Were the Middle Ages funny? To answer that question, Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu hunt through some of the rudest, silliest and surprising works in English literature in search of the Medieval sense of humour.
Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu are both writers and historians, and regular contributors to the London Review of Books.
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Were the Middle Ages funny? To answer that question, Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu hunt through some of the rudest, silliest and surprising works in English literature in search of the Medieval sense of humour.
Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu are both writers and historians, and regular contributors to the London Review of Books.
Sign up to listen to this series ad free and all our subscriber series in full, including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings:
Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/medlolapplesignup
In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/medlolscsignup
Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The character of Gawain, one of King Arthur’s leading knights, recurs throughout medieval literature, but the way he’s presented underwent a curious development during the period, moving closer and closer to an impossible and perhaps comical ideal of chivalric perfection. In 'Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight', his most well-known incarnation, Gawain faces a series of peculiar tests and apparently fails them all. 'Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle', a later poem, takes many elements from 'The Greene Knight' and exaggerates them to the extreme: the cups the knights drink from are so large they’re impossible to drink from, and Gawain faces an even more peculiar sequence of tests, but meets them all perfectly. Irina and Mary discuss the degree to which this exaggeration can be taken as a satire on chivalric expectations, and whether by this point the character of Gawain should be considered more monastic than knightly.
Read the text here:
https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-sir-gawain-and-the-carle-of-carlisle
Read some Arthurian background in the LRB here:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n24/tom-shippey/so-much-smoke
Non-subscriber will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series including Mary and Irina's twelve-part series Medieval Beginnings, sign up:
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Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk
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