okay - trying to work some thoughts out so I'm going to type without actually even looking at the screen or anything. Sorry for typos if anyone bothres readign ths.
Things I need to do with this diss project to make this a bit more manageable:
1- stop tyring to deal with eveyrhting in secular/sacred terms, if much of what I'm trying to do is deconstruct those boudnaries. I may need to propose a new terminological set to deal with them, but if nothing else I have to explain why i think that's a false dichotomy and work on how to articulate probelms without miring myself in the either/or thinking that iI'm criticizing. That's difficult. But doable.
2 - I need to figure out exactly who I could really justify as being the audience for this mansucript and what their social conditions were. Am i really dealling wtih knights at all, or am i dealing with people who would more or less aspire to be knights, or are there even knights in london by 1330 that would be recognizably such? probably not when i think about it, because they point out that knights were at least as much engaged in legal and administrative work as they were in any sort of military action - even Edward I dealt with chivalry as nostalgic, so my trying to assert that this is really for real armor wearing knights is a bit naive. however, that doesn't mean that the chivalric ideal is dead or anything, just that i need to reformulate what looking at chivalry would do for someone who's more in upper levels of society in a later sense, rather than in the hard and fast estates model that probably never quite existed anyway.
3 - I need to define how I'm dealing with romance better, and why i think the romantic tone is so important in this ms. Essentially the way I see it, romance is one of those things that breaks down fiction/reality binaries and melds them into each other - one creates the other which in turn reflects an idealized version of the first, or helps to recreate it etc. And if people in medieval times had no problem justifying large scale courses of action on writings that were generally agreed to be a pack of lies, then even the normal boundaries we see between the real and the pretend are liable to be thrown out the window whenever expedient. That said, everythign in this manuscript can be read as a romance which is important and thus necessary to unpack, define, and explain more.
4 - I really need to put my chapters into a non-outline form and figure out what the connections are that Im trying to make between them. I probably need a gender chapter as well as the others because it comes up too much.
5 - deal with social anxieties explored in the text, how these are expressed, whether or not there is some sort of narrative of resistance going on alongside what's held up to be good and fine and all that rot and work that into my overall thought.
Am running into a mental roadblock. Will go drink some water and come back to this in a bit when I've digested a bit more.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
dissertations thoughts clogging my brain
Alright - we'll start with what I've just gotten read - the first chapter of Ralph Hanna's London Literature. A lot of it is involved with various different minor scribal differences to try and make a case for certain dialects of London English (Types II and III) overlapping more than most scholars would like to give them credit for. Not of interest for me because the manuscript I'm working with has been pretty well dated for the first chunk of the 1330's. Hanna's major and most provoking claim is that we should be thinking of 1300's London not as the country-capital megolith it is now, but as just another provincial town that would have actually been a bit more provincial than most - he cites that the major churches (other than St. Paul's, I'd presume) were all on the borders of London (i.e, like Canterbury), which is different from places like York or King's Lynn or Norwich, and that London didn't necessarily have the burgeoning literary culture many other cities did at the time.
He gives remarkably few manuscripts that can be dated to roughly the time of Auchinleck - ten in all (several which are later). The majority of them have the same works in common; the preponderance of works written at the time are largely Scripture-based works, explanations or interpretations of Scriptural texts, hagiographies and lessons for correct living, most of which seem to assume a high level of understanding and intellectual curiousity on the part of the audience. Auchinleck contains several examples of this type of literature, along with some extremely basic texts that seem to have been aimed at educating younger or less intellectually capable minds. Hanna points out (p 13) that compendiums of this type of literature seem to have been common household items given their common occurance in legal records like wills.
It is the coexistence of this type of literature with the romances in Auchinleck that can give modern readers pause, yet it is doubtful that the manuscript's contemporary audience would have found it odd at all.
Now for another book that's been thought provoking and clogging my brain for about a week - Kaeuper's Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe. I'l be dropping out the French stuff whenever necessary, though it occurs to me that knowing attitudes towards chivalry in France would be important given the amount of literature in Auchinleck that seems to have been translated into English for the first time.
