Department of English

• Wednesday, November 5, 2025 - 5:00pm to 6:30pm

FBH Graduate Student Lounge (room 330)

Please join us this Wednesday evening for a work in progress from Professor Elizabeth Allen of UC Irvine! A flyer with all the details is attached below. Professor Allen's project is entitled "Debt and Romance Mitigations in Sir Amadace."

She writes,  “Debt and Romance Mitigations in Sir Amadace” is part of a chapter on fourteenth century tail-rhyme romance Sir Amadace, a story about an indebted knight. I explore what it means that the tale’s two women settle their husbands’ debts at great cost to themselves. Though the tale is usually understood as negotiating between mercantile exchange and aristocratic obligation, it is also centrally concerned with marriage, particularly the legal fiction of marital unity (or coverture). Ultimately, one woman’s debts are paid off, and the other woman, Amadace’s wife, is saved from being cut in half by the very creditor who demanded she be divided in the first place. By attending to these sacrificial women we can see afresh how the romance conceptualizes debt, commerce, and aristocratic largesse through the lens of marriage. A third section will explore how this approach might affect interpretation of Amadace’s social role.

The chapter is part of a larger project I’m starting, tentatively titled Romance and the Forms of Mitigation. The book proposes that Middle English romance constitutes a distinctive site of legal thought, opening a space of fictionality where questions about (for example) the relations between resistance and treason, personal offense and felony, lordly conduct and debt, land rights and martial appropriation can be explored. The genre’s depiction of legal responsibility and judgment is often designed to resist strict justice and mystify violence, though these very impulses toward mitigation produce “happy endings” that often reveal cracks in what they seek to repair.

  Contact us if you'd like access to the WIP, and please come with a question or two that you'd like to pose and discuss as a group!

Looking forward to seeing you this Wednesday at 5:00 in the grad lounge!