17401

SoSe 15: MÜ-Medieval English Literatures: Middle English Manuscripts and Texts

Neil Cartlidge

Kommentar

What difference should it make to our understanding of medieval literary culture that it survives in the form of handwritten (rather than printed) books? This module encourages participants to look beyond modern editions of Middle English texts and to think about the nature of the medieval manuscripts on which those editions are based. Such books potentially provide all sorts of extra information about the relationships between texts, the generic expectations of medieval readers and even the geographical origins of their scribes. Yet they also render problematic some of the most basic concepts on which students of literature rely: concepts like 'the text', 'the book', 'authenticity' and even 'literature'. This module provides an introduction to major fourteenth-century manuscript miscellanies like BL MS Harley 913, BL MS Harley 2253 and the Auchinleck MS; and it also foregrounds the work of two Middle English writers who seem to have responded particularly consciously and creatively to the variation and instability characteristic of scribal transmission. Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales have a complex and controversial textual history (which we will discuss), but they can also be read as a deliberate dramatisation of manuscript-culture's fragmentariness, open-endedness and multiple different voices. Thomas Hoccleve is one of the earliest poets in English to address the experience of anxiety, depression and madness: for him, problematising both authorial identity and reader-response is a means of depicting his own obsessiveness, sense of isolation and attempts at finding consolation. Primary texts: Auchinleck: http://auchinleck.nls.uk Harley 913: Anglo-Irish Poems of the Middle Ages, ed. Angela Lucas (Dublin, 1995); and Neil Cartlidge, 'Festivity, Order and Community in Fourteenth-Century Ireland: the Composition and Contexts of BL MS Harley 913', Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003) 33-52 [available via JSTOR] Harley 2253: http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/publication/fein-harley2253-volume-2 [and subsequent volumes due to appear in 2015] Chaucer: The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (New York, 1987) Hoccleve: Thomas Hoccleve: 'My Compleinte' and Other Poems, ed. Roger Ellis (Exeter, 2001) Suggested preliminary reading: Boffey, Julia, and A.S.G. Edwards, 'Manuscripts and Audience' in A Concise Companion to Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford, 2006) pp. 34-50 [Phil. Bib. Level 1: HH 5080 S257] Kennedy, Beverley, 'Contradictory Responses to the Wife of Bath as evidenced by Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Variants' in The Canterbury Tales Project: Occasional Papers Volume II, ed. Norman Blake & Peter Robinson (London, 1997), pp. 23-39; and at http://petermwrobinson.me.uk/canterburytalesproject.com/pubs/op2-kennedy.pdf Schließen

13 Termine

Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung

Do, 10:00 - 12:00 13 Termine

Do, 16.04.2015 10:00 - 12:00

Dozenten:
Prof. Neil Cartlidge