“Als wel the lord as the schepherde, He broghte hem alle in good accord”: Harmonious Materialism in the Confessio Amantis

Using R. F. Yeager\u27s analysis of the figure Arion as a starting point, this article argues that in the Confessio Amantis, John Gower shifts his impulse toward social correction from direct estates satire to a more subtle approach encoding his social critique in the love stories of the Confessio. Examples of this approach include a variety of tales from Book 5, and the Apollonius of Tyre story in Book 8. Details of the poem\u27s ending and later works like In Praise of Peace indicate that Gower still retained an interest in direct critique of social problems

Re/Writing the Orient: Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the Thousand and One Nights, and the Hundred and One Nights

Canto XXIII marks a tragicomic turning point in the Orlando Furioso, as the tension sustaining the titular character’s epic stoicism and romantic chivalry falls away to reveal a maniacal anti-hero. This canto’s staging of Orlando’s madness signals a significant extra-textual literary transition, unsettling the binary of medieval and classical literary traditions that Ariosto draws on, and suggesting a novel genre of literary expression. This article explores one avenue by which Ariosto disrupts such ostensible polarities through the dynamic intertextual practice of writing and rewriting the “Orient.”  A close reading of Canto XXVIII’s resounding echoes of the Thousand and One Nights’ and the lesser-known Hundred and One Nights’ frame tales, illuminates the Furioso’s double focus upon movement toward and away from Muslim-Arab cultural affiliation, a push-pull that opens a space of difference where literary traditions can converge neither in reconciliation nor domination of one another. In particular, this paper examines how Ariosto’s poem captures the ambiguous hybridity of the medieval Mediterranean as an ever-shifting terrain defined not only by oppositionality and hostility, but also by curiosity, exchange, and alliance

The view from Fortingall: the worlds of the Book of the Dean of Lismore

No abstract available

Interactive Visual Alignment of Medieval Text Versions

Textual criticism consists of the identification and analysis of variant readings among different versions of a text. Being a relatively simple task for modern languages, the collation of medieval text traditions ranges from the complex to the virtually impossible depending on the degree of instability of textual transmission. We present a visual analytics environment that supports computationally aligning such complex textual differences typical of orally inflected medieval poetry. For the purpose of analyzing alignment, we provide interactive visualizations for different text hierarchy levels, specifically, a meso reading view to support investigating repetition and variance at the line level across text segments. In addition to outlining important aspects of our interdisciplinary collaboration, we emphasize the utility of the proposed system by various usage scenarios in medieval French literature

The Elegiac Puella as Virgin Martyr

This is a postprint (author's final draft) version of an article published in the journal Transactions of the American Philological Association in 2009. The final version of this article may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/apa.0.0023 (login may be required). The version made available in OpenBU was supplied by the author.This paper explores the ideological currents running through Maximianus's subversive revival of the genre of Augustan love elegy in the beleaguered Rome of the mid-sixth century. The third elegy narrates an apparent childhood reminiscence of the poet, a failed romance with a young girl, Aquilina. But it soon becomes clear that, in the character of Aquilina, Maximianus has deliberately blurred the literary archetypes of the elegiac puella and the virgin martyr from Christian hagiography. This bizarre configuration allows the elegist simultaneously to provoke questions about the representation of female figures in both genres. By likening the elegiac puella to the martyr, Maximianus highlights the latent violence of elegiac topoi. By likening the martyr to the elegiac puella, Maximianus highlights the eroticism that often has a prominent place in accounts of virgin martyrdom. Not merely a formal experiment or the product of Augustan nostalgia, Maximianus's elegies represent a real attempt to reinvent elegy's questioning stance in a new social and religious context

‘My printer must, haue somwhat to his share’: Isabella Whitney, Richard Jones, and crafting books

Given Isabella Whitney’s reputation as the first English professional woman writer, her books are fertile ground for the recent material turn in the study of early modern women’s writing. Women’s engagement in book production meant that their texts were mediated through the work of booksellers, printers, and other agents in the print trade. We need to remember that writers make texts, but books are made by publishers and printers. Whitney’s own working relationship with her printer-publisher, Richard Jones, is well-known. Yet, the precise nature of Jones’s role in the production of Whitney’s books and her fashioning as an “Auctor” remains shadowy, largely because questions of agency have not been explored through the technologies of book production. To understand the ways in which Whitney’s texts were mediated through print, and her participation in this process, this essay will focus on how her books of poetry were made, starting with the role of her printer-publisher, Richard Jones

On the Feasibility of Automated Detection of Allusive Text Reuse

The detection of allusive text reuse is particularly challenging due to the sparse evidence on which allusive references rely---commonly based on none or very few shared words. Arguably, lexical semantics can be resorted to since uncovering semantic relations between words has the potential to increase the support underlying the allusion and alleviate the lexical sparsity. A further obstacle is the lack of evaluation benchmark corpora, largely due to the highly interpretative character of the annotation process. In the present paper, we aim to elucidate the feasibility of automated allusion detection. We approach the matter from an Information Retrieval perspective in which referencing texts act as queries and referenced texts as relevant documents to be retrieved, and estimate the difficulty of benchmark corpus compilation by a novel inter-annotator agreement study on query segmentation. Furthermore, we investigate to what extent the integration of lexical semantic information derived from distributional models and ontologies can aid retrieving cases of allusive reuse. The results show that (i) despite low agreement scores, using manual queries considerably improves retrieval performance with respect to a windowing approach, and that (ii) retrieval performance can be moderately boosted with distributional semantics