Marginalia -- The Journal of the Medieval Reading Group at Cambridge



Foreword


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)



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