Legends Of Saints Research Articles

Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text

In A. C. Spearing develops a new engagement of narrative theory with medieval English first-person writing, focusing on roles functions of I as a shifting textual phenomenon, not to be defined either as autobiographical or as label of a fictional speaker or narrator. Spearing identifies explores a previously unrecognized category of medieval English poetry, calling it autography. He describes this form as emerging in mid-fourteenth century consisting of extended nonlyrical writings in first person, embracing prologues, authorial interventions in commentaries on third-person narratives, descendants of a genre of French medieval He argues that autography arose as a means of liberation from requirement to tell stories with preordained conclusions as a way of achieving a closer relation to lived experience, with all its unpredictability inconsistencies. Autographies, he claims, are marked by a cluster of characteristics including a correspondence to texture of life as it is experienced, a montage-like unpredictability of structure, a concern with writing textuality. Beginning with what may be earliest extended first-person narrative in Middle English, Winner Waster, book examines instances of the dit as discussed by French scholars, analyzes Chaucer s Wife of Bath s Prologue as a textual performance, devotes separate chapters to detailed readings of Hoccleve s Regement of Princes prologue, his Complaint Dialogue, witty first-person elements in Osbern Bokenham s legends of saints. An afterword suggests possible further applications of concept of autography, including discussion of intermittent autographic commentaries on narrative in Troilus Criseyde and Capgrave s Life of Saint Katherine. A deeply challenging engaging book, Autographies: The I of Text be required reading in every graduate course in medieval English literature. In wonderfully nuanced close readings of various late medieval texts, A. C. Spearing extends further theorizes his earlier groundbreaking work in Textual Subjectivity. His proposal of autography as a new way of conceptualizing medieval first-person writing should have profound bearing on how future scholars conceptualize, designate, discuss character, intent, voice. Peter W. Travis, Henry Winkley of Anglo-Saxon English Language Literature, Dartmouth College A.C. Spearing dares us to think without anachronistic notions, teaches us, by impressive example, how to become better readers of medieval French English poetry. Ad Putter, University of Bristol Professor Spearing proposes in this new study a nuanced persuasive theoretical framework for interpreting late medieval first-person narratives without anachronistic dependency on autobiography modern preoccupations with narrative coherency. Drawing on postmodern theory French scholarship on dit, Autographies promises to spark conversation that extends beyond Medieval English circle to include French medievalists who will find a worthy cross-disciplinary discussion initiated literary theorists who will discover a sorely understudied corpus whose relevance is made manifest. Deborah McGrady, University of Virginia

TÜRK KÜLTÜRÜNDE MENÂKIBNÂMELER VE MENÂKIBNÂME YAZICILIĞI

Saints legends were formed in the oral tradition. This narrative is a product of the people imagination. For some saints that ocur in the oral culture narratives were transcribed by some handwritters. After XIIIth century these works have started calling as menakibname. Althought menakibname is fictional they have some historical elements in their inside. A saint’s miracle consists of a number of these works were written for some purposes. Menakibnames have been written by usually seen that there is a cult around. Menakibnames send from oral culture period to written period in a kind of structure. Oral written in to the culture medium from the culture a retransferred in a given structure. Saint legends in oral culture exists in separete narratives. A handwritten with the formating has become a top narrative. When transferring the handwritten to written arratives in a specific orderand time sequence observes. Handwritten was handled in dependently of each saint legend organize to form a box. Thus, each narrative in itself creates a whole. Handwritten to read the book, which was held in front of a community is understood. Reading the books onside a community, emerges a second oral culture stage.

