Lainie Pomerleau | Georgia Institute of Technology (original) (raw)

Conference Presentations by Lainie Pomerleau

Southeastern Medieval Association, 2019

Even the most devoted English majors sometimes find medieval literature courses formidable. Under... more Even the most devoted English majors sometimes find medieval literature courses formidable. Undergraduate students are typically unfamiliar with the language and literary norms of medieval texts. These unknowns are compounded by popular assumptions about the period's
historical "otherness," resulting in the unfortunate belief that medieval literature is too inaccessibly distinct from more modern literatures. I created the course Graphic Romance: Medieval Romance, Graphic Novels, and the Visual Narrative to combat such assumptions.
Graphic Romance is a medieval literary course that uses comics and graphic novels, like
Deadpool Killustrated and Hellboy, as entry points into Middle English romances. Introducing medieval romances through the gateway of comics and graphic novels helps students more deeply consider narrative form and genre in works like Sir Gowther and Havelock the Dane.
My presentation will discuss how using graphic novels to study medieval romance offers students a way to better understand the complicated and contradictory elements of romances and contemporary comics. Comics and romances both rely on descriptive narrative techniques that
lead their readers through surreally violent and erotic landscapes while exploring the uncomfortable relationships between honor, loyalty, violence, love, and gender. By focusing on narrative and character issues traditional to most literary classes – but less traditional in medieval
literature courses – students are given the chance to study medieval romances for their literary value outside of purely social-historical terms. This approach makes medieval literature more accessible to more students while offering evidence of medieval literature's continued value as a dynamic part of literary history that speaks to contemporary issues affecting modern medievalism today, like diversity, privilege, and exclusion. By connecting medieval literature to contemporary issues in society, the academy, and the greater modern medieval community
Graphic Romance encourages students to take their study of texts hundreds of years old and bring them into their own lives.

Terne Wathlyne, the former lake turned forested park Tarn Wadling in Northwest England, is the se... more Terne Wathlyne, the former lake turned forested park Tarn Wadling in Northwest England, is the setting for the eponymous The Awntyrs off Arthure at Terne Wathlyne. The reallife lake hardly seems to be either urban or holy, at least not compared to great medieval cities like Jerusalem or Rome. Within the text of the romance, however, the homely Terne Wathlyne is -for the duration of the story at least -of similar religious significance to its more populous counterparts. While neither a pilgrimage destination nor a location with a history of miracles and heavenly visions, Terne Wathlyne is the space where earthly concerns about land rights, royal favor, and chivalric battle clash with purgatorial warnings about the future of the Round Guinevere's soul. The intersection of this world and the next helps illustrate how even a good king's power pales in significance compared that of the afterlife as depicted in the truly horrifying (but religiously powerful) vision of Guinevere's decaying mother.

Very little attention has been paid to the bedchamber in William Shakespeare's English history pl... more Very little attention has been paid to the bedchamber in William Shakespeare's English history plays, largely because the private chambers featured are usually spaces of political or martial imprisonment, rather than private domesticity. As such, any discussion of the third part of Henry VI -or any part of the tetralogy, or any of his English history plays -within the confines of the conference's theme would appear to be at best a game of find the bed as some sort of traditional bedchamber is dug up or at worst a tedious historical chronology of who is who in the War of the Roses. Rest assured, I plan to do neither; instead, I would like to spend my time today discussing how the space of captivity becomes a distorted bedroom and birth chamber in 3 Henry VI.

In this session, we invite papers which explore the pedagogical relationship between teaching tex... more In this session, we invite papers which explore the pedagogical relationship between teaching texts and learning women in conjunction with the language, locations, and spaces of female education. The papers in this session will include discussions of vernacular and Latin learning, spiritual and non-religious feminine instruction, the iconography and depiction of female learning, and the presentation and exchange of educational materials in a manuscript culture.

We would like this session to address gaps in current research by exploring the dynamics of feminine pedagogical literature; scholarship on this topic is expanding, but many works, such as Alex J. Novikoff’s The Medieval Culture of Disputation: Pedagogy, Practice, and Performance (2013) do not pay special attention to gender. Several noteworthy contributions that explore female pedagogy include Beth Allison Barr’s “‘Sche hungryd ryth sor aftyr Goodys word’: Female Piety and the Legacy of the Pastoral Programme in the Late Medieval English Sermons of Bodleian Library MS Greaves 54” (2015), Michael Clanchy’s “Did mothers teach their children to read?” (2011), and Renate Haas’s “Femina: female roots of ‘foreign’ language teaching and the rise of mother-tongue ideologies” (2007). We hope that our session can chart new directions for interdisciplinary research in this area.

This panel plans to address gaps in current research by inviting papers to further explore the dynamics of female pedagogical literature, the creation of gendered instructional voices, and the forms and genres of women’s educational material, including religious instruction, books of manners, romances, and hagiography. We also invite papers examining the societal significance and influence of medieval women’s instructional literature as a whole, especially as it concerns works written and produced by women writers. In order to facilitate a dialogue between individual presentations, we will limit topics to the British Isles, but will leave the time period open to all medieval texts (500-1500).

The apocalypse of Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is envisioned as both a weapon of God and a dem... more The apocalypse of Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is envisioned as both a weapon of God and a demonic force, a pre-existing and omnipresent punishment envisioned as a long-term chain reaction relived and retold generation to generation. In a manner similar to the Beowulf-poet’s use of repetition, direct address, metaphors, and moralizing tone, Wulfstan’s apocalyptic admonishment to the English looked to its own history to explain how and why men invite and unwittingly welcome evil into their days. Beowulf’s dragon episode and conclusion resemble the type of text Wulfstan’s Sermo becomes: a warning to people to look within for the devil and antichrist. I would propose, however, that Wulfstan and the Beowulf-poet envision a potentially positive apocalyptic outcome; if cowardice and ignorance create apocalyptic conditions, both texts also hint that bravery and faith offer a chance for redemption. While the apocalypse cannot cease to exist, vigilance, mindfulness, and loyalty are capable of postponing its inevitable judgement.
Although scholars have not sought parallels between these two early eleventh-century texts, I suggest that Beowulf, particularly in the dragon episode, envisions the apocalypse like Wulfstan does. Beowulf ‘s vivid description of an aging ruler about to meet his death, as well as the ultimate destruction (one in the poem’s long line of failed kingdoms) of Beowulf’s world and people intersects with Wulfstan’s message to the English. The Sermo and Beowulf focus their attention on socio-historical exegeses by using historical repetition to link the current state of affairs to the antichrist and apocalypse. A troubled present is not powerful enough to remind people of the last days; only history, the memories of their elders’ memory, is strong enough. The apocalypse’s insidious nature lies precisely in its repetition; the apocalypse and its agents share the world with people as, over and over again, they ignore the warnings of the past and incite God’s anger. Wulfstan and the Beowulf-poet employ stories of past kings and their families, treachery and invasions, to drive home their point - life as we know it will come to an end.
The antichrist, as dragon or Vikings, pre-exists in the homeland and while redemption and righteous actions can put off the inevitable, they cannot eradicate it entirely. Beowulf may destroy the dragon and Wulfstan may have encouraged some of the English to behave more like Christians, but the dragon and Vikings can, and will, be replaced with others, like Wulfstan’s ancient Britons and Geatland’s destruction. The apocalypse is not a sudden moment but a long change marked by evil, men who choose betrayal instead of loyalty, and cowards who hide in the forest during battle. History and memory are loci of choices and warnings that, unheeded, relegate Wulfstan’s Anglo Saxons back to the woods with Beowulf’s retainers.

The popularity of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard III owes just as much to Rich... more The popularity of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard III owes just as much to Richard’s morally repugnant character as hagiographies of saints do to moral perfection. In the written Richard, Shakespeare synthesizes medieval saints’ lives, historiographies, and romances, creating a moral instead of purely biographic truth. King Richard’s malignant characterization actively dialogues with a medieval hagiography rich with saintly figures and their violent persecutors. Richard III is hagiographic in nature and operates as an adaptation of, not a break with, medieval hagiographic traditions established in works like William Caxton’s Golden Legend (particularly his Life of Thomas Becket), and the extreme conversion narrative of the romance Sir Gowther. Like saints legends, the Shakespeare’s Richard is a conflation of the amazing and fact, an example of Renaissance hagiography, a Protestant adaptation of that most Catholic and medieval literary tradition.

It is tempting to simply dismiss Bleak House’s Ada Clare as one of Dickens’s least interesting ch... more It is tempting to simply dismiss Bleak House’s Ada Clare as one of Dickens’s least interesting characters, a woman so good and self-sacrificing she makes Little Nell seem complex. I would argue, however, that Ada’s one dimensional character, reminiscent of medieval hagiographic literature, is the key to understanding who she is; an anchoritic ascetic, rather than Angel in the House, in the Victorian cult of female domestic piety. A marginal character, both metaphorically and literally, she offers a subversive statement on female will, agency, and domestic piety, undermining the Angel through ascetic devotion. Religious mysteries, so long connected to Catholicism, were reimagined, in part, by Victorian domestic culture; Ada, however, fully appropriates domestic spirituality in an effort to reject the accepted Angel, and instead create a self-willed space of feminine religious ardor. Ada leaves society and abdicates her duties as a woman and mother willingly; they are not taken away from her but refused by Ada, allowing her to maintain complete physical autonomy and control of her body and lifestyle. Her self-effacing and psychologically destructive marriage disrupts the assumption that wives are naturally the source of masculine comfort and steadiness; instead, Ada sought to destroy her “earthly” self through marriage, and in doing so aligns herself with the subversive, medieval anchoritic tradition, whose followers also sacrificed their goods, health, and entire beings in response to an irresistible calling. These women, like Ada, undermined power structures and gender expectations through religious mysteries, refusing alliance with religious orders or marriages; while Ada is a distinctly Victorian version of this vocation, her will to submit, will to refuse, and desire to eradicate her identity on the altar of Victorian feminine domesticity pushes firmly back against the obedience required of the mythic Angel in the House.

Women in medieval romances are often critically approached as marginal characters; however, they ... more Women in medieval romances are often critically approached as marginal characters; however, they do sometimes move from the edges into the main landscape of the story, if only for a little while. My paper will explore how Morgan and Gwenyver access modes of coercive kinship in an attempt to supersede their marginal status as women in Sir Thomas Malory’s “The Deth of Arthur.” My theory of coercive kinship, based in part on Eleanor Searle’s work on medieval predatory kinship practices, is characterized by its aggressive and unstable mix of political, social, and domestic affiliations and loyalty. As such, I would argue that a similarly complex mechanism is needed for examining the role of these two women in Le Mort Darthur’s political and domestic Arthurian family. Political-familial bonds of kinship have twice the ability to generate or lose power, either through lines of lineage or lines of marital alliance. Morgan, like Gwenyver, is attempting to utilize her position as a female relative to exert influence and power at Arthur’s court. But as each woman accesses only singular political-familial bonds (Gwenyver’s politically important marriage and Morgan’s privileging of blood lines), neither woman is able to build the dual bonds of political and family relations necessary to make coercive kinship work. As a result, they lose their non-marginal status in Camelot as they are eventually relegated back to the territorial and textual boundaries of Avalon and the nunnery at Amesbury.

Thesis Chapters by Lainie Pomerleau

Dissertation: Word and Deed: The Writing and Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Queens, 2019

This chapter discusses Katherine Parr's short but productive career as a public author, which beg... more This chapter discusses Katherine Parr's short but productive career as a public author, which began and ended with her marriage to Henry VIII. This chapter examines how Lamentation of a Sinner, written in the last year of Henry's life, allowed her subjects an intimate look at Queen Katherine's religious conversion through her first-person narration. Like Margaret Beaufort and Cecily Neville, Katherine Parr inscribed her queenship through the written and printed word, the authority for which stemmed from her public influence and authority over matters of religious reform. Katherine Parr used her royal position to authorize her work in Lamentation. This book, which was the only work she published after Henry VIII's death, provided a deeply personal account of her religious conversion in an effort to resuscitate her reputation while publicly declaring her Protestantism. The intent behind Lamentation is reminiscent of First Ladies in the United States who publish their memoirs during and shortly after their husband's presidencies. Those books, like Katherine's, are typically offered to adjust public opinion while supporting the policies of their husbands' administrations. Lamentation of a Sinner is a spiritual autobiography that offers a contrasting mix of abject first-person narration and socio-political authority. The book alternates between personal confessions of sin and commanding language strongly encouraging others to follow her in their own spiritual journeys. Lamentation encompasses the type of modeling behavior featured in the Ordinance and the inversion of the first-person narrative used in Margaret Beaufort's translation. The work balances unsettling images of the realm's queen abjectly baring her sinful soul to her subjects as their Christian equal, while simultaneously using her elite status as a queen to authorize her narrative's powerful religious instruction.

