- Faced with an insecure thane questioning both his brawn and his good sense, Beowulf fills the story with details that will impress the Danes. ....
- Perhaps an even more effective way to respond to criticism – especially when it is unfair – is to bear the hatred of critics as a badge of pride. Christianity offered a useful model: Jesus was depicted as an outsider, mocked and reviled by the masses, and saints’ lives presented early Christian martyrs as heroes who were bold enough to affirm their faith in the face of social disapproval and violent punishment. Rejection and ostracism form a central emotional experience of Christianity. A prophet has no honour in her own country, after all. ... This is the approach that the 15th-century mystic Margery Kempe took when she faced public scorn for her unusual conduct. ....
- If, try as you might, you can’t see a way to shed a more positive light on your actions, then you can admit to your wrongs but portray your accusers as petty and unsophisticated for being so upset about them. In a playful work written late in his career, Geoffrey Chaucer depicted a fictionalised version of himself being denounced for writing misogynistic poetry. ....
Reputation in Medieval Literature
Get medieval on your haters: lessons from Beowulf and Chaucer:
Reputation mattered to medieval people a great deal, in many ways more than to us today. They were concerned about what could happen to their public standing; to people at the time, both glory and infamy seemed to move as fast as the wind. And just as today we usually understand how unreliable public opinion is, so did people in the past. Anyone in the Middle Ages with a decent classical education knew that Latin fama meant both the positive kind of renown gained for great deeds, and mere rumour. In the Latin epic Aeneid, a popular medieval school text, Virgil depicted ‘Fama’ as a horrible feathered monster covered in many tongues, mouths and ears. She doesn’t sleep, but flies through the night screeching and terrifying cities with her mix of facts and crooked lies. So how do you fight rumour, the beast that never rests?
