The ‘Children’s Corner’ is the preferred name among modern critics for the first eight items in MS Ashmole 61 – among them a saint’s life (St Eustace), a romance (Sir Isumbras), and six conduct texts – which may have been aimed at a particular subset of the household. Focusing on this first portion of the manuscript shows how human social virtue depends on acknowledging and cooperating with human and non-human associates in the household ecology. Within this section of the manuscript, the imaginative narratives instruct through animals and other non-human figures, while the direct-address conduct texts (spoken by a father, a mother, and ‘Dame Curtasy’) teach pragmatically. A new materialist reading of this section reveals the recurring method of decentring the human and including objects in society, which encourages reading even conduct texts beyond the constraints of their overt performative instructions. This chapter demonstrates the important effects of premodern conceptualisations of the physical world on reading, on interpretation then and now, and on our understanding of and engagement with the Middle Ages.

This chapter presents the French courtly love debate, the demande d’amour, as the scaffolding that supports William Dunbar’s longest poem, The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. The demande d’amour is assessed against the conventions typical of the French form as well as a near-contemporary Scottish example, Sir Gilbert Hay’s inset demande in The Buik of King Alexander the Conquerour. This leads into a broader discussion of poetics in fifteenth-century Scotland, especially as represented in Dunbar’s wider corpus. Next, the composition of the locus amoenus, the frame garden, is contextualised by other examples from Dunbar’s poetry. The narrator’s role in the poem is shown to be highly influential to the concepts of narratology and subjectivity. These various aspects of the text are demonstrated to intersect at moments of narrative grotesque where conventions and expectations are ruptured and reformed in distorted and dissonant ways.

The conclusion draws together several correspondences and divergences between The Palyce of Honour and The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. Textual hybridisation and transfiguration are noted as key themes; concepts of authenticity, veracity, and eloquence in poetic expression are also discussed in their various contexts in the two texts. This brief collation is presented as locus for further applications of the narrative grotesque in medieval texts. The literary complaint and animal allegories, specifically avian, are both touched on as possible venues for this strategy to be used.

In the final chapter on The Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, the widow’s response is shown to be the culminating speech in the text. Her discourse is delivered in the form of a medieval sermon. As a preacher, the widow is shown not to parody the genre nor use it ironically; rather, she engages the form as a suitable apparatus for delivering her exposition of a ‘venerean’ morality. This morality plays off of anti-feminist discourses and conduct literature. But, the widow’s sermon complicates any reading of the text as simply an embodiment of anti-feminist discourse; William Dunbar integrates various allusions to allegorical representations of Venus, especially as found in other Scottish poems, such as Dunbar’s The Goldyn Targe and Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid, in order to invest her discourse with a deep and pervasive ambivalence. The narrative grotesque shows the ways in which these influences and discourses are ligatured together in order to question modes of authority, rhetoric, and generic boundaries.

This chapter builds on the previous one by focusing more closely on the temporal dissonance and thus multiple subjectivities created between the two protagonists: Douglas the dreamer and Douglas the narrator. It is shown that their voices create an affective antinomy that appears most vividly at moments of textual rupture and fusion. This narrative grotesque reveals Gavin Douglas’s self-conscious exploration of the role of the poet and of poetics in society; a pursuit greatly influenced by the precepts of Italian humanism. This concern is in part demonstrated through the recurring motifs of harmony and transfiguration. Furthermore, his destruction of medieval dream vision conventions is shown through contrastive comparisons with Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame. The inset literary complaint is also demonstrated to multiply this destructive effect by reimagining the purpose and form of the complaint as a discourse about love.

This chapter focuses on the affective instruction that inanimate objects offer human members of the household in MS Ashmole 61, among them a collection of tools critiquing and defending their layabout master (Debate of the Carpenter’s Tools), a finger-pointing drinking horn (Sir Corneus), out-of-season cherries and gifts bearing distributive justice (Sir Cleges), an embodied document of religious redemption (Short Charter of Christ), and a host of household objects that test the embodied human’s commitment to social and spiritual ethics (Dietary). These non-human participants are not purely symbolic anthropomorphic figures: in none of these cases is the object presented a human-subject-in-drag or a direct representative of human (or divine) will. Instead, the materiality of the object remains central (not merely superficial) and the object behaves in terms of its particular network, influencing the human agents sharing that network but not acting solely for the benefit of the human.

This chapter reveals a tendency in MS Ashmole 61 for objects to encourage self-reflection in their human neighbours and to provide opportunities for penance and redemption. In this section of the manuscript, the widespread necessity of such assistance is re-emphasised. Here, human error is witnessed in the wounds on Christ’s body (Wounds and Sins), the extent of humans’ misappropriation of other material agents to support their own luxury (Vanity) and of self-imposed human spiritual exile (The Sinner’s Lament and The Adulterous Falmouth Squire), with the human soul infecting the human body and producing the tangible pains of hell (Prick of Conscience Minor), leading to perhaps the most emotionally wrenching poem in the collection (Maidstone’s Seven Penitential Psalms), expressed through the material effects of tears of contrition and in contrast to the incorrupt non-human animals with whom humans share the earth. This section of Ashmole 61 is a reminder that the weakness of one element in a morality-assemblage was understood as extending to and potentially harming all.

This chapter locates Gavin Douglas’s poem, The Palyce of Honour, within a wider medieval tradition of dream vision poetry. Geoffrey Chaucer’s dream vision poems, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, as well as Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid are presented as intertexts to Douglas’s vision. Douglas’s text is shown to fracture typical expectations of the dream vision landscape, the dreamer’s interaction with this landscape, as well as the narrator’s conceptualisation of the process of recording the dream vision. The poem is then set in conversation with concepts of Italian humanist poetics, which conceived of the poet as a divine conduit, a prophet, that could transmit divinely inspired discourses. The framework of the narrative grotesque is applied in order to elucidate the ways in which Douglas warps the medieval genre to integrate humanist philosophies of poetics into his work.