Text
Stories about the Arthurian court were popular in medieval England, and the worn condition of some of the manuscripts suggests that they were well read. The Ragnelle narrative may have been intended for a festive or less than serious audience. Thomas Garbaty sees the poem as a humorous parody of the Arthurian legend, where Arthur is cowed by both the challenging knight and Ragnelle, "passing the buck" to Gawain. The Wedding of Sir Gawain survives in a poorly copied 16th-century manuscript located in the Bodleian Library (Bodleian 11951, formerly Rawlinson C.86) though it was probably written in the 15th century.
Read more about this topic: The Wedding Of Sir Gawain And Dame Ragnelle
Famous quotes containing the word text:
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)