Unhappy Families: Literary Inheritance in the Fifteenth Century (A Roundtable)

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Medievalists@Penn

Organizer Name

Sarah W. Townsend, Daniel Davies

Organizer Affiliation

Univ. of Pennsylvania, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Presider Name

Daniel Davies

Paper Title 1

Hoccleve's "Fadir" and Chaucer's "Stace"

Presenter 1 Name

Elizaveta Strakhov

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Marquette Univ.

Paper Title 2

Father Aesop, Neighbor Chaucer: Henryson's Testament of Cresseid and (Inter)national Literary Inheritance

Presenter 2 Name

Marian Homans-Turnbull

Presenter 2 Affiliation

Univ. of California-Berkeley

Paper Title 3

Loop the Noose: The Oedipal Judas in Late Medieval Drama

Presenter 3 Name

Mariah Min

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Univ. of Pennsylvania

Paper Title 4

Writing Mothers and Reading Daughters: Christine de Pizan and Jacquetta of Luxembourg

Presenter 4 Name

Sarah W. Townsend

Start Date

13-5-2016 3:30 PM

Session Location

Valley I Ackley 105

Description

This session explores textual relationships through the lens of the unhappy family. The English poets that succeeded Chaucer, such as Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate and Stephen Scrope, expressed anxieties about their literary pedigree, comparing themselves to ‘father’ Chaucer and finding their own abilities lacking. How does filial awareness and resentment shape and motivate authorship? A secondary focus of this session is to examine the insular inheritance of continental French literature. Might French source texts allow fifteenth-century English poets to re-think their relationship to Chaucer and shape a new vision of English literary history?

Sarah W. Townsend, Daniel Davies