DOI: 10.25136/2409-8698.2023.12.69469

Abstract: The subject of research in this article is a multi-genre composition, and the research material is the medieval English poem “Amoryus and Cleopes”, underestimated by modern literary criticism: essays by English researchers about it are extremely few, and works by foreign researchers, apparently, are completely absent; in the 108 years since its first publication, it was published once again in Middle English, but was never translated not only into other languages, but also into modern English. There are also no scholars specializing in the work of its author, the mid-15th century writer John Metham. Meanwhile, this is definitely an interesting work, since it varies the plot from the Fourth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and its creator copies Ovid’s material not mechanically, but quite creatively, including it in a genre- and stylistically variegated composition of plot episodes. In the process of research, we identified the boundaries of these episodes and focused attention on one of them, within the framework of which the poet Metem put into the heroine’s speech a lot of information of the “encyclopedic” type, obviously gleaned from various bestiaries and works of medieval zoologists. Our goal was to identify motifs transferred into the poem from the most famous of these works. Along the way, Metham's verse forms were described, and his free handling of the Chaucerian heptath used in the poem was revealed. Our article shows that the traditional attitude to the 15th century as a “barren age” is not entirely justified and that between the death of Chaucer and Lydgate and the appearance of the Scottish “Chaucerians” at the end of the century, there were English authors with an original style and works with individual poetic features.

DOI: 10.25136/2409-8698.2022.8.38539

Abstract: The subject of the study is the real and probable connections of Aquitanian (and in particular Poitevin) poetry of the High Middle Ages with the traditions of early Medieval Celtic (and in particular Welsh) literature. A narrower topic of research was the influence of Welsh poems in the form of Englyns on the early samples of Guillaume IX's poetry, primarily in the early forms of englyn milwr and englyn penfyr. An additional subject of research was the metric features of these early forms of Englyns. At the same time, a broader topic of research was the topic of the possible origin of exact rhymes in continental poetry of all subsequent historical periods from an ancient Welsh poetic source. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that, firstly, within its framework, for the first time in European literary studies, specific features of the metrics of early Welsh Englyns were considered, and secondly, for the first time in poetry, a hypothesis was presented about a possible Welsh source of the origin of the exact rhymes of the poetry of the troubadours and their followers, and this hypothesis was confirmed by separate historical and literary facts, as well as general directions of work with her were indicated. Important conclusions of the author are: 1) the hypothesis about the Welsh origin of European rhymes was considered against the background of the "Arabic" and "Latin" hypotheses and found no less consistent, 2) the considered early samples of Welsh Englyns demonstrated a much greater looseness of the meter than the researchers who wrote about them imagined, exact metric formulas for each of the two mentioned early forms were established, and with the help of these formulas, the non-syllabic character of the early Englins was proved.

DOI: 10.25136/2409-8698.2020.9.33799

Abstract: The subject of this research is the principles of presentation to the reader of the full corpus of poetic texts of troubadours in a specialized publication in form of metrical-strophic reference book. Analysis is conducted on the approaches towards compiling such type of compendium demonstrated By I. Frank and V. B. Tomashevsky in 1950s. The author determines the strong and weak aspects of their prosodic publications. Taking into account the specificity of Old Provencal poetry, the author defines the additional ways of its presentation in the reference book comparable to I. Frank’s “Metrical Repertoire of Troubadour Poetry” that retains scientific fundamentality of the latter and addresses its flaws. The novelty of this research manifests in creation of a range of methods for compiling compendiums of strophic forms of Provencal poetry and conducted classification according to the principle of the volume of strophes, which in this article is presented in appendix page. The author concludes on the need of utilization of various methods of composing reference material, which would maintain apparent connection of strophic forms of different sizes substantiated by plausible genre proximity; possible correlation between the late medieval forms of literature in Romanic languages and forms of troubadour poetry, for establishing genetic affinity with the latter and the subsequent creation of historical poetics of the European strophe.