Fraternity and danger: Imagining male community in late medieval England.
Sharp, Michael David
1999
Abstract
My dissertation explores the efforts of Middle English poetry to define boundaries between licit and illicit forms of homosocial desire within political, martial, and religious communities in late medieval England. In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, English literature often manifests a profound ambivalence toward those communities most highly entrusted to serve the nation, whether by administering its laws, defending its borders, or tending its spiritual needs. Drawing on recent theories of gender and sexuality, I argue that representations of male community in Middle English poetry reveal a deep-seated anxiety about the vulnerability of homosocial desire to forms of perversion. Chapter 1 examines forms of fraternal desire in the native (or Matter of England) romance. The native English romance suppresses the heterosexual love story in favor of a focus on social and political bonds between men. With this suppression of the feminine, homosocial desire becomes a much more evident, and evidently problematic, phenomenon. In the late fourteenth-century romance <italic>Athelston</italic>, the initially idealized sworn brotherhood between the king and his three friends generates excessive and inappropriate forms of fraternal desire, which in turn threatens the destruction not only of the brotherhood, but of the English nation itself. Chapter 2 considers the dissolution of the Round Table in the alliterative <italic>Morte Arthure </italic>, where insularity undoes knightly community not by distracting it from chivalric ideals, but by encouraging its reckless pursuit of those ideals at the expense of heeding proper counsel. Chapter 3 argues that the alliterative poem the <italic>Parlement of the Thre Apes</italic> should be understood as an anti-Ricardian poem of the early Lancastrian period. The poem's uniquely sympathetic depiction of poaching in the royal forest responds to the destructive insularity of Ricardian rule. Chapter 4 discusses the clash between secular and monastic ideals of male community in Chaucer's <italic>Monk's Prologue </italic> and <italic>Tale</italic>. Chapter 5 argues that Chaucer's Friar and Summoner attack one another in their tales by figuring each other's spiritual corruption in sodomitical terms. By coupling the pursuit of unlawful gain with illicit and carnal forms of interaction between men, the Friar and Summoner give sodomitical form to the practice of simony. This project revises scholarly understanding of homosocial desire in the Middle Ages. Representations of male community in late medieval English writing suggest that even the most normative of affective bonds between men might mutate under overly insular conditions, creating forms of desire that threaten the very stability of English society.Subjects
Danger England English Fifteenth Century Fourteenth Century Fraternity Imagining Late Male Community Medieval Middle
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