'Penolopees trouthe'
Creators: name: Graham, April Michelle Adamson
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2017

description: This dissertation examines the figure of the faithful woman in late medieval English literature. Medieval writers who hark back to classical and Biblical sources to construct moralized exempla of faithful women often simplify and alter their stories to fit specific agendas and give themselves moral authority. This study argues that, by the later Middle Ages, English authors self-consciously referenced and critiqued this tradition, not only in the service of reconceptualizing virtue, but also as an avenue through which to rethink literary and social hierarchies. Late medieval English authors use faithful women, like Penelope, to reconceive ethical authorship or virtuous living. The dissertation takes Penelope as its guiding figure for investigating how authors engaged with female faithfulness because, thanks to a distinctive medieval commentary tradition, she was taken by nearly all later medieval readers as a paragon of wifely faithfulness. Chapter One argues that the long literary tradition of engagement with Penelope points to a moralizing program of writing classical women’s lives that lends ethical importance to authors and their works. In Chapter Two, I show that Chaucer explores literary value and authority through engagement with the tradition of moralizing references to Penelope in several of his poems, including Anelida and Arcite, Book of the Duchess, and The Franklin’s Tale. Each of these poems engages with the Romance of the Rose and Ovid’s Ars Amatoria to comment on the possible uses and drawbacks of referring to traditionaly exemplary female figures like Penelope. The chapter ends with Gower’s Confessio Amantis, in which the poet takes a somewhat bolder approach to making use of Penelope. Rather than showing his narrator as confined by traditional views of classical women, Gower’s Genius rewrites Penelope’s letter from the Heroides to reconceive literature as authorized and even made necessary by morality and experience. In the third chapter the dissertation turns to the Man of Law’s Tale, which stages a shift in the Canterbury Tales from classical female virtue toward a more explicitly Christianized, English literature; in doing so, it explores the use-value of the literature of female fidelity and virtue in the vernacular. Through this move to non-classical female exemplarity, the Man of Law’s Tale reveals that simply replaying female suffering and virtue, even in the context of Christian history, does not solve the problems inherent to Ovidian pity and suffering. Custance is read by her peers and by the Man of Law in ways that perpetuate her suffering and wandering. Her instability, imposed from without, mirrors the vagaries of vernacular transmission and reader response, calling into question the ability of Middle English to serve as a literary, national language. Finally, Chapter Four examines another Middle English text, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, that stages a movement of cultural transmission from the ancient world to medieval Western Europe through an icon of female faithfulness. The play uses Mary’s social transgressions and eventual fealty to Christ, as well as the Queen of Marseilles’ negotiations of religious and marital fidelity, to explore the implications of religious, sexual, and political faith for the lives of everyday medieval Christians.   By examining Penelope, Custance, and Mary Magdalene, this dissertation historicizes medieval moralizing rhetoric and shows that its uses go beyond the banal to address the relationship of author to audience, the value of literature, and the interplay between literary history and human history. These late medieval iterations of conservative-seeming “good women” stories turn out to contain seeds for challenging tradition and rethinking medieval readers’ relationship to the past.