Medieval Narrative Research Articles

Im Schatten des Baumes. Zur Semantisierung des Schattens im höfischen Roman

The article investigates the meaning of ›shadows‹ in selected courtly romances of the 13th century, most significantly Wirnt von Gravenberg’s Wigalois as well as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Willehalm. The question in focus is whether shadows in medieval narratives perform a specific function. Firstly, the change of meaning of the ›shadow‹ from the rhetorical traditions of antiquity (i.e., locus amoenus) to medieval literary traditions will be examined. In addition, the analysis of relevant scenes in which the shadow of a tree plays an important role helps to answer the question of whether the shadow as narrative tool functions as a significant element in the plot of courtly romances in general.

Consolation in Medieval Narrative. Augustinian Authority and Open Form.By Chad D. Schrock.

Consolation in Medieval Narrative. Augustinian Authority and Open Form.By Chad D. Schrock.

The Practice of Holy Fasting in the Late Middle Ages: A Psychiatric Approach.

During the Late Middle Ages, the practice of fasting among religious women in an attempt to follow a pious and ascetic life was common. In this paper, three cases of medieval religious women are described with a particular attention to the figure of St. Catherine of Siena, her life, popularity, and iconography. In the Middle Ages, holy fasting was characterized by a refusal to eat that could involve binging and purging, lack of menstruation, an interest in cooking for others, and in some cases death due to inanition. In the Medieval narratives of fasting holy women, we can see patterns that are compatible with symptoms of anorexia nervosa. From a psychiatric perspective, it is possible to elucidate and understand the practice of fasting among religious people in the Late Middle Ages.

Η επανάσταση του Nικ. Φωκά και του Νικ. Ξιφία (1021-1022): η τελευταία εσωτερική κρίση στη βασιλεία του Βασιλείου Β΄ (976-1025)

The Phokas-Xiphias Revolution was the third and the last revolution of the age-long reign of Basil II the Bulgar-slayer, led by two renowned generals, Nikephoros Xiphias and Nikephoros Phokas. It broke out in Cappadocia in 1022 with the purpose to overthrow the Byzantine Emperor. Medieval narratives that relater these events written in Greek, Arabic, Georgian, or Armenian, all agree that this insurrection was extremely serious. It involved a large number of rebels within the empire and the insurrectionists were widely believed to be in contact with forces outside the empire, including the Georgian king George I (1014-1027). The revolution broke out when the military conflict between Byzantium and Georgia was still ongoing. Some Georgians including the noble Pheris were actively involved in it. In this article all existing sources on this issue are analyzed. An emphasis is given on the causes of the revolution and its consequences on the Empire’s foreign policy.

What is a Narrator?: Narrator Theory and Medieval Narratives

This article questions the “narrator theory of narration” with particular reference to medieval narratives, often retellings of existing stories, and generally neglected by current theory. Part I analyzes the concept of the internal, potentially unreliable narrator, widely regarded as a narratological necessity. Part II examines the history of the term narrator . Part III studies the theories of narration implied by scribal annotations in some medieval manuscripts. Parts IV, V, and VI discuss three medieval cases—Malory’s Morte Darthur , Chaucer’s Physician’s Tale and the anonymous Pearl —in which application of the narrator theory proves to be misleading.

Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature by Julieann Veronica Ulin (review)