Servant of God and protector of the faithful: St. Nicholas as saint and redeemer in late medieval Burgos

During the late medieval period, non-noble merchants were an ever-growing part of Iberian society with both the money and the status to commission works of art. Yet, in studies of fifteenth-century Iberian art, this important group of patrons has been largely overlooked. This article examines the high altarpiece of the Church of San Nicolás de Bari in Burgos, which was completed in 1505. Specifically, the article focuses on the eight narrative scenes of the life of Saint Nicholas as depicted at the center of the altarpiece and considers the manner in which these scenes reflect the personal devotion of the altarpiece's merchant patron, Gonzalo López de Polanco. This article compares Polanco's version of the St. Nicholas narrative to the saint's legend as it is represented in contemporary works of art as well as in fifteenth-century devotional and liturgical texts. These comparisons, combined with analysis of Gonzalo López de Polanco's testament, demonstrate the important role that the patron's life and devotion to Saint Nicholas of Bari played in the commission and overall design of his funerary altarpiece.

Manipulating Martyrdom: Corneille's (Hetero)Sexualization of "Polyeucte"

he article offers a reappraisal of one of Pierre Corneille's masterpieces, "Polyeucte" (1643). This tragedy departs radically from the dramatist's named sources, more so than in any other of his works. It is argued here that the plot is altered in order to avoid any potentially subversive readings. There is an obvious political agenda--the monarch is not criticized at any point--but an overlooked factor may be a desire to neutralize the suggestion of homoeroticism. Thus, the play represents an apologia for Christian marriage and intimate relations between the sexes. This manipulation amounts to the portrayal of a heterosexualized hero, far removed from a virgin-martyr stereotype, and from the saint's legend as presented in standard narratives.

Georgij Ugrin v...

This work is devoted to the younger brother of Moses Ugrin and Ephraim Novotorzhsky, who was widely known in old Russian history and literature. The author has collected and has briefly analysed all sources, in which Ugrin is men-tioned. This work considers Ugrin's biography, the issue of his sanctity, as well as the icons and miniatures with his image. The author also provides a critical analysis of the his-torical foundations of the story George Ugrin, which appeared in 2000 in Russia, and which puts forward, in an artistic form some hypotheses about the origin of the three broth-ers, and also about the Ugrin's relationship to Prince Boris of Rostov. In the end of the paper, relevant fragments from sources (such as church annals, legends of saints etc.) are presented, which serve as the evidence on which the arguments put forward in this paper rest.

The Hebrew folktale: history, genre, meaning

The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning. By Eli Yassif. Translated by Jaqueline S. Teitelbaum. Foreword by Dan Ben-Amos. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pp. xx + 561, acknowledgements, notes, index, $59.95 cloth.) The Hebrew Folktale is the magnum opus of Eli Yassif, Professor of Hebrew Literature and Jewish Folklore at Tel Aviv University. In it, Yassif attempts to outline the course of the folktale in Hebrew culture through the ages. he traces the folktale as a part of Hebrew literature, but he is especially concerned with its reflections and refractions of Jewish life in particular historical epochs: biblical, second Temple, rabbinic, medieval, and contemporary. The use of the term folktale in the title is somewhat misleading. What Yassif intends is a survey of Hebrew folk narrative-myth, legend, fable, fairytale, novella, comic anecdote, exemplum-only some of which are to be found in Aarne and Thompson's Types of the Folktale. Indeed, the great emphasis on legends of various kinds and the de-emphasis of wonder tales, jokes, and anecdotes suggest that the English title of this work was chosen with perhaps more aesthetic than descriptive considerations in mind. In the biblical Yassif discusses the remnants of myth in Genesis, the legendary aspects of the story of Job, the fable of Jotham ( judg. 9:6-20), the novella-like aspects of the stories of Joseph and the scroll of Esther, and the story cycles of the Patriarchs. Folk narratives reside beneath the apocryphal and pseudepigraphical writings of the second Temple period-e.g., Maccabees, jubilees, Tobit, juidth, Ahikar. This period-marked by the to Zion, Hellenization, and the Hasmonean revolt-gave rise to the retelling of biblical tales, tales of the wise courtier, martyrological tales, and fairytales. Thematically there is a focus on the confrontation of the Jewish community with foreign domination, community survival, and miraculous rescue. The chapters on the rabbinic and medieval periods are the biggest in the book. The former is the of the talmudic and midrashic compendia that emerged following the destruction of the second temple. Expanded biblical tales (usually tied to a biblical verse), tales of magic and demonology, exempla and parables, and legends about individual rabbis abound. Only comic tales would seem to be a truly novel form in this literature. The Jewish Middle Ages begin with the Islamic expansion at the end of the seventh century. No new genres emerge, and there is considerable repetition, extension, and elaboration of stories, styles, and structures from the previous period, although there are a large number of narratives translated into Hebrew from other languages. Legends predominate, with an emphasis on saints, the exorcism of demons, and the intervention of God in the protection and salvation of Jewish communities assailed and assaulted by antisemitic rulers, clergy, and neighbors. The narratives of the contemporary period (post-medieval) are represented only by Hasidic tales of the zaddik (righteous man, Hasidic leader, collections of which begin to be published in the early nineteenth century), and legends of saints and return to the faith stories told in Israel today. Although these stories are rooted in the realities of modern society, their thematic structures are old. They are employed aggressively today in mass rallies to promote the of the secular community to orthodox belief and practice. The Hebrew Folktale is a work of staggering scope and scholarship, and there is much to be learned from it. But it is also daunting, especially for those with modest knowledge of Hebrew sources. While Yassif tries to explain much, much is left to the reader to unravel. As the work is translated from Hebrew, it might be assumed that readers of the original work would have a greater familiarity with terminology, textual chronology, and the nature of talmudic, midrashic, and other texts. …

