Sir Thopas Research Articles

Romance with a Difference: The Squire’s Tale and Sir Thopas

ABSTRACT The unfinished Squire’s Tale and Sir Thopas are often characterized as imperfect or parodic representations of the romance genre. However, far from being examples of artistic failure, their generic and stylistic incongruities suggest Chaucer was attempting a sweeping revision of tired generic clichés and paving the way for future innovators. His playful treatment of the genre disrupts the structural integrity of the tales and ultimately prevents either from finding resolution. Despite this, both have a huge amount of aesthetic value, and their presence within the larger Canterbury Tales framework shows that Chaucer was willing to forgo completion in service of generic renewal. By examining how the Squire’s Tale and Sir Thopas deviate from the norms of the romance genre, this article argues that Chaucer was trying to write romances in a different way, and it offers a new understanding of the composition and value of the Squire’s Tale.

Little Lewis and Latin Folk in Chaucer's Prologue to the Treatise on the Astrolabe

Little Lewis and Latin Folk in Chaucer's Prologue to the <i>Treatise on the Astrolabe</i>

Imagining the Bob and Wheel

AbstractMedieval poetic forms defy classification, and yet medievalists trade in postmedieval formalist taxonomies—sometimes without reflecting on their history. This essay takes up the case of the “bob and wheel,” a rhyming flourish best known fromSir Gawain and the Green Knightand Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas. This form, which has no given name or firmly set shape in the manuscripts in which it is found, was codified by the philologist Edwin Guest in 1838. This essay tracks the history of the interpretation of the bob and wheel across time, from the Middle Ages to the present day, and finds that it has been imagined as a tail, a game, and a cog in a machine. These phantasmic images have not only represented but also influenced readers’ experience of this form—reflectinganddiffracting, bringing before-unseen patterns of meaning into focus and resonating with before-unheard synchronous frequencies.

Parody and Subversion of Chivalric Values in the Tale of Sir Thopas and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Medieval romances such as the Tale of Sir Thopas and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are traditionally associated with the values of knighthood and chivalry. This paper, however, argues that, instead of extolling the idealistic concepts of chivalry such heroic quests and courtly manners, many medieval romances, with the two romances examined as cases in point, offer an alternative perspective towards chivalry, one that parodies and subverts such chivalric values as pretentious and hollow. This parody and subversion of chivalric values such as knightly bravery and feats of heroism involves the methodology of first setting up readers’ expectation for a heroic romance and then engaging in generic manipulation that undermines the overly idealistic professions of knightly valor and courtly chivalry. Finally, the end of this exposure regarding the shortcomings of chivalric values can be surmised as a “fourteenth century political and social commentary” towards the chivalric ideals that is increasingly becoming irrelevant.

Sensory Satires and the Virtues of Herbs in Sir Thopas’s Fair Forest

Sensory Satires and the Virtues of Herbs in Sir Thopas’s Fair Forest

“How Strange Life is!”: The Performative Narrator and Chaucerian Similarities in Steven Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Stephen Leacock’s humorous Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) is now less known outside Canada, but was in its time possibly more recognized abroad than the country was, and remains a foundational touchstone of Canadian fiction. Yet its genial humor has brought it affection but slighter academic regard, and its amorphous narrator has received criticism for his claimed inconsistency in knowledge level and identity. This article asserts that this alleged inconsistency can be explained by the example of Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas. While it is an odd connection, Chaucer also deploys a narrator who knowingly employs a lowered or counterfactual viewpoint, and so both the poem and the Sketches are contextualized as explicit performances. Recognizing the narrator’s guise as an admitted reciter separate from his fictive story may help elucidate this critical issue and raise regard for Leacock’s masterpiece.

Cute Chaucer

ABSTRACTReading Sir Thopas through cuteness shifts critical attention from the tale’s generic classification to questions of aesthetics and affect. The production of cute features through infantilization and feminization triggers tender caretaking and sadistic aggression; the cute object is paradoxically held gently and squeezed violently. Under the duress of the cute response, the Chaucerian narrator, Thopas, and the text become deformed. The flattening of physical and textual bodies leads to the obliteration of verticality and depth. Drawing on the superflat movement in Japanese contemporary art, I argue that cuteness in Sir Thopas effects a compression of the text’s narrative layers and semiotic networks. Mirroring the horizontal, non-linear organization of the poem’s layout in medieval manuscripts, desire moves sideways across Sir Thopas. The lateral mobility and the agglutinating property of cuteness allow it to adhere to and cutify objects in its vicinity; the catalogues of romance tropes in Sir Thopas thereby function as cute object clusters within a late medieval middling household. Too much sticky sweetness, however, results in revulsion and not adoration. When the Host interrupts Chaucer and compares the poem to excrement, he enacts the labile fungibility of cuteness and disgust. Sir Thopas is both feces and a dainty thing.

Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, ed. Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, 104. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. ix, 224.

Readers of Chaucer become accustomed to his self-deprecating humor. In one famous example, the character of Chaucer the Canterbury pilgrim begins telling the tale of a knight named Sir Thopas who tries to rescue the elf queen. He uses such complicated verse forms that the host tells him to stop the “rym doggerel” and to “telle in prose somewhat.” Chaucer the poet thus shows his virtuosity and his humanity. The host is not an uncultured boor, as some early critics said; however, the pilgrim does not speak as Chaucer himself would have done on such an occasion.

The Change in Chaucerian Aesthetics: From The Tale of Sir Thopas to The Tale of Melibe

The Change in Chaucerian Aesthetics: From The Tale of Sir Thopas to The Tale of Melibe

Sir Thopas: A Story for Young Children

This article proposes that Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas is a children's story—that is, to borrow F. J. Harvey Darton's succinct definition, a work designed "to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them." Previously, no English children's books have been identified prior to the sixteenth century: Sir Thopas is by some 100 years the oldest extant children's story in England. The article further proposes that Sir Thopas is part of an extended experiment in writing for and about children. The tale's placement in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales between The Prioress's Tale and The Tale of Melibee signals Chaucer's interest in writing for and about children, and encourages us to appreciate his pioneering artistry in an important new way. Looking out for a fresh device, Chaucer recognized that children like to see themselves in a story; that they can enjoy a story without understanding everything in it; that they can read or listen without having things explained to them; and that it is acceptable if, like young Thopas, they are simply laughing and playing.

In Flaundres

The Biennial Chaucer Lecture In Flaundres David Wallace Vniversity ofPennsylvania for Miri Rubin Social anxiety ...is just maladjustment to change.But who has anticipated, or adjusted to, the scale of change in Southern California over the last fifteen years? ...the urban galaxy domi­ nated by Los Angeles is the fastest growing metropolis in the ad­ vanced industrial world. Mike Davis, City ofQuartz T,space of Chaucec studies is still p,eeminently England: ostensibly fourteenth-century England, but often the England of those Victorian founding fathers honored by one ofour sessions. 1 The time of Chaucer studies has been closely complicit with that of regnal history; recent interest in the Lancastrians may confirm the habit of situating Chaucer along the timeline of emergent English nationalism. But This text represents "In Flaundres," a talk given at the Huntington Library on 27 July 1996. Some substantiating details, sacrificed to the fifty-minute format, have been re­ stored. I have reprieved one paragraph (cut for the talk) on Sir Thopas as a Flemish tap­ estry; I have added one crucial sentence on the discovery of Flanders, as recorded by Bavaria Herald, as "dat woeste land" ("the waste land"). 1 "Foundational Moments: England"; Derek Brewer, presiding, with Sigmund Eisner, Charlotte Brewer, and Steve Ellis. Ellis, in his unpublished paper "Chaucer's England, England's Chaucer," discusses fascinating and egregious Victorian attempts to endow Chaucer with essential Englishness. F. D. Maurice, for example, wrote in 1866 that Chaucer "has been called a Wycliffite. He is not that. He is simply an Englishman. He hates friars, because they are not English and not manly. He loves the poor parson, because he is English and manly" (qtd. in Ellis, p. 2). 63 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER fourteenth-century Chaucer is not, in these senses, a poet of England: his native ground-the place where he spent most of his time-is not "England," but rather the eastern quadrant of a terrirory immediately abutting continental Europe. In strict political terms, this territory ex­ tended into the continental landmass, after 1347, with Edward Ill's col­ onizing ofCalais; Flanders was hence to be seen as a border country.2 In simple economic terms,hence in the practice ofeverydaylife-the myr­ iad exchanges of language, manufacturing, foodstuffs, tydinges, and merchandise-England and Flanders had long been interdependent.3 It would be difficult to isolate a discourse ofEngland in Chaucer, but there is a discourse ofFlanders� As a discourse, this bears some relation to a territory called Flanders, has consequences for those tagged as Flemish, but speaks most eloquently of the anxieties and desires of its English authors. "Flaundres" plays in Chaucer like certain names that reverber­ ate through our own cultures: Belfast and East LA; Brixton, Brooklyn, and Berkeley-we may never have been to these places, but we know 2 I follow May McKisack in speaking of colonization: ". . . on 4 August 1347," McKisack writes, Edward III "entered the town and proceeded to evacuate almost all the inhabitants, in order ro people it with English colonists whose descendants were to hold it for another two hundred years"; The Fourteenth Century, 1307-1399 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 137. 3 It is important ro note that exchanges between England and the Low Countries in­ cluded both luxury items and the staples of everyday life. "Londoners," Vanessa Harding writes, "drank Dutch beer and perhaps some Rhenish wine, and ate imported apples, pears, onion, and garlic"; "Cross-Channel Trade and Cultural Contacts: London and the Low Countries in the Later Fourteenth Century," in Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul, eds., Englandandthe LliW Countries in the Late Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 163. On the extraordinary mixing of Middle Dutch and Middle English terms that occurs in select fifteenth-century business documents, see Laura Wright, "Trade between England and the Low Countries: Evidence from Hisrorical Linguistics," in ibid, pp. 169-79. Dutch terms for activities associated with beer-brewing and boatbuilding proved especially influential. 4 Citation of "Flaundres" in Chaucer hence works in ways comparable to the nam­ ing of "Lombardy." "Lumbardye" evokes both the historical terrirory ruled by northern Italian despots, or tyrants-an imaginative terrain explored by...

