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Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination (The New Middle Ages) by Angela Florschuetz (auth.) is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Marking Maternity in Middle English Romance: Mothers, Identity, and Contamination (The New Middle Ages) about?

T he motivating crisis of the mid-fourteenth-century tail-rhyme romance Octavian is caused by the violent intrusion of the eponymous emperor into his wife's birth-chamber, or lying-in room. 1 He intrudes at the instigation of his conniving mother, who has bribed a kitchen servant to join the delirious and exhausted new mother in her bed-nude. Upon his entrance, Octavian jumps to the obvious though erroneous conclusion that his wife is an adulteress. He deals with the situation with considerable dispatch, immediately beheading the terrified servant and tossing the severed head at his awakening wife. The slandered empress thus emerges from a premonitory nightmare only to enter a far more horrifying reality of violence, blood, and disgrace. This intrusion precipitates the central crisis of the plot, the scattering of the royal family and consequent endangering of the patrilineal line due to the violation and misrepresentation of the empress' lying-in room. Octavian's entrance into his wife's lying-in room breaks the codes through which births, particularly aristocratic births, were culturally constructed and represented in late medieval culture. Aristocratic births were configured wit

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Author

Angela Florschuetz (auth.)

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan US

Published

2014

Language

EN

ISBN

9781137343482

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Romance, Literary Criticism