Some Medieval Literary Terms

Genre: Term for a conventional kind of literature. Awareness of genre creates audience expectations that affect response to a work. Chaucer presents a variety of genres in The Canterbury Tales, and our course has surveyed important genres of medieval literature. Have a ready genre label for all works in this second part of the course.

Romance: Tale of chivalric adventure and action. The Knight's Tale adds serious philosophic overtones to examination of cause and effect. Special sub-genre is the Breton lai, a short romance set in the past, often with supernatural elements and a love problem, e.g., Marie's Lanval, The Wife of Bath's Tale, and The Franklin's Tale.

Fabliau: Short humorous, often bawdy story of lower-class life. Miller's Tale shows Chaucer's artistic brilliance in elaborating low-style genre with rhetorical embellishments and additional plot parallels and complications. Reeve's Tale is less elaborated performance of the fabliau.

Literary confession: Revealing monologue by character or figure in personification allegory. Chaucer adapts it brilliantly in the prologues of the Wife of Bath and Pardoner.

Exemplum: Moral tale illustrating a point and often used to embellish a sermon. The Pardoner is tells a brilliant exemplum when he finally gets to his narrative.

Beast fable: Allegorical tale where animals act in human ways. The Nun's Priest's Tale presents humorous mock-heroic description and dialog using this genre.

Spiritual autobiography: Personal story of religious experiences and strivings. The writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe represent two different approaches to this genre.

Dream vision: Description and analysis of the visions of a narrator.

Allegory: Figurative narrative conveying a veiled meaning. McGowan used Dante's four levels to categorize some medieval allegories:

• literal or historical: the plain narrative details
• allegorical or Christological: interpreting details in terms of the life of Christ or his Church. Example: the ark in Noah play's stands for the Church
• moral or tropological: interpreting details in terms of the experience of an individual. Example: morality plays and the Reason-Passion model.
• anagogical: representing the Last Things--judgment, heaven, and hell.

Personification allegory: Representing abstract concepts or events by characters acting in a narrative or drama. Everyman uses this device effectively: the transience of life is represented by the unfaithfulness of Fellowship and Kindred and Everyman's conversion comes through an encounter with Knowledge of his sins and the steps of Penance.

Robertsonian criticism: Critical school that interprets medieval literature with Christian doctrinal or moral meanings, often using allegorical methodology.

Moral psychology: Expressing human behavior and mental faculties by using medieval penitential patterns such as Reason-Passion, sin, and conversion. A Robertsonian reading of The Nun's Priest's Tale sees Chaunticleer's Passion dominating his Reason.