12 April 2007 – Postgraduates Present

April 12

Amanda Moss (Royal Holloway College, University of London)
Westminster School MS 3: a fifteenth-century devotional miscellany

Westminster School MS 3 is one of many vernacular devotional miscellanies, produced during the first part of the fifteenth century, aimed at the growing lay market for accessible theological material. The manuscript provides devotional and conduct advice, suitable for use by a pious household, from expositions of basic prayer and the Ten Commandments, through to a treatise on marriage and the education of children. Yet it also contains a mixture of orthodox and Lollard-leaning texts, which raise questions about the rationale behind the selection and ordering of the material and the nature of the piety that the compiler sought to promote.  

Kirsty Black (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Displaced Chronicle: A Modernist Reworking of Medieval Historiography

David Jones’s The Anathemata, published in 1952, is a fragmented epic demonstrating a preoccupation with cultural identity and national roots and a concern for the preservation of the past.  It is widely described as lacking narrative coherence, for which it is criticised, yet accepted as being characteristically modernist.  However, I argue that those qualities which are most typically ‘modernist’ are in fact equally ‘medievalist’, and are derived directly from Jones’s extensive research of medieval sources.  The coherence of The Anathemata relies on an understanding of Christian historiographical principles, which underpin a dislocated, though not absent, narrative form. I suggest that Jones was influenced by the narrative model offered by the medieval chroniclers and writers of the vitae, with its digressions, catalogues and anachronisms, and that his emulation of the earlier authors is closely associated with his Catholic beliefs.  

Pirkko Koppinen (Royal Holloway College, University of London)
Multimodal Images: The Boar in Beowulf

This paper examines the different extra-textual references required to read Beowulf’s signs and uses material from Anglo-Saxon archaeology and textual culture in order to argue that to read the multiple meanings of the boar-image in the text requires a multimodal approach which engages the reader in the visual and written cultural discourses, in which the text is grounded. Although the boar occurs only six times in the course of the 3182 lines of the Old English poem Beowulf, it remains an important signifier in the text with multiple functions.  The potential complexity of the boar-sign in the meaning-making process is aptly illustrated with the threefold Peircean sign and its components: icon, index, and symbol.  As an Old English word for ‘a boar’, eofor is an abstract symbol, but the connection between the word and the concept ‘boar’ is not easily available to the modern reader – it needs to be learnt.  The boar-image on a helmet, as another extra-textual, visual sign may be viewed as an icon, as in the case of the Anglo-Saxon Benty Grange helmet, or a visual signifier which resembles the ‘real’ boar by its metonymic association.  Thus, the boar-image in Beowulf is also an index as it points to an extra-textual boar-crest on a real helmet.  To take the boar-image’s indexicality further, the word eoforlic ‘boar-image’ sometimes stands for, or replaces the word helm ‘helmet’ through metonymy.  The boar-image also indexes the protection that the helmet offers to its wearer, as well as status, wealth, worth, and the contract between the Anglo-Saxon lord and his retainer.  The word on the manuscript page has the power to evoke all of the above meanings and more in the modern reader’s mind – as long as the connections between the different modes the poem engages in are learnt.  However, although archaeological evidence is often useful in imagining the heroic world in Beowulf, the iconic image of the boar escapes us.  

Tom Hinton (KCL)
Medieval Occitan Narrative and Cultural Identity

The identification of Occitan as a ‘lyric language’ may help to explain not only the low number of surviving narrative texts in the language, but also the generic hybridity which is a common feature of these texts, this hybridity resulting primarily from the interaction of lyric and narrative discourses. Recent work has suggested that the narrative form itself, epitomised by the paradigm of chivalric romance, was viewed by Occitan writers as French and that lyric discourse in the Occitan text therefore represents a kind of ‘cultural resistance’ to French influence in Occitania. I would like to argue rather that the use of narrative models drawn from the French literary tradition allowed these texts to negotiate the potentially stifling identification of troubadour production as the essence of Occitan culture.  

Vicki Blud (KCL)
Sex and the City: Female Exile and Urban Wilderness

Using Giorgio Agamben's 'Homo Sacer' as part of the theoretical framework - the idea of the outlaw being neither in one space nor another – this paper looks at the concept of exile from the point of view of female characters or speakers. Referring to Bisclavret's wife and the speaker of "Wulf and Eadwacer', it argues that, although the outlaws living in the archetypal wastelands are the conspicuous exiles, the women in these texts suffer exile within urban space.  

Christopher Lay (QMUL)
The manuscripts of William Lichfield's "Complaint of God"

Lichfield's 'Complaint of God', a fifteenth-century verse dialogue between God and Man composed by the rector of All Hallows, Thames Street, in London, known in his time as a radical preacher.  The critical obscurity it which it has lain since the Reformation is belied by its appearance in a substantial number of manuscript and printed witnesses from the mid-fifteenth century to 1534.  This paper examines the appearance of the 'Complaint of God' in a number of fascicular manuscripts compiled from independently-produced booklets. It suggests that slim booklets of popular pious works were a recognised commodity at the end of the Middle Ages, part of an growing market for the speculative production of texts which prefigured the coming of print.