tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post2206353317535742015..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Mothers (and Giants) to Think Back ThroughCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70817546119044379322008-04-01T21:04:00.000-04:002008-04-01T21:04:00.000-04:00It's funny, though, because isn't the intimacy of ...It's funny, though, because isn't the intimacy of the master-slave relationship a kind of hybridity too? I don't want, however, to <I>pick on</I> the Arner: I found it <I>extremely</I> useful for opening up poco issues to my undergrads.<BR/><BR/><I>My point is that the poem tries to resolve a genuine problem in the region from which it comes, namely the problem of whether the lines between "English" and "Welsh" can be easily , obviously drawn in all cases--this doesn't deny the considerable losses that the Welsh suffered under the "heel" of English colonization, but instead tries to cope with the fact that one's exotic others sometimes turn out to be neighbors.</I><BR/><BR/>Well put. <I>On Difficult Middles</I> does this sort of thing too, and hurrah for it and other such projects.<BR/><BR/>Just to talk about, well, <I>me</I> for a bit: This hits upon my (still far-distant) plans for Book #2, which is yet another Jewish/Xian relations in the MA thing, but one that looks at dietary laws and ceremonies, all designed to keep a proper distance, as effecting strange minglings: Xians keeping kosher to elude perceived sleights by Jews, Jews compelled to keep Easter solemnity (like any Xian), wetnurses as a site of particular anxiety, &c.<BR/><BR/><I>I'll write another time about the "disappearing" Welsh in Eisner, but also the larger tradition on the loathly lady.</I><BR/><BR/>Looking forward to it.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-89438458395979111282008-04-01T17:44:00.000-04:002008-04-01T17:44:00.000-04:00Hey guys & gals, So much to say, so little time. ....Hey guys & gals, <BR/><BR/>So much to say, so little time. . . <BR/><BR/>Karl, you're exactly right about Arner's account of my reading. My feeling is (and I've said this to Lynn) that she misconstrues my point about hybridity. I'm certainly NOT arguing for a "friendly" association between English and Welsh. She really wants to keep the Marxist edge--and so I think, along the lines of Benita Parry, wants to resist all Bhabhean moves. But my point about SGGK is that the poem complicates any clear boundary between "English" and "Welsh" not in favor of friendship, but as a result of the considerable intimacy across triangulated difference: Welsh, English centrality, and English regional identities (Cheshire and Lancs) which as we know could make quite powerful claims on one's loyalties. I think Lynn assumes that "intimacy" = friendship, or affection, which of course psychoanalysis (to say nothing of accounts of domestic violence) have shown us to be untrue. My point is that the poem tries to resolve a genuine problem in the region from which it comes, namely the problem of whether the lines between "English" and "Welsh" can be easily , obviously drawn in all cases--this doesn't deny the considerable losses that the Welsh suffered under the "heel" of English colonization, but instead tries to cope with the fact that one's exotic others sometimes turn out to be neighbors. <BR/><BR/>I'll write another time about the "disappearing" Welsh in Eisner, but also the larger tradition on the loathly lady. Or, perhaps more accurately: the Welsh are often positioned as both (paradoxically) instrumental to the movement of the motif to ME, and somehow unconsequential, having produced few versions of it themselves. The big exception to this is Gleyns Goetnick's study of Peredur. <BR/><BR/>Gotta run! P.Patricia Inghamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03121127536343567140noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-37512876689756813722008-04-01T08:31:00.000-04:002008-04-01T08:31:00.000-04:00Huh, how about that. Looks interesting...This soun...Huh, how about that. Looks interesting...<BR/><BR/>This sounds like the only place to get one's Welsh on...Lynn M. Wollstadt, "Repainting the Lion: “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and a Traditional British Ballad." <BR/><BR/>I wonder who's reviewing it?Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-64207033614116516022008-04-01T08:27:00.000-04:002008-04-01T08:27:00.000-04:00Oh, and on loathly ladies ... there is now this.Oh, and on loathly ladies ... there is now <A HREF="http://www.mipcatalog.