Reviewed by: Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature by Julieann Veronica Ulin Martin L. Warren Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature, by Julieann Veronica Ulin, pp. 216. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. $95. Jennifer Veronica Ulin’s study opens with the 1890 obituary of the landlord and politician Arthur McMurrough-Kavanagh (misidentified in the original obituary as Alexander), whose misfortune was to be born without arms and legs. Harold Frederic, the obituary’s author, identifies McMurrough-Kavanagh’s bodily misfortune as emblematic of a curse laid on the MacMurroughs for sowing the seeds of the English colonization of Ireland when the twelfth-century Diarmuid Mac Murrough invited English forces to aid him in regaining his position as ruler of Leinster. Diarmuid Mac Murrough’s fateful bringing of the English to Ireland took place between 1152–72, and in Ireland’s collective memory, those twenty years came to be characterized as the source for the modern English presence. This narrative is the origin story, the foundational colonial story, that lies at the center of Ulin’s Medieval Invasions in Modern Irish Literature. Ulin’s study examines how writers as varied as Lady Gregory, James Joyce, Sean O’Faolain, Brendan Behan, and Jamie O’Neill employ the origin story “in order to disrupt the [End Page 154] causal relationship between the series of events in 12th-century Ireland and its modern condition, to portray modern Ireland’s entrapment within medieval narrative cycles believed to prefigure the present, or to imagine what escape might be possible from the modern legacy of the medieval period.” Ulin posits that by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers began to question the inherited narrative regarding Ireland’s misfortunes: “In inviting the medieval into the modern texts, writers over the last century and a half disrupted rather than simply preserved or revered the historical narrative, thereby dismantling and reimaging the national story.” The impetus for this questioning, according to Ulin, begins in the late nineteenth century with newly translated sources that allowed for challenges to the most influential account events seven centuries earlier, Giraldus Cambrensis’s History of the Conquest of Ireland. Ulin asserts that her book provides the first full account of how the reimagining of events disrupts “the received causal narrative of Irish history, to reframe a range of present conflicts in light of that history and to invite alternative conceptions of the modern nation.” Cambrensis’s account had established a causal relationship between the abduction of Dervorgilla and the Norman invasion. In the first chapter, “Modern Disruptions,” Ulin meticulously outlines how the nineteenth-century translation of such histories as The Annals of Clonmacnoise, The Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland, The Annals of Loch Cé, and The Annals of Ulster led to scholarly debate over the significance of Dervorgilla’s abduction in precipitating the Anglo-Norman invasion. Having laid the foundation, Ulin goes on to demonstrate how this scholarly debate has acted as a catalyst, down to the present day, for Irish writers to examine the origin story in their own texts. For example, in chapter one she analyzes how two early novelists understood the causal narrative of Irish history in differing ways. Charles Gibson’s 1857 novel, Dearforgil: The Princess of Brefney, A Historical Romance of 1152–1172, strongly reinforces the traditional understanding of the origin story by linking Dervorgilla’s abduction to Henry II’s appearance in Ireland in 1172, while Anna Scanlan’s 1895 novel, Dervorgilla, or the Downfall of Ireland, challenges the “gender blame game” of the origin story that portrays Dervorgilla as an Eve who brings about the fall of Ireland. Using these and other texts, Ulin demonstrates the disruptive force of such literary re-imaginings. The next chapter, “Medieval Cycles,” establishes with great skill how Yeats and Lady Gregory, among other Irish writers, employed the medieval origin story to reframe a range of conflicts present in their own times. Ulin analyzes Yeats’s 1919 play, The Dreaming of the Bones, and Lady Gregory’s 1907 play, Dervorgilla, each of which foreground the significance of Irish medieval history to the narrative construction of its modern colonial conflict. Gregory’s play centers “on the aesthetic construction of this history, focusing not...

Response Time: Linear, Nonlinear, Queer

The asynchronous temporalities Gentile analyzes in her chillingly compelling article are deeply troubling to anyone concerned with gender and racial justice in the United States today. Dinshaw raises questions for further discussion that concern temporality in psychoanalytic theories of the subject and the psychically disenabling nature of temporal linearity and unidirectionality, citing queer theorist Tim Dean’s (2011) work on HIV/AIDS and temporal anxiety. She ends with a medieval narrative that offers an alternative vision that does not fetishize the fetus at the expense of the mother, as do Gentile’s disturbing examples, but rather sees the pregnant body as a site of creative asynchronicity and meaning making.

Traveling Companions: Narrative Diffusion of <em>Floire et Blancheflor</em> in Medieval Miscellany, 1325–1400

