Current PhD Student

Michael Smith

Thesis Title:

The Awntyrs off Arthure in London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 491:Presentational and Performative Choices for a Modern Audience

Supervisors:

Dr Nicola McDonald and Dr Ollie Jones

Description:

The Awntyrs off Arthure is a fifteenth century alliterative poem in the Arthurian canon. Unlike ‘conventional’, non-rhyming, long line alliterative poetry, the Awntyrs takes the poetry to new levels of performative delivery by combining long and short lines in 13-line stanzas noted also for their use of a structured rhyme scheme, iteration and concatenation. Poems written in this way, which are relatively few in number, continue to challenge critical thinking about how Middle English alliterative poetry was delivered.

The Awntyrs is known to exist in four MSS, each of them subtly different to the other and none being a reliable witness to the autograph. The version of the poem in Lambeth Palace Library MS 491 is distinguished by having subtly different opening lines which position the narrative as being particularly critical of King Arthur.

The thesis researches the limitations of delivering such a complex poem to an audience many centuries distant from its original creation. The research explores the impact of the MS’s poetic rules on the effective delivery of the text and seeks to identify ways in which to convey the narrative and potential meaning of the work via translation, illustration and performance.

A further aspect of the research examines how illustration can be used to communicate elements of the text which might be lost through reading or performance alone. The research will also explore the extent to which the illustrative process can be used to undertake a closer reading of the text than might occur through conventional translation.

The thesis will draw on how other translators and illustrators have worked with medieval alliterative poetry, examining the extent to which the form restricted or enabled their creative process and attempting to understand whether a medieval poem of such complexity needs to be seen as ‘medieval’ at all.