Medieval Literature Paper (Help)

Requirements:

MLA style, including works cited page

2400 – 2800 words

at least four (4) secondary research sources and (2) primary texts, all of them quoted

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The purpose is to argue for a particular reading or interpretation of a given text or passage. Your

paper should have an argumentative thesis, and you should seek to prove that thesis through

textual evidence, which is to say I want you to quote from the text, analyze those quotations

through close reading, and thereby argue for an interpretation of your chosen text.

Prompt: Compare and contrast the interpretations (or significance/role) of Merlin’s character within the two texts.

Primary texts:

Text #1: History of the Kings of Britain (Novel) by Geoffrey of Monmouth

Text #2: Vita Merlini (Poem) by Geoffrey of Monmouth

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Feel free to use these sources or your own:

Brooke, Christopher. "Geoffrey of Monmouth as a Historian." Classical and Medieval Literature Criticism, edited by Jelena O. Krstovic, vol. 44, Gale, 2001. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420034337/LitRC?u=tall85761&sid=LitRC&xid=86cd2dc8. Accessed 17 Apr. 2019. Originally published in Church and Government in the Middle Ages, edited by C. N. L. Brooke, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 77-91.

Tatlock, J. S. P. “Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini.” Speculum, vol. 18, no. 3, 1943, pp. 265–287. JSTO, www.jstor.org/stable/2853704.

Christine Chism. “‘Ain't Gonna Study War No More’: Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and Vita Merlini.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 48, no. 4, 2014, pp. 457–479. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/chaucerrev.48.4.0458.

Dalton, Paul. “The Topical Concerns of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie: History, Prophecy, Peacemaking, and English Identity in the Twelfth Century.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 44, no. 4, 2005, pp. 688–712. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/431937.

Some notes I’ve gathered from each text (May use if needed):

Historia:

· Amazed auditors with her ambiguous words, relating the darkest moments in British history

· British prophet

· Enters midpoint as a possible solution to the quandary of Vortigern’s collapsing fortress

· Youth without a father whose blood will stabilize the fortress’s foundation

· Tried to resolve the violent dialectic of family struggle by removing family from the equation

· More uncanny than merely a fatherless being

· Hybrid of a spirit (supernatural figure of irresistible sexual desire or a royal nun)

· Does not evade the conflicts of masculine desire and resistance the destabilize foundation in the text

· Intensifies them, playing them out in a meta historical key

· Vortigern accepts his authority as a narrative informant

· Acknowledges the human cost of British foundational violence

· Literary meditation on the larger dialectics of British history renders the violence magnificent, monstrous, even pleasurable

· Geoffrey’s acknowledgement that there is no solution to the problem of human transience

· Allows Geoffrey to redramatize the problem in a narrative vein that distances it from what is tragic and pathetic

· Presents Britain as a coveted object of desire, a treasure to be possessed, and a living palimpsest on which Kings inscribe their deeds

Vita:

· Explorer of the fecund British landscape

· 12 years later

· Watched the stars as routinely as a modern businessman would watch the nightly news

· Prophesies compulsively not to Kings in portentous circumstances but to anyone in earshot

· Enters in the beginning and is neither the fatherless child nor hybrid of desire and constraint

· Becomes very antisocial after the death of his 3 companions, which causes him to lose the desire to connect emotionally with any human being

· Addresses the creatures of the woods as his dear companions, identifying most closely with the wolf

· After he is partially healed, he returned to society, not sociality

· Coldly addressed his wife/sister

· Love, desire, the capacity to connect to other humans had become too costly to sustain

· During his first healing, he is depicted as a prophet whose insights serve neither Kings are God

· Insights disenchant human relations, revealing them to be hypocritical and futile (emphasis on his 3 laughs)

· Society torments human with its betrayal, foolishness, and need; sociopathic laughter is all her can muster

· Incident communicates the force of his masculinity and broader enmity against ongoing social relations

· Only comforted by the return to the woods – highlights absence of social relations

· Exhibits a fascination with Britain’s natural world as an exquisite structure and a marvelous creation of God’s deputy, Nature