Alicia Marchant

Narratives of Death and Emotional Affect in Late Medieval Chronicles

Despite their ostensibly unemotive tone, medieval chronicle narratives communicate an intricate range of emotions, particularly fear and hope, associated with death and the posthumous fate of human beings, both as individuals and in relation to the broader narrative of Christian salvation. The numerous records of deaths of individuals narrated in chronicles are intrinsically emotive events, and privileged loci both for the depiction of emotion and for the manipulation of readers’ emotional responses to the narrative. The supposedly relentless sequential ordering of chronicles is often varied on these occasions for emotive effect. Following Roland Barthes’s suggestive essay ‘ Tacitus and the Funerary Baroque’, and taking the example of the execution of the Archbishop of York, Richard Scrope, in 1405, I argue that the reiteration of death is itself central to the chronicle texts’ significance.

‘Adam, you are in a Labyrinth’: The First-Person Voice as the Nexus Between Body and Spirit in the Chronicle of Adam Usk

The fifteenth-century chronicle of Adam Usk (d.1430) is unique in several respects, in particular in the modes of narration that he employs. While other chronicles of the era employ covert forms of narration, in which an effaced and impersonal narrator presents a meaningful chronological narrative, in Adam’s chronicle there are frequent moments of overt narration in which he uses first person singular, provides detailed accounts of his personal spirituality, and uses strategies of internal focalisation, such as internal monologue and dreams, to narrate world events. Adam examines his individual place in the world, and does so within a genre in which such explorations are not expected. This article examines the intrusion of Adam into the chronicle narrative, both as an embodied being (a body travelling in the world he chronicles) and as a spiritual being, able to experience direct communication from god.