All models are wrong, but some are useful.-George BoxThere are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.-Mark TwainIntroductionIdentifying how a narrative travels from one place and time to another, and hence from one culture or community to another, remains a persistent problem in both folklore studies and literary history. Often, the movement of narratives must be triangulated and approximated from the surviving evidence. For the medieval period, such evidence is often scant and difffijicult to evaluate-of the narratives that survive in written material at all, many of those survive in only a handful of manuscripts. This article contends that when the manuscript corpus of a medieval narrative is found largely in a specifijic type of manuscript-the vernacular anthology or miscellany-one can use the increased context provided by the anthology to trace the geographic and temporal difffusion of a narrative across literary communities and to see what companion narratives travel with a given story. Using the foundational European tale of Floire and Blancheflor, I explore what a narrative's traveling companions across its surviving corpus can tell us about the narrative cultures through which it traveled.Floire and Blancheflor fijirst appears in the written record as the twelfth-century Old French romance Floire et Blancheflor. It possesses a moderate number of manuscript witnesses, but so many or so few as to render it an outlier among surviving Old French narratives. Further, the manuscript witnesses appear across a wide swath of geographic and linguistic areas, from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Ultimately, I suggest four iterations of traveling companions for the tale: (1) Floire and Blancheflor, Berte of the Big Feet, and Mainete; (2) Floire and Blancheflor, Berte of the Big Feet, and Claris and Laris; (3) Floire and Blancheflor, Amadas and Ydoine, and Partonopeus of Blois, and (4) Floire and Blancheflor, Blancandin and Orgeuilleuse d'Amour, and Partonopeus of Blois. Viewing Floire and Blancheflor as fundamentally tied to these sets of stories in a given narrative community changes our understanding of the narrative's reception in its time.With the rapidly increasing commercialization of manuscript production over the thirteenth century, bespoke vernacular manuscripts were increasingly available to the wealthy, secular public. While some of these codices contained only a single text, many were what are now referred to as vernacular literary anthologies. It now appears that a great deal of the so-called miscellany manuscripts are, in fact, organized according to principles ranging from rudimentary groupings of thematically related texts to an elaborate overall design (Huot 11). Who, exactly, was doing that organizing is open to question; however, it would have necessitated a complex interaction between bookseller, scribe, and patron. As the written trace of a complex narrative culture, manuscripts were assembled not casually but deliberately, as a result of someone's decision that it should exist, as a result of common or group decision that it should be made in this fashion and another (Rouse and Rouse 3). This intentionality does discount the possibility that such seemingly random collections of texts simply existed for the sake of convenience, or so that the reader would have more than one story at hand. However, when patterns of association between individual narratives crop up repeatedly across multiple such manuscripts, we can make begin to hypothesize about the potential thematic, cultural, or historic connections between them.New Codicology1 values the codex as an object of inquiry rather than the corpus, treating each codex as a living artifact rich with multiple sites of meaning (material, textual, and historical). In this scenario, each book is an idiosyncratic individual, capable of being parsed only when confronted as a whole. …

Merlin’s Conception by Devil in William Rowley’s Play The Birth of Merlin

Rowley’s early modern play amalgamates both the medieval Galfridian-based and Francophone narratives of Merlin’s conception by daemon, incubus, and devil in order to engage contemporary debates on the devil’s influence in the world, to ventriloquize social commentary via the figure of the Clown, and to have Merlin hail Prince Charles as the future Arthur.

History and Chronicles in Late Medieval Iberia: Representations of Wamba in Late Medieval Narrative Histories, by Aengus Ward

History and Chronicles in Late Medieval Iberia: Representations of Wamba in Late Medieval Narrative Histories, by Aengus Ward

Dream Vision in Chaucer's Poetry

Dream vision is an important and well _ known medieval narrative genre in poetry . The basic framework is that the confused narrator falls asleep and dreams , then his dream will be the main story. The dream often takes the form of allegory , enigmatic , and it needs a kind of interpretation on the part of the reader .After the troubled narrator is awakened , he determines to write his dream in a poem . 1 Dream vision poetry has an impressive and extensive image, which has been widely commented upon . Falling asleep, dreaming , dream vision , prophetic visitations and oracular guidance are familiar motifs from a number of widely known literary sources , like for example in the Bible , Greek and Latin classics , continuing in to the late antiquity and in to the medieval period . 2 Dream visions have important elements in common , firstly, all dream visions are written in the first person . The narrator becomes the dreamer and tells the story as his own experience . Sometimes , the dreamer becomes the protagonist of the dream fiction , and other times , he is only an observer as in Chaucer 's Book of the Duchess .3

