TY - CHAP
T1 - Wonder and Wonder Working in Middle English Romance
T2 - The Prose Merlin
AU - Flood, Victoria
PY - 2024/7/31
Y1 - 2024/7/31
N2 - This chapter explores the complex role of wonder in distinctions between historical truth and demonic fiction in late-medieval writings on the prophet and wonder worker Merlin, and his incubus father. It takes as its central point of enquiry the first two books of the Middle English Prose Merlin (concerning the prophet’s birth and childhood), which it approaches as the product of a long Latin and French Arthurian tradition. One of the earliest prose romances in England (three decades before Malory), the Prose Merlin survives in its fullest form in a single mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff. 3. 11, and is dated roughly contemporary with this.
AB - This chapter explores the complex role of wonder in distinctions between historical truth and demonic fiction in late-medieval writings on the prophet and wonder worker Merlin, and his incubus father. It takes as its central point of enquiry the first two books of the Middle English Prose Merlin (concerning the prophet’s birth and childhood), which it approaches as the product of a long Latin and French Arthurian tradition. One of the earliest prose romances in England (three decades before Malory), the Prose Merlin survives in its fullest form in a single mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff. 3. 11, and is dated roughly contemporary with this.
U2 - 10.1515/9781802702019-015
DO - 10.1515/9781802702019-015
M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)
SN - 9781802700411
T3 - Borderlines
SP - 193
EP - 206
BT - Medieval Perceptions of Magic, Science, and the Natural World
A2 - Escobar-Vargas , Carolina
A2 - Lawrence-Mathers, Anne
PB - Arc Humanities Press
ER -