Date/Time
Date(s) - 13 Oct 2011
5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Tognino Hall, Duane Library, Rose Hill Campus
Category(ies) No Categories
Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies presents Jocelyn Wogan Browne (Fordham) on “Blood Matters: Reading with the Heart in Medieval Devotional Literature” (Inaugural Lecture by Thomas F.X. Mullarkey, Chair in English Literature).
This lecture begins with books and texts from the court of England’s great royal patrons of the arts, Henry III (reigned 1216-1272) and his queen, Eleanor of Provence (d. 1291). It explores some medieval reading habits and ideas about readers’ responses, which seem curiously allied to the more familiar devotional poetry of the 17th century produced by poets such as John Donne. One particular focus here is a challenging and intense poetic meditation on Christ’s passion composed for Queen Eleanor, in which sacrificial violence, divine and chivalric, is used both to engage affective response on the reader’s part and to organize the cultural geography of the world around the poem, including the 1270-1274 crusading expedition of Eleanor’s son, Edward I. Composed in French by a Latinate cleric for a Provençal and French-speaking Queen of England, such a poem may seem simply an exotic curiosity. But it is part of a wider tradition of such composition in French, Latin and English between the 13th and the 15th centuries, some of which will also be looked at in the lecture.
English literary history has often viewed emotive devotional writing as primarily a phenomenon of the late 14th and 15th centuries, when large numbers of works began to be composed in medieval English. But a significant corpus of texts in French—England’s other major vernacular language—survives from the beginning of the 12th through the early 15th centuries, though it has often been ignored in favor of English-language English literature. When we take into account all the languages in which lay and religious people communicated and produced texts between, for example, the influential meditations of St. Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) and the devotional and doctrinal writings of the 15th century, Eleanor’s poem becomes not so much exotic as a valuable indication of the rich multilingualism of English medieval culture. The linguistic and literary history of England is not a story of the inevitable “triumph of English,” but rather that of a complexly polyglot society. For devotional poetry, as for manygenres of English literature, there is a new history to be written in the light of multilingual perspectives, and these new histories can also speak afresh to our own sense of identity.
For directions to the Rose Hill campus, see here.
A reception follows, and all are invited. Contact (718) 817-4655 or [email protected] for more information.