La littérature à l’éprouvette by Jean-François Chassay

medieval characters modeled on Mordred who mimic his deeds. In his stand-out essay anchored on Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Griffith reveals a treasure trove of rich representations and reinterpretations of Merlin: that shapeshifting prophet-magician, conceived by demonic rape (or adultery), who acts as a morally ambiguous independent agent, straddling the sacred and the sinful, at times threatening to usurp even authorial power. Kamath’s essay analyzes the allegorical Livre du Cuer d’Amours Espris wherein the author René d’Anjou casts himself as the hero Heart who fails in service to Love, bested by the anti-hero Refusal. Although the essay fits less naturally into the volume, it opens a welcome window into the emotional life of the late-medieval aristocratic male and adds a dimension of introspection lacking in other medieval narratives. The chapters dedicated to character-types present thought-provoking material (“Crusaders,” “Saracens,”and most fascinatingly“Ungallant Knights”where James Wade considers the codicological context of stories in household miscellanies), but devote little attention to French literature—excepting “Son of Devils” wherein Cartlidge examines the offspring of demonic unions (Marie de France’s Yonec, Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Robert le Diable) and probes such important issues of medieval identity as the trauma of recognizing one’s own sinfulness. Cartlidge provides a useful, if brief, introduction, but to appreciate the thematic threads that bind the essays, one must read the book. There is no comprehensive bibliography and the skeletal index inexplicably includes“kitchen implements, as weapons”but overlooks key common concepts such as“incest,”“rape,” or “adultery.” That the book leaves us thirsting for more—for other (anti)heroes and certainly for (anti)heroines who appear only tangentially here—proves its value. New York University Marilyn Lawrence Chassay, Jean-François. La littérature à l’éprouvette. Montréal: Boréal, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7646-2131-8. Pp. 140. $19,95 Can. Chassay’s major interest is the interaction between science and literary culture. This book provides a fine example of his knowledge in both areas. His essential argument in the five essays which constitute this collection is that the dichotomy often proclaimed between literary and scientific cultures reflects a major, albeit wide-spread simplification, and that scientific inquiry shares many elements with literary undertakings . According to Chassay,it was a combination of the Cold War and“la découverte de l’ADN” (128) that gave impetus to this split, and that rather than the two being opposed,“la fiction investit la science”(123). Although Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is not mentioned, Kuhn’s ideas pervade Chassay’s thinking. He conceives of scientific research as permeated by acts of the imagination and notes how much scientific explanation develops by means of metaphors. His essays all loosely follow the same structure. He begins with a discussion of a scientific concept or creation (the computer, for example), explains its history and potential, 258 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 259 and then entertains some academic hand-wringing about how this scientific advance threatens humanistic culture. The bulk of what follows will then demonstrate how artists, contemporary and from earlier eras, have already imagined or used this aspect of science in their literary works. In terms of artistic sources, Chassay is not limited to the Francophone world; he draws his examples from the literature of Europe (East and West), and the Americas. For those already open to a healthy interchange between the sciences and the arts, the arguments made may not seem terribly new, but what provides them with a renewed vitality,is Chassay’s relaxed,often ironic style.He is something of a provocateur, but one who knows what he is talking about. Thus a sentence like “au Moyen Âge, les populations avaient une mémoire beaucoup plus importante que la nôtre” (114) might initially raise some eyebrows, but, as a variety of scholars have demonstrated, it is quite true. Throughout this collection Chassay confronts complacent lieux communs with facts and this is nowhere more evident than in his rebuttal of the regularly announced death of literature. Chassay scoffs at this notion and suggests instead that if literature suffers, it is from...

Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance ed. by Neil Cartlidge

Reviews 257 modernists should be advised, however, that Braga’s concerns lie less with the genre’s immediate intellectual and literary contexts than with a larger dynamic, which he attributes to the perennial Western search for the lost paradise of Genesis. Although the reason-experience dichotomy provides a useful intellectual framework, it is sometimes cumbersome. It does not serve to order his diverse corpus into distinctive French and British traditions, since many texts appear in both parts. Detailed discussions of imagination’s place in the thought of succeeding rationalists or empiricists do not yield sufficient interpretive insights. And the treatment of verisimilitude under the empiricist rubric leads to some overly schematic characterizations of the French fictional tradition. Since Braga is at his best when detecting mythical antecedents or charting the displacement of marvelous worlds, one wishes he had foregrounded the mythical and psychological underpinnings of his argument. Nonetheless, this book offers an insightful exploration of anti-utopia’s early modern antecedents and of their connections to the larger story of modernity’s repression of ‘la pensée enchantée.’ Dartmouth College (NH) Kathleen Wine Cartlidge, Neil, ed. Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance. Cambridge: Brewer, 2012. ISBN 978-1-84384-304-7. Pp. x + 248. £50. This book explores the complexities behind the seemingly clear-cut polarity of hero versus villain in medieval romance. It examines the contradictions in and evolution of select characters and character-types, both intradiegetically and from a literary-historical perspective. Most essays in the collection concentrate on English literature, referring intermittently to French works as influences and models. However , six of the fourteen chapters provide meaty analysis of medieval French and Anglo-Norman material, namely the chapters dedicated to “Turnus” (Penny Eley), “Hengist” (Margaret Lamont),“Mordred” (Judith Weiss),“Merlin” (Gareth Griffith), “The Anti-heroic Heart” (Stephanie Viereck Gibbs Kamath), and “Sons of Devils” (Neil Cartlidge). In clear and careful close readings, Eley shines her scholarly spotlight on the long-overlooked character of Turnus. She deftly explores possible religious, social, historical, and political reasons why the heroic Turnus of Virgil’s Aeneid morphs into an antihero for audiences of twelfth-century Christian, feudal France in the Roman d’Eneas.With impressive breadth, Lamont traces how the ninth-century villain Hengist emerges as a nineteenth-century hero thanks to Wace (Roman de Brut) and other poets who grappled with the cultural and genealogical amalgamation underlying a nascent English national identity. Weiss’s skillful survey of four centuries of revisionist retellings tracks the moral degeneration of Mordred—from Arthur’s fellow (non-consanguineous) warrior, to Arthur’s traitorous nephew who incestuously desires Guinevere, to Arthur’s son by incest with his sister—and touches on countless medieval characters modeled on Mordred who mimic his deeds. In his stand-out essay anchored on Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Griffith reveals a treasure trove of rich representations and reinterpretations of Merlin: that shapeshifting prophet-magician, conceived by demonic rape (or adultery), who acts as a morally ambiguous independent agent, straddling the sacred and the sinful, at times threatening to usurp even authorial power. Kamath’s essay analyzes the allegorical Livre du Cuer d’Amours Espris wherein the author René d’Anjou casts himself as the hero Heart who fails in service to Love, bested by the anti-hero Refusal. Although the essay fits less naturally into the volume, it opens a welcome window into the emotional life of the late-medieval aristocratic male and adds a dimension of introspection lacking in other medieval narratives. The chapters dedicated to character-types present thought-provoking material (“Crusaders,” “Saracens,”and most fascinatingly“Ungallant Knights”where James Wade considers the codicological context of stories in household miscellanies), but devote little attention to French literature—excepting “Son of Devils” wherein Cartlidge examines the offspring of demonic unions (Marie de France’s Yonec, Robert de Boron’s Merlin, Robert le Diable) and probes such important issues of medieval identity as the trauma of recognizing one’s own sinfulness. Cartlidge provides a useful, if brief, introduction, but to appreciate the thematic threads that bind the essays, one must read the book. There is no comprehensive bibliography and the skeletal index inexplicably includes“kitchen implements, as weapons...

Forms of Perspective and Chaucer's Dream Spaces: Memory and the Catalogue in <em>The House of Fame</em>

In the medieval intellectual tradition, the interior of an architectural space was well established as a metaphor for a different kind of interiority, the invisible space within the mind. The classical conceit of the memory palace--an ancient rhetorical technique for the organization of the memory as an internalized series of rooms--provided medieval authors with a practical tool for mnemonic enhancement as well as an imaginative means by which to link mental and physical interiors within the spaces of narrative. (1) Several recent discussions of space in medieval English literature, building on the work of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, have explored the social, political, and cultural implications of but few have closely considered the relationship between these two different forms of interior the material and the mental/memorial. (2) The role that plays in the narrative representation of space fundamentally links these two forms of interiority, and, in his discussion of Perspective and the presentation of space, F. K. Stanzel usefully emphasizes the connection between visual or spatial and the subjective perspective of narration (115-22; section 5.2). Tracing the complexity of interior spaces in inward-looking medieval fictions can extend and nuance the conclusions about in narrative that Stanzel draws based largely on 19th and 20th-century novels. (3) Although in the past romance has played the most prominent role in the application of narrative theory to medieval texts, (4) the conventions of the medieval dream vision--in which an autodiegetic narrator or narrator-hero typically reports the events of a dream after waking--ideally position this genre for investigation in terms of the relationship between and the representation of interior space. (5) For medieval writers like Chaucer, the depths of the mind and physical interior spaces could not be mapped onto one another perfectly, nor were they incommensurable: the medieval first-person narrative can demonstrate how the perceiving mind or consciousness organizes and makes sense of physical space in ways that resemble how the trained mind or memory organizes and makes sense of its own accumulated cognitive contents. Three of Chaucer's dream visions--The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, and The House of Fame--closely link interior spaces with subjectivity, inwardness, and problems of perspective, but this essay will focus primarily on The House of Fame, a dream narrative structured as a personal journey through a series of three interior spaces. (6) Each of these dream visions, however, follows its respective narrator-dreamer as he moves through various interior spaces, on one level reproducing the mise-en-abyme effect of framed dream narrative itself, a multiply embedded voyage within the mind. The temples, palaces, walled gardens, and stranger interiors represented in these dream poems are most often constructed through the literary device of the catalogue, in which the contents of a given room are listed at length but rarely placed in precise spatial relation to one another. Drawing uncritically on Stanzel's distinction between perspectival and aperspectival spatial representation, one might not hesitate to associate these dream visions with the uncomplicated aperspectivism of the early Victorian novels to which he points. Yet the contexts and complications of spatial in medieval narratives like the House of Fame challenge the binary impulse of typologies like Stanzel's. The poem includes both aperspectival inventories and a handful of more perspectival depictions of spatial relations among objects, but the key technique of the list or catalogue, understood in the context of the medieval rhetorical arts, must be reevaluated as a unique organizing schema for representing and making sense of interior spaces. To employ the catalogue as the primary tool of spatial description may seem capable of producing only a jumbled, aperspectival representation of an interior, but the strategy aligns with the narrator's difficult task of organizing into narrative description and rendering intelligible the overwhelming profusion of information confronting his senses. …

