Abstract: The subject of this article is the evolution of the plot in historical perspective. The material is the unity of medieval Western European works with similar plots, known as the Constance Saga. The study involved its samples dating back to the second half of the 14th century. The aim of the study was to determine the evolution paths of the generalized plot of the Saga in the noted period relative to its state in previous periods. Along the way, the task of deriving a plot formula covering all the examples of the Saga with detailed specification in the form of selected motives was solved, which in turn are combined into two main plot situations and two motive complexes corresponding to these situations. Also, taking into account the derivation of a general formula of the Saga specific works of the indicated period were subsequently identified. The leading research method was motive analysis, and the methodology was historical poetics and literary comparative studies. These formulas of Sagas help to better understand the structure of plots, their similarities and differences, and they also show in which direction the plot tends to change, for example, what genre elements can actively penetrate the original plot and give the event material a new coloring. Medieval literature is well formalized, like examples of folklore, and the technique of presenting plots in the form of formulas for a more visual comparison of various literary texts, what allows achieving significant results in comparative historical research. This is the novelty of the presented study, since until now the selected works were compared to search for individual motivic correspondences, but there were no attempts to derive a general formula for the entire set of works of this group.

Abstract: The subject of research in this article is a multi-genre composition, and the research material is the medieval English poem “Amoryus and Cleopes”, underestimated by modern literary criticism: essays by English researchers about it are extremely few, and works by foreign researchers, apparently, are completely absent; in the 108 years since its first publication, it was published once again in Middle English, but was never translated not only into other languages, but also into modern English. There are also no scholars specializing in the work of its author, the mid-15th century writer John Metham. Meanwhile, this is definitely an interesting work, since it varies the plot from the Fourth Book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and its creator copies Ovid’s material not mechanically, but quite creatively, including it in a genre- and stylistically variegated composition of plot episodes. In the process of research, we identified the boundaries of these episodes and focused attention on one of them, within the framework of which the poet Metem put into the heroine’s speech a lot of information of the “encyclopedic” type, obviously gleaned from various bestiaries and works of medieval zoologists. Our goal was to identify motifs transferred into the poem from the most famous of these works. Along the way, Metham's verse forms were described, and his free handling of the Chaucerian heptath used in the poem was revealed. Our article shows that the traditional attitude to the 15th century as a “barren age” is not entirely justified and that between the death of Chaucer and Lydgate and the appearance of the Scottish “Chaucerians” at the end of the century, there were English authors with an original style and works with individual poetic features.

Abstract: The subject of the study is the real and probable connections of Aquitanian (and in particular Poitevin) poetry of the High Middle Ages with the traditions of early Medieval Celtic (and in particular Welsh) literature. A narrower topic of research was the influence of Welsh poems in the form of Englyns on the early samples of Guillaume IX's poetry, primarily in the early forms of englyn milwr and englyn penfyr. An additional subject of research was the metric features of these