Harry Bailly and Chaucer-Pilgrim’s ‘Quiting’ in The Tale of Sir Thopas

Harry Bailly and Chaucer-Pilgrim’s ‘Quiting’ in The <i>Tale of Sir Thopas</i>

Laughing at Knights: Representations of Humour in Sir Perceval of Galles, Sir Beues of Hamtoun, Lybeaus Desconus and Geoffrey Chaucer s Tale of Sir Thopas

Laughing at Knights: Representations of Humour in Sir Perceval of Galles, Sir Beues of Hamtoun, Lybeaus Desconus and Geoffrey Chaucer s Tale of Sir Thopas

Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works by Laura F. Hodges (review)

LAURA F. HODGES, Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works. Chaucer Studies Vol. 42. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. xi, 232. isbn: 978-1-8438-4368-9. $99.Laura Hodges has spent much of her scholarly career studying medieval clothing, particularly what she calls costume rhetoric (the sociological and economic implications of medieval dress). Two of her previous books have explored this topic in a more limited way by covering the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where Hodges cataloged the variety of Chaucer's techniques in depicting clothing but could not determine an overarching pattern in Chaucer's artistic choices. However, in Chaucer and Array, Hodges knits together her earlier work and expands upon it by analyzing Chaucer's descriptions of clothing in the entirety of his writings. In particular, Hodges argues that when we examine Chaucer's writings collectively, he reveals several tendencies in his depictions of wardrobe going beyond mere characterization; these range from meeting genre expectations, to subverting or reversing those same expectations, to creating comic incongruity. The genre of the particular work influences which strategy Chaucer will employ.Hodges is meticulous and thorough. Her book's copious footnotes sometimes threaten to eclipse the entire page, but her writing style is uncluttered by jargon and her arguments are always cogent and careful in their claims. Although Hodges occasionally nods to Michael Camille, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Lorraine Stock in her footnotes, her explications focus less on gender politics and medieval sexuality than one might expect, given the content of the tales. Instead, her readings will be of special benefit to scholars interested in the semiotics of clothing, materialist criticism, and medieval expectations of genre. For the most part, as she explores these topics, her mission is one of augmentation rather than revolution; she usually provides new information that supports older understandings of the text rather than radically seeking to revise how we read a given work. A notable exception to that tendency is her rebuttal of some of the more dated annotations in the standard scholarly text of Chaucer's works, The Riverside Chaucer published in 1987, where Hodges is quick to point out unhelpful, incomplete, or potentially misleading understandings of clothing terminology.In Chaucer and Array, the most thorough explorations are of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, The Clerk's Tale, The Miller's Tale, and Sir Thopas, each of which has its own chapter of discussion. …

Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages by Louise D’Arcens (review)

