Sisson, Lauren Michele
(2024)
Representations of mother-son relationships in late-medieval English miscellanies, c. 1300 – c. 1500.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
Scholarship on medieval mothers and motherhood has gained momentum since the formative works of Clarissa Atkinson, and Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons. The significance of mothers and motherhood in the society and culture of the Medieval world is now more widely understood. However, literary portrayals of mother-son relationships remain relatively unexplored, despite their ubiquity. This thesis explores representations of mother-son relationships in a range of texts found in a sample of Middle English miscellanies, dating c. 1300 to c. 1500, setting textual analysis alongside social and cultural historical contexts. The Auchinleck manuscript, the London and Lincoln Thornton manuscripts, and the Heege manuscript are important collections of Middle English literature, and represent a wide chronological and social span.
Taking a thematic approach, this thesis considers how representations of mother-son relationships engage with medieval questions and anxieties about relationships, family structure, gender, identity, women, and, importantly, the role of mothers to sons and heirs within the gentry-bourgeois family. By using appropriate analytical frameworks, and through reference to other contemporary sources and other studies, each chapter grounds its discussion in the social, cultural, and historical context, to consider how the issues and questions engaged with in representations of mother-son relationships might intersect with, and address, enduring matters that concerned gentry-bourgeois audiences.
The first chapter, ‘Creation’, addresses moments in texts where both mothers and sons significantly contribute to the construction of the other’s identity. The second chapter, ‘Consumption’, focuses on scenes of consumption and incorporation, while the third chapter, ‘Incest’, examine portrayals of incestuous mother-son relationships. All together, this thesis demonstrates the importance of mother-son relationships in the definition of gentry-bourgeois gendered identities, in the construction and maintenance of the family and lineage, and in shaping behaviours among the manuscripts’ audiences.
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