Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Preface: The Ends of Romance?

2010; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ems.2010.0001

1538-4608

Mickey Sweeney,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

Preface: The Ends of Romance? Mickey Sweeney “The Ends of Romance?” was the theme set for the 2010 Illinois Medieval Association and Medieval Association of the Midwest joint conference held at Dominican University and is the theme that best unifies the collection for this edition of Essays in Medieval Studies. The genre of romance has often been considered an access point into the cultures of the medieval world; therefore we were interested in examining why, how, and even if romances do actually reflect the nature of the world which seemed to embrace the genre, while constantly modifying it, for several hundred years. With this conference we wanted to open the romances to exploration in the broadest of terms and received proposals from the fields of History, Music, Art History, Theology, English, and Language Studies. The challenge, of course, like the study of the Middle Ages itself, is to bring to light, and to attention, all the new things that such a combination of topics and scholars reveals about the world and time period under discussion. In this collection we have had the happy fortune to have several studies that directly compliment each other while still introducing debate; for example, see the three essays on Dante that open this edition of EMS and focus us on the language and artistry of the great poet. Jason Aleksander in his essay “The Aporetic Ground of Revelation’s Authority in The Divine Comedy and Dante’s Demarcation and Defense of Philosophical Authority” argues in his introduction that “nothing could be clearer for the interpreter of Dante’s writings than his concern for defending the independence of secular political authority against ecclesiastical encroachments” (p. 1) He cites Marco as explaining “bad leadership is the cause that has made the world rotten, and not nature that in you is corrupt” (p. 2). This argument for Dante is redirected in Tonia Triggiano’s essay “Dante’s Heavenly Lessons: Educative Economy in the Paradiso.” She argues instead that the poem’s goal is one of spirituality and learning: “The educative process in the Comedy—occurs in a wide [End Page v] variety of experiences as pilgrim and reader progress together in an itinerary that promises nothing less than a revelation of God. To this objective, a certain preparation is required, and the poet trusts the evolving maturation of the pilgrim’s will and intellect to a succession of capable teachers”(p. 15). Dante’s great work also demonstrated the fraught nature of man’s relationship to God and sin as Elizabeth Dolly Weber demonstrates in: “Connoisseurs of Sin: The Perils of the Confessional in Fabliaux and Marian Miracle Stories.” She argues: “The fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno begins with a process familiar to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Christians. Sinners come before an agent of God, confess their sins, and are given a penance. This is the Sacrament of Confession but with a horrible twist: the confessor does not give absolution, but damnation. . . . An encyclopedic knowledge of sin is necessary to allow a confessor to select and impose the appropriate penance, but that knowledge itself can be dangerous” (p. 27). And it is the theme of knowledge itself and how difficult it can be for the modern critic and linguist to make sense of how words were used in the medieval context that connects Alexander J. McNair’s piece: “El Cid, the Impaler?: Line 1254 of the Poem of the Cid” to the Dante pieces, as he explores the necessity for critics to scrutinize every word in a poem before they can begin to make assumptions about a text. His comprehensive study argues persuasively that romances are significant sources for understanding the society that produced them and is reflected in them. He queries: “Centuries before the first documented appearance of the verb empalar in Spanish, how would this ‘very ancient’ death sentence be described by Iberian Romance vernacular? Could the Spanish language’s earliest surviving epic, the Poem of the Cid (1207), provide evidence of this ‘cruel and barbaric’ punishment?”(p. 46). Exactly such issues of language and the necessity for careful study that lay foundation for the next series of Middle English essays. “Choosing Thou or You...