Copying Couplets
Performing Masculinity in Middle English Moral Poetry
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12358233 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Christina M Fitzgerald (University of Toledo, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 107-129 |
| Publication date | 2020-04-02 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Exemplaria (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1041-2573 • E-ISSN: 1753-3074 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10412573.2020.1822000 |
| OpenAlex | W3120743167 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
A late medieval, middle class, masculine, social self is performed in the content and prosodic, rhetorical, and textual form of moral poetry consisting of exchangeable, aphoristic couplets of advice, voiced from man to man, which reappear over a large range of poems in manuscripts owned or compiled by men. Manuscripts discussed are: Bodleian, MS Laud Misc. 108; Oxford, MS Balliol 354 (Richard Hill’s Book); BL, MS Harley 2252 (John Colyns’s Book); Bodleian, MS Rawlinson C. 813 (The Welles Anthology); Beinecke MS 365 (The Book of Brome); BL, MS Additional 37049 (a Carthusian miscellany); Durham University Library, MS Cosin V.III.9; St George’s Chapel, Windsor, MS E.I.I; and Bodleian, MS Eng. poet. e.1. The couplets’ repeatability as units of poetic exchange allows the men who wrote them into the flyleaves, blank spaces, and margins of manuscripts, or into their own household books, to perform reading and composing practices that reflect and create the social and textual networks in which the individual men are embedded. The “fungible couplets,” as the essay names them, perform the complications of middle class masculinity itself, marking its inescapable social components even while simultaneously expressing defensiveness and anxiety about the social sphere’s undesirable influences on the practice of self-management
Art · Literature · Masculinity · Middle class · Middle English · Poetry · Psychoanalysis · Windsor · Classics · Early Modern Women Writers · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
| Highly cited | No |
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