoress walled in a cell at St. Julian's Church in Norwich, received sixteen visions in thirteen seventy-three during an illness, recorded as the Revelations of Divine Love. She calls sin "behovely" and God a mother, and T. S. Eliot quoted her "all shall be well." An anchoress, sixteen visions, God as mother. She is optimistic where her age was not.

Next, a laywoman who dictated her life.

ENL 0414 Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe, a laywoman who recorded visiting Julian for advice, dictated her religious experiences to two scribes, saying she could not write. The Book of Margery Kempe is widely cited as the first autobiography in English, though scholars dispute the label. A laywoman's visions, dictated. "First autobiography" is a disputed claim.

Here is the method for naming a medieval genre.

ENL 0415 Telling Medieval Genres Apart

Six medieval genres are easily confused. A romance tells of knights, love and wonders: Gawain, Malory. A lai is a short romance from Breton tradition: Marie de France. A dream vision frames its matter as a dream: Piers Plowman. A lyric is a short song of one feeling. A ballad is an anonymous narrative song passed orally, with refrains. A mystery play stages scripture in a guild cycle, while a morality play stands alone and gives abstractions roles. Ask three questions: drama or poetry; story or feeling; biblical, chivalric or allegorical. An anonymous, orally altered narrative with a refrain is a ballad.

The capstone gathers the period's kinds.

ENL 0416 The Medieval Inheritance

The Middle Ages beyond Chaucer give the exam a set of genres and a handful of works. Romance gathered three Matters, of Rome, France and Britain, and the Arthurian legend grew by additions, from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chrétien. Marie de France wrote lais from Breton tales. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sets a beheading game at a New Year feast, tests Gawain with three hunts and three temptations, and nicks his neck for the girdle he hid, though his shield bears the pentangle; it uses the revived alliterative line with a bob and wheel, the line Langland used for Piers Plowman. Malory gathered the legend in prison, with Lancelot at its tragic centre. Lyrics sang of love and faith, and ballads changed from voice to voice. The guilds staged mystery cycles, the Second Shepherds' Play set a stolen sheep beside the Nativity, and Everyman went to death with only Good Deeds. Julian of Norwich wrote of divine love, and Margery Kempe dictated what is often called the first English autobiography. Almost every work is anonymous, so sort by kind.

This unit named the kinds behind anonymous works. We described romance and its three Matters, and Marie de France's lais. We followed Gawain through the beheading game, the three temptations, the hidden girdle and the pentangle. We placed Piers Plowman and Malory in the alliterative revival and the gathered legend. We told the lyric from the ballad, and the mystery cycle from the morality play. And we met Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, then sorted every kind by three questions: drama or poetry, story or feeling, and which kind of story. Unit six, The Sixteenth Century, opens the Renaissance.