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Bibliography for "Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature
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Conclusion
These romances do not treat their subjects as if they had no correlatives in life. On the contrary, insular poets seem as interested in their ability to comment on the world as in their capacity to escape life's necessities or to idealize life's processes through the transformations of poetry. They are sharply aware of contemporary political, religious, and cultural principles, and they examine as well a set of convictions important to the barony: that noble power rests in the land and its heritability, so that noble merit inheres in perpetuating the patrimony and the family; furthermore, that the behaviors fostered by this system—courageous initiative in war, respect for law and custom in peace, cultivation of social graces through wealth—are virtues that justify and expand the dominance brought by landholding. The insular romances give poetic form to this ideology and to other beliefs, dramatizing their confrontations and finally picturing all of them contributing to baronial
advancement. In summary, insular romances resist the political principle that national or royal interests must come before baronial ambition, the Christian teaching that religious values are superior to concern for the world, and the cultural principle that courtliness transforms its adepts beyond the merely human. To be sure, these dominant ideologies deeply affect the romances, providing them with important measures of value
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Introduction
In the decades following the Norman Conquest, a new dialect of Old French expressed England's gradual detachment from continental influence. Usually called Anglo-Norman after the political and geographic divisions that gave rise to it, this dialect originated in the many continental vernaculars spoken by the conquerors and their followers, but it soon became "a language apart," defining aurally the separation of its speakers from France. The romances written in Anglo-Norman dialect, while not much noticed on the continent, had a profound influence on emerging Middle English
romance. In this study I argue that Anglo-Norman romances and their Middle English versions form a distinctively "insular" body of works, closely related to one another and to their situation in England. Divided from continental romance in emphases as in language, the insular works share poetic concerns and techniques that respond forcefully to issues of their time and place
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Abbreviations
Abbreviations for "Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature
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Introduction
The Thesis of this book is that gender is crucial to Geoffrey Chaucer's conception of romance in the
Canterbury Tales. In Chaucer's works, as in those of other poets who engage romance, gender provides a way of reading aspects of the genre beyond courtship alone. Social hierarchies, magic, adventure, and less salient preoccupations of romance are so intimately involved in gender that their operations are unclear in isolation from it. My concern is not with identifying specific sources and analogues for the Canterbury Tales nor with encompassing in my discussion every aspect of romance. The many studies that illuminate these issues provide a context for investigating more specifically how Chaucer understood the place and meaning of gender in the history of romance
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The Writing Lesson of 1381
One of the many fields that constitute "the third estate" as a historical category is writing. We know the rebels of England's 1381 rising through chronicles, court records, charters, poems, and so on. Yet the rebels remain outside representation in that they do not represent themselves for the written record. They are reimagined by those who write. Maintaining a largely oral culture alongside an increasingly literate higher culture, England's lower strata appear in written records as incoherent and irrational creatures or as models of submission and faith, variously constructed by various writers' own positions and preoccupations. The distortion of records does not render them useless. Historians have striven to recover the rebels' actions and motives by reading chronicle accounts against one another, searching court rolls for proceedings earlier brought on behalf of villeins against lords, interrogating the records of perhaps spurious accusations and confessions subsequent to the revolt, and recognizing in other ways that all histories are interpretive and incomplete accounts. From my own partial position—partial, that is, in being both disposed toward literary analysis and limited by a professional training in literature—I would like to examine the written absences that historians work to overcome and to propose that absence is an important feature of the rebels' cultural status
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Bibliography for Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tale
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Chapter 1: Masculinity in Romance
Masculinity is a persistent concern in Chaucer's tales deriving from romance, although it often seems a subtext to more evidently political and social issues. My first concern is to suggest how romances use gender difference to establish masculine identity. After a brief look at the function of difference in elaborating masculinity, this chapter turns to two complications in that paradigm
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Chapter 4: Subtle Clerks and Uncanny Women
The wonders of Chaucer's tales, his flying horse and healing sword, shape-shifting fairy, beloved elfqueen, and illusionist clerk, draw on some of the most familiar manifestations of magic in romance. Magic is a generic marker that signals the inferiority of romance in the hierarchy of genres. The persistent claim leveled against romance magic is that it evades the genuine concerns
of the world in favor of seductive falsehoods. In Insular Romance I have argued that the "lying wonders" of romance can comment on political and social concerns,- here I argue that magic becomes in romance a means of expressing gender difference. Participating in the cultural construction of gender and at the same time moving against its restraints, the deployment of magic in romance is far from irrelevant to worldly concerns
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