Reading Landscapes in Medieval British Romance.
- Author/Editor
- Richmond, Andrew Murray.
- Title
- Reading Landscapes in Medieval British Romance.
- Published
- Ph.D. Dissertation. The Ohio State University, 2015. Open access at http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1428671857 (accessed February 3, 2023).
- Review
- From Richmond's abstract: "My dissertation . . . interpret[s] the textual landscapes and ecological details that permeate late-medieval British romances . . . c.1300 – c. 1500, focusing on . . . fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English and Scottish conceptions of the relationships between literary worlds and 'real-world' locations. In my first section, I analyze the role of topography and the management of natural resources in constructing a sense of community in 'Sir Isumbras,' 'William of Palerne,' and 'Havelok the Dane,' and explain how abandoned or ravaged agricultural landscapes in 'Sir Degrevant' and the 'Tale of Gamelyn' betray anxieties about the lack of human control over the English landscape in the wake of population decline caused by civil war, the Black Death, and the Little Ice Age. My next section examines seashores and waterscapes in 'Sir Amadace,' 'Emaré,' 'Sir Eglamour of Artois,' the 'Awntyrs off Arthure,' and the Constance romances of Chaucer and Gower. Specifically, I explain how a number of romances present the seaside as a simultaneously inviting and threatening space whose multifaceted nature as a geographical, political, and social boundary embodies the complex range of meanings embedded in the Middle English concept of “play” – a word that these texts [including Gower's tale of Apollonius] often link with the seashore. Beaches, too, serve as stages upon which the romances act out their anxieties over the consequences of human economic endeavor, with scenes where shipwrecks are configured as opportunities for financial gain for scavengers and as mortal peril for sailors [including Constance]. In my third section, I move beyond the boundary space of the sea to consider the landscape descriptions of foreign lands. . . , focusing in particular on representations of Divine will manifested through landscape features and dramatic weather in the Holy Land of 'Titus and Vespasian' and the Far East of 'Kyng Alisaunder.' Finally, my concluding section returns to literary descriptions of medieval Britain, examin[ing] the idea of the 'foreign at home.' I discuss here how romances of Scotland and the Anglo-Scottish border such as 'Sir Colling,' 'Eger and Grime,' and 'Thomas of Erceldoune' cast the Border landscape as one defined by rugged topography, extreme weather, and an innate sense of independence, while also emphasizing its proximity to the Otherworlds of Fairy and Hell. I then trace how these topics get developed later, in the early modern ballads that are based on some of these romances, explaining how song-texts persist in communicating some of these same ideas regarding Scottish and northern English landscapes."
- Date
- 2015
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations