Sir Orfeo: Madness and Gender*

Spearing, A. C.

doi:10.4324/9781315841335-13

Cited by 2 publications

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“…The same features more pointedly distinguish the poem as a Breton lay, the shorter medieval song‐poem typified by the work of late twelfth‐century poet Marie de France. A. C. Spearing defines Marie's lays and the Middle English poems like Orfeo and King Horn that fit this sub‐genre of romance as ‘relatively brief narratives with Breton settings, in which the story focuses on human emotions, often crystallised in some symbolic object, and magic or the supernatural frequently plays a crucial part’ (258).…”

Section: Sir Orfeomentioning

confidence: 99%

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

Downes

McNamara

2016

Literature Compass

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Critics have long addressed questions of affect, feeling and emotional expression in Middle English literature, but only in recent years has their interest begun to take theoretical form under the rubric of the ‘history of emotions’. Current critical attitudes to the study of emotions in the past have been shaped substantially by the work of historians, whose focus on emotion in documentary sources has been influenced in turn by research in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, linguistics and, increasingly, the cognitive sciences. How might existing methodologies situating emotions historically drive new approaches in Middle English literary studies? This article contends that existing analyses of Middle English literature relating to affective discourses might fruitfully be brought into conversation with new multidisciplinary forms of research into past emotions. We survey current critical trends in both the history of emotions and in Middle English literature. Case studies of two late Middle English literary texts, the anonymous Sir Orfeo and Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, show how the last fifty years of scholarship has addressed emotions in Middle English literature. We conclude by suggesting future directions that might be taken up by critics of medieval English literary texts and genres to develop further the relationship between literary studies and the history of emotions.

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Section: Sir Orfeomentioning

confidence: 99%

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

Downes

McNamara

2016

Literature Compass

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Bourgeois Ethics Again:

Critten¹

2015

The Chaucer Review

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This essay focuses on the interrelationship of the romances and the conduct poems contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61 (ca. 1500). Drawing on the work of Felicity Riddy, it examines the contrasting ways in which these texts articulate a particular bourgeois ethos. Tensions that arise from their different approaches to this phenomenon are read as evidence of an attitude towards the matter of good conduct that is at once more searching and more provisional than that which has typically been attributed to the milieu in which Ashmole 61 was copied and read.

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Sir Orfeo: Madness and Gender*

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

The History of Emotions and Middle English Literature

Bourgeois Ethics Again:

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