English 416G (Winter 2000) "Middle English Verse Romance: The Problem of Trust"

"For creatures with the properties of human beings the problem of trust today is no closer to the margins of practical life, no more narrowly domestic and personal than it was in the high Middle Ages." John Dunn's recent comment points directly to an issue at the heart both of many of the best Middle English romances and of latemedieval English society. Poems otherwise as diverse as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Amys and Amylion, or Chaucer's Knight's Tale, for example, use a vocabulary of trust centred in the terms trouthe and tresoun and incorporate incidents raising this and related issues. In this course we will explore the formal development of Middle English verse romance while at the same time examining the problem of trust both in the narratives and in the social context in which, and for which, they were written. Our goal will be to use linguistic, legal, and other evidence to formulate supportable connections between the romances and their social context which cast an explanatory light on the poems themselves.