Browsing by Subject "Harley 2253"
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Item Anthologizing women : medieval genre, gender and genital poetics(2017-08-10) Sapio, Jennifer Leigh; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-; Scala, Elizabeth, 1966-; Hutchison, Coleman; Sidhu, NicoleThis study investigates three medieval manuscript collections – compiled in the 14th and 15th centuries in Herefordshire, Derbyshire and East Anglia, respectively – that are significant in their similarly implied female readerships, their thematic treatment of the “problem of women,” and their vocalization of the perspectives, and indeed often complaints, of female characters. At the intersection of feminist and bibliographic and textual methodologies, this project traces the interpretive effects of reading gendered, and specifically genital, discourse in the context of the medieval household books and literary anthologies that contain them, investigating representations of the body in various generic texts – from the speaking “Daun Cun” of the Anglo-Norman fabliau to the metaphorical “purs” of the Chaucerian complaint ballad, and lastly, to the saint’s “castle” in East Anglian religious drama. We will find, for example, that the variant of the raunchy fabliau “Le Chevaler qui fist les Cons Parler” in MS Harley 2253 resonates with the editorial concerns of the manuscript, namely a dialogic critique of misogyny and a commitment to unveiling societal injustice and gendered violence. In the case of the Findern manuscript, we posit a gendered reading of Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Purse” in the context of the “feminist sequence” of canonical texts as well as the original female-voiced lyric poems contained in the collection, one that draws parallels between the “feminization” of the pregnant female, the (masculine) poet, and the courtly subject. Finally, I investigate the representation of the saint’s body in the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene as a gendered edifice, in all its vulnerability as well as spiritual power. Ultimately, I argue that this poetics of the body is employed in a range of genres as disparate as fabliau, complaint and religious drama in order to expose the inherent violence against women that props up the patriarchal ideology of chastity, marriage and courtly culture. According to this poetics, political poems written by male artists for the king become allegories for love, sexual rather than political union, and pregnancy; and religious dramas about devout women ring with unruly resonances of prostitution and rape.Item Wicked horses : women's will in Harley 2253(2012-05) Sapio, Jennifer Leigh; Birkholz, Daniel, 1967-British Library MS Harley 2253 is a unique fourteenth-century miscellany consisting of 140 folios and containing 116 different texts, including lyrics, political poems, fabliaux and other secular and religious texts in verse and prose, Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman. While the so-called “Harley Lyrics” popularized by Brook’s edition may have registered widely on scholarly radar, many of the non-English texts in the collection have failed to elicit critical attention. However, these texts are vital points in the narrative of English literary history. In particular, the four Anglo-Norman fabliaux included in Harley 2253 constitute a majority of the extant pre-Chaucerian fabliaux produced on the English isles, and of these, Le Dit de la Gageure and Du Chevalier a La Corbeille have no Old French analogues. This report explores the Anglo-Norman fabliaux in this manuscript, their relationship to the continental French tradition and to the subsequent English (ie. Chaucerian) fabliaux incarnations. Specifically, I argue that representations of female desire – figured as an opposition between “stillness” and doing one’s “will” – surface in these obscene misogynist stories that simultaneously objectify and colonize the female body. “De Clerico et Puella”, Le Dit de la Gageure and Le Chevalier qui fist Les Cuns Parler all include an unmarried female who articulates her sexual desire freely, a sharp contrast to the traditional cuckoldry plot of Old French fabliaux which revolves around a married woman’s illicit affairs. Indeed, the grotesque images of sexual violence and the pornographic images of sexual fulfillment in these pre-Chaucerian fabliaux are not contained by the ecclesiastic context from which these texts originate, but rather they linger and are transformed by the female characters, patrons, readers and hearers of the medieval manuscripts in their domestic contexts.