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=MIPCATALOG&Product_Code=978-1-58044-124-7" REL="nofollow">this</A>.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-6630813212640471742008-04-01T08:18:00.000-04:002008-04-01T08:18:00.000-04:00"Faint Scrawl," Tom:Limiters = Friars. She's diggi..."Faint Scrawl," Tom:<BR/><BR/>Limiters = Friars. She's digging at Hubert with that line, but also echoing a standard anti-fraternal critique of the friars as a horde (see the excellent Penn R. Szittya, <I>The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature</I> (Princeton UP, 1986, but also see Deleuze and Guattari on the horror of the Horde in <I>Thousand Plateaus</I>). Might even push at friars in their <I>missionary</I> aspect here, which is, of course, a kind of <I>pre</I>colonial aspect (the avant garde). If my hunches hold, this is how they're used in Southern France against the 'Cathars,' how they're used, vainly, in the Fraternal <A HREF="http://www.utppublishing.com/pubstore/merchant.ihtml?pid=7623&step=4" REL="nofollow">travels to the East.</A> I want to imagine a real difference in terms of models of taking land between the friars (the new model) and the (12th-century) monks (the 'old' model), but I don't know where to take this...<BR/><BR/>But, Tom, you might also wonder: what about Arthur's kids? And where are children, more generally, in the Cant Tales? What happens to them? Paging Dan Kline...they're murdered, sacrificed, raped, and, yes, a few turn out well, but overall, I think of the CT's children as nodes of pathos.<BR/><BR/>==<BR/><BR/>I remember reading only two pieces on the loathly lady. Susan Carter, "Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted: What lies Behind Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale," <I>The Chaucer Review</I> 37.4 (2003): 329-45....and if my memory of my readings in Loomis holds, this does seem a bit...Loomis-y. E.g., Carter discovers the Triple Moon goddess in the wyf, maide, and widow at the court when the rapist returns. Other parts of the article are much, much better than this. Also Manuel Aguirre, "The Riddle of Sovereignty," <I>The Modern Language Review</I> 88 (1993): 273-282. According to my notes, nothing about Wales or the Britons in either one.<BR/><BR/>PCI, who's been forced to blog!, given your current projects, you've no doubt read/encountered Lynn Arner, "The Ends of Enchantment: Colonialism and <I>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,</I>" <I>Texas Studies in Literature and Language</I> 48.2 (2006) 79-101? Again, if my notes haven't betrayed me, Arner thinks you over-emphasize hybridity in Anglo-Welsh relations and lose the coercive aspect of hybridization...but this isn't how I remember, for example, <I>Sovereign Fantasies</I> (which I used for an inhuman <I>Avowyng</I> reading) (and I think Arner mis-steps by arguing for the barbarity of Bertilak's castle, when it would have been much easier, and <I>possibly</I> more interesting, to work with it as a utopian fantasy at the heart of the colonial wilderness, as if travelers to Shangri-La had discovered, not some Orientalized dreamworld, but instead a cleaned-up version of London).<BR/><BR/>Anyway!<BR/><BR/>Not that you need my approval, but I love the new project. I can't think offhand of any treatments of the important Newfangledness topos (except perhaps as a negative image of Dean's <I>World Grown Old</I>), and certainly nothing, then, that treats it as a site of ambivalence, of desire, or even, if you want to go there, the objet petit a. But given that you're pushing enchantment, <I>probably</I> don't want to do that!<BR/><BR/><I>do more with what seems to me similarity between the effacement of the Welsh as colonized subject (taken seriously rather than critiqued for their 'complicity' with English colonization--when I was first working on this material, the conventional wisdom about Welsh as colonized was that they weren't really a "unified" group, but rather folk with particular loyalty to their locality)and the effacement of the Welsh in much (but not all) writing on the 'loathly lady' as a "celtic" motif.</I><BR/><BR/>This sounds fascinating, and I hope it finds a home someday. Perhaps my problem was looking to the article to fill in some gaps in my Wife of Bath knowledge (as I transform myself into a Chaucerian, at least for this semester). If I wanted, however, to turn on the Carter and Aguirre, above, and no doubt others (thinking of the notes in the TEAMS Gawain volume), to have the Wife of Bath be only one piece of a larger critique of the effacement of the Welsh, your approach sounds very, very useful.