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This book is an open-ended critical account of the Gawain-poems. The four poems of MS Cotton Nero A.x, Art. 3 are untitled in the manuscript, but titled by modern editors, in manuscript order: Pearl, Cleanness (or Purity), Patience, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poems testify that he was cultivated, with an appreciation of the finer points of chivalric life, and also deeply religious - a cleric, no doubt, given his biblical knowledge, his interest in Christian doctrine, and his understanding of sermon style. Pearl is a religious dream-vision in which the dream is largely taken up by dialogue between the narrator or dreamer, as a figure in his dream, and a woman who is a fount of divine wisdom. Cleanness combines discussion of a religious virtue with retelling of stories from the Bible. Its three main stories are from the Old Testament, and they centre on Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Belshazzar's feast. Patience is a poem that combines discussion of a moral quality with biblical narrative, in the case of Patience, one narrative only, the story of Jonah.Sir Gawain is a record of, and tribute to, the beauties and pleasures of chivalric life. Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience suggest that for the poet national events may have merged with events in his own life to challenge his faith. With Gawain too it is possible that the public and the personal intermingle to shake his faith in chivalry and the feudal model of social order.
. Whereas Julian demonstrates the security of her personal faith in the face of national events, Pearl, Cleanness , and Patience suggest that for the poet national events may have merged with events in his own life to challenge his faith. With Gawain too it is possible that the public and the personal intermingle to shake his faith in chivalry and the feudal model of social order. Chivalry is evidently in his blood, and as one who writes for courtly patrons he may be said to have a vested interest in it. At the same time, especially if he is a cleric, he may be
society, and avoided possible negative associations of the workhouse, prison or asylum. The factory presented as a high-class country estate or manor house that not only looked impressive, but also cared for the workforce on a feudal model, as a community with common goals and familial relationships (Figure. 3.1). As the domestic servant class sought employment in factories after the First World War, the feudal model might have been reassuring to some, but oppressive to others.9 From at least the mid-seventeenth century, with the development of avenue gardens in Britain
arms from the number two state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), enabling them to pursue nationalist foreign policies, and to dilute economic dependency. Moreover, as Thompson (1970) has shown, the Middle East is a partial exception to Galtung’s feudal model in that, while fragmented economically and politically, it enjoys trans-state cultural unity which nationalist states have exploited to mobilise regional solidarity against the core. Thus, the conjuncture of the Cold War and the spread of Pan-Arabism allowed Nasser’s Egypt to sufficiently roll back
-century historians who have imposed inflexible and anachronistic ideas upon them. For Reynolds, the feudal model of society is the prime example of this. Feudalism is described as a concept foreign to the Middle Ages on the first page of Kingdoms and Communities , an argument developed in detail ten years later in Fiefs and Vassals. Reynolds gives us a memorable metaphor: ‘feudalism has provided a kind of protective lens through which it has seemed prudent to view the otherwise dazzling oddities and varieties of medieval creatures’. 12 The Middle Ages has often been seen in
-scale immigration to urban environments due to rapid industrialisation. The belief that officers – by birth and economic standing – could lead men was due to their civilian status as stewards of the labouring classes. This was based on the model of the country estate: the ‘landlord-tenant’, or the feudal model.43 While the problems associated with this model became apparent in the blunders of the Crimean War, during the period in which ‘Locksley Hall’ was written, it still operated as the paradigm. Often the courageousness displayed by officers – men with everything to lose
like a feudal model than a bourgeois patriarchal unit.21 Moreover, in contrast to James I’s version of patriarchalism, Bacon here inverts the relationship between family and national political authority. In The True Law of Free Monarchies James I wrote: By the law of nature the king becomes a natural father to all his lieges at his coronation, And the father, of his fatherly duty, is bound to care for the nourishing, education and virtuous government of his children: even so is the king bound to care for all his subjects. (1603 ed., Fo.B3v) James I’s patriarchal
the margins Assessment What can be seen in the case of the seven princely states examined here is the emergence of a system that attempted a re-creation of the European feudal model, with a colonial touch. In fact, it is striking that the colonial reports and printed materials project these enclaves along the same lines as Europe’s past. Although the princely rulers paid fixed token amounts to the colonial government, they had access to massive resources which increased with the passage of time. Additionally, most of the exploitative practices, such as forced
merit the bliss of heaven, but they commonly insist on this work occurring within a traditional social role, correlating virtue with particular social conventions and sin with their transgression.39 As illustrated in Mirk’s sermon above, writers frequently connected a three-estates model with the Vineyard parable, so that the story promotes distinct work for different social groups. This essentially feudal model divides a community according to function – those who pray, those who fight, and those who labour – in a manner that reflects not the reality of late medieval
statehood as essential statehood based on the foundation of an essential, meta-signifying subject. The premises of that foundation are deconstructed in earlier chapters. The allusion to very unequal availability refers to the contrast between the currently hegemonic model of form (political statehood) and the societal constitutionalist model of form that is its most promising rival, in light of the crisis of political statehood and the possible regression to a semi-feudal model of ‘populist democracy’ that forfeits the most important gains of polit ical modernity.22