In the medieval poem Pearl, the narrator enters, in dream, a divinely beautiful land and comes upon a river beyond whose banks he sees even more sublime pleasures:
Forthy I thoght that Paradyse
Was ther over gayn tho bonkeso bradeo. banks, broad
I hopedo the water were a devyse thought
Bytwene myrtheso by mereso made. delights, pools
It is indeed paradise, or, rather, the New Jerusalem, that lies beyond that river, but he will later fail in his attempt to ford the stream. The word “devyse” here means both “boundary” and “division.” But to the narrator, it is clear that the barrier is equally a connection and a possible way in, a “device” that would unlock, for him, the gates of paradise.
In Middle English, to “devyse” is to tell, to narrate, to will, to plan, to feign; a “devyse” is a division, a boundary but also a “device,” an emblem, a contrivance. Medieval Devysings explores specifically medieval poetic devices that cross the boundaries of the secular and the sacred, the material and the visionary. We also explore later “devisings” (retellings, reconceptions) of these relations in the works of writers closer to our own time whose work is indebted to medieval models.
We spend our time reading primary texts together and seeking out conceptual common ground across periods and fields. Our meetings revolve around poems that meditate upon the relations between the temporal and divine worlds. Typically we choose a loose theme or topos—feasts; moons; Orpheus—and trace its forms in a variety of fields.
Our thematic focus arises from the formal properties of medieval poems: repetitive forms that make stark “devyses” or boundaries between the here-and-now—the world of time and death and what Keats calls “wormy circumstance”—and the divine order at once imitated by poetic form and always out of reach. Our formal interests necessarily extend to questions about how “lyric” and narrative forms of poetry are related, how song and episode intercalate; how form expresses a relation between supernatural and natural or embodied themes; what attitudes to the supernatural vs. embodied worlds are available in a given formal and temporal framework. Our conceptual interests, then, lie in the affordances of medieval forms: reducing Robin Hood to a refrain makes all the starker his ideality; the elaborate twelve-line stanza of Pearl mirrors and fails divine principles of order; Keats’s Miltonic line enfolds and gets caught in the patterns of medieval narrative poetry.
For past and upcoming meetings, see the Events page. If you would like to become a regular member of the cluster, please contact Elizabeth Allen (eallen@uci.edu), Rebecca Davis (radavis@uci.edu), Jayne Lewis (jelewis@uci.edu), or Hugh Roberts (hroberts@uci.edu).
A special thank-you to Anna Finn for designing the cluster’s website and logo.