The Portrayal of Female Sainthood in Renaissance San Gimignano: Ghirlandaio's Frescoes of Santa Fina's Legend

Domenico Ghirlandaio's two frescoes depicting the Legend of S. Fina in the Collegiata at San Gimignano (intended for the promotion of this local saint's official recognition by the Church) present an ideal image of female sainthood that focuses overwhelmingly on Fina's physical body. Ghirlandaio used Fina's recumbent position on a hard board to his advantage, providing settings that establish her likeness to the Virgin Mary, Christ Crucified, the early martyrs, and the Eucharist. The settings also imply her connection with the institution of the itself both through a visualization of the metaphorical equation of the spiritual and material Church and through reference to the Mass of St. Gregory. In a very brief depiction of a saint's legend unparalleled in the fifteenth century, Ghirlandaio endowed a little-known local female with universal Christian significance.

DIE HEILIGE RITA DES WAGGONBAUWERKS. ALTGERMANISTISCHE ÜBERLEGUNGEN ZU CHRISTA WOLFS DER GETEILTE HIMMEL

In this article the author analyses the progression of the protagonist, Rita Seidel, in Christa Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel. At the outset of the work Rita Seidel is inexperienced in both love and politics; however, at the end of the novel she has become a convinced socialist, able to overcome the loss of her first love Manfred. This development, typical of the “Ankunftsroman”, is however not like that of the “Bildungsroman”; for Wolf's protagonist reason does not appear to be of primary importance, since the contradictory nature of socialist society, as it is presented in the novel, does not lead her change her socialist outlook, but paradoxically it seems to confirm her beliefs in those ideals. The author concludes by arguing that the structure underlying the progression of the heroine in this novel is like that which is to be found in medieval legends of saints; the function of the socialist Rita Seidel in Wolf's novel, not unlike that of the medieval holy figure of the sinner-pope in Hartmann's Gregorius, is to serve as an imitatio to believers.

