Fantoum and fayry3e : the identification and significance of the literary green figure in medieval British literature

This doctoral thesis identifies and analyzes the green figure, a uniquely textual typological phenomenon, which occurs in the English literary tradition of the Long Middle Ages. The green figure type is defined by the green coding of a character’s physical description, unbound by genre or language. Whilst this type has never been explicitly defined in medieval text, its presence is inarguable; it relies entirely on medieval writers’ inclusion of the color green in the clothing or skin of a character’s physical description, supernatural and otherworldly contexts, and the occupation of liminal spaces, whether physically, metaphysically, socially, philosophically, or any combination of the above. The medieval green figure survives in seven iterations across the span of medieval English literature, beginning in twelfth-century historiographical works and ending with the poetry and witch trials at the beginning of the Scottish early modern era. In addition, there is textual evidence to suggest that the green figure was an artistic export into early modern Spain. Necessary to each iteration of the green figure type is the strict adherence to its three-factored code and the concept of the mental picture guided by distinctive textual description that is analyzed by the development of the type’s iconography. The Green Knight, of the late fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, forms the nexus or template by which all other iterations of the type are analyzed due to the extensive and detailed description of his person, attire, and accouterments in addition to the character’s fame and accessibility. Ultimately, the findings of this thesis not only confirm the type’s existence in medieval literature but are also used to investigate the evolution and transmutation of the green figure into other literary traditions in and out of Britain.