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This book introduces a new critical framework for reading medieval texts. The narrative grotesque decentres critical discourse by turning focus to points at which literary texts distort and rupture conventional narratological and poetic boundaries. These boundary-warping grotesques are crystallised at moments affective horror and humour. Two seminal Older Scots works are used to exemplify the multivalent applications of the narrative grotesque: Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour (c. 1501) and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (c. 1507). These texts create manifold textual hybridisations, transfigurations, and ruptures in order to interrogate modes of discourse, narratological subjectivities, and medieval genre conventions. Within the liminal space opened up by these textual (de)constructions, it is possible to reconceptualise the ways in which poets engaged with concepts of authenticity, veracity, subjectivity, and eloquence in literary writing during the late medieval period.
From the proliferation of temporal and affective potentialities in Douglas’s dream vision poem, discussion here shifts to William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo ( c . 1507). Whereas Douglas’s text is deeply solipsistic and achieves its narrative grotesque within the psyche(s) of a single persona, Dunbar’s work creates antinomy – and ultimately the narrative grotesque – via its complex interplay of speakers and poetic form. These multiple ‘voices’ offer to the audience a
philosophical and aesthetic concerns in literary narratives. This study considers two Older Scots poems that exemplify the narrative grotesque, namely Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour ( c . 1501) and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo ( c . 1507). Narrowing focus to these two texts allows for a forensic examination of the multivalent forms and outcomes of the narrative grotesque. When it is applied as a framework for reading medieval texts the narrative grotesque will be shown to be an
Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque , p. 26. 3 Bawcutt (ed.), William Dunbar , Volume 2, p. 287; the note to lines 60–3 calls attention to the similarity of the passage with Lydgate’s The Floure of Curtesy (c.1401): ‘[…] “Alas, what may this be, / That every foule hath his lyberté / Frely to chose, after his desyre, / Everyche his make thus, fro yere to yere?’ (53–6). Line references from John Lydgate, The Floure of Curtesye , in The Chaucerian Apocrypha
their quasi-omniscient role, achieves a sense of cathartic release from the confused manipulations of the text. Notes 1 For associations with the latter see Calin, The Lily and the Thistle , pp. 109–11. 2 Ross, William Dunbar , pp. 227–32. 3 The Pardoner’s Tale , for instance, does not cross into this grotesque sphere because he still purports to preach Christian teachings. The disconnect
MF, poems by Sir Richard Maitland (1496–1586), with a couple by his son, John (James VI’s chancellor), and the many by William Dunbar form the greater part of the compilation, as far as can be established from the manuscript’s disarranged state. 43 The emphases are thus on family piety, personal behaviour and aspects of court life. The two elrich fantasies included in MF, Lichtoun’s ‘Quha doutis?’ and Roule’s ‘Devyne poware’, have been placed in a group of diverse works, including those by Dunbar, Lydgate, Douglas, Henryson, Stewart and the anonymous Christis
treatment by Macrobius and Calcidius, is magnified in Douglas’s interpretation of the form. Despite the almost rote nature of literary dream visions by the opening of the sixteenth century, Douglas affects an innovative take on the form by incorporating humanist perspectives into the popular medieval mode. Despite their waning popularity across the rest of Europe, dream visions were a popular mode in Scotland in the fifteenth century. Two pre-eminent Scottish makars, William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, engage the genre
moments which reveal the intersection of ideas, affect, and form. In Gavin Douglas’s The Palyce of Honour and William Dunbar’s The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo new correspondences were discovered by means of the narrative grotesque: they share a concern with poetic making that is expressed in weird and wonderful new shapes and patterns; their self-conscious interrogations of medieval forms and perspectives create an unlikely blend of genres, voices, and structures that, in turn, materialise into
Historical Review 23 (1926), pp. 106–15. Even James VI’s Basilikon Doron, penned in Middle Scots, was ultimately published in an anglicised version; see Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and the Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish context and the English translation’, in Linday Levy Peck (ed.), The mental world of the Jacobean court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 36–54. Problematically, the ESTC makes little attempt to distinguish between books published in Scots and those in English. For instance, limiting works to Scots and searching for William Dunbar’s
greater frequency than they do in present-day Western societies. Reference to trance can be found in William Dunbar’s poem ‘Fasternis evin in Hell’ ( c .1507): OFF Februar the fyiftene nycht Full lang befoir the dayis lycht I lay in till a trance; [ I fell into And than I saw baith hevin and hell. 24 The poetic trance or dream-vision was a literary motif, but Dunbar’s lines do demonstrate a cultural understanding that trances might occur in the night or during unusual conditions of sleep. Grizell Love, a Presbyterian visionary who saw other