Studying literary exempla in Medieval Arthurian literature: a research proposal

• Lidón Prades Yerves ^[1]
  1. [1] Universitat Jaume I

     Universitat Jaume I

     Castellón, España

     
• Localización: Fòrum de Recerca, ISSN-e 1139-5486, Nº. 26, 2021 (Ejemplar dedicado a: XXVI Jornades de Foment de la Investigació en Ciències Humanes i Socials), págs. 46-46
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Ejemplar
• Resumen

  • Exempla constitute a ubiquitous form of narrative literature most widely known because of the use that medieval preachers made of them; however, they can be found in other types of literature. It is generally agreed that exempla can be classified into three categories: the sermon exemplum, the public exemplum, and the literary exemplum (Scanlon, 2017). Intimately linked to the development of oral transmission, sermon exempla became widely cultivated from the thirteenth century onwards, when the mendicant orders began compiling them into collections. However, some of the exempla contained in these collections were closely related to those used by Gower or Chaucer in their secular works. In fact, in the British Isles, exempla were most popular in their literary form. Although the use of exempla in authors of vernacular English poetry has been the subject of a considerable amount of research, the presence of this genre in the Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages has received little scholarly attention. In this presentation, I contextualise the development of the exemplum genre, paying particular attention to its capacity to hybridise. After this, the research done within the histoire des mentalités, nowadays integrated into the field of cultural history, will be presented as the framework within which my dissertation emerges. I will finish by putting forward the research questions that shape my dissertation; namely, i) which exempla, if any, are present in a corpus of Arthurian romances; ii) what is the function of those exempla in the works where they are found; and iii) what are the sources of those exempla and how have they reached the texts under scrutiny.