Old and Middle English Literature

1. It is commonly assumed that medieval chivalric literature, with its estimate of the values of romantic love and knightly prowess, is secular in orientation and sharply distinct from clerical literature, which espouses contempt for the world, suspicion of the flesh, and a rejection of prideful self-advancement. Discuss major chivalric works to test the validity of this distinction. Include at least three of the following: Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Chaucer's Troilus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chretien's Lancelot, and Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur.

2. Dante's La Vita Nuova, Pearl, and Chaucer's Book of the Duchess ostensibly present consolations for the death of a loved one. Explain what the death signifies in each case in light of the ultimate purpose, style, and strategy of each text. To what extent, if any, is each author drawing on Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy?

3. The origins of the Renaissance "querelle des femmes" can be traced back to such late medieval works as the "marriage group" in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (the tales of the Wife of Bath, Clerk, Merchant, and Franklin), his “Legend of Good Women” and Christine de Pizan's letters in the debate about the Romance of the Rose, her Book of the City of Ladies, and her Treasure of the City of Ladies. Choosing at least two works by each author (tales count as separate examples), examine the positions each text takes in the debate about the nature and character of women. Are these two authors consistent in their positions? In what sense, if any, are they proto-feminists as some critics have recently claimed?

4. The late fourteenth century was a very tumultuous time, but it also coincided with the emergence of a vernacular literature in England. Explain how the prologues to the three major English poems produced during the last quarter of this century—Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Langland's Piers Plowman, and Gower's Confessio Amantis—address some of the social and/or political issues of the day and how the style and genre of each prologue contributes to its critique of society and is appropriate to the poem that it introduces.

5. Old English literary texts are often discussed as efforts to combine two cultural traditions, the Germanic and the Christian. Examine such elements as theme, genre, characterization, and style in Beowulf and at least two other Anglo-Saxon poems in order to explain how these two traditions are brought together, what the ultimate purpose of each text seems to be, and how successful the poet is in each case.

6. Chaucer’s “early poetry” has been described as romantic and serious while The Canterbury Tales garners such descriptions as comic and realistic. How do you explain this difference? Or, can it be argued that the traditional dichotomy is a false one?

7. Complete a full explication de texte of a medieval work of your choice using the following medieval writers as your point of entry: Dante’s “Accessus,” Boccaccio’s On Poetry, and St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine.

8. An argument can be made that the dominant tone of Old English poetry is heroic in nature. The same assertion can be made that the mood is primarily elegiac. Which one of these seems most accurate to you? Why?

9. Using Boethius, Dante, Jean de Meun, Julian of Norwich, and Andreas Capellanus, formulate a comprehensive medieval definition of love. Apply this definition to an analysis of three medieval texts of your own choosing.

10. Owing chiefly to the influence of Northrop Frye, romance is often perceived as a well-defined genre, or narrative mode, paradigmatically shaped by the quest of a single knight having a successful outcome. And romance is typically seen as the over-arching category into which fall all shorter, self-contained narratives about aristocratic knightly adventures. How useful, in practical analysis of actual chivalric narratives, is this conception of romance? Would it be more useful to conceive of this same body of literature as being defined by a set of espoused behavioral values (whether courtoisie, service, prowess in combat, a personal code of honor), rather than by any such structural pattern as Frye outlines? Your answer should include: one romance of Chretien de Troyes, as well as at least three of the four narratives listed as “Arthurian romances” on your reading list: “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell,” “The Alliterative Morte Arthure,” “The Stanzaic Morte Arthur,” and “The Rise of Gawain, Nephew of Arthur.” You may include Malory’s “Tale of Gareth” and Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” if you have not discussed either of these in depth in another of your exam essays.

11. Most of the texts written for anchorites during the Middle Ages were addressed to women. Choosing two of the following texts, The Ancrene Riwle (Books 6 & 7), “Holy Maidenhood,” or the “Wooing of Our Lord,” discuss the rhetorical strategies that the male authors use in these texts and the assumptions about their female readers and spirituality informing these strategies. Then choosing either Julian of Norwich’s Showings or Margery Kempe’s Book, explain whether or not the author seems to endorse or challenge the assumptions about female spirituality underlying the anchoritic literature.

12. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” appears in the same manuscript (Cotton Nero A.x) as “Pearl,” “Patience,” and “Cleanness,” and, like them, is written in alliterative verse in a West Midlands dialect. For these reasons, it is often alleged that the same author (the “Pearl-poet”, or the “Gawain-poet”), wrote all four poems. However, at least on its face, the Arthurian narrative reflects a courtly milieu and preoccupations, in sharp contrast with the clerical, religious focus of the other three poems. What argument can be made from the internal evidence of the works themselves that the same author composed all four poems? What evidence does not fit this thesis?

13. The prologues to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis all criticize late-medieval English society on the basis of implicit assumptions about the ideal social order. Moreover, each author uses a distinctive satiric method to express his critique. Selecting two of these prologues, compare and contrast them in order to articulate the social values endorsed by each author and to identify the differences in the techniques for satirizing his contemporaries. How effectively does each prologue introduce its respective text and epitomize the concerns and methods of each author?

14. In any discussion of the much-debated question, whether Malory’s Morte D’Arthur is one book or several, largely independent tales, the most problematic part of Malory’s narrative is the lengthy middle section, embracing the “Tale of Sir Tristram” and “The Tale of the Sankgreal” (Vinaver’s titles). Address the question of unity, focusing particularly on these two “tales” and employing critical topics you judge to be most relevant, whether of chronological consistency, causation, generic structure, character development, thematic coherence, historical/societal determinants, etc. Note: an either/or thesis is not essential.

15. The dream vision is one of the most popular and generically supple poetic forms in the Middle Ages. Of it, Anthony Spearing has written that “the dream-framework inevitably brings the poet into his poem, not merely as the reteller of a story which has its origin elsewhere, but as the person who experiences the whole substance of the poem.” Using three examples, discuss the figure of the dreamer in relationship to both the writer and the vision.

16. With the exception of Lancelot, Gawain is perhaps the most and famous of the knights of the Round Table. The trait most commonly associated with him is courtesy, with all its myriad inflections. Using three examples, discuss different representations of Gawain with respect to this virtue. How do texts involving this knight valorize or complicate this chivalric ideal?

17. Beowulf, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Knight’s Tale are set in a pagan period and comment, either implicitly, on both this past and the poet’s present time. Analyze each poem’s portrayal of the social values of the pagan culture and how this past relates to its own Christian culture. What kind of consolation does each poem provide for the suffering of it’s pre-Christian hero?

18. Over the last quarter century many new methodologies have been introduced to displace the “old historicism” and the “new criticism” that dominated literary studies until the 1970s. The effectiveness of these critical approaches in studying the texts written during the Middle Ages has been debated. Using one critical method to elucidate two medieval texts or two different methods with the same medieval text, demonstrate whether or not the approach can be useful in medieval studies. (Methodology can mean a particular school or a renowned critic.)

19. Despite the apparent realism of the Wife of Bath, her Prologue and Tale have antecedents or analogues in the literary tradition. Discuss the relationship between the Wife’s Prologue and the character of the Old Woman in the Romance of the Rose and then compare and contrast her Tale with either Gower’s “Tale of Florent” or “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell.” Discuss how the changes that Chaucer makes in the tale suit the Wife and how they contribute to his development of the character as she is presented in the Prologue.

20. In his letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, Spenser describes the Fairie Queene as an Allegory of “darke conceit.” In his letter to Con Grande Dante implies that The Divine Comedy can be interpreted according to the levels of Biblical exegesis used in the Middle Ages. Explain what these four levels are and then analyze the kind of allegory actually developed in three of the following texts: Dante’s Inferno; Pearl; Julian of Norwich’s parable of the lord and servant in chapter 51 of her Showings; Langland’s Piers Plowman, Prologue through Passus VII; and Malory’s “Tale of the Sankgreal.”