LYDGATE'S "LIFE OF OUR LADY": A TEXT IN TRANSITION

Lydgate's Life of Our Lady poses a number of difficult questions. What kind of work is it? Is it finished? When was it written? The poem notoriously challenges critical taxonomy. Its traditional title gives no accurate idea of its form: it is neither a `religious biography' nor a conventional saint's legend.2 Criticism is further hampered by uncertainty as to its state of completeness: Derek Pearsall assumes that it is an unfinished fragment of a 'life'; John Norton Smith, conversely, sees it as a complete work `intended for reading during the Christmas Cycle'.3 As for the date of the Life of Our Lady, Pearsall simply states that `It is impossible ... to date the poem accurately.'4 What I shall propose here is that in seeking answers to these questions one must take into account the nature of the text: a text in transition. Il . The judgements of modern critics tend to emphasize the virtues of Lydgate's style in the Life of Our Lady, his imagery, his emotional intensity, the richness and lavishness of his use of traditional motifs, while dismissing the poem's claim to narrative form, representing it rather as an amorphous 'mixture' or 'mosaic' of 'discontinuous' and 'scattered' material.' However, the real problem with narrative structure in Lydgate's poem is simply that different parts of it seem to have been constructed to two quite different designs: a continuous narrative on the one hand, and a series of independent readings on the other. George Keiser argues that of all the programmes of book and chapter division presented by the manuscripts of the Life of Our Lady, the six-book structure alone `probably was authorial'.6 If so, Lydgate planned the very noticeable difference in size between the first three books (I: 889 lines; II: I669; III: i 8o6) and the last (IV: 406 lines; v: 700; VI: 462). Pearsall considers that this disproportion argues `some decline in the impetus of the work' after `the riches of the first three books'.7 There does indeed seem to be a substantial change of direction between Book III and Book Iv: the prayer to the Virgin at the end of the third book is offered `in full conclusion' (III. 804), as if to round off a completed work, and Lydgate's elaborate establishing of a temporal context at the start of the fourth book is full of references to things new (Iv.8, 14). It is true, too, that the last three books are all constructed on the same very simple pattern: each is devoted to one specific incident in the life of the Virgin according to the Gospels of Luke and Matthew (the circumcision of Christ, the visit of the Magi, and the Purification of the Virgin), and in each the narrative of the scriptural event is simply juxtaposed with the explanation of the significance of the liturgical feast in which it is commemorated.8 Nevertheless, by examining carefully the narrative structure of each book, it becomes clear that the really significant division is not between the long Books I-III and the short Books iv-vs, but between the different narrative methods in the first two and the last four books.' Critics have long recognized the logical patterning of the later books and have attempted to explain the structure and function of the Life of Our Lady as a whole in the light of this perceived plan. Pearsall observes: `Especially towards the end, we can see how the material is promised and delivered for the appropriate liturgical feast', and, extending this perception backwards, he claims: `The whole structure of the poem reflects the course of the liturgical year', though Lydgate `only gets as far as the Purification'.'` In Norton Smith's view, the whole poem as it stands is `organized around the Christmas Cycle: its principal points of interest are the major feasts of the Cycle: Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany, and Purification'. This is an attractive interpretation: the poem does not come to an accidental end because for some reason Lydgate was unable to proceed with it but, in Norton Smith's words, moves from `the dark spiritless inertia of Advent' in the Prologue to `the light and spiritual illumination of Candlemas'. …

Nandanar: Untouchable Saint and Caste Hindu Anomaly

Cultural beliefs in support of untouchability are still prevalent in India today despite government efforts and new ideologies to combat them. These beliefs, I suggest, cannot be understood solely as a cultural tradition passively carried forward to the present, but are supported as well by psychological and social dynamics. Here, a study of the differing caste versions of an untouchable saint legend helps reveal some of these psychological and social aspects of untouchability beliefs through a discussion of attribution theory in social psychology and Bakhtin's dialogic approach to literature. In 1984-85 I1 did fieldwork in Tamil Nadu in a Paraiyar (untouchable) community near Chidambaram. From interviews with caste Hindus1 in the vicinity, sharp insights of some untouchable informants, and observances of interactions between caste Hindus and untouchables, I became aware not only of caste Hindus' views of untouchables-views in accord with the traditional Hindu belief that untouchables are inherently polluting, immoral, submissive, and lacking in intelligence-but also noted how cognitive manipulations in attribution processes, in conjunction with Hindu ontology and etiology, helped maintain these views, even in the face of contradictory information, such as an untouchable exhibiting positive qualities. These cognitive processes also became evident as I collected stories about Nandanar, an untouchable saint, and no

Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context

Previous articleNext article No AccessHeathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary ContextGordon WhatleyGordon Whatley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 61, Number 2Apr., 1986 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2854043 Views: 11Total views on this site Citations: 18Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1986 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jeremy Tambling Mars, Jupiter, Saturn: History and Its Reversals, (Mar 2021): 141–191.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65628-7_4Rory McTurk St Erkenwald and the Legendary History of St Paul’s, (Sep 2021): 51–71.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77267-3_3Elizabeth Papp Kamali Felony and the Guilty Mind in Medieval England, 2 (Jul 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108670890Richard H. Godden St. Erkenwald, (Aug 2017): 1–3.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118396957.wbemlb473Brian Cook Reading the Allegory of St. Erkenwald, Neophilologus 101, no.33 (Apr 2017): 455–468.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-017-9525-9Alban Gautier Bibliographie, (Jan 2017): 711–756.https://doi.org/10.4000/books.psorbonne.29238Stefan Schustereder COMING TO TERMS WITH A PAGAN PAST: THE STORY OF ST ERKENWALD, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 48, no.2-32-3 (Dec 2013): 71–92.https://doi.org/10.2478/stap-2013-0008Kathy Lavezzo Nation, (Feb 2013): 363–378.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118328736.ch23Frank Grady Looking Awry at St Erkenwald, Exemplaria 23, no.22 (Jul 2013): 105–125.https://doi.org/10.1179/104125711X12946752336109 Notes, (Mar 2009): 163–241.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511575662.009Seeta Chaganti Silent Inscription, Spoken Ceremony: Saint Erkenwald and the Enshrined Judge, (Jan 2008): 47–71.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615380_3PHILIP SCHWYZER Exhumation and Ethnic Conflict: From St. Erkenwald to Spenser in Ireland, Representations 95, no.11 (Aug 2006): 1–26.https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2006.95.1.1Annemarie Thijms The Sacrament of Baptism in St. Erkenwald: The Perfect Transformation of the Trajan Legend, Neophilologus 89, no.22 (Apr 2005): 311–328.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-004-0960-zFrank Grady The Trouble With Trajan, (Jan 2005): 17–44.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-12367-1_2David Wallace The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, 34 (Mar 2008).https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200Ralph Hanna Alliterative poetry, (Jan 1999): 488–512.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521444200.023 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber Les Noces Feintes: Sur quelques lectures de deux thèmes iconographiques dans les cassoni florentins, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 6 (Oct 2015): 11–30.https://doi.org/10.2307/4603690 Salvatore Settis Traiano a Hearst Castle: Due cassoni estensi, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 6 (Oct 2015): 31–82.https://doi.org/10.2307/4603691

The Cecilia Legend as Chaucer Inherited It and Retold It: The Disappearance of an Augustinian Ideal

By comparing successive versions of an early saint's legend, one can trace the progress of religious ideas across the Middle Ages. The procedure is always illuminating, but there is particular interest in applying it to the Cecilia legend, for this is the only actual saint's legend retold by Chaucer. The implications of Chaucer's version, the narrative he assigns to the Second Nun in the Canterbury Tales, cannot be seen clearly unless one knows the tradition behind it. The Cecilia legend survives in a series of alternative versions that comprise an ideal context for defining the salient features of Chaucer's narrative. The oldest of these versions, and the ultimate source for all the rest, is the longer Passio S. Caeciliae. A derivative historical romance dating from the early Middle Ages,1 the Passio is noteworthy for its intellectual seriousness and its avoidance of the excesses, both in plotting and in theology, that characterize some of the more popular legends. In fact, the central meaning of the Passio resides in a complex ideal of perfection that is close to Augustine's teachings, not only in specific details but also in its balance between affirmation and transcendence of the created order. Of the descendants of the Passio in later centuries, all but a few can be ignored here. Three of the English ones the drastic abridgment by iElfric at the end of the tenth century, the popular adaptation in the Northern Homily Cycle at the end of the fourteenth, and the more detailed account by Osbern Bokenham in the mid-fifteenth, which draws both on the Passio itself and on the Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragine2 will serve to illustrate

