SGGK overview

• Complex Structure

• Romance

– Genre concerned with Knightly Identity

SGGK Overview

• Identity

–Honor

–Masculinity

–Sexuality

SGGK Overview

• Poem explores

Knightly Character

The nature of Chivalry

SGGK Overview

• Strong Christian component in the text

The Book of Margery Kempe

• Important Terms

– Litteratus—amanuensis

– Mysticism

– Imitatio Christi

Mysticism

• “an immediate knowledge of God attained in this present life through personal religious experience. It is primarily a state of prayer, and as such admits of various degrees from short and rare divine ‘touches’ to a practically permanent union with God”

• Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church

Book of Margery Kempe

• Genre

• Autobiography

–Hagiography

–Spiritual autobiography

–Can we consider this autohagiography?

Kempe

• Defying Categories

– Options for women

– Kempe’s marriage and secular life• Life with her husband – youth and age• Book 1.11• Book 1.76

Kempe

• Mystical experiences– 1.1

– 1.79

– Mysticism and eroticism

Pilgrimage

• Jerusalem, heavenly and earthly 1.28

• Bodily eye/spiritual eye

• Affective piety – Changes in representations of Christ

Early medieval

Kempe’s reaction to a Pietà

• Weeping—Affective piety– Book 1.28

• The Compassion of Mary 1.79 (p. 397)

Vision of the Passion

• Meditations on the Life of Christ

• Kempe comforts the Virgin Mary 1.79

• Visions of torture– Connections to Anti-Semitism

York Play

• Context in medieval drama

– Mystery cycles

– Passion plays

– Corpus Christi plays

– Communal forms, connections to liturgy

York Play

• Urban form

• Community based

• Chester, York, N-Town, Towneley

Medieval Drama

• Non-professional

• Cross-dressing

• Early Records (REED)

• Pageant Wagons

• Feast of Corpus Christi

The York Play

• Crucifixion is one part of a sequence describing suffering

• The banality of evil l. 229

• The role of the spectator– L. 253

York Play

• Anachronism– Mahound (line 61)

Controversy over Passion Plays

Medieval Section Overview

• Two linguistic and literary historical periods

• Old English—Anglo-Saxon

• Middle English

Beowulf

• Nature of the hero

• Structure of the poem

– Relation to issues of gender

Canterbury Tales

• Estates Satire

• Miller’s Tale—Fabliau—Quitting

• Wife of Bath—Anti-feminist Satire

• Pardoner—

– Spiritual and physical ambiguity

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• Text Structured through parallels

• The façade of courtly culture

• Testing of Knightly Identity

Kempe

• Auto-hagiography

Affective piety