Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: The Materiality of Medieval Romance and The Erle of Tolous
- 2 Courtly Culture and Emotional Intelligence in the Romance of Horn
- 3 Emplaced Reading, or Towards a Spatial Hermeneutic for Medieval Romance
- 4 Devotional Objects, Saracen Spaces and Miracles in Two Matter of France Romances
- 5 The Werewolf of Wicklow: Shapeshifting and Colonial Identity in the Lai de Melion
- 6 ‘Ladyes war at thare avowing’: The Female Gaze in Late-Medieval Scottish Romance
- 7 The Evolution of Cooperation in The Avowyng of Arthur
- 8 Ritual, Revenge and the Politics of Chess in Medieval Romance
- 9 Adventures in the Bob-and-Wheel Tradition: Narratives and Manuscripts
- 10 Reading King Robert of Sicily's Text(s) and Manuscript Context(s)
- 11 The Circulation of Romances from England in Late-Medieval Ireland
- 12 The Image of the Knightly Harper: Symbolism and Resonance
- 13 Carving the Folie Tristan: Ivory Caskets as Material Evidence of Textual History
- 14 Romancing the Orient: The Roman d'Alexandre and Marco Polo's Livre du grand Khan in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodl. 264
- 15 The Victorian Afterlife of The Thornton Romances
- Index
7 - The Evolution of Cooperation in The Avowyng of Arthur
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction: The Materiality of Medieval Romance and The Erle of Tolous
- 2 Courtly Culture and Emotional Intelligence in the Romance of Horn
- 3 Emplaced Reading, or Towards a Spatial Hermeneutic for Medieval Romance
- 4 Devotional Objects, Saracen Spaces and Miracles in Two Matter of France Romances
- 5 The Werewolf of Wicklow: Shapeshifting and Colonial Identity in the Lai de Melion
- 6 ‘Ladyes war at thare avowing’: The Female Gaze in Late-Medieval Scottish Romance
- 7 The Evolution of Cooperation in The Avowyng of Arthur
- 8 Ritual, Revenge and the Politics of Chess in Medieval Romance
- 9 Adventures in the Bob-and-Wheel Tradition: Narratives and Manuscripts
- 10 Reading King Robert of Sicily's Text(s) and Manuscript Context(s)
- 11 The Circulation of Romances from England in Late-Medieval Ireland
- 12 The Image of the Knightly Harper: Symbolism and Resonance
- 13 Carving the Folie Tristan: Ivory Caskets as Material Evidence of Textual History
- 14 Romancing the Orient: The Roman d'Alexandre and Marco Polo's Livre du grand Khan in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodl. 264
- 15 The Victorian Afterlife of The Thornton Romances
- Index
Summary
The Avowyng of Arthur is a materially and economically minded poem. Its monstrous boar of Carlisle, for instance, is a very material creature. ‘Masly made’ and exuding overpowering ‘smelle other smekis’, the boar is almost too much matter for Arthur to manage. Tusks ‘of thre fote’ (191) and armour-like hide break apart flesh, vegetation and spearshaft until the king matches matter with matter. He drives his sword ‘inne atte the throte’ (249) and butchers the boar into more manageable body parts. Later and less violently, we see ‘mete’ and feeding help Baldwin to win contests at home and abroad. The materiality and economic potential of human bodies is foregrounded. A man puts himself in a barrel like a comestible and has his head blown off by artillery (1021–32) and women murder one another prosaically and trade sex for survival. Yet the economics of the Avowyng refuse to be dominated by materiality. Sir Kay might think instinctively of naked competition for material profit and loss, as when he taunts Sir Menealfe about the loss of his prisoner (‘If thou have oghte on hur coste [spent], / I telle it for tente [count it lost]’ (431–2)), but Sir Gawain and Sir Baldwin exhibit a much more supple economic mentality. By the time Arthur has come to admire Baldwin's seemingly reckless vows as ‘profetabull’ (1130), the poem has unpacked numerous complex exchange situations, in which the potential of material capital is only fully realized in combination with symbolic capital.
As the Avowyng thinks economically, what it thinks about is cooperation. It can be read as a discussion of exchanges, reflecting on situations and strategies that promote conflict or cooperation. An economic imagination which addresses the problem of cooperation (understood at the level of the particular exchange, as giving a benefit to another at a cost to oneself) is one of the poem's chief, and most fascinating, sources of coherence.
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- Medieval Romance and Material Culture , pp. 111 - 128Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015