The Discarded Image

Content Warning: This section includes descriptions of racist attitudes and biases put forth by the author.

The final chapter explores just how prevalent the Model was in medieval writing. Sometimes, elements of the Model were added whether they fit with a work’s topic or not. For instance, the poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight starts the narrative by explaining the history of the Trojan War and then tracing the Trojan lineage down to King Arthur. This is not a useless aside; instead, it reinforces the Model, affirms popular beliefs about inheriting classical cultures, and links Gawain to a much broader literary tradition. Many other works uphold the model by including catalogs of objects. People’s literary tastes were very different in the Medieval Era; they were rather “like Professor Tolkien’s Hobbits” (142) in their love of order and predictability. Instead of constantly searching for novelty and originality, readers prized works that felt familiar, told well-loved stories, and reminded them of things they already knew. 

Literature of this time tends to be repetitive because the standard education in Rhetoric advised writers to include digressions and delays in their work.