Vespasiano in America: conquistadors, gold, anti-Semitism, and the Spanish Black Legend

One of the most persistent negative cultural stereotypes in the West is purveyed by the myth known as the “Spanish Black Legend,” a form of orientalism and anti-Semitism that portrays Spaniards as uniquely brutal and greedy, assigning to them the role of “the other” traditionally held by Muslims and Jews. This article examines the use made in the early modern era of medieval narratives about the fall of Jerusalem to the Romans in AD 70, focusing on the anonymous late fifteenth-century Castilian romance known as the Historia del noble Vespasiano. The latter's dramatic visual illustrations of death, destruction and gold-ingesting prefigure some of the images of the conquistadors as articulated by the Spanish Black Legend, including the famous Theodore De Bry woodcut that depicts Indians pouring molten gold down the throats of Spaniards, a striking parallel with the scene of the Jews forced to eat powdered gold in Vespasiano.

Medieval Storytelling and Analogous Oral Traditions Today: Two Digital Databases

We are pleased to present two open-access digital databases of video clips from performances of medieval narratives and analogous living oral storytelling traditions: Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase (http://www.nyu.edu/pmnt, [PMNT]) and Arthurian Legend in Performance (https://vimeo.com/ArthurPerform, [ALP]). While in the process of editing, along with our colleague Nancy Freeman Regalado, a book entitled Performing Medieval Narrative (Vitz et al. 2005), we came up against a challenge: to most people, including many academics, it was simply inconceivable that the narrative literature of the medieval past had been performed. The underlying thinking, at least among scholars in modern literature departments, was that such works survive as books, and that books are to be read—silently. People were of course aware of references to performance within medieval texts, but these references did not seem believable or, more precisely, such performances were not imaginable. Most people had never seen narrative works from the Middle Ages performed and had trouble understanding how they could be performed. Their primary experience with live storytelling was typically the type of bookish entertainment provided for children in public libraries and independent bookshops. Storytelling in the West has been largely infantilized in the past century, making it difficult for many people to understand how adults of any level of sophistication might in the past have enjoyed watching and listening to the performance of narrative—in other words, storytelling. To help people conceptualize ways in which narratives might have been performed in the Middle Ages, and to experiment with various new ways medieval narratives might be performed for audiences today, we began work on our website Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase. We created the pilot version of PMNT with a team from the Digital Studio of New York University Libraries, with Jennifer Vinopal as Project Manager.1 Launched in 2004, the website was hacked in 2011. When forced to shut down PMNT, we migrated the contents and rebuilt the site with the generous support of Vinopal and the team at NYU’s Digital Studio. Benefiting from technological advancements, the new PMNT, launched in 2012 at http:// www.nyu.edu/pmnt, allows for broader and easier searching of its contents, and, unlike our original site, can be accessed from smartphones and other mobile devices. Oral Tradition, 28/2 (2013):279-290

