| Maying festivals and poetry circumscribe a festive space and time outside of the ordinary, and this particular space and time—bordered with flowers, punctuated by birdsong—had a powerful hold on the medieval English and French imagination. The polyvalent metaphors of Maytime festivity lent themselves to very different and sometimes conflicting rhetorical and artistic ends. Maying's green imagery of warmth, growth, and renewal encouraged numerous uses of the ritual, both sincere and ironic, embracing and distancing. For medieval poets, Maying was a perfect vehicle for representing a desire for renewal and fertility of all kinds—social, intellectual, and sexual. Medieval Maying texts celebrate the florescence of landscape, love, and poetry at the same time as they recognize a subtext of defloration, involving deflowered women and the transitory flower.; This dissertation examines how two late medieval English authors—Chaucer and Malory—manipulated the festive symbols and paradoxes of Maying in order to explore larger cultural concerns. Representations of Maying festivals appear in a wide cross-section of medieval documents and artwork: courtly poetry, manuscript illuminations, town records, legal documents, household accounts. In Chapter One, I show how these sources demonstrate a pervasive uneasiness about the Maying ritual. Chapter Two discusses Chaucer's debt to the quintessential medieval Maying poem, the Roman de la Rose, and his use of Maying motifs in three dream visions: the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. In Chapter Three, I examine Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which the Knight, the Merchant, and the Wife of Bath offer contending visions of women's involvement in Maying and spring festivals. This chapter's final section briefly considers the importance of Maying to Chaucer's poetic identity. Finally, in Chapter Four, I explore how Malory uses Maying and the transitory flower to express a bittersweet longing for a lost world. |
