Elizabeth Allen is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature, and of diverse articles and book chapters on Marie de France, Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan, among other topics in medieval and early modern English literature. The paper we will discuss is drawn from a chapter of her book in progress, Uncertain Refuge: Ideas of Sanctuary in Medieval English Literature.

Here is an abstract of the topic to be discussed: Sanctuary offers a conceptual apparatus for thinking about medieval political power and the ethics of care and protection. This chapter examines two texts concerned with the king’s legal and moral capacity to protect his subjects. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight interweaves spaces of refuge with portable forms of protection, the hero's famous shield and his talismanic girdle. The Westminster Chronicle structures the Merciless Parliament (1388) around a signal violation of sanctuary in his own monastery. In very different genres, both texts respond to a shared set of political concerns.