Tradition and the Individual Talent of Frances Hodgson Burnett: A Generic Analysis of Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden

Tradition and the Individual Talent of Frances Hodgson Burnett:A Generic Analysis of Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden Phyllis Bixler Koppes (bio) Frances Hodgson Burnett's lasting contribution to children's literature consists of three books, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), and her best work, The Secret Garden (1911). This was Marghanita Laski's assessment in 1951, and subsequent critical opinion has usually agreed with her.1 Burnett's individual achievement in these books can be described by placing them within the appropriate literary traditions. In Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess Burnett combined two genres she knew as a child: the fairy tale and the exemplum. In The Secret Garden she continued to use themes and motifs from these genres, but she gave symbolic enrichment and mythic enlargement to her poetic vision by adding tropes from pastoral tradition at least as old as Virgil's Georgics. Previous descriptions of development in Burnett's three best known works have focused on the increasing depth and subtlety in the portrayal of her main child characters.2 While this approach highlights a special strength of The Secret Garden, it fails to explain why A Little Princess and especially Little Lord Fauntleroy remain "curiously compelling"3 now that beautiful, innocent children are not as fashionable as when Burnett was writing. The following analysis of Burnett's earlier works as fairy tale-exempla, on the other hand, avoids using standards of psychological credibility in characterization more appropriate to realistic novels of child life. Moreover, a discussion of Burnett's use of mythic and pastoral traditions in The Secret Garden, shows this work to be her masterpiece not just because its main child characters are multi-faceted but because the work as a whole is richer than its predecessors in thematic development and symbolic resonance. Both the exemplum and the fairy tale made a deep impression on Burnett as a child. In The One I Knew Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (1893) Burnett was highly critical of the exempla she had read. She described them as "horrible little books" [End Page 191] given by "religious aunts," books "containing memoirs of dreadful children who died early of complicated diseases, whose lingering developments they enlivened by giving unlimited moral advice and instruction to their parents and immediate relatives."4 In "Little Saint Elizabeth" (1890), the story of a child whose good instincts are warped by her aunt's religiosity and by the many "legends of saints and stories of martyrs" she has read, Burnett similarly scorned the excesses of the religious exempla as well as the attempts to imitate them too literally and self-consciously.5 Despite such harsh criticism, however, Burnett returned to this genre repeatedly in her memoir; like Little Saint Elizabeth, she had been much affected by the religious stories she read. "There was nothing she would have been so thankful for as to find that she might attain being an Example," Burnett said of herself as a child; but self-examination had told her that she could not match the fictional children in their high standards of conduct or in their ability to effect instant conversions in others (The One I Knew Best, pp. 188189). Fairy tales, on the hand, provided Burnett with more affectionate memories. As an adult, she had friends on two continents scouring old bookstores for a particular collection of tales which she had owned, memorized, and then lost when she was seven or eight years old. She was retelling the stories to children and was about to publish them when someone found her "Lost Fairy Book." In 1904 she wrote an appreciative preface to a new edition of this work, Granny's Wonderful Chair (1856) by Frances Browne.6 Browne's fairy tales—which are at the same time parables against greed and pride—could well have pointed Burnett toward the combination of fairy tale and exemplum she achieved in Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.7 From the religious exemplum she took the child paragon who has a beneficial influence on those around him; her narratives are secularizations of the story about...