Reviewed by: Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages by Louise D’Arcens Rosemary Greentree D’Arcens, Louise, Comic Medievalism: Laughing at the Middle Ages (Medievalism), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2014; hardback; pp. 219; R.R.P. £55.00; ISBN 9781843843801. Writing about comedy is a serious undertaking, and Louise D’Arcens offers a studious account of the process, to show that ridicule can have a serious purpose. She sets out possibilities for laughing ‘at, with and in the Middle Ages’ (p. 3), when she announces her plan to probe aspects of medievalism from Don Quixote to educational television, concluding with the smells of theme parks. Both of the latter cover an ambit from gravity to grossness. The serious purpose is generally didactic, with varying targets and intentions. Ridicule of the medieval romance happened even in the Middle Ages, as we see when the Host intervenes to stop the wearying absurdity of The Tale of Sir Thopas, with slight unkindness to the pilgrim Chaucer. Cervantes forces harsher revelations on Don Quixote. The laughter at ‘his delusional knight errantry’ (p. 36) is grim, but Don Quixote’s fantasies are his ‘ballast against the changing world’ (p. 38). ‘Chaucer in the Age of Wit’ presents that age’s attempt to refine and renovate a poet perceived as uncultivated and outmoded. D’Arcens points out that Chaucer was at least matched in vulgarity by Rochester and Swift, but Addison and Pope thought the coarseness of the fabliaux must be avoided and more elegant verse forms employed to allow readers of the time to appreciate the antique works. Using his guise as ‘the people’s court jester’ (p. 73), Dario Fo, in Mistero Buffo and other plays, offered political satire, to expose ‘the pretensions and abuses of the powerful, both religious and secular’ (p. 74). Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Baktin wrote in similar vein, in Mystery-Bouffe and Rabelais and his World, and Pier Paolo Pasolini also used medieval materials. Umberto Eco showed the importance of medieval laughter in The Name of the Rose, and those who have employed it in all ages acknowledge the dangerous effectiveness of piercing satire. [End Page 285] Nineteenth-century comic medievalism introduced the thread of camp that D’Arcens follows throughout, with the bewildering cross-dressing of pantomime and burlesque. All art forms introduced parody of other genres, and historical periods and genres mingled freely. The allusions to other performances included Shakespeare’s and contemporary plays, and there was comment on current events. The audience’s knowledge and wish to extend it were assumed. The audience was also expected to recognise and be entertained rather than offended by the anachronistic burlesque. Medieval cinematic figures can speak freely in their disguised voices, and D’Arcens detects parodic references in many films of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The preposterous picaresque adventures of the knight-errant Brancaleone, in Mario Monicelli’s films, seem closest to those of Don Quixote. Camp references to sexual mores abound, and the chastity belt becomes a recurring motif. Time travel is sometimes a theme, and its reversal in Les Visiteurs offers sustained satire of modern life. As primus inter pares in the genre, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is selected, for its irreverent familiarity with Arthurian literature and meta-parody. Laughter has always leavened education, which can be seen as the purpose of many works. D’Arcens considers this in some television programmes and in theme parks. There are frequent allusions to other performances. Medieval Lives, presented by Terry Jones, intersperses scholarly sections with Pythonesque sketches. Similarly, Tony Robinson, in The Worst Jobs in History, often recalls his role as Baldrick in Blackadder in his medieval menial tasks. Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories gain attention as they ridicule, horrify, and disgust, and D’Arcens notes his contradictory yearnings for both ‘a world without schools’ and ‘schools with good history lessons’ (p. 151). References to others’ works are plentiful, and all may be seen as a counter to more serious presentations, such as those of Simon Schama and David Starkey. The intimacy of television enhances the effects. In theme parks, intimacy is extended when the visitor enters the setting for earlier events. There may...

Introduction

Introduction

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time and Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches

Reading the Forms of Sir Thopas

Chaucer’s Sir Thopas has always been read in terms of its forms: the tail-rhyme that creates the poem’s laughable music, the affiliation with romance that grounds its parody in the forms we call genre. Nor are these forms of Sir Thopas inconsequential. Christopher Cannon has recently argued that it was precisely in the forms of romance that textual objects in the thirteenth century rose above the vagaries of matter and became literary essence: through King Horn, Havelok the Dane, and the other texts that Sir Thopas spoofs, “the spirit of English romance became the spirit of English literature.”1 But if Chaucer registers this apotheosis of the literary through a knowing de-materialization of his own text, Cannon’s study of early Middle English literature asks us to return to the matter that grounds that spirit. Similarly, the material forms of Sir Thopas raise questions about how to understand the poem’s essence—that is to say, how the tail-rhyme meter or the layout of a manuscript page might be invested with literary significance. In different ways, both New Criticism and textual materialism have made it commonplace to assert that form shapes meaning, but I am equally interested here in the ways in which it fails to do so. For the material forms of Sir Thopas, specifically its manuscript layout, bear a problematic relation to its immaterial

Medieval Habit, Modern Sensation:

[H]abit is an immensely powerful agent for regulating, even creating, the acuity of sentience. Just as one may regulate the amount of light by opening and closing one’s eyelids or by turning and tilting one’s head through hundreds of angles and planes, so habit acts to set in place countless gateways that either open and allow the world to rush toward one or instead close it to keep it wholly at bay. —elaine scarry1

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Medieval English Manuscripts: