Steven Bruso | Endicott College (original) (raw)
Associate Professor of English at Endicott College. My book project explores representations of male physicality and its relationship to knightly masculinity and violence in Middle English romances of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
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University of the Basque Country, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
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Conference Presentations by Steven Bruso
Ethics in the Arthurian Legend, eds. Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer, (D.S. Brewer), 2023
Publications by Steven Bruso
Studies in Medievalism 32, 2023
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2017
This essay examines representations of knightly physicality in two fifteenth-century English text... more This essay examines representations of knightly physicality in two fifteenth-century English texts: the Middle English Secrete of Secretes, and Knyghthode and Bataile. These texts are examples of mirrors for princes and Vegetian military manuals, respectively, and despite their neglect in the present, both of these genres were standard reading for fifteenth-century English readers ranging from gentry to royal families. Even if they were not knights, many in this audience saw themselves in knightly terms, making it useful to pair these texts to consider how knightly bodies were represented to such an audience. Long before large, muscled, male bodies were popularized in 1980s and 1990s action cinema, these medieval texts foreground the necessity of building muscular bodies to knightly identity, while simultaneously describing them through a rhetoric of hardness that characterized their envisioned use as physical and psychological weapons.
Arthuriana 25.2, Sep 2015
The poet of the Alliterative Morte Arthure complicates the traditional depiction of Mordred-as-tr... more The poet of the Alliterative Morte Arthure complicates the traditional depiction of Mordred-as-traitor in order to show how both Mordred and Arthur struggle to negotiate the dual roles of kings publicly emblematized on coins, seals, and regalia--king-as-warrior and king-as-governor.
Ethics in the Arthurian Legend, eds. Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer, (D.S. Brewer), 2023
Studies in Medievalism 32, 2023
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2017
This essay examines representations of knightly physicality in two fifteenth-century English text... more This essay examines representations of knightly physicality in two fifteenth-century English texts: the Middle English Secrete of Secretes, and Knyghthode and Bataile. These texts are examples of mirrors for princes and Vegetian military manuals, respectively, and despite their neglect in the present, both of these genres were standard reading for fifteenth-century English readers ranging from gentry to royal families. Even if they were not knights, many in this audience saw themselves in knightly terms, making it useful to pair these texts to consider how knightly bodies were represented to such an audience. Long before large, muscled, male bodies were popularized in 1980s and 1990s action cinema, these medieval texts foreground the necessity of building muscular bodies to knightly identity, while simultaneously describing them through a rhetoric of hardness that characterized their envisioned use as physical and psychological weapons.
Arthuriana 25.2, Sep 2015
The poet of the Alliterative Morte Arthure complicates the traditional depiction of Mordred-as-tr... more The poet of the Alliterative Morte Arthure complicates the traditional depiction of Mordred-as-traitor in order to show how both Mordred and Arthur struggle to negotiate the dual roles of kings publicly emblematized on coins, seals, and regalia--king-as-warrior and king-as-governor.