Assignments

Background Reading:

• Introduction to Medieval Romance (from The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance)
• The Privileged Practice of Violence (from Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence) -- see especially pp. 129-160
• Introduction to Susan Crane's Insular Romance
• Online Chaucer Bibliography

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Essay Questions:

Essay 3

Topics

Choose one of the following topics:

• From the time of Chrétien de Troyes, the ennobling power of love was an important thematic component of the romance genre. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde makes it central and arguably concentrates more on the protagonists’ experience of love than even Chrétien does. Discuss the nature of courtly love in Troilus and Criseyde. Is Chaucer’s vision of love ennobling or “ignobling”?
• Romance, as a genre, is characteristically built up from aventures, chance or unmotivated events, so that aventure can sometimes seem to be the driving force of events. How does Geoffrey Chaucer exploit this technique in Troilus and Criseyde to re-examine dilemmas typically experienced by characters in romance? You may focus your discussion on one such dilemma.

Research

Research is not a required component of this essay; however, each essay topic requires that you demonstrate a clear understanding of the social environment in which the romances were composed. You may wish to do some outside research to clarify or expand your knowledge from class lectures by reading some of the Background Reading given here. The editions of your texts also contain useful bibliography up to about 1990. You can find more recent criticism on the Bibliography page of this web site. Online encyclopedias like Wikipedia can be a useful starting point but should be used only as a starting point to seek out useful links and bibliographic references for further exploration.

Format and Mechanics

Your essay should be approximately four to five pages in length. Slightly over or slightly under does not matter, as it is the quality of the discussion that I will focus on in my grading. You should include a bibliography if outside material is used. You must quote the poems in the orginal Middle English, and you do not need to translate your quotations unless you are making a point about how the language should be interpreted.

In this assignment you will be graded not only on your understanding of the literature, but also on your ability to utilise the language and conventions of literary criticism. Your essay should be formatted according to the conventions of a recognised style guide, such as MLA or Chicago. Pay very close attention to the guidelines for citing poetry. Poems should be cited by line number, not page number. Quotations of more than four lines should be indented. Shorter quotations should have slashes indicating line breaks. Read over the guidelines detailed in my essay advice pages for further information.

Essays must be typed and proofread for spelling, grammar, and format. Essays deficient in these areas will be penalised substantially in proportion to how distracting and/or time-consuming I find the errors. In particularly bad cases where mechanical errors are so distracting that I cannot concentrate on the content of your discussion, I will base your entire grade on the mechanical errors. This stuff is important!

Due date: December 21 by 5:00 pm. Please place your essays under my door in Sierra Tower 803.

Essay 2

Topics

Choose one of the following topics:

• The question of whether violence is socially productive is at the centre of the plot of Sir Tryamour. Describe the author’s depiction of violence and his view of its possible value. In addition, discuss what social contexts might have given rise to the author’s views.
• It has often been suggested that tail-rhyme romances were produced for popular (non-courtly) audiences. Does this mean that they are fundamentally less learned or sophisticated in their treatment of important social issues than courtly romances like Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde?

Research

Research is not a required component of this essay; however, each essay topic requires that you demonstrate a clear understanding of the social environment in which the romances were composed. You may wish to do some outside research to clarify or expand your knowledge from class lectures by reading some of the Background Reading given here. The editions of your texts also contain useful bibliography up to about 1990. You can find more recent criticism on the Bibliography page of this web site. Online encyclopedias like Wikipedia can be a useful starting point but should be used only as a starting point to seek out useful links and bibliographic references for further exploration.

Format and Mechanics

Your essay should be approximately four to five pages in length. Slightly over or slightly under does not matter, as it is the quality of the discussion that I will focus on in my grading. You should include a bibliography if outside material is used. You must quote the poems in the orginal Middle English, and you do not need to translate your quotations unless you are making a point about how the language should be interpreted.

In this assignment you will be graded not only on your understanding of the literature, but also on your ability to utilise the language and conventions of literary criticism. Your essay should be formatted according to the conventions of a recognised style guide, such as MLA or Chicago. Pay very close attention to the guidelines for citing poetry. Poems should be cited by line number, not page number. Quotations of more than four lines should be indented. Shorter quotations should have slashes indicating line breaks. Read over the guidelines detailed in my essay advice pages for further information.

Essays must be typed and proofread for spelling, grammar, and format. Essays deficient in these areas will be penalised substantially in proportion to how distracting and/or time-consuming I find the errors. In particularly bad cases where mechanical errors are so distracting that I cannot concentrate on the content of your discussion, I will base your entire grade on the mechanical errors. This stuff is important!

Due date: December 7

Essay 1

Topics

Choose one of the following topics:

• Athelston flirts with a number of forms of justice based on different types of authority. Discuss the various types of justice in the poem and the social tensions they illuminate or attempt to resolve.
• Octavian and Sir Isumbras are both tales of family separation and piety set against a backdrop of confrontation with the pagan world. Choose one of these topics (family separation, piety, or confrontation with the pagan world) and discuss the similarities and differences between their treatments in the two poems, as well as the social circumstances which may have given rise to these treatments.
• The fourteenth century saw the rise of a cultural debate about the nature of gentillesse, or nobility. Discuss the nature of this debate as it surfaces in medieval romances dating from the period. You may refer to Athelston, Octavian, and/or Sir Isumbras,but concentrate on two of these poems.

Research

Research is not a required component of this essay; however, each essay topic requires that you demonstrate a clear understanding of the social environment in which the romances were composed. You may wish to do some outside research to clarify or expand your knowledge from class lectures by reading some of the Background Reading given here. The editions of your texts also contain useful bibliography up to about 1990. You can find more recent criticism on the Bibliography page of this web site. Online encyclopedias like Wikipedia can be a useful starting point but should be used only as a starting point to seek out useful links and bibliographic references for further exploration.

Format and Mechanics

Your essay should be approximately four to five pages in length. Slightly over or slightly under does not matter, as it is the quality of the discussion that I will focus on in my grading. You should include a bibliography if outside material is used. You must quote the poems in the orginal Middle English, and you do not need to translate your quotations unless you are making a point about how the language should be interpreted.

In this assignment you will be graded not only on your understanding of the literature, but also on your ability to utilise the language and conventions of literary criticism. Your essay should be formatted according to the conventions of a recognised style guide, such as MLA or Chicago. Pay very close attention to the guidelines for citing poetry. Poems should be cited by line number, not page number. Quotations of more than four lines should be indented. Shorter quotations should have slashes indicating line breaks. Read over the guidelines detailed in my essay advice pages for further information.

Essays must be typed and proofread for spelling, grammar, and format. Essays deficient in these areas will be penalised substantially in proportion to how distracting and/or time-consuming I find the errors. In particularly bad cases where mechanical errors are so distracting that I cannot concentrate on the content of your discussion, I will base your entire grade on the mechanical errors. This stuff is important!

Due date: November 2

Translations:

The translations assignment is not yet ready; however, I have some advice for you to start thinking about. Translations will be approximately 15-30 lines of poetry, so you should begin practicing on sample passages from the texts. Troilus and Criseyde will be harder because of the more complex syntax.

Your translation must be in prose, not poetry, so translate sentence by sentence, not line by line. Your translation must remain as close as possible to the meaning of the original Middle English within the confines of acceptable Modern English grammar. (Hint: run your translation through your word processor’s grammar checker to see if it conforms to acceptable Modern English.) Make sure that your translation includes all the information given in the Middle English. Do not summarise or paraphrase the material. Although you may have to leave out words to make sentences fit Modern English idiom, make sure that you don't leave out anything meaningful.