This tenth edition of
Marginalia showcases again
essays submitted as part of the requirements of the MPhil degree.
Alongside a dissertation and a palaeographical project, the course
requires each student to write two such essays, and those published here
have been selected by the convenors of the MPhil course as the best
writing that the year has produced. Also published in this edition are reviews, written by members of the Medieval Reading Group, of some exciting and provocative recent contributions to the field of medieval study.
Megan Leitch's 'Segges slepande' and Cotton
Nero A.x: The Ethics of Sleep
examines the Gawain-poet's conceptualisation of sleep as a ledger of
virtue. She discusses the incidents of sleep in all four poems of the
manuscript: Jonah's slumber through the storm in Patience,
Belshazzar's drunken stupor in Cleanness, Gawain's real or feigned
rest beset by temptation and anxiety in Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight, and the sleep that
frames the dream of Pearl. Leitch begins with the Gawain-poet's
preoccupation with courtesy, and looks at how the courtesy manuals
themselves advise the regulation of proper sleep – the position, duration,
and bodily condition of self-controlled and healthy repose that does not
risk the sleeper falling into sloth or vulgarity. She argues that sleep, a
state beyond self-control, threatens the balance that is at the heart of
courteous conduct and, for the Gawain-poet, comes to represent a liminal
and precarious state of lack of moral awareness and self-regulation.
Leitch's readings of this theme as an 'ethical event', and her analyses of
the lexical figures 'to slip' or 'to slide' into sleep, present a
persuasive account of sleep as a favourite metaphor of the Gawain-poet,
and another instance of the way he makes legible the invisible quality of
true courtesy.
Sam Block's article, 'Among other, I, that
am falle in age': Lydgate,
Plural Singularity and Fifteenth-Century
Testaments, offers a sophisticated reading of The
Testament of Dan John Lydgate,
contextualising the poem alongside secular and legal testaments, such as
fifteenth-century wills, the spiritual testaments of St Francis and St
Ignatius, and other poetic testaments that borrow from both models - an
intersection that reminds us of the ways in which the literary writing of
this period, perhaps more than any other, participates in (and postures
as) other social discourses and forms. Block offers, through incisive
textual analysis of Lydgate's poem, a thesis of 'plural singularity'. He
suggests that the poem articulates both particularity and universality,
the individual's participation in the collective Christian experience, and
his appropriation of that experience into his own autobiographical
narrative: the Testament claims the macrocosmic Christian narrative as its
own peculiar story, and in turn offers up its own narrative as a
synecdoche of the universal one.
These articles offer persuasive and detailed insights into less
well-known as well as familiar works. They combine close textual analysis
with important contextualisation and remind us again of the richness and
reward of the corpus of Middle English literature.
Our thanks, as always, go to those whose assistance and encouragement
make this journal possible: the authors of the articles and reviews, the
editors, and members of the advisory board, the wizards who work their
website wonders, the faculty members who kindly advise and support the
Medieval Reading Group and its journal. Particular thanks go to Ruth and Sebastian Ahnert, whose excellent management of this site over several years, and whose kind and patient passing-on of their expertise, is much appreciated. But most of all, thanks go to the
members of the MRG, without whose lively debate, accomplished scholarship
and committed support, this enterprise would not be possible.
Joanna Bellis
Pembroke College, University of Cambridge
(on
behalf of the Medieval Reading Group)
