Sir Gaiwan Notes

In _______-century English, truth meant not only truthfulness but fidelity.

14th

____________ attitudes even erupt into romance on occasion: after Sir Gawain learns from the Green Knight how he has been taken in by the lady, he tries to comfort himself with a bitter catalog of men who have been betrayed by women, starting with Adam (lines 2415- 28). This is treason against the love- service imperatives of chivalry to which Gawain seems to return. Still, the presence of the lady's ugly double, Morgan le Fey, suggests that the antifeminist and courtly images of woman are mysteriously connected.

Antifeminist

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK), an _____________ chivalric romance, but with a surprisingly chaste Gawain.

Arthurian

__________ often treats courtly love with tongue in cheek. Nicholas claims to be dying of love in The Miller's Tale (lines 172- 73), and ________________ parodies the lover's complaint in "Complaint to His Purse." There are similarly irreverent treatments of doctrines of love and lovers in Lanval, The Wife of Bath's Tale, and Gawain, where the ladies take the initiative and the lovers are passive or "daungerous." ... In Middle English writings, eroticism can be found not only in the love and worship knights have for women, but also in bonds between men and in medieval spiritual devotion.

Chaucer

The story begins in the court of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere during the _____________ festivities.

Christmas

The ____________ ___________ mocks that scene when he playfully asks the king to grant him a "game," which challenges the court's reputation for chivalry.

Green Knight

In ___________ scenes in art and drama, Mary appears as a simple maiden in a medieval version of the pastoral... She also presents a majestic figure as "the high Queen of heaven (line 647). One of the "five fives" symbolized by Sir Gawain's pentangle are her five joys, and therefore, says the poet, her image is fittingly portrayed on the inside of Gawain's shield. Gawain's "plight / is perilous unless / sweet Mary minds her Knight."

Nativity

__________ and others promoted the view that women, and wives in particular, were promiscuous, luxury- loving, extravagant, loose- tongued, proud, quarrelsome, deceitful, domineering, and guilty of every other vice or annoying disposition men could think of. Even pleasure in sexual relations between husband and wife was doctrinally considered sinful.

Preachers

The genre of _____________ is the most popular form of literature in the late medieval period. It is a genre with set rules just as the epic has rules. The tradition is over 300 years old by the time of SGGK.

Romance

The cult of the ___________ in the late Middle Ages is especially associated with highly emotional expressions of religious feeling. Poetry, drama, and art depicted the physical torment of Christ on the cross and the grief of Mary with a vividness meant to generate powerful feelings of empathy in readers and spectators. But affective piety was not always or primarily expressed through an outpouring of grief. It could also be an expression of joy as it is in the Shepherds' Play when the Angel sings the Gloria in excelsis and as in lyrics like "I Sing of a Maiden" and "Adam Lay Bound," which celebrate the Mother of Christ in vernacular song.

Virgin

Gawain's "___________" is a test not only of his own knighthood but of the court and, in a larger sense, of the worth of chivalry itself.

adventure

The medieval Church, which required its priests, monks, and other officials to be celibate (with uneven success), used the _____________ literature it inherited from the ancients to persuade men to renounce women.

antifeminist

The heavily ____________ knight is declining in favor of long bows and gunpowder; however, the cult of chivalry is more popular than ever.

armed

Worthy knights are praised and wicked knights condemned by the standards of a moral code and a code of manners called ___________. The word designates the honorable deeds and behavior of a knight (chevalier, caballero), especially in war and tournaments on his cheval (horse).

chivalry

The plot suggests that the source of ____________ lies in the heroism not of strong arms, but of good manners, wit, and elegance

civilization

Scholars have used the phrase "______________ _____" to designate a set of literary conventions in which the lady is wooed, usually at a distance, by a knight who fights in her honor, devotes himself to her, and suffers pallor, chills and fever, insomnia, anorexia, and other symptoms that, he insists, will be his death if he does not obtain her "mercy."

courtly love

___________ __________ idealizes women but emphasizes, in that very act, their difference from a male standard.

courtly love

According to one distinguished _________, the Middle Ages invented romantic love; or, more precisely, it invented that mode of eroticism that one historian called "amour courtois," translated into English as "courtly love."

critic

This notion of love as service uses metaphors of slavery (he is her thrall), religion (he worships her and prays to her), and politics (he petitions, commits treasons; she is a tyrant) to make women into objects of ____________ worship.