The Trojan Ass: Asinarius as Mock Epic

The medieval narrative poem Asinarius (late 12th-early 13th c.) has commonly been considered a fairy tale ante litteram, predating the self-conscious development of the literary genre from early modern times onward. Under influence of the deeply rooted notion that fairy tales have their origins in oral-folkloric traditions, scholars who have studied this text have tended to do so in terms of its supposed indebtedness to folktales, possibly even derived from Indian mythology. Meanwhile, its essential nature as a piece of Latin literature has been largely neglected. This article proposes a literary contextualizing of the text, situating it within the broader field of Latin literature. More specifically, it argues that the Asinarius poet playfully engages with epic texts, both ancient and contemporary, dealing with the matter of Troy. Thus, the reader is invited to a mock-epic reading of the poem, all too easily obfuscated today by an anachronistic “Grimmian”perspective.

A Middle English Version of Saint Ursula's Prayer Instruction in Nijmegen, Universiteitsbibliotheek, HS 194

Dating back to the late antique period, the martyrdom of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins became a focus of devotion in the late medieval and early modern period in continental Europe and the British Isles. Jacobus de Voragine discussed St. Ursula's martyrdom in detail in the Legenda Aurea , which included a prayer instruction that St. Ursula revealed to a dying monk in return for his faithful devotion to her. Taking their cue from St. Ursula's revelation in the Legenda Aurea , late medieval narratives such as the Shropshire Miracle expanded the prayer instruction revealed by St. Ursula and contextualized it in the historical setting of the life of the fifteenth-century English hermit John of Warwick. The Shropshire Miracle, in turn, was embedded in lives of St. Ursula, which were exported from England to Germany, and subsequently imported back into England. The key feature of these late medieval and early modern sources is the prayer instruction revealed by St. Ursula, a form of reciprocated devotion which cemented the reputation of St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins on the one hand, and on the other hand ensured protection in this life and access to heaven for the petitioner. While Ursuline prayer instructions survive in large numbers in Latin, the number of instructions in English is limited. The fifteenth-century English manuscript Nijmegen, Universiteitsbibliotheek, HS 194 contains a uniquely attested and re-contextualized version of St. Ursula's prayer instruction that is here situated within the medieval and early modern development of the cult of St. Ursula and printed for the first time.

“The Road Not Taken”: Virtual Narratives inThe Franklin’s Tale

One of the most distinctive features of medieval narratives identified thus far is their tendency to weave into their narrative fabric stories that are briefly referred to or implied but remain undeveloped. Recent research in narrative poetics can, however, help bring to light other, previously unrecognized features of medieval and other premodern texts. Possible world theory and the concept of virtual narratives, in particular, can show that medieval narratives are also structured by events (e.g., plans, dreams) that, though thoroughly described, are never realized: they remain, instead, virtual to the end. This essay studies Geoffrey Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale because, among medieval narratives, it flaunts the richest domain of the virtual. Its plot largely revolves around not what happens in its story world but what could happen in it and yet does not. Paying attention to virtual strings of events in this tale helps us evaluate the characters’ behavior and draw critical conclusions about Chaucer’s aesthetic purposes. It also enables us to trace the development of the genre of lai, to which this tale belongs. A comparative study of the earlier lais of Marie de France and Sir Orfeo suggests that The Franklin’s Tale marks a moment in the history of genre development when medieval lais, due to Chaucer’s interest in unrealized possibilities, begin to resemble modern psychological narratives more than medieval romances.

Medieval narratives between history and fiction: from the centre to the periphery of Europe, c. 1100-1400

The of literary fiction in medieval Europe has been a hotly debated topic for at least two decades. Important progress has been made, but difficulties remain in finding a common ground among scholars from various disciplines and regions. The present volume seeks to clarify and broaden the subject in two ways: first by including a wide range of medieval narratives irrespective of their modern label and affiliation to certain disciplines; secondly, these studies extend the discussion beyond the canonical French and German romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by focusing mainly on texts in Greek, Latin, and Old Norse and by opting for a peripheral and a long-term view of the problem. The chapters take us from Greco-Roman antiquity to medieval France, then to the Scandinavian lands and from there to south-eastern Europe and Byzantium as the link back to the Greco-Roman world. This disposition also follows a spiral motion in time: from Antiquity to Late Antiquity and from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. By broadening the linguistic as well as the geographical and chronological scope of the debate, the book shows that we should not think of one rise of fiction, but rather of a potential always imbued in, and related to, historical narratives and that a modern understanding of medieval fiction cannot afford to disregard non-fictional or non-vernacular writing.