Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Bibliography of Jill Mann's works
- 1 The Man of Law's Tale and Crusade
- 2 The Language Group of the Canterbury Tales
- 3 ‘Save man allone’: Human Exceptionality in Piers Plowman and the Exemplarist Tradition
- 4 The Land of Cokaygne: Three Notes on the Latin Background
- 5 The Canterbury Tales and Gamelyn
- 6 The Cheerful Science: Nicholas Oresme, Home Economics, and Literary Dissemination
- 7 The Poetics of Catastrophe: Ovidian Allusion in Gower's Vox Clamantis
- 8 Preaching with the Hands: Carthusian Book Production and the Speculum devotorum
- 9 The Necessity of Difference: The Speech of Peace and the Doctrine of Contraries in Langland's Piers Plowman
- 10 Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity and the Insights of Allegory
- 11 Amor in claustro
- 12 ‘And that was litel nede’: Poetry's Need in Robert Henryson's Fables and Testament of Cresseid
- 13 The Art of Swooning in Middle English
- 14 The Theory of Passionate Song
- List of contributors
- Index
- Tabula gratulatoria
13 - The Art of Swooning in Middle English
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Bibliography of Jill Mann's works
- 1 The Man of Law's Tale and Crusade
- 2 The Language Group of the Canterbury Tales
- 3 ‘Save man allone’: Human Exceptionality in Piers Plowman and the Exemplarist Tradition
- 4 The Land of Cokaygne: Three Notes on the Latin Background
- 5 The Canterbury Tales and Gamelyn
- 6 The Cheerful Science: Nicholas Oresme, Home Economics, and Literary Dissemination
- 7 The Poetics of Catastrophe: Ovidian Allusion in Gower's Vox Clamantis
- 8 Preaching with the Hands: Carthusian Book Production and the Speculum devotorum
- 9 The Necessity of Difference: The Speech of Peace and the Doctrine of Contraries in Langland's Piers Plowman
- 10 Chaucer's Complaint unto Pity and the Insights of Allegory
- 11 Amor in claustro
- 12 ‘And that was litel nede’: Poetry's Need in Robert Henryson's Fables and Testament of Cresseid
- 13 The Art of Swooning in Middle English
- 14 The Theory of Passionate Song
- List of contributors
- Index
- Tabula gratulatoria
Summary
Plurent des oilz si baron chevaler;
Encuntre tere se pasment.XX. millers …
[His brave knights' eyes are brimming with tears;
Twenty thousand fall to the ground in a swoon …]
Swooning occurs so frequently in many medieval narratives, and so extravagantly in some, as to pass for almost commonplace behaviour that prompts puzzlingly little comment or explanation by medieval authors, or reaction from bystanding characters within the texts. Such swooning belongs to a convention-governed lexicon of medieval body language, with its own rules, patterns and expectations, and swooning often characterizes the accretions to medieval narratives typically added by the embellishing imaginations of subsequent translators and adaptors of earlier texts. It is this ubiquity and clustering of swoons in medieval literature that is the focus of this essay, together with the pointers emerging from such swooning for continuity and change in reception and interpretation of body language and behaviour.
One modern response to such ubiquitous medieval swooning might be to caution that ‘a swoon is not a swoon’, warning against taking these swoons literally, rather than as rhetorical flourishes and generalized tokens of responsiveness. Yet the many references in medieval texts to swooning characters lying long on the ground, or as if dead, tend to indicate that their swoon is indeed a swoon, unlikely to be intrinsically different from modern understanding of a swoon as an abrupt loss of consciousness (and with that, usually, a physical collapse) brought on by psychological and physiological factors.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval Latin and Middle English LiteratureEssays in Honour of Jill Mann, pp. 211 - 230Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011