The chivalric dragon: hagiographic parallels in early Spanish romances

The chivalric dragon: hagiographic parallels in early Spanish romances

THE PEARL-POET AND JOHN MASSEY OF COTTON, CHESHIRE

WITH I N the last few years, several pieces of evidence have been brought forward which strongly suggest that a man with the name 'J. Massey' was the author of the Middle English Pearl and of the alliterative saint's legend, St. Erkenwald. As the Pearl-poet is widely considered to be the poet of the other poems of MS. Cotton Nero A. x, Cleanness, Patience, and Gawain and the Green Knight, the identification, if correct, gives us the name, at least, of a major English poet, a man who hitherto has been persistently anonymous. The evidence for this identification has been based in part on the discovery of a poetic reference by Thomas Hoccleve to a contemporary named, simply, 'maister Massy' and who was, according to Hoccleve, greatly skilled in the arts of poetry. At the same time that this reference was noticed, an anagram was found in the Pearl which, unravelled, yielded the signature J. Massi. It was conjectured from the fact that the proper name 'John' yielded theJ of the anagrammatic signature that John may have been the poet's Christian name. This anagram was later confirmed by the discovery of the same signature in St. Erkenwald (sometimes attributed to the Pearl-poet) where it is built into an anagram based strictly upon the numerology of the Pearl anagram. In St. Erkenwald, the anagram again contains the initial J.I The short poem by Hoccleve which devotes 18 of its 27 lines to Massey is included as an envoy in a mid fifteenth-century manuscript of Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes (B.M. MS. Royal D. xviii, f. Ioor). The only other known manuscript of the poem (one which presents a somewhat better text) is headed: 'Ce feust mys en le livre de monseigneur Johan, lors nommez, ore Regent de France & Duc de Bedford.'z Together the two texts

The Physician's "Historical Thyng Notable" and the Man of Law

1MLT: J. S. P. Tatlock, Development and Chronology of Works (1907; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), p. 187; P. Baum, The Man of Law's Tale, MLN, 64 (1949), 192; Nevill Coghill, Poet Chaucer (1949; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 136. PhysT: R. K. Root, Poetry of Chaucer, rev. ed. (1922; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1957), p. 219; E. T. Donaldson, ed., Poetry (New York: Ronald, 1958), p. 927; A. C. Baugh, ed., Major Poetry: An Anthology for the Moderrn Reader (New York: Appleton, 1963), p. 485; Nevill Coghill, Chaucer's Narrative Art, Chaucer and Chaucerians, ed. D. S. Brewer (London: Nelson, 1966), p. 126. For contrary view, see Paul E. Beichner, Chaucer's Man of Law and Disparitas Cultus, Spec, 23 (1948), 70-75, who comments on legal knowledge evinced in MLT; Frederick Tupper, Chaucer's Saints and Sinners, JEGP, 15 (1916), 59-67; and R. M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1955), pp. 195-200, who argue from dubious evidence of the Physician's moral obliquity that his tale was assigned ironically. Two other substantial studies, Edward A. Block, Originalityr, Controlling Purpose, and Craftsmanship in Man of Law's Tale, PMLA, 68 (1953), 572-616, and Michael R. Paull, Influence of the Saint's Legend Genre in the Man of Law's Tale, ChauR, 5, no. 3 (1971), 179-94, are not concerned with appropriateness. Huling E. Ussery, Physician: Medicine and Literature in Fourteenth-Century England, Tulane Studies in English 19 (New Orleans, Louisiana: Dept. of English, Tulane University, 1971), was published after my paper was written. From a careful examination of the medical profession in England in the fourteenth century, Ussery argues persuasively that the Physician would have been in orders. As in his earlier paper, Appropriateness of Physician's Tale to its Teller, PMASAL, 50 (1965), 545-56, he finds the tale appropriate to a learned cleric and physician, whose

