Thomas Grey images

Eton college, painted around the time Grey wrote.

The churchyard about which Grey wrote. He's buried here.

Some Spenser Resources

Hello,

Since we're not reading all of the Fairie Queene, here are some resources to help with our reading of Spenser. I will have brief summaries to handout in class on Thursday so you know what happens in the parts we don't read. For a complete summary, sparknotes does a decent job; you might want to peruse their explanation of the plot.

For some background reading on Spenser (if you're interested), check out his page on Luminarium. Part of what makes Luminarium so useful is the links to publicly-available essays, many of them by literary scholars and experts. You might want to spend some time poking around on the site generally.

Make sure you write down any questions you have about FQ. I'll see you all Thursday!

Tudors, the Reformation, and Humanism

Not that we're at all ambitious. . . .

A great resource for this period is Lara Eakin's website on the Tudors. She's not associated with a university, and this site is definitely produced by enthusiasts, but it's also accurate and interesting.

I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about this map by Laurence Nowell in class today. I'll post my lecture notes after class on this blog.

Lecture notes:
Q: Who are the Tudors?

Henry VIII: broke from Church of Rome in 1530s. This was a political move, not a doctrinal one.

Edward VI in 1547, move toward a doctrinally reformed church

Mary in 1553, back to RC

Eliz in 1558, back to Prot (although she may have been herself fairly Catholic in her leanings).

Q:So what are the main differences between Cath and Prot (remember, for our purposes we will refer to all sides of the argument as Christian)? And what’s this about the puritans?

The book goes over Faith alone and scripture alone.
Faith alone is supposed to be reassuring (to Luther, anyway), but how does one get faith? Can we ever believe on our own? Calvin just makes this worse, as do the “Puritans” who follow his thinking. Do humans ever have any choice or control in their own salvation?

We can also see this as a debate over the role of the body in salvation, with the Puritans opposing spectacle as useful for achieving belief.

Q: What’s all this humanism business, then?
Generally a belief that in this world, we should focus on humans and their achievements. We’re not to the scientific revolution yet, but we’re moving towards a model of describing the world as we experience it, as a goal in itself rather than a mode of getting us to the afterlife. Maps, for instance, become “modern” at this time.

Humanists believed that education was crucial. This is doubly true of Protestants, who wanted people to be educated enough to read the Bible (later on, it occurs to them that this can lead to trouble. . . .)
Also a stress on the vernacular. English has an inferiority complex at this time; some folks want to make it more eloquent by adding imported words, others want to return to “true English” vocabulary.

Q: I thought this was the renaissance. What’s this about nostalgia for the middle ages?

Particularly in England, there was a need to research the oldest English history, both to vindicate the Church of England (see! Our ancestors got it all right until those blasted Norman Papists showed up!) and to claim that England had a special identity and status. Claiming national identity requires one to show that it has always been present.
Why have a national identity? This is the sort of question that people didn’t ask until recently, because we’re all indoctrinated to think in these terms. Especially in the Elizabethan period, though, people in the government wanted “English” to be the primary identity category for their subjects (rather than “East Anglian,” or “merchant,” or even, perhaps, “Protestant.”). They worked the presses to spread this sort of view, tying notions of what it was to be “English” to Protestantism, dynastic loyalty and love for Elizabeth, the history of England, England’s place-names and geography, and some of its cultural phenomena like the common law.

Sir Gawain: animal, vegetable, mineral. . .

One thing to discuss in the hunting scenes of SGGK is the progression of animals which are hunted: deer, boar, and a fox. Books about animals were very popular throughout the Middle Ages, and there are some good web sites that can tell us what attributes where associated with different beasts.

This site gives general overviews, and has some nifty manuscript illuminations; it also contains descriptions of gems (remember how often the text calls Gawain a pearl?). Some other medieval bestiaries have been edited and one of them is available as an etext through Carnegie Vincent Library (if anyone wants to work on a topic like this for a paper).

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

This is one of the most famous of the Middle English Romances. It exists in 1 manuscript, which does have some illuminations (illustrations):

Sir Gawain brings up several key themes which we'll discuss in class on Tuesday. I'll add the list of themes to this post after discussion, so you can keep them in mind for reading the rest of the poem.

Edit: Some ideas that you all raised in class for themes:
Nature/court
Color schemes
Honor
Bravery

Some things I'd like to add:
Trouthe (truth)
Game
Reciprocity

Consider form, too: what does the stanza structure allow the poet? What does it keep him from doing?

Introduction to Old English

The article on Caedmon currently on wikipedia is written by one of the experts in the field and was reviewed by the Anglo-Saxonists list-serve.

Not only did Bede influence chronology and commit the facts and legends of early British history to writing--he's got his own theme park! Ok, so it's really more a living history museum than a theme park. It still makes Anglo-Saxonists happy.

The Sutton Hoo finds are spectacular (check them out at the British Museum if you're ever in London). See more pictures at this site.