Dissertation: Word and Deed: The Writing and Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Queens, 2019

Chapter three looks at Cecily Neville's devotional reading habits in her retirement as they were ... more Chapter three looks at Cecily Neville's devotional reading habits in her retirement as they were described in her Household Ordinance, a work which gave a detailed, idealized account of Cecily's daily habits and the organization of her household. Cecily Neville was an active literary participant, particularly as a reader and book collector, during her lifetime. As a queen, she was responsible for modeling best practices and behaviors, a public obligation that extended to textual descriptions of her life as, at one time, England's most influential woman. I examine the public presentation of Cecily Neville's reading schedule of devotional literature as a curated literary act. The Ordinance's detailed descriptions of her daily religious habits and reading, as well as its discussion of the efficiency and good manners of the household itself, features the perfect picture of a life of earthly responsibility and spiritual practice. Her public model of private devotional literary reading reflects the devotional practices outlined in works she owned, like Walter Hilton's Epistle on the Mixed Life. This model of active devotion, often called the mixed life, was especially popular in the later fifteenth century as more lay people attempted to create a spiritual life similar to those who were professionally religious. The model presented in the Ordinance is aspirational; it features a woman of highest royal authority an idealized life. The Ordinance does not reflect reality, but it does not have to. Its purpose is to provide a model of aspirational reading and book ownership as personified by Cecily Neville, like celebrity lifestyle branding on social media platforms like Instagram. The work's ethos is dependent on Cecily's social position and her acknowledged influence and position as a model to other readers.

Dissertation: Word and Deed: The Writing and Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Queens, 2019

This chapter looks at Beaufort's work as a translator in her English translation of Book IV of Th... more This chapter looks at Beaufort's work as a translator in her English translation of Book IV of Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ. This chapter argues that the paratextual and rhetorical choices made in Book IV reflect Beaufort's use of literary work to authorize Tudor regnal authority. The book's dedication to Margaret and the printer's declaration that the entire translation project was done at the behest of "pryncesse Margaret, moder to our lorde and kinge," as well as the inclusion of the royal Tudor Portcullis and other insignia throughout the book make the devotional text into something more than what it purports to be. While Beaufort's translation does not change the words of the original work beyond what is needed for English readability, the prominence of her heraldry and royal title changes the nature of the ethos behind the text's first-person narration from spiritual to political authority. Her translation translates more than on a linguistic level because she is a highly visible translator. The paratextual signs of her royal position create correlations for the reader between the text's instructions about religious faith and the importance of being faithful to England's Tudor monarchy. The text ceases to invite the reader to see themselves in the generalized "I" of the narrative persona, but rather re-positions them as subordinate to the royal voice attached.

Dissertation: Word and Deed: The Writing and Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Tudor Queens, 2019

This chapter examines the Margaret Beaufort-directed annotations of Tudor births and deaths in th... more This chapter examines the Margaret Beaufort-directed annotations of Tudor births and deaths in the manuscript Beaufort Beauchamp Book of Hours' (BBBOH) calendar as a form of life writing. Although life writing is not a genre traditionally associated with the middle ages, the BBBOH offers textual evidence of the genre being used. Beaufort documented the Tudor's past to create a family history that not only justified Henry VII's ascension to the throne but explained his kingship as the event that set right the Yorkist overthrow of Henry VI. Margaret Beaufort had a vested interest in building up the Tudor claims to the crown to secure her family's future. The annotations are not revisions of historical accounts; they all happened, but not every event or figure is included. Instead, the Calendar annotations draw attention to the genealogical elements of Margaret's choosing that trace Henry VII's Lancastrian relatives through his mother and grandmother, Katherine Valois. The Calendar includes his victories over Richard III and other rebellions, thus offering a version of Henry's life and kingship that focuses on the life moments justifying the establishment of the Tudor monarchy. Life writing itself is a narrative shaped by choices, as decisions about what memories to include and what memories to discard effect the trajectory of story. The life story being told varies distinctly from a chronological historical rendering that includes everything that happened. Margaret's annotations are selective and reflect a composer whose interest lays in describing Henry VII's lineage and life as reestablishing the succession of true kings. While a Book of Hours may seem an unusual place to find public relations-like material for the Tudors, it was not a book intended for strictly private use. Margaret's will includes specific instructions that the BBBOH be given a place of prominence in Henry VII's newly constructed Lady Chapel, the resting place of many of the Tudor figures features in the annotations. Book and architectural space work together, like objects in a scrapbook with memories written down, to create the public image of an ordained monarchy.

