3 - Scandals at Court: Pride and Penitence in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Arthur

Summary

Since the 1980s the critical understanding of the Middle English alliterative courtly romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has undergone a remarkable reassessment: previously seen as the work of a provincial author writing in the obscurity of the north-west Midlands of England, it is now generally regarded as the sophisticated creation of a cosmopolitan courtier-poet working for a London-based audience of Cheshire retainers attached to the glamorous court of Richard II. In a ground-breaking study (1983), the historian Michael J. Bennett argued that the localized milieu of the poet’s native region could not have provided him with a suitable audience for cosmopolitan texts such as Sir Gawain and Pearl, which survive in the same small manuscript, British Library Cotton Nero A.x. Following Gervase Mathew’s claim in his book, The Court of Richard II (1968), Bennett suggests that this modest codex (which includes crudely drawn illustrations) was probably a copy of a de luxe manuscript that originated at the royal court.

There are, however, important dissenters to Bennett’s hypothesis. Thorlac Turville-Petre finds no evidence to suggest that the works of the Gawain poet might have been known or appreciated in London. But Turville-Petre’s argument depends on an anachronistic binary that implicitly equates a London-based author like Chaucer with “nation” and a provincial poet like the Gawain poet with “region.” It is perhaps more accurate to characterize Chaucer as a London poet who happened to have cosmopolitan aspirations. The same may be said for the Gawain poet: regional by origin (and dialect), he was far from regional in his tastes, reading, and temperament. The nation/ region binary fails to take into account the mobile and itinerant nature of the international court that provides the context for the poem’s composition and performance. Emperor Charles IV’s court traveled regularly between his principal residence at the Hradčany in Prague, his country seat at Karlstein castle (located 35 kilometers from Prague), and his third palace, at Tangermünde in Brandenburg. These examples of the domicilium principale all combined the function of palace and place of worship, revealing the extent to which the pious emperor needed to worship wherever he was residing.