Negotiating Violence at the Feast in Medieval British Texts.

Author / Editor: Elmes, Melissa Ridley.

Published: Ph.D. Dissertation. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2016. Dissertation Abstracts International A77.11(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses and at https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/listing.aspx?id=19566.

Physical Description: viii, 330 pp.

Description: From Elmes's abstract: "Making use of theoretical underpinnings from anthropology and history that characterize the feast as a culturally essential event and medieval violence as a rational and strategically-employed tool of constraint, coercion, and manipulation, I convert the essentially historical question of the cultural importance of feasts into a literary one by close reading feasting scenes and their aftermath in order to consider how the writers in medieval England used the motif of violence at or following the feast to illuminate, critique, and offer correction to social, political, and religious issues tied to the specific concerns of justice, loyalty, and treason within a community. Looking at texts ranging from the Anglo-Saxon epic 'Beowulf,' the Welsh 'Mabinogion,' and Latin 'Historia Regum Britanniae' to chronicle-based works by Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower, the Middle English Arthurian romances 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' and Sir Thomas Malory’s 'Le Morte Darthur,' the Old Norse 'Clari’s Saga,' and outlaw tales of Robin Hood, Gamelyn, and Hereward the Wake, I demonstrate through a comparative approach centered on interpretation and analysis supported with contextual historical evidence that violence associated with the feast is typically presented according to genre expectations and mirrors cultural anxieties that are specific to the community in which and for which a given text was produced." Includes analysis of the "Man of Law's Tale" and its analogues, and comments on the apocryphal "Tale of Gamelyn."

Chaucer Subjects: Man of Law and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Chaucerian Apocrypha