Melissa Furrow (Draft Profile)

After working on King Edward and the Shepherd for my edition of Ten Bourdes (ably assisted by former student Peter Chiykowski), I have recently begun a large project on court poetry in the multilingual court of Edward III (r. 1327-1377), a project that arises directly from what I discovered while working on that poem. Datable to surprisingly early for a court poem written in English, King Edward and the Shepherd was clearly composed for performance at Edward’s court around 1348, and is set in Windsor Forest and Windsor Castle about two years earlier. It is a fascinating combination of the satirical, in its attacks on purveyancing and the failure of the regime to protect against predatory outlaws, and its adroit praise of Edward, setting him up as both a king who listens to his people and a family man who himself was well-loved by his father and mother. Given that Edward III invaded his father’s kingdom and thus helped to depose him, this praise plays an obviously welcome political role. But looking backward from the time of Chaucer and his own reminiscences of youthful work, Edwardian court poetry had been thought to be largely chansons, virelais, rondeau, and ballades—fixed form highly conventional lyric love poetry, most likely in French. My early investigations of that court and its poetry have opened up interesting topics: the degree and kind of influence of Philippa of Hainault and the cultural traditions and poets she brought with her into England; the relationship between the poetry of Edward’s court and that of other French language courts in Europe; the relationship between the political and the lyrical, the French and the English; the role of poetry and other forms of entertainment in building Edward’s prestige but also shaping Edward’s chivalric ideals; and the toleration or perhaps even encouragement of criticism, both ironic and in the form of blunt advice, given to a king who had to be restrained on more than one occasion by Philippa from executing men who angered him. I will be pursuing this research over the next few years, and welcome inquiries from potential graduate students who might themselves want to pursue work on some of this mid-fourteenth-century literature and engage in the nitty-gritty of archival research on the court context.