Abstract

Bridges to the Past: Orientation, Materiality, and Participatory Reading in Late Medieval England explores the value that Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological theorization of “orientation” holds for thinking about the kinds of participatory, embodied, spatial, and temporal performances medieval texts invite through their material and textual appeals to embodied experience. Ahmed’s use of orientation to explore how and why some bodies are able to inhabit the world more comfortably than others offers an original vantage point from which to consider how readers might experience material and literary forms differently based on their prior experiences in the world. Approaching medieval reading practices through the lens of orientation allows us to consider the significance of material and textual form(s) while at the same time attending to the diversity of readers and their bodies. Building on Ahmed’s work, each of this dissertation’s three central chapters consider a unique way in which the orientation(s) of medieval readers might have influenced their experience of a text. The first chapter, “Coming to the Table: Orientation and Participatory Reading in Wynkyn De Worde’s 1498 Sammelband of the Assembly of Gods and the Canterbury Tales” explores how Ahmed’s discussion of orientation’s relationship to comfort and “feeling at home” helps us to think about the reading experience suggested by British Library, BL G. 11587, a Wynkyn De Worde Sammelband in which Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is presented alongside the anonymous psychomachian dream vision the Assembly of Gods. De Worde’s repeated use of William Caxton’s “Pilgrims at the Table” woodcut throughout this Sammelband, I argue, facilitates a reading experience based on “(re-)orientation,” in which readers are invited to gradually habituate themselves to the codex over time, thus allowing the book to function as a “virtual” extension of domestic space. The second chapter, “Chaucer’s Narrators, Dullness, and Complexion Theory,” takes up the question of orientation as it applies to Chaucer’s embodied narrative personae, which a medieval audience would have likely recognized as humorally “phlegmatic.” Tracing the evolution of Chaucer’s embodied descriptions of his narrators from his early dream poems, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls to later dated works like “Envoy to Scogan,” “Complaint of Venus,” and Legend of Good Women, it proposes that the phlegmatic body offered Chaucer an authoritative grounds for his vicarious poetry about love, in which the craft and deception of the prototypical young sanguine lover/poet is replaced by the straightforward craft of the phlegmatic poet, imagined as absent of deceit due to the dulling of the senses that went along with that humoral profile. The third chapter, “Bridges to the Past: Noise, Materiality, and Performing Community in ‘The Bridges at Abingdon’,” considers the orienting potential of a literary “table” produced by a mercantile member of Abingdon’s religious guild The Brotherhood of the Holy Cross to memorialize the guild’s building of two bridges across the Thames. The table, which is sole witness to the fifteenth-century alliterative poem, “The Bridges at Abingdon,” scripts a public performance that nuances our current understanding of religious guilds’ relationship to discourses of “public voice” current in late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century England.