The Royal Stanza in Early English Literature

PMLA ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Canterbury Tales ◽  
Equal Length ◽  
James I ◽  
James I Of Scotland ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early English

The traditional history of the rhyme royal stanza in early English literature, including its earliest attribution to James I of Scotland, needs reexamination. The name was apparently first recorded by Gascoigne in 1575, and, while no evidence exists to connect it with James I, the stanza itself was used in fourteenth-century poetic contests to address real or imaginary royalty. It appears in royal entry ceremonies, as illustrated by a text surviving from York in 1486. Chaucer employed the stanza first for royal address, as in the Parlement and the Troilus, but later, in the Canterbury Tales, as a characterizing device. The word “prose,” which he uses to describe the verse of the Man of Law's Tale, has been universally misread. It actually refers here to formal stanzas of equal length, and it must be read as the first attempt to create a poetic high style in English literature.

scholarly journals Early English meter as a way of thinking

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-65
Author(s):  
Eric Weiskott
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Geoffrey Chaucer ◽  
English Literature ◽  
William Langland ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
Verse Form ◽  
Early English

The second half of the fourteenth century saw a large uptick in the production of literature in English. This essay frames metrical variety and literary experimentation in the late fourteenth century as an opportunity for intellectual history. Beginning from the assumption that verse form is never incidental to the thinking it performs, the essay seeks to test Simon Jarvis’s concept of “prosody as cognition”, formulated with reference to Pope and Wordsworth, against a different literary archive.The essay is organized into three case studies introducing three kinds of metrical practice: the half-line structure in Middle English alliterative meter, the interplay between Latin and English in Piers Plowman, and final -e in Chaucer’s pentameter. The protagonists of the three case studies are the three biggest names in Middle English literature: the Gawain poet, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Richard FitzRalph and the Fourteenth-Century Poverty Controversies

1983 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Doyne Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mendicant Orders ◽  
Century Thought

Richard FitzRalph, archbishop of Armagh (c. 1300–60), is a well-known but ill-defined figure in the history of fourteenth-century thought. Two aspects of his writings have chiefly attracted the attention of modern scholars: his theory of dominium and grace, and his polemics against the mendicant orders. In the former role, he is considered the source of one of the major doctrines of Wyclif; in the latter, a continuator of the polemic of William of Saint-Amour, and a source of the anti-mendicant sentiment prevalent in English literature in the age of Chaucer.

On Translating Anglo-Saxon Poetry

PMLA ◽  
1898 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 286-296
Author(s):  
Edward Fulton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Final Conclusion ◽  
English Poetry ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
English Verse ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Early English

What verse to use in translating Anglo-Saxon poetry is a question, which, ever since Anglo-Saxon poetry has been thought worth translating, has been discussed over and over again, but unfortunately with as yet no final conclusion. The tendency, however, both among those who have written upon the subject and those who have tried their hand at translating, is decidedly in favor of a more or less close imitation of the original metre. Professor F. B. Gummere, in an article on “The Translation of Beowulf and the Relations of Ancient and Modern English Verse,” published in the American Journal of Philology, Vol. vii (1886), strongly advocates imitating the A.-S. metre. Professor J. M. Garnett, in a paper read before this Association in 1890, sides with him, recanting a previously held belief in the superiority of blank verse. Of the various translations which imitate the A.-S. metre, the most successful, undoubtedly, is the Beowulf of Dr. John Leslie Hall, which appeared in 1892. Stopford Brooke, in his History of Early English Literature, also declares his belief in imitations of the original metre, though in his translations he does not always carry out his beliefs. He lays down the rule—and a very good rule it is—that translations of poetry “should always endeavour to have the musical movement of poetry, and to obey the laws of the verse they translate.” For translating A.-S. poetry, blank verse, he thinks, is out of the question; “ it fails in the elasticity which a translation of Anglo-Saxon poetry requires, and in itself is too stately, even in its feminine dramatic forms, to represent the cantering movement of Old English verse. Moreover, it is weighted with the sound of Shakspere, Milton, or Tennyson, and this association takes the reader away from the atmosphere of Early English poetry.”

Liturgy

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Holsinger
Keyword(s):  
Middle English ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Middle English Literature ◽  
English Writing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early English ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Common Prayer

In medieval England, liturgy was a looming presence in so many aspects of English literary production. Yet many fundamental questions concerning the relationship between liturgy and vernacular literary production have remained unaddressed. This article explores the liturgical character of Middle English literature and how liturgy links the pre- and post-Conquest eras. In pursuing a liturgical history of early English writing, it outlines a detheologizing vision of liturgy and its objects. It also discusses the phenomenology of the modern theologized category of the “service book,” how previous theologizing habits of liturgical understanding have affected the Middle English religious lyric, and the writing and dissemination of the Book of Common Prayer.

Old Books and New Beginnings North of Chaucer

2020 ◽  
pp. 619-635
Author(s):  
Iain Macleod Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Canterbury Tales ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
Dream Vision ◽  
James I ◽  
James I Of Scotland ◽  
New Beginnings ◽  
Do So

Starting from the claim that Chaucer’s profoundest legacy to his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century successors was his dynamic, dialogic use of literary form, this chapter shows how the two Scottish works that most fully respond to him (The Kingis Quair and Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid) use their textual frames to revise Chaucer’s unsettling modes of mediating a story. They do so in particular to shape new beginnings of and altered endings to familiar genres and stories. Adapting framing modes from Troilus, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament, and even the Canterbury Tales, The Kingis Quair (attributed to James I of Scotland) remakes the Boethian dream vision as an optimistic celebration of faithful heterosexual love. Revising Chaucer negatively, Henryson’s Testament brings beginnings and ends together by inserting itself into a narrative gap in the final book of Troilus, audaciously framing itself ‘within’ and ideologically prying open a prior work.

VII.—The Fourteenth-century Glass at Wells

Archaeologia ◽  
1931 ◽  
Vol 81 ◽  
pp. 85-118
Author(s):  
J. Armitage Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early English ◽  
Round Arch ◽  
Western Wall ◽  
Pointed Form

The earliest painted glass preserved in the cathedral church of Wells— with the exception of the ten small tracery lights on the staircase leading to the chapter-house–belongs to the opening years of the fourteenth century. The reason for this is to be found in the history of the building. Begun under Bishop Reginald about the year 1186, it represents the period of transition between the Norman and the Early English styles. The thick walls with their straight buttresses are of the Norman type: the stout piers of the nave would betray the Norman heaviness, if each were not surrounded by four and twenty slender shafts. But, on the other hand, this is the first great church in England to banish wholly the round arch, which was still being used at Glastonbury for ornament where the structure did not require the new pointed form. In this transitional style Bishop Reginald's church was carried through to the end of the nave under Bishop Jocelin (1205-42), until the western wall was reached; and then, in the latter half of that great builder's time, we get quite suddenly the full perfection of the Early English in the elaborate splendour of the great west front.

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