erotic

Romances often present such love as _______________, perhaps because wealthy families usually arranged marriages according to the dictates of rank and property rather than sexual attraction. The third point of the triangle seems to be included in dominant stories like that of Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere, in which the bond between Lancelot and Arthur is often treated with erotic or quasi- erotic seriousness.

extramarital

When Gawain comes to face what he believed all along to be the real test, he does not realize, nor do most readers, that the real test is already over and that he has, at least partly, __________ it.

failed

Gawain is anxious to demonstrate his _____________ but as it turns out, his "troth" will be tested in ways he does not expect.

fidelity

In the New Year's Day celebration at Arthur's court, at the beginning of the story, the poet observes the _______ entertainment of the youthful court with an amused eye.

gay

Often a knight, though nobly born, must nevertheless achieve true "____________" through overcoming his shortcomings and failures in the course of his adventures. Truth, religious faith, loyalty, and humility are the most important qualities in which the protagonists of romance are tested, qualities that are probed and defined by fresh perspectives in different stories.

gentilesse

A ______________ must have valor, generosity, loyalty, honor, and skill in battle. He must also have all the skills needed to succeed in the world of the court: temperance, a reverence for women, and manners. The Green Knight declares that Gawain is the best of all Arthurian knights. Gawain demonstrates the principles and behaviors of courtesy. This opinion is shared by the Arthurian court but not by Gawain and critics are divided.

hero

But Gawain will be absolved, and the failure will bring him to __________. Gawain is, in a sense, reborn— with a new awareness of his vulnerability to pride and self- deception, which he now recognizes as a potential pitfall of the chivalry to which he aspired.

humility

The poet makes us feel Gawain's _____________ and the winter hardship, not just of the knight sleeping in his armor but of the birds that "pipe pitifully into the piercing cold."

isolation

In France during the latter half of the twelfth century, King Arthur's court became the center for the most characteristic form of romance associated with the Middle Ages, the romance of chivalry. Its protagonist is a ________ who typically rides out alone in search of adventures or on a quest, which is often a rescue mission on behalf of a fellow ___________ or lady in distress.

knight

In other Arthurian tales, Gawain is often portrayed as _______ than an ideal knight. The treatment of Gawain is one element which distinguishes this unique poem.

less

Although only _______ could become priests, from early Christian times the convent was an option for women, though mainly women of the aristocracy, who chose to lead a spiritual life...

men

The Wife of Bath's fifth husband has an anthology of antifeminist literature, which includes most of Chaucer's sources for the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and she reminds us that the ___________ of male writers is motivated by vested interests.

misogyny

The work raises __________ questions about the meaning of chivalry pertinent to the poet's time period.

moral

The _________ on the shield describes Gawain as having five senses faultless and five fingers that never failed. It also notes the five wounds of Christ, the five joys of Mary (Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection, Ascension, Assumption ) and Gawain's five virtues (boundless beneficence, brotherly love, pure mind, manners, compassion).

pentangle

A romance can be written in verse or _________ with high-style diction. The characters are part of the aristocratic upper class. The major themes and plot lines concern love and the effects of love on the human psyche and behavior.

prose

Romances tend to have 3 parts: ___________ integration; _________ disintegration involving tests and marvelous events __________ reintegration often with happy endings, especially marriage.

social

Medieval literature reveals two diametrically opposed ____________ of women: one represented by Eve, who caused the Fall, and the other by Mary, sometimes referred to as the second Eve (as Christ is the second Adam), who bore humanity's Savior. The Latin Ave, the angel's salutation to Mary in the Annunciation, it was noted at that time, is Eva spelled backward; and as the Fall was associated with Eve's sexuality, so salvation was associated with Mary's virginity. The cult of the Virgin developed at the same time as the cult of chivalry.

stereotypes

A knight's adventures serve as _________ not only of his strength and courage but also of his character and courtliness. Nobility, wealth, good looks, and military prowess are qualities with which the romance hero is often endowed by birth, although in some romances a knight from the lower nobility and of humble means rises to high rank through feats of arms and a great marriage.

tests

The essence of chivalry is supposedly _____________, as proclaimed by the pentangle on Gawain's shield.

truth

While the story spans a _____________ in the life of Gawain, all the action takes place during the Christmas celebrations bookending the year.

year