Hagiographical Style in Death Comes for the Archbishop

In almost every novel she wrote Willa Cather experimented with a new mode or form of writing: the pastoral in My Antonia, the naturalistic novel, with its wealth of material and psychological detail, in One of Ours, the musical sonata form in The Professor's House, a Jamesian diptych in My Mortal Enemy, the historical novel in Shadows on the Rock. The most successful of these formal experiments is her use of the saint's legend in Death Comes for the Archbishop. In a letter to the editor of The Commonweal she explains that she had wanted for a long time to try something that would be the equivalent in prose of the frescoes of a saint's life, a narrative which, like the non-dramatic stories of the Golden Legend, would have none of the artificial elements of composition. She also explains that for several years she had wanted to write a novel about the Southwest, and that the one subject that particularly captured her imaginative interest there was the story of the Catholic Church. In the saint's legend she found an aesthetic form which provided her, a non-Catholic, with an approach to her subject. But doubtless the real attraction of the saint's legend was that it was a non-dramatic form of narrative which would allow full play to her considerable powers of deSCriptive writing (she had little talent for dramatization). No longer restricted by the necessity of organizing action in terms of plot, or by the need to realize character in terms of psychological cause and effect, she was free to develop her descriptive writing as a mode of reflection upon some of the aesthetic and moral problems with which she was most concerned.

The diet and digestion of allegory in Andreas

As a narrative poem, Andreas usually suffers from comparison with Beowulf. Stanley, for example, writes that the Andreas poet ‘can do the big bow-wow like any man going’, but also that the versified saint's legend is to Beowulf roughly as Cowley's Davideis is to Paradise Lost. Such comparisons are of long standing, and the reasons for them are apparent. Further, the common emphasis in both poems on the language of war and seafaring and the similarities in the larger patterns of their plots – both heroes cleanse foreign lands – imply a degree of dependence. Despite our knowledge, therefore, of Andreas's Greek and Latin sources and of the traditional character of Old English poetic diction, most readers would agree generally, I suppose, with Brodeur's observation that the Andreas poet was familiar with Beowulf and sometimes reproduced its phrasing.

The Middle English Amis and Amiloun: Chivalric Romance or Secular Hagiography?

Romance is one of the most abused generic terms of medieval literature. For a good many scholars it serves as a commodious bottom drawer which will hold almost anything that could not be stored elsewhere. Having been enlarged to mean nothing less than “imaginative fiction,” the term romance communicates very little, especially when it is applied to such a conglomerate body of works as “The Middle English Romances.” Apparently indifferent to the possibilities of greater clarity and meaning through a more circumspect application of the word, scholars have wasted little time on morphological problems in the Middle English romances, and yet they would not discountenance discussions of whether The Scarlet Letter is a novel or a romance. There, indeed, labelling the work with one or the other term becomes a matter of making a statement about the area of meaning of the work and about the techniques with which this meaning is conveyed. In medieval studies, the latitude in application of the term romance and its consequent diminishing usefulness for descriptive purposes might have been felt more keenly if it were not for the assumption that the tracing of the sources of a given work has contributed the most significant part to its understanding. However, the variety of forms that the same story material can demonstrably assume, e.g., the Arthurian tradition, should make us more sensitive to the opinion of some scholars that generic patterns have a more important influence than story material upon the shape of a literary product. Moreover, the concept of genre acts as a kind of perspective which one assumes towards the work one is examining, and depending upon its appropriateness, it can make the structure more or less meaningful. The few writers who have ventured to deal with the whole body of the so-called romances and to make judgments on their respective merits have ignored the possibility that, without finer and more specific terminological distinctions, they may be mistaken about some of the ugly ducklings. Such has been the lot of the Middle English version of the story of Amis and Amiloun, because the perspectives of romance and saint's legend are not identical.

Flaubert's Saint Julien: The Sin of Existing

This streamlined tale, which Flaubert claims to have composed as a relaxing exercise, but which he himself termed “effervescent,” is in fact, in its very craftsmanlike perfection, one of his most turbulent texts. Cruelty, spirituality, pathology—the most disturbing aspects of his temperament as well as the most paradoxical interplay of themes make of this reworking of a minor saint's legend one of Flaubert's most “personal” works. No text of Flaubert's appears on the surface more impassive and more liberated from any element that is not under the strictest esthetic control. The aloofness of an almost inhuman hero, the historical and mythic distance, the utilization of an already existing legend, the display of quaint erudition—all suggest a totally impersonal relation between the author and his literary material.