University of Georgia, PhD Dissertation, 2019

Dissertation Abstract: My dissertation examines a critically underserved body of women’s literatu... more Dissertation Abstract: My dissertation examines a critically underserved body of women’s literature from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries created by queens - either by legal right or by coronation - that publicly informed and confirmed their and their husbands and sons' royal authority to the aristocratic reading community. I analyze the intersection of queenship and literary culture though four case studies focused on different modes of literary intervention. The women included in this study are Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother who was credited with ending the War of the Roses; Cecily Neville, mother to kings Edward IV and Richard III; and Katherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII. Beaufort, Neville, and Parr had a vested interest in maintaining their family's status because their own positions depended so heavily upon the standing of the royal family. Literary culture, particularly with the emergence of print, became a useful tool for reinforcing or making the case for their family's royal legitimacy. Their literary activity was not subversive, nor did it manipulate patriarchal institutional authority. Their works reflected open, direct enforcement of their families' positions that offered the queen-consorts and king-mothers involved in the day-to-day of ruling a means of asserting their influence on their aristocratic peers and, by extension, the realm at large.

Published Works by Lainie Pomerleau

Renaissance Papers, 2015

The popularity of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard III owes as much to Richard's... more The popularity of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard III owes as much to Richard's morally repugnant character as hagiographies of saints do to the saints' moral perfection. To mold the character of Richard, Shakespeare synthesizes medieval saints' lives and romances, creating a moral, instead of purely biographic, truth. Almost never written within the saint's lifetime, hagiographies were offered as moral and spiritual exempla, and, later in the tradition, as an explanation for their sanctification. Almost every saint also had a nemesis whose vicious ignorance complemented the saint's moral perfection; without such a figure, there could be no saint nor story. The victory of the saint's good over their enemy's evil was considered proof of holiness, and as medieval religious drama developed, tyrannical figures like Herod or Thomas Becket's King Henry II became, quite literally, "necessary evils." King Richard's malignant characterization actively dialogues with an English medieval hagiography rich with saintly figures and their violent persecutors. Richard III is hagiographic in nature and operates as an adaptation of, not a break with, medieval hagiographic traditions established in works like William Caxton's Golden Legend, particularly his Life of Thomas Becket, and the extreme conversion narrative of the romance Sir Gowther. I suggest that

Professional Development by Lainie Pomerleau

Southeastern Medieval Association, 2019

Dissertation: Word and Deed: The Writing and Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Modern Queens, 2019

Dissertation: Word and Deed: The Writing and Literary Culture of Medieval and Early Tudor Queens, 2019

University of Georgia, PhD Dissertation, 2019

Renaissance Papers, 2015

Taught students reading fluency of Middle English; to navigate various questions of form, style, ... more Taught students reading fluency of Middle English; to navigate various questions of form, style, genre, influence, and authority which are peculiar to pre-modern literature; to appreciate the authorial, linguistic, ethical, and gender paradoxes typical of Middle English romances; to understand how manuscripts were constructed and how they differ from printed books, as well as to understand the collaborative work behind contemporary graphic texts; to understand how medieval romance and contemporary comic books and/or graphic novels influence and fit into the traditional literary canon; to comprehend medieval “reading” as a broad matrix of intellectual, interpersonal, aural, somatic, and devotional practices; to understand how authorial creativity and adaptation worked for those who wrote and illustrated medieval romances and those who write and draw visual texts today; to appreciate the aesthetic, material, economic, social, and even political potential of both medieval manuscripts and modern comics.

Taught students to understand relations among the concepts of text, performance, medium, remediat... more Taught students to understand relations among the concepts of text, performance, medium, remediation, and appropriation; comprehend and analyze Shakespearean plays or poems as texts, performances, and mediated experiences; analyze Shakespearean plays in terms of the effect played by changes in media on viewers’, auditors’, and audiences’ experience and understanding of the plays; demonstrate the effects of media and remediation on Shakespearean plays; understand Shakespeare's changing literary, cultural, and educational role through media analysis.

Taught students reading fluency of Chaucerian Middle English; to navigate various questions of fo... more Taught students reading fluency of Chaucerian Middle English; to navigate various questions of form, style, genre, influence, and authority which are peculiar to pre-modern poetry; to appreciate the authorial, linguistic, ethical, and gender paradoxes typical of Chaucer's poetry; to understand Chaucer's position amidst the literary canon in which he participated and which he helped to create; to understand how authorial creativity and adaptation worked for both Chaucer and for contemporary authors who themselves have adapted his works.