Journal of Taibah University the first issue

Medieval and Renaissance Values in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
and Spenser’s Epithalamion
11
and hence, lost his honor. Gawain’s concern with his safety before the
final encounter with the Green Knight undermines his religious
devotion, which offers an ironically symbolic contrast. While Gawain
has left Camelot confidently wearing the sacred golden pentangle, he
accepts the lady’s worldly gift. Gawain repents his sin, however, and
his repentance is appropriate for a good Christian knight of the King’s
court, and even more, from a medieval point of view.
The medieval moral and religious code of behavior
significantly implies that Gawain has to be a good Christian in order
for him to attain the elevated status of knighthood. The actions of
Gawain clearly illustrates the inherent relationship between moral
values, like knightly courage, nobility and courtesy, and medieval
religious values. Unlike the supremacy of humanism in Spenser’s
Epithalamion, this makes even the social codes of behavior
subordinate to religious values in the medieval romance. Two
examples will make such point quite clear. The first is that Gawain,
seduced, for a second time, by the married lady of the castle, never
forgets his gentility and courtesy even though he is ominously
exposed to one of the major sins, fornication, in the Christian tradition
as well as in medieval ideology. The Gawain:
For that high-born beauty so hemmed him about
Made so plain her meaning, the man must needs
Either take her tendered love or distastefully refuse.
His courtesy concerned him, lest crass he appear (1770-3).
Because faith is much more important than courtesy, the hero
resists sexual temptation, once again, while still showing remarkable
gentility. Although he even attempts to refuse all her ‘love tokens,’ he
finally submits to her repeated petitions, accepting her magical girdle
“of a gay green silk, with gold overwrought” (1832), to save his life.
The second instance of the supremacy of religious over social values
in Sir Gawain, is in the final part of the poem, where Gawain receives,
I suggest, a socially sympathetic response from the knights of the
Round Table. When Gawain loses his honor by wearing the green
belt, the King’s court enacts an ideally collective social behavior. All
the King’s court members resolve to put on green belts as “a token by
the Table Round”(2519) to share with Gawain his spiritual disgrace.
However, this social act of sympathy never lifts the physical and
immoral scar on his neck, which remains an eternal mark of Gawain’s
spiritual fault. Sir Gawain’s religious symbols and ramifications are
explored further by Phillipa Hardman who examines recent
scholarship in regards to the hero’s use of the “pentangle” and “the