“Be prepared to perform what I ask” - Invasions of Affective Piety in the Comedic Activity of The Second Shepherds’ Play and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract

Beginning with an investigation into forms of aurality used in late fourteenth and early fifteenth-century Middle English devotional literature, this article breaks down journeys of affective piety in both the courtly romance and urban cycle plays. Traditional understandings of genre divisions are super-ceded in the Middle English period by performative spirituality and invocations to the audience/ reader to a contemplative posture. The Wakefield Master and the Gawain poet developed their work in dialogue with Lollard critiques of church excesses. They both show investment in personal expressions of inward devotions which had been popularized in the work of Nicholas Love and other Carthusian texts dealing in popular piety. Both The Second Shepherd’s Play and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight develop landscapes of upheaval and redemption around their characters, drawing the reader into individual reflection on well-known sacraments and intervals of the church year.