Nottingham Medieval Studies

The introductory essay traces a constellation of critical theories, cultural contexts, and modes of reading medieval literature to situate this collection of essays within a cross-disciplinary critical landscape. Central to this discussion are the interconnected thematic concepts guiding this collected volume, namely the construction and performance of ‘voice’ as a gendered act. In this respect, the idea of ‘female voice’ is developed not as a monolithic, binary concept, but rather as a nuanced and malleable amalgamation of a range of cultural, literary, and structural factors. Finally, the collection of essays on texts in Middle High German, modern German, Latin, French, and Older Scots is presented as a valuable project in reading medieval literature within a transcultural textual network.

This essay considers two little known Scottish royal women, Margaret of Scotland (d. 1445) and Madeleine of Valois (1520-1537), and interrogates examples of male-authored verse (in Scots, French, and Latin) composed on the occasion of their marriages and deaths. It discusses how the female voice of these two women was ventriloquized for notably political purposes, and how the textual construction of the royal female voice was linked inextricably to the broader crafting of these women’s identities. Such analysis in turn encourages further consideration of how speech in medieval and early modern European literature was imagined within specifically gendered contexts, and raises further crucial questions of agency and autonomy, in particular concerning who has responsibility for the memorialization of these women and what control women more generally had over their own voice - and bodies - in life and death.

The representation of women is often used as a critical touchstone for the re-assessment of many medieval texts: this is also true of discussions of Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados. This essay compares these poems’ representation of female figures, specifically Cresseid and Dido, but also others, both mortal and immortal. It reflects briefly on the differences between the Scottish poems and their Chaucerian models, Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, and The Legend of Good Women and considers in more depth the frames provided for their narrative of women’s experience. Finally, it explores the provision of speech to female figures, and the relationship between women’s voices, and their agency and experience, and the masculine frames of judgement in which they are set. The essay concludes by suggesting that having a voice may be considered as a proxy for moral agency, and brings culpability in its wake.

By careful manipulation of narrative tenses, Mark E. Amsler has argued, Douglas’s Palyce of Honour presents a retrospective narrative of becoming a poet, a narrative that juxtaposes two voices in the poem: that of a dreaming, incompetent former self in pursuit of poetic Honour, and that of a fully competent, narrating one. Taking Amsler’s observation further, I show that the two voices, the earlier and the later one, are in almost irresolvable conflict, correlated as they are with gendered temporalities: that of Honour, male and martial in outlook, and that of Venus, amorous and female. The poet-dreamer experiences both temporalities as frightening, as both pose the threat of (self-) annihilation. I argue that this contest of temporalities is part of Douglas’s complex allegorical response to Chaucer’s model of literary renovation as presented in the The House of Fame. Chaucer’s is a model based on the textual challenges the Troy story poses to the poet in attempting his own ‘faithful’ retelling of the material. Misogynist though Douglas’s commentary on Chaucer’s use of the Troy story is, he offers modern readers a historical perspective on female voices that are capable of defending tradition against ‘false’ renewal.

The story cycle The Seven Sages of Rome is known for showing how different characters tell and interpret the short stories embedded in its frame narrative according to their own interests and biases. The frame narrative has so far been excluded from this reading, with all trust placed in the omniscient heterodiegetic narrator at the expense of the female protagonist. This essay opens new research perspectives by suggesting that the heterodiegetic narrator in one of the texts in the Seven Sages tradition, Johannes de Alta Silva’s Latin Dolopathos (c. 1184-1212), might be unreliable, and that the discredited female protagonist’s voice is as worthy of being heard as the other characters and narrators. This is particularly provocative insofar as the woman’s narrative contains the accusation that she has been raped, which is framed as false by the narrator.

Heinrich von Neustadt’s adaptation of the Historia Apollonii regis Tyri diverts from the traditional plotline by interpolating a twelve thousand verse narrative of the hero traversing a multitude of kingdoms during his fourteen-year exile. He repeatedly fights members of the same monstrous family across this embedded narrative. Early on, he encounters Flata, who along with her son Kolkan has taken control of the kingdom of Galacides. This essay posits that Flata embodies what Barbara Creed has labelled the monstrous-feminine. Especially with regard to her motherhood, she is framed as abjectionable, monstrous, and horror-inspiring. The portrayal of her monstrous body creates a dissonance with her courtly discourse. She is furthermore presented in a set of embedded voices which promote Apollonius. This essay investigates the implications of a voice embodied at once as monstrous and maternal on the agency of the figure issuing it as much as the consequences of its framing within a larger narrative invested in the ascent of a hero.

This essay examines two Middle High German tales of a bride losing her virginity before the wedding night and deceiving her husband-to-be with a virginal substitute. These texts construct female voices as emerging from a conflict between the physical (sexual) and the social status of female characters. In Die unschuldige Mörderin, this conflict leads to serial murder. In the Tristan romance, murder is only averted by the use of ambiguous female speech and the repurposing of male characters as channels of communication. These texts show female bodies and voices as sites of troubled negotiations of power, hetero- and homosocial interactions, as well as female agency.

This essay examines the Middle High German Märe, Das Häslein (‘The Little Hare’). This comic tale weaves together two separate episodes with distinct generic associations: the first a fully-fledged fabliau, the second more fabular in tone. The interweaving of logical formula and moral instruction deftly represents the vibrant intertextuality of comic literature. Female voices prove to be essential conduits for the successful functioning of both moral and logical aspects of the poem. As such, considering the intersection of gender, speech, and silence as it appears in Das Häslein exposes the ways in which individual texts integrated different strands of writing in order to disrupt boundaries and ultimately to reinforce social mores and ideological systems.

This essay explores the question of how different versions of the medieval Gregorius narrative explore corresponding episodes in which the central female character keeps silent instead of speaking her mind. Hartmann von Aue, in the Middle High German reworking of his Old French source, demonstrates different ways in which a noblewoman uses what little agency she has whenever she can. In contrast, a later Latin adaptation of Hartmann’s text presents its audience with a heroine who is kept powerless and speechless at the outset but who ultimately gains the ability to raise her voice. Thomas Mann, in turn, in his twentieth-century interpretation and adaptation of Hartmann’s text, transforms an originally medieval female character who is treated problematically by others and who herself behaves problematically into a character who is an essentially problematic person on account of her deep-rooted willingness to conform to the gendered role assigned to her.