Medieval Studies Dissertation Abstracts

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KYNDE INNOCENCE: CHILDREN IN OLD FRENCH AND MIDDLE ENGLISH ROMANCE

Nicole Clifton, Ph.D. Cornell University, August 1993

Medieval children were not simply miniature adults, as is sometimes asserted. The Middle Ages appreciated childhood as a special phase of life. Adults might find children amusing; but they also recognized and cherished such qualities as innocence, pitiableness, loyalty, and perseverance, which are frequently associated with children in medieval romances. These qualities, and the value placed upon them, allowed authors to use child characters both to entertain and to illustrate moral lessons. French and English romances circulating in the fourteenth century display somewhat different views of childhood. In English poems, children's positive qualities are widely accepted, whereas in French tales, admirable children are more likely to be presented as exceptions to a less pleasant norm.

I examine two romances, Amis and Amiloun and Floris and Blancheflor, which enjoyed considerable popularity in the Middle Ages and circulated in both Old French and Middle English texts. I also consider two apparently less popular romances, which show no signs of having been translated: the Middle English Athelston and the Old French Roman de Silence. All these romances have important characters who are children. The Middle English writers generally stress the ingenuity and bravery of older children, while emphasizing the helpless innocence of babies. In the Old French texts, on the other hand, these differences are flattened; a very young child may demonstrate great courage, while an older one may be pitied by adults within the story for his beauty and helplessness. Such variations depend to some degree on the intended audience for the romances. Middle English writers appear to have been writing, or translating, for more general audiences, whereas Old French writers often seem to have composed under the direction of a patron, for a specific readership.

My approach to these romances is based in social history, influenced by feminist psychoanalytic theories, particularly the writings of Nancy Chodorow, as well as by anthropological approaches to childhood such as that of Nancy Scheper-Hughes.

RIDDLES OF SUBJECTIVITY IN OLD ENGLISH POETRY

John William Tanke, Ph.D. Cornell University, January 1993

This project explores a group of Old English poems which invite the reader to decipher an encrypted subjective identity: the Exeter Book Riddles, The Dream of the Rood, and the runic "signatures" to Cynewulf's Christ II, Juliana, Fates of the Apostles, and . Combining rhetorical and ideological analysis, I argue that these "riddles of subjectivity" are inherently unsolvable.

Chapters One and Two review attempts to theorize the Old English riddle genre. In the first, I discuss the classification of riddles as "wisdom literature," particularly the thesis that by disclosing their encrypted content, the solver gains access to the symbolic universe of Anglo-Saxon society. I reject this thesis through a close reading of Riddle 20, whose subject is a sword personified as a celibate warrior. In Chapter Two I discuss the genre of the sexual or double-entendre riddle, focusing on the intersecting issues of social class and gender in Riddle 12. A meditation on themes of slavery and sexuality, this riddle features a certain "dark-haired servant woman" who is simultaneously celebrated and repudiated as a source of transgressive sexual pleasure.

Next, I offer a reading of The Dream of the Rood, paying particular attention to the speech of the personified cross. Rejecting the view that the cross symbolizes Christ's passive humanity, I argue that the poem aims to represent not the mystery of Christ's divided subjectivity but rather that of the divided human subject. I relate the enigma of prosopopoeia (the impersonation of a fictive Other) to the rhetoric of sacrifice, and suggest that the argument of the poem is that salvation hinges upon an "absolute symbolic identification."

In Chapter Four I discuss Cynewulf's runic "signatures" as a form of encrypted self-representation. Focusing on the radically formal difference between runes and Latin letters, I argue that Cynewulf's signatures represent an explicit self- textualization and foreground the tremendous anxiety which attends the Christian's relation to the Last Judgment. Christian subjects write their lives with thoughts, words, and deeds, constructing a text that is necessarily cryptic to themselves, but absolutely legible to God.

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