New Medieval Literatures

Anglo-Saxon England produced the first Western European who can be plausibly shown to have flown. Eilmer of Malmesbury was a Benedictine monk living in the early eleventh century who had read the classical story of Daedalus and wanted to test the truth of the fable. Eilmer fashioned a pair of artificial wings, leapt from the abbey tower, and flew for a full furlong before falling to the earth and breaking both his legs.

While it is difficult to strip Eilmer’s tale of its mythical associations, the probability of his feat does not buckle under scrutiny. It stands, therefore, at a crossroads. Are we dealing with a technological reality or an imaginative story? This article uncovers and examines some of the most striking incidents of human flight in the literature, art, and science leading up to Eilmer’s lifetime in order to gain a sounder understanding of the monk’s performance. In doing so, I wrest that performance away from conventional histories of science but also challenge earlier dismissals of the flight as mere legend.

This essay considers the Cronica Majora’s account of the flight into sanctuary of Henry III’s fallen justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, as it illuminates the practice of sanctuary seeking in general. Far from simply providing a ‘home base’, sanctuary affords symbolic opportunities for both fugitive and pursuer. Chronicler Roger Wendover highlights the king’s ire and his subject’s humility, divorcing Henry from divine sanction while sanctifying Hubert. Wendover frames Henry’s action as a refusal to perform the powerful role of merciful monarch exemplified by Richard I. Thus while Wendover shows Hubert’s skill in fleeing to the church at key moments, he portrays Henry as a clumsy player in the symbolic ‘game’ of sanctuary. Matthew Paris’s additions and illustrations intensify the conflict, but finally shed light on its resolution. Sanctuary does complex symbolic work to recast political crisis and sovereign power.

This article offers a reader response to the trope of the woman ensconced in her tower through the life and writings of Margaret Paston. The Pastons were avid consumers of romance, so the trope is one that Margaret would have known well. During her lifetime, the Pastons came to possess Caister Castle, and Margaret spent some time there. She found that with the increase in social status of owning a castle came the more restrictive movement necessitated by castle life. While living in her manor houses, Margaret made herself accessible to all manner of people, and manor house architecture itself expressed a gender ideology of equality. I argue that through her move from castle to manor house, Margaret was actively rejecting the higher status position of the upper aristocracy and the restrictive gender ideologies laid out by castle architecture and chose instead to remain part of the lower aristocracy, its gender ideology of greater female freedom witnessed by both the more equal accessibility of spaces within the manor house, and by Margaret’s relative ease of movement and accessibility there.

The seventh-century kingdom of the East Angles threatened the pan-English Christian unification envisaged by Bede in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Radwald first raised East Anglia over its neighbours, but his pagan and Christian altars scandalized the monastic historian and prompted him to demonize that king and, by extension, the whole East Anglian gens during his reign. The region was tainted with spiritual evil until the mid- to late seventh-century conversion efforts of Kings Eorpwold, Sigeberht and Anna and the missionary initiatives they sponsored. Bede trumpets these subsequent glories to prove to his readers, and likely to convince himself, that the religious ambivalence long characteristic of East Anglia had ceased to be a guiding political imperative in a fully Christianized England.

From the writings of early Church Fathers through the twelfth century, Herod the Great was considered an exemplar of arrogance as madness, a role that is expanded in the English cycle plays of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. In the York, Chester, N-Town, Towneley, and Coventry plays, Herod’s keen historical foresight betrays his awareness of the unfolding of Christian eschatology. The predetermined failure of his own actions to prevent the ascendancy of Christ suggest the impotence of a non-Christian future. Herod’s performances align deviance with knowledge, reaffirming faith and humility as the governing ethics of Christian epistemology. As a medium through which playwrights develop a kind of vernacular typology, the dramatic Herod testifies to the vitality of cycle drama within the landscape of fifteenth-century vernacular theology in England.

This essay considers John Foxe’s treatment of Geoffrey Chaucer in his Actes and Monuments as it might shed light on ‘post-historicist’ criticism. Instead of a chronology, Foxe uses a combination of form and affect to unite the threads of his reformist history. Chaucer is not connected to events of the fourteenth century, but finds formal and affective affinities with other reformist writers across three centuries. By emphasizing Chaucer’s mobile poetic forms, Foxe combines irregular temporal trajectories to figure a reformist aesthetic that exceeds traditional historicist analysis.

Galaad (Galahad), the saintly hero of the thirteenth-century Old French Queste del Saint Graal, is from one perspective an abstract Christ-figure whose actions and meaning are predetermined by divine providence and allegorical interpretation. However, throughout Galaad’s Grail quest, the romance also cultivates an antithetical resistance to totalizing allegoresis. It insists that the hero’s exploits and their sacred significance are contingent on his ethical agency and therefore on a personal virtue that remains constantly at stake, especially in the readerly activity of negotiating between the material surface of the world (and the text) and its possible meanings. The Queste thus uses Galaad to emplot, in a way characteristic of fictional romance narrative, the theological aporia of divine grace’s coexistence with human free will.

Saint Anselm of Canterbury’s Orationes sive meditationes, written in the late eleventh century, influenced generations of later authors of devotional and mystical literature, and the prologue to the Orationes, in particular, was repeatedly translated and reworked by vernacular authors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in England. This essay examines the textual and codicological contexts in which this prologue occurs in four late medieval manuscripts, and situates Anselm’s prologue within broader theoretical conversations regarding the respective values of indexical and affective modes of reading. Although selective modes of reading are at times perceived as being less sophisticated than those that engage with written works more comprehensively, the late medieval interest in translations of Anselm’s prologue indicates that reading selectively could be seen as a sophisticated method for engaging the reader’s emotions so as to propel him or her towards a more devout and pious lifestyle.

Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS 8009 is a late fifteenth-century London household book containing a diverse range of works, including saints lives, ballads, prayers, husbandry texts, and romances. This essay looks to Chetham MS 8009 as an artefact of vernacular literary consumption in the fifteenth century, and as a representative witness to horizons of literary knowledge in the period. In using this manuscript to trace the affective potential of Middle English romance, this piece considers how emotions are linked to the various forms of ethical thinking that such miscellanies might activate.

The fourteenth-century Amis and Amiloun emphasizes the oath of fidelity between two nearly identical male friends. Their ‘queer’ relationship is compounded by the diverse and pleasurable alliances they share with others, including Belisaunt and Amoraunt, thus making their relationships more akin to Karma Lochrie’s heterosyncratic than modern notions of queerness. Amiloun’s disabled body serves as the crux that forges these alliances, demonstrating that heterosyncrasy depends upon disability. Despite the poem’s tragic end, which at first glance appears to ‘prostheticize’ the deviances produced by the text’s non-normative bodies and unions, Amis and Amiloun aligns the queer/disabled with a pleasurable excess that promises a world-making both within and without the text that positions the heterosyncratic community as a valued and valuable way of life for people of all genders, sexualities, and abilities.

This analytical survey offers an overview of current approaches to disability in medieval literature and culture. The first section traces important medical, social, religious, and cultural models of disability. The second section examines how critical notions of monstrosity and prosthesis inform contemporary analysis of medieval texts. The third section demonstrates connections between medieval literature and activist-oriented criticism. The final section considers cross-historical approaches to disability, including future approaches to disability aesthetics and theory.