The first thing Kaeuper points out that is obvious, yet usually ignored, and completely necessary, is that to be responsible scholars we should really try and move beyond the aura of romance that surrounds chivalry and look at knights for what they were - warriors who, to whatever personal degree, followed chivalry as they personally viewed it - and that the chivalric code is one that promoted violence, and one that fused honor with the correct expression of violence and piety. The ideals expressed by "chivalry" were in constant flux and reinterpreted often by the Church (usually trying to figure out what to do with the warrior class), literature, and the knights themselves. I would argue that Auchinleck fits into this milieu; it seems overwhelmingly concerned with the lives of knights, the proper morality for knights to display and live by (one which generally only seems to need the intercession of priests for baptism and marriage; confession and penance are often, if not exclusively, at the discretion of the individual knight).
One issue common in chivalric literature is how to live in a society prone to random and often large scale fits of violence. That knights are the usual cause of this unrest can be seen through their appearance in many romances - there is the good knight protagonist of the story, and then several bad knights whose appearance is often rather demonic - black and imposing. The major point is that even contemporary authors regarded chivalry as a mix of the great social hope for high ideals at the same time they were concerned about its effects and the problems of its malpractice. Kaeuper looks at chivalry on a macro scale, trying to tease out the good and the bad in various situations. I propose to look at the Auchinleck manuscript as a particular expression of chivalric ideals in a particular location at a particular time with particular goals in mind.
That said, I need to learn more about London in 1330.
Kaeuper points out that chivalric literature is at least as prescriptive as it is descriptive, and that its authors were often concerned with trying to create the very ideal they were trying to describe. At the same time, the chivalric tradition is one that arose from the warrior tradition (and as such revelled in violence), rather than any sort of institutional behest, and it is a tradition that the Church and State governments were trying to co-opt and control. When it comes to the Church this is especially instructive - the Church's attempt to force some sort of control over knights comes in sacralizing the dubbing ceremony and in the Crusades. However, knights in romantic literature seem to resist any real clerical control (very true in Auchinleck); they often seem to act as though they have a special relationship with God that allows them to act as their conscience allows (violently or otherwise). Knights are often aligned with hermits when they are aligned with the church at all; this is interesting because hermits were alone and on the very fringes of the clerical hierarchy. In many cases, the hermits are mentioned to be past knights as well, and many knights go on to lead the life of a hermit after the major violent portion of their career is over. In many ways hermits were independent of the Church, and thus seem to give knights a way to claim correct morality while living outside of clerical control themselves.
In 14th century England, the top levels of secular society were quite fluid and interacted quite often. The secular courts in England were some of the strongest in England at the time, and knights often sat on the courts and held judicial duties. The clerical courts, meanwhile, had very little ability to enforce laws when it came to knights. The prevailing theme in much English literature is that one should be obedient to the king and the secular structure as long as the king in charge merits that obedience; bad kings mean that violence and working outside the system to promote one's own ends is essentially fine.
This could mean that one of the main reasons that the Auchinleck manuscript shows such a concern with proper chivalric ideals is due to the reign of Edward II, who was generally not a beloved king. Edward II's reign is described most fully in the last extent text, the Simonie, and I should look and see what sorts of violent outbreaks there were at that time. One of the major things the manuscript could be doing would be re-creating a system of chivalry that promotes social order rather than social mayhem; if Hanna is correct in his assumption that the Auchinleck's closest analogue is the legal custumals of London at the time, then this would be a way to form a sort of code for chivalry in an imaginative mode, rather than a legal one. This would be a good time to revisit Patty Ingham's book Sovereign Fantasies to come up with some sort of rationale for why the romance mode would be a good mode for this sort of exploration to take place.
And now I should publish this and start trying to figure out what would work as part of the diss proposal and what is stuff that I just need to keep in mind...
He gives remarkably few manuscripts that can be dated to roughly the time of Auchinleck - ten in all (several which are later). The majority of them have the same works in common; the preponderance of works written at the time are largely Scripture-based works, explanations or interpretations of Scriptural texts, hagiographies and lessons for correct living, most of which seem to assume a high level of understanding and intellectual curiousity on the part of the audience. Auchinleck contains several examples of this type of literature, along with some extremely basic texts that seem to have been aimed at educating younger or less intellectually capable minds. Hanna points out (p 13) that compendiums of this type of literature seem to have been common household items given their common occurance in legal records like wills.
