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: 10.7256/2409-8698.2017.1.21105

Abstract: The object of the research is one of the hypotheses about derivation of European rhyming stanzas, in particular, the one saying that Provencal trobadouresques got that type of stanzas as a heritage from the Dark Ages and Early Medieval poetry. in his research Semenov analyzes the milestones of that hypothesis development in the history of literature as well as variants of that hypothesis in reserches by the leding experts in Western European Medieval studies of the 19th - 20th centuries. The author defines differences between different methods of proving that hypothesis, in particular, the non-literature method and literature argumentation method. As the connecting elements of the Latin poetry that existed prior to end-stanzas, the author anayzes leonine rhymes and end homaioteleuton. In his reserch Semenov has used the comparative historical approach to describing rhyming stanzas as a text phenomenon as well as has covered the most important events in that period of literary history that related to old Provencial poetry. The scientific novelty of the research is caused by the fact that for the first time in the academic literature the history of existence of so-called 'Latin thesis' is represented as the process that had its internal development logic. The author also analyzes pros and contras of the Latin derivation of European rhyming stanzas. In conclusion, the author states that the aforesaid hypothesis never became popular because there are too few examples proving it, besides, there is a fundamental difference between Latin rhymes and  trobadouresque poetry.