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NEWS SUMMARY
AND MARKETING |
Some of the most fascinating questions of 14th-Century literature relate to  the
author of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and three other
poems found in a medieval manuscript not discovered until some 500 years
later.Who was the poet? For whom did the poet write? Did the poet have a patron? Dr. Ordelle Hill, an EKU English professor, has received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to explore answers to those questions and others. Hill will argue that the poet of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" pays tribute to the English nobleman Henry of Grosmont, the first Duke of Lancaster (1310-1361). "I believe he is in some way connected to a nobleman who was the most significant aristocrat outside King Edward III at that time," Hill said. Apart from linguistic and dialect studies that have placed the poet in the Staffordshire/Derby/Chester area, "nothing about the poet has been firmly established by scholarly consensus," Hill said. "Yet we do know something about the poet's world, a consideration that has not always been fully appreciated. Essentially, the "Sir Gawain" poet has left us special knots of identity (like those on the Hunt for the Unicorn tapestries) which lead us to recognize Henry Grosmont, an inspirational patron for the talented poet. After a recent trip to England that focused on "Grosmont country," the ruins of some of the Grosmont castles, their architecture and the topography of the region's land and an analysis of Grosmont's book, "Le Livre des Seyntz Medicines," Hill became convinced that the Gawain poet and Grosmont knew each other and came from the same social environment, perhaps the same household. "Clearly, nearly thirty years after the last serious study on the relationship between the nobleman and the poet, the subject needs to be reopened," Hill added. Hill said his two-fold study would focus on Grosmont's material culture and further analysis of his book in conjunction with "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." The professor plans to re-visit England this summer and will spend two to three weeks in research at the Public Records Office in London and additional time touring castle sites he has not yet visited. "This study will make me a better informed teacher of the humanities in both my undergraduate world survey courses, and in my more specialized undergraduate and graduate Middle English literature classes," said Hill, who joined the EKU faculty in 1966. "(It) will help me connect better with ... readers for whom the castle is a recognizable image and will give me a way to talk about other aspects of the material as well as intellectual culture of the fourteenth century. "Beyond the classroom, my audience for this study is any part of the academic community that has an interest in the medieval period," he continued. "This project has both particular significance for literary studies and broad significance for humanities." In 1987, Hill was one of the 30 participants selected for an NEH summer institute focusing on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Since 1991, he has served as editor of Medieval Perspectives, a proceedings journal for the Southeastern Medieval Association. He has made numerous presentations on castles and "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" at professional medieval conferences and authored several articles related to medieval literature. |