<BR/><BR/><I>I find the Albion material fascinating, but more far removed from traditions of sovereignty, although now that you mention it, I can't quite recall why I think that</I><BR/><BR/>Yeah, hmmm....I tend to think of the Albion material as a (and I'm sure I've said this somewhere above) place to think through, encounter, fall into, be swallowed up by (choose your metaphor) problems and fascinations of sovereignty. Sort of like the hag, but <I>not</I> as easily relegated to some chthonic/sylvan Other, and perhaps with a more complex relationship to eros.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70593219083117585812008-03-31T14:42:00.000-04:002008-03-31T14:42:00.000-04:00Patty, thanks for joining the conversation. There ...Patty, thanks for joining the conversation. There was a line that really struck me in what you wrote:<BR/><BR/><EM>effacement of the Welsh in much (but not all) writing on the 'loathly lady' as a "celtic" motif</EM><BR/><BR/>I don't know much of the scholarly history of treating the loathly lady ... mainly just Sigmund Eisner's book. He was a disciple of Roger Sherman Loomis and wrote in the same pan-Celtic vein. I'm wondering of you see a larger effacement of Wales within this scholarly tradition (ie did Loomis speak of vanished Celtic gods at the expense of vanishing the living Welsh?) or is the disappearing act limited to the loathly lady critics?Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27410171601523632262008-03-30T18:14:00.000-04:002008-03-30T18:14:00.000-04:00Well, now you've gone and made me get a blogger ac...Well, now you've gone and made me get a blogger account!<BR/><BR/>I'll confess, Karl, to being all about reclaiming enchantment amidst disenchantment and the WofB is of course the patron saint of such an endeavor. [My current book project has, as one of IT'S ambitions a hope to offer a "new history of enchantment."] And it's really in this regard (or perhaps, better, in this spirit) that I deploy the pastoral in that little essay. [At one point I was planning a book on the utopian impulse of romance, but that project has transmogrified into a related project on the "medieval new," that is, what it means that medieval culture's account of newness, newfangeledness, novelty and 'novelries' is so interestingly ambivalent.]<BR/><BR/>But back to the Wife's Tale. I wasn't really trying to suggest that the Welsh Britons were some kind of source for Chaucer, but that the Britons are associated here with loves [as Jeff put it in one of these replies] that are somewhat mummified. I was interested in the way in which those "old dayes" nonetheless carried a good deal of enchanting power, power that a reader (comme moi) could appropriate for semi-utopian projects. <BR/><BR/>I think my slight resistance to the Albion direction with the WofB has to do with what the longstanding links between the loathly lady tradition and Irish female sovereignty--and in the longer version of that article (some of which was left on the cutting room floor), I do more with what seems to me similarity between the effacement of the Welsh as colonized subject (taken seriously rather than critiqued for their 'complicity' with English colonization--when I was first working on this material, the conventional wisdom about Welsh as colonized was that they weren't really a "unified" group, but rather folk with particular loyalty to their locality)and the effacement of the Welsh in much (but not all) writing on the 'loathly lady' as a "celtic" motif. <BR/><BR/>I find the Albion material fascinating, but more far removed from traditions of sovereignty, although now that you mention it, I can't quite recall why I think that! But I also feel at this point that I should fess up and say that Stephen Knight really found this reading uncompelling--and it was his resistance that (long story) inspired my use of Raymond Williams. So I'm very grateful!<BR/><BR/>Heh, this blogging stuff is pretty fun. <BR/><BR/><BR/>; ) [Clearly emoticons are beyond my current skill-level.]Patricia Inghamhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03121127536343567140noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-48986121576004218132008-03-29T16:37:00.000-04:002008-03-29T16:37:00.000-04:00I'm preparing a class on the Wife's Tale and was w...I'm preparing a class on the Wife's Tale and was wondering what to say about the intro. A google search led me to this recent post. Very interesting. Somehow it nudged my thinking along to recognize that ...