Melissa Furrow (Draft Profile)
2013
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.
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