Abstract This article explores the temporal strangeness of Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale and its relationship to the tale’s wider spiritual and moral meaning. Following a recent revival of scholarly interest in medieval time, the article argues for an approach that moves beyond earlier research on The Prioress’s Tale , which has tended to concentrate on historicizing its anti-Semitism and the figure of the Prioress herself. It draws on Gillian Adler and Paul Strohm’s work on medieval ‘timescapes’ and Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject to analyse the role of Chaucer’s ‘litel clergeon’ as an uncanny, undead figure suspended in eschatological and temporal limbo. A close reading of the tale’s complex patterns of time reveals how its narrative timescape explores and sanctions its performance of both violence and salvation.
Abstract This article adopts a multi-directional gaze to consider Christian and Sufi texts side-by-side, in a study of Divine maternity across both bodies of literature. In both the Christian and the Sufi texts, maternity is a crucial way of conceiving the Divine, and is a crucial configuration of the relationship between devotee and Divine. The texts are all chronologically close, spanning the 1170s to 1250: the anonymous texts Ancrene Wisse and the Wooing Group ( c. 1230), and the works by the Sufis Muḥyddin Ibn ʿArabī (1165–1240), Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār ( c. 1145–1220), and ʿUmar Ibn al-Fāriḍ (1181–1235).
Abstract Addressing anxieties surrounding the space taken up by spirits, this article examines the spatial and physical depictions of a medieval ghost in the fourteenth-century Middle English verse version of the Gast of Gy and an illumination from the fifteenth-century Burgundian manuscript, J. Paul Getty Museum MS 31. Positing a consideration of the ghost as an acousmatic apparition, it compares the ways in which two different modes wrestle with the visual and semantic incongruities of representing and delineating a presence whose existence is founded on insubstance. Treating aspects of the ghost including corporeality, sound and invisibility, this article introduces Michel Chion’s concept of the acousmêtre and argues for an enduring interest in the Gy- narrative around difficulties of spatiality and location. It explores the links between these spatial anxieties displayed in the text and the Avignon Papacy of the fourteenth century, considering the adaptation and redirection of authorities both doctrinal and textual over the course of the narrative’s reproductions.
Abstract Homiletic Fragment II is a short poem of twenty lines in the Exeter Book of Old English poetry. Here it is argued that the poem is complete and artful, and neither homiletic nor fragmentary. This article explores the poem in its manuscript context and discusses its vocabulary, themes, content, and effectiveness, with a view to better understanding its structure, and the spiritual impulse behind it. A new interpretation and translation is offered. It is suggested that the poem was composed in a monastic context and was intended to encourage the monastic practice of hesychasm , preparation of the individual for prayer and contemplation of the divine.