<BR/>Elf-Queens's world--matriarchalish, women impregnated by incubi (without bodies). <BR/><BR/>Christian world: Limiters only (?!) dishonour, but don't impregnate. (If I understand the line.)<BR/><BR/>In the tale what does the rapist do? Takes the woman's virginity, but no mention of impregnating.<BR/><BR/>Reminds me of a student who asked yesterday, Where are all the Wife of Bath's kids?<BR/><BR/>--<BR/>Interesting blog. I already wasted an hour here. :)<BR/><BR/>-TomAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21801534825221367132008-03-28T21:40:00.000-04:002008-03-28T21:40:00.000-04:00Thanks for the comment, PCI. On being more right t...Thanks for the comment, PCI. On being more right than interesting, first, I should repeat that I'm sure the is more with me than with your argument. A 'help my unbelief' situation, likely. <I>Right</I> after all shuts doors...even trapdoors! And interesting opens them, keeps things moving, and, well, interesting. So thanks again for your article, without which I'd be without any of the my thoughts on the links, however tentative, between Albina and the Wife.<BR/><BR/>Second, I hope I didn't come across as saying that <I>you're</I> critiquing the pastoral. Far from it! So far as I get it, yours is of course a post-disenchanted (to use a Dinshavian locution much-loved around these parts) appropriation (? discovery? rediscovery?) of the pastoral. Without it, there'd be nothing of the Welsh in the Wife's Tale, yes?<BR/><BR/>And, as for my trapdoor, it'd be foolish of me to argue that the Albina story is wholly outside, wholly before, the Arthurian. <I>That's</I> what I should remember...Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-17912884223213608692008-03-28T09:36:00.000-04:002008-03-28T09:36:00.000-04:00Whoops! Sorry, Karl. And thanks to you for your in...Whoops! Sorry, Karl. And thanks to you for your interesting reading of the tradition. [Thanks, Jeff, for the correction.] <BR/><BR/>Note to self: spend a little more time on those lurking skills! Perhaps it's even time for me to come up with a blogger identity. <BR/><BR/>PIAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-21553193084336889752008-03-27T07:52:00.000-04:002008-03-27T07:52:00.000-04:00Hi Patty, it's so good to "see" you here.I don't w...Hi Patty, it's so good to "see" you here.<BR/><BR/>I don't want to take credit for Karl's excellent post: he's the one invoking your essay, not me ... though I do have an essay in process that takes your essay as its point of departure!Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-8671025462831499652008-03-26T09:49:00.000-04:002008-03-26T09:49:00.000-04:00Dear Jeff and everyone, So here's where I reveal m...Dear Jeff and everyone, <BR/><BR/>So here's where I reveal myself as a regular lurker to "In the Middle"! And thanks for the reference to my Wife of Bath article--and, truth be told, I'd always rather be interesting than right, although I do have ambitions that venture toward the compelling. <BR/><BR/>But I just logged on, Jeff, to say that I take your account a la Albion as a friendly rejoinder--and am not at all adverse to tumbling through that trap door you set. My one objection: I wouldn't say I'm actually critiquing the 'pastoral'--and I have a passionate fondness for Raymond Williams County and the City--so much as trying to "trapdoor" it!<BR/><BR/>Cheers, <BR/><BR/>Patty InghamAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-38741475876555724572008-03-21T07:53:00.000-04:002008-03-21T07:53:00.000-04:00Ah-ha! Modem and router and laptop are always the ...Ah-ha! Modem and router and laptop are always the last thing to be packed. Before they disappear: if I'm onto anything, it's because I've been inspired by Chris Baswell and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's Albina project...which I think I am (might have been once?) involved in somehow...I must check on that.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-36948990954790377052008-03-21T05:56:00.000-04:002008-03-21T05:56:00.000-04:00Good luck with the moving Karl, and good luck with...Good luck with the moving Karl, and good luck with this project. You'll pardon the pun, but you are on to something BIG with this, and I can see it moving beyond Chaucer.<BR/><BR/>Though I do think that Lanval and Launfal are fully within the Arthurian imaginary!Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-14008107235640355762008-03-20T21:16:00.000-04:002008-03-20T21:16:00.000-04:00I'm of a mind that they support my pointUh, duh, t...<I>I'm of a mind that they support my point</I><BR/><BR/>Uh, duh, that's pretty much what you said. NOW I'm really gone, even if I got this wrong too.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-23778487167490448322008-03-20T21:15:00.000-04:002008-03-20T21:15:00.000-04:00Totally suggestive; you'll get no counterargument ...Totally suggestive; you'll get no counterargument from me on that point. <BR/><BR/>And thanks for the reminders on the Incubi in Geoffrey HRB. <BR/><BR/>As for the fairies in Lanval: I'm of a mind that they support my point--after all, there's a way in which they're outside of Arthurian time, and hence 'before' it, and Arthur is, after all, a failure, at least in that lai. <BR/><BR/>As for the Lynch: "not only as a British foundation myth but also as a cautionary tale about the dangers to society of ambitious-and foreign-women who usurp masculine privilege." That's a standard reading of the text (admittedly little read when Lynch did her article, and still not much read), but my argument in my 2003 Med Academy Conference paper was for the Albina story as a return of the repressed: I stressed the uncanny similarities instead of the differences, and so hollowed out the patriarchy from within. Something like that. I'd say more, but I'm moving tomorrow, final packing right now, so no ITMing for me for a few days.Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-27539858652007298612008-03-20T14:01:00.000-04:002008-03-20T14:01:00.000-04:00Oh and here is one more thing, regarding incubi: t...Oh and here is one more thing, regarding incubi: they are quite Arthurian, too. Don't forget that Geoffrey of Monmouth's Merlin is the son of an incubus, and he provides a an extended gloss on them as well. <BR/><BR/>As to fairies and Arthur ... that's not just Chaucerian, either. In Marie de France's Lanval, the mysterious lady is fairy-like, and takes Lanval to the Isle of Avalon at the end. The Middle English version by Thomas Chestre is more explicit: Sir Launfal's love is here named Dame Tryamour (that's the medieval version of a James Bond woman), and she is the daughter of Oberon, "Kyng of Fayrye." Launfal is at the end "take ynto Fayrye." The dominant wife in both would be lusty Guenevere. (I love the shocked -- shocked! -- line in Chestre "sche hadde lemmannys under her lord").<BR/><BR/>All that's missing is the negative gynecocracy (I supposed you have a positive one in Marie, since Avalon is ruled by the Lady and not some father figure).<BR/><BR/>That's not to argue you out of your argument at all, Karl, because as I said I think it's a compelling one ... but it still seems to me compelling in its suggestiveness rather than its secure connection. Then again, think of the amazing article that Kathy Lynch wrote connecting the Squire's Tale to the Thousand and One Nights, using mainly the power of suggestion ("East Meets West in Chaucer's Squire's and Franklin's Tales" Speculum 70 1995 530-551). Lynch, by the way, connects the Franklin's Tale to the Albina myth:<BR/><BR/><EM>Indeed, Dorigen's role recollects a foundation myth that is sharply opposed <BR/>to the one Geoffrey provides of Brutus civilizing Britain. In a story that was <BR/>very popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Anglo-Norman and English romancers describe the background to Geoffrey's account of Brutus's <BR/>arrival, and in particular tell of Albin[a], the Greek or Syrian princess who, as <BR/>in the story of Danaus's daughters, joins with her sisters in plotting against their <BR/>husbands' mastery by killing them in their sleep.52 <BR/>The Greek Albina's plans are <BR/>thwarted by her youngest sister's mildness toward her own husband and betrayal <BR/>of the insurrection to their father. (In the versions where Albina is Syrian, her <BR/>murderous designs are successful.) Discovery leads to the sisters' exile and their <BR/>abortive attempt to found the matronyrnic nation of Albion. Despite their grand <BR/>schemes, however, the sisters find that they are unable to get along without <BR/>men, and they surrender themselves to libidinous appetites and the embraces <BR/>of the devil, who, in various forms, impregnates them with the giants whose <BR/>progeny Brutus will come to slay and colonize. The addition of the story of <BR/>Albina thus recasts the matter of Geoffrey's Historia not only as a British foundation myth but also as a cautionary tale about the dangers to society of ambitious-and foreign-women who usurp masculine privilege. A society, like a marriage, the story seems to say, must be founded upon the authority of the <BR/>male, upon the patriarchal law that brings order to the chaos of the land once <BR/>the "regne of Femenye" (1.866), like enemies from the outside, is cleared away. <BR/>In reality, however, Dorigen is far from realizing the full threat of feminine <BR/>autonomy. Like Albina and her sisters, Dorigen's elevated social standing may <BR/>give her the upper hand over Arverag~s,~~ <BR/>and he may swear to her at the <BR/>beginning of their marriage that he "[nle sholde upon hym take no maistrie / <BR/>Agayn hir wyl" (lines 747-48). But the most that can be said is that she mo- <BR/>mentarily flirts with freedom from masculine subjection just as she flirts with <BR/>the squire Aurelius.</EM> (pp545-6)<BR/><BR/>(apologies for the off formatting, a hazard of cut and paste).Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-88797003613408278572008-03-20T13:36:00.000-04:002008-03-20T13:36:00.000-04:00MLT does seem like a better fit, but I still think...MLT <I>does</I> seem like a better fit, but I still think: a) British historical setting; b) Incubi; c) gynecocracy, sort of,; d) lust, e) vanishing women; f) dominant wives; g)and, why not, a discovery of women occupying the heart of every masculine desire (think of the old wife saying to the rapist, "I know what you want"), and think: Albina and the sisters. <BR/><BR/>Just checked my Riverside textual notes and was very disappointed to see that the there's no indication that any scribes changed the 24 dancing women to 29. Anyone have ManRick at hand?Karl Steelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03353370018006849747noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-83532020096012792712008-03-20T10:20:00.000-04:002008-03-20T10:20:00.000-04:00Fascinating, Karl. I must admit the idea of a conn...Fascinating, Karl. <BR/><BR/>I must admit the idea of a connection between Chaucer and the Albina myth has suggested itself to me in the past -- though, just as Dr V suggested, in relation to the MLT more than WoB (and also to a degree the Knight's T, with its conquered Amazons, and the Squire's T, with its actual inhabited Femenye that Canacee brings about). I've even brought the materials into my undergrad classroom in translation, but I have found it hard to move beyond being suggestive in the connection: there just isn't anything that would definitively link Chaucer to Albina.<BR/><BR/>Still, I've argued many times that Chaucer has three strategies for all things British (and thereby Welsh): <BR/>(1) relegation to silence<BR/>(2) displacement to Brittany<BR/>(3) museumfication [Britain as a historical entity rather than a contemporary one].<BR/><BR/>I'll give this post more thought though. It's very intriguing.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-67427216615027256912008-03-20T09:55:00.000-04:002008-03-20T09:55:00.000-04:00What the story of Albina also makes me think of is...What the story of Albina also makes me think of is Custance in the Man of Law's tale. There's the rudderless ship, obviously, but also the charge by Donegild, however false (or not?), that Custance is an "elf" who has given birth to a monster. The Man of Law tries very hard to make Custance's story into a quasi saint's life, but can't entirely bury her elvish otherness. And though she is constant and passive in her suffering at times, she can also be feistily and strangely head-strong (or just strong) -- as in her conversion of Hermingild (and interesting community of two women, found threatening and thus violently dissolved by the unnamed knight who frames C for murder), or in her miraculous throwing of the rapist overboard from her rudderless ship. I know, it's supposedly the BVM who did that, but then the MoL says "How may this wayke womman han this strengthe..." and compares her to David slaying Goliath -- there's your giant-slaying for you.<BR/><BR/>I know this doesn't really help you with the WBT, but I'm in the midst of teaching MLT, so my head is elsewhere!Dr. Viragohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03960384082670286328noreply@blogger.com