21. Much of Old English and Middle English secular literature focuses on the warrior class, but the values this class espouses differ somewhat between the two periods. Using Beowulf and either “The Wanderer” or “The Battle of Maldon” as representative of Anglo-Saxon attitudes and selections from Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (excluding the Sankgreal) and either Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as representative of the Middle English period, discuss the similaritites and differences in the depiction of the warrior class and its code of values. Does the conception of heroism change between these two periods?

22. Although the mystery and morality plays of the late Middle Ages seem very different from the secular drama of the Renaissance, one can ascertain certain similarities between the two. Using specific examples from both periods, including both a miracle and a morality play, discuss the vestiges of medieval drama on the Renaissance stage.

23. Many chivalric romances contain critiques of chivalry imbedded within them.  Citing exactly three medieval romances, show how the narratives critique or interrogate the chivalric ideology and how these critiques are ultimately resolved.

24. Chaucer and Gower choose to tell several of the same tales in the Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis:  Wife of Bath’s Tale/Florent in CA I; Man of Law’s Tale/Constance in CA II; Manciple’s Tale/Phoebus and Cornide in CA III; and Physican’s Tale/Virginia in CA VII.  Discuss the similarities and differences in plot, characterization, theme, style and purpose between the two author’s versions of two pairs of tales.

25. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that all Christians should make an annual confession. This mandate led to a proliferation of pastoral literature on the sacrament as well as a number of literary texts that emphasize the centrality of penitence to salvation. Selecting three texts from the following list, discuss how sin or human fallibility, the sacrament of penance, or repentance for sin is a central theme in each work: “Dream of the Rood” (even though it is earlier than 1215), Dante’s Inferno, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Cleanness, Piers Plowman, Confessio Amantis, “The Parson’s Tale” in the Canterbury Tales, or Julian of Norwich’s Showings.

26. Discuss the theme of exile or the journey into an inhospitable territory in three texts, at least one of which is not from the Anglo-Saxon period.  How (if at all) does this theme develop over the Middle Ages?

27. The medieval church considered virginity the highest state of life, followed by chaste widowhood, and then marriage. The anti-feminist tradition developed, at least in part, to persuade young men to forsake marriage for vocations as unmarried clerics. The issue of virginity is also important in texts depicting female characters and those addressed to or written by women. Analyze the author’s rhetorical and/or narrative strategy, either in favor of or against virginity, in three of the following texts: The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, “Holy Maidenhood,” Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue or Second Nun’s Tale, The Book of Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. (If you select one or both of the Canterbury Tales, discuss the tale-teller’s strategy rather than Chaucer’s.)

28. From the publication of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764 through to the poems of William Morris at the end of the nineteenth-century, English authors expressed their fascination with the medieval period through two different literary movements, the Gothic and the Gothic Revival. Select one of these movements and briefly identify its characteristic forms and conventions, citing two or three Goth or Gothic Revival texts as examples. (This part of the answer should not be long.) Then identify three medieval texts from which these conventions may have been derived and discuss how you would use them to provide a context in a course either in Gothic or Gothic Revival literature.

29. Though composed in the Anglo-Saxon and the late medieval periods respectively, Beowulf and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur both survey the rise and fall of a ruler and the decline of his tribe or kingdom. Discuss the conception of heroism and the causes of social deterioration that each text presents in an effort to explain the differences in cultural context between these two texts. To what extent is the ruler responsible for the suffering of his people and to what extent are the causes of decline inherent in the society’s values? (You need only discuss the last two books of the Morte.)

30. Medieval writers are very concerned with establishing their auctoritas, whether it be through claims of divine revelation, references to older texts, the presentation of their ethos, or other means. Choosing three texts exemplifying different methods, explain how each author establishes his or her authority to speak and how each particular method is appropriate to the social situation of the author and the subject matter, genre, and theme of the given text. (Individual narratives of the Canterbury Tales can be considered as separate works and their narrator’s method of establishing auctoritas can be discussed rather than Chaucer’s.)