It is the coexistence of this type of literature with the romances in Auchinleck that can give modern readers pause, yet it is doubtful that the manuscript's contemporary audience would have found it odd at all.
Now for another book that's been thought provoking and clogging my brain for about a week - Kaeuper's Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe. I'l be dropping out the French stuff whenever necessary, though it occurs to me that knowing attitudes towards chivalry in France would be important given the amount of literature in Auchinleck that seems to have been translated into English for the first time.
The first thing Kaeuper points out that is obvious, yet usually ignored, and completely necessary, is that to be responsible scholars we should really try and move beyond the aura of romance that surrounds chivalry and look at knights for what they were - warriors who, to whatever personal degree, followed chivalry as they personally viewed it - and that the chivalric code is one that promoted violence, and one that fused honor with the correct expression of violence and piety. The ideals expressed by "chivalry" were in constant flux and reinterpreted often by the Church (usually trying to figure out what to do with the warrior class), literature, and the knights themselves. I would argue that Auchinleck fits into this milieu; it seems overwhelmingly concerned with the lives of knights, the proper morality for knights to display and live by (one which generally only seems to need the intercession of priests for baptism and marriage; confession and penance are often, if not exclusively, at the discretion of the individual knight).
One issue common in chivalric literature is how to live in a society prone to random and often large scale fits of violence. That knights are the usual cause of this unrest can be seen through their appearance in many romances - there is the good knight protagonist of the story, and then several bad knights whose appearance is often rather demonic - black and imposing. The major point is that even contemporary authors regarded chivalry as a mix of the great social hope for high ideals at the same time they were concerned about its effects and the problems of its malpractice. Kaeuper looks at chivalry on a macro scale, trying to tease out the good and the bad in various situations. I propose to look at the Auchinleck manuscript as a particular expression of chivalric ideals in a particular location at a particular time with particular goals in mind.
That said, I need to learn more about London in 1330.
Kaeuper points out that chivalric literature is at least as prescriptive as it is descriptive, and that its authors were often concerned with trying to create the very ideal they were trying to describe. At the same time, the chivalric tradition is one that arose from the warrior tradition (and as such revelled in violence), rather than any sort of institutional behest, and it is a tradition that the Church and State governments were trying to co-opt and control. When it comes to the Church this is especially instructive - the Church's attempt to force some sort of control over knights comes in sacralizing the dubbing ceremony and in the Crusades. However, knights in romantic literature seem to resist any real clerical control (very true in Auchinleck); they often seem to act as though they have a special relationship with God that allows them to act as their conscience allows (violently or otherwise). Knights are often aligned with hermits when they are aligned with the church at all; this is interesting because hermits were alone and on the very fringes of the clerical hierarchy. In many cases, the hermits are mentioned to be past knights as well, and many knights go on to lead the life of a hermit after the major violent portion of their career is over. In many ways hermits were independent of the Church, and thus seem to give knights a way to claim correct morality while living outside of clerical control themselves.
In 14th century England, the top levels of secular society were quite fluid and interacted quite often. The secular courts in England were some of the strongest in England at the time, and knights often sat on the courts and held judicial duties. The clerical courts, meanwhile, had very little ability to enforce laws when it came to knights. The prevailing theme in much English literature is that one should be obedient to the king and the secular structure as long as the king in charge merits that obedience; bad kings mean that violence and working outside the system to promote one's own ends is essentially fine.
This could mean that one of the main reasons that the Auchinleck manuscript shows such a concern with proper chivalric ideals is due to the reign of Edward II, who was generally not a beloved king. Edward II's reign is described most fully in the last extent text, the Simonie, and I should look and see what sorts of violent outbreaks there were at that time. One of the major things the manuscript could be doing would be re-creating a system of chivalry that promotes social order rather than social mayhem; if Hanna is correct in his assumption that the Auchinleck's closest analogue is the legal custumals of London at the time, then this would be a way to form a sort of code for chivalry in an imaginative mode, rather than a legal one. This would be a good time to revisit Patty Ingham's book Sovereign Fantasies to come up with some sort of rationale for why the romance mode would be a good mode for this sort of exploration to take place.
And now I should publish this and start trying to figure out what would work as part of the diss proposal and what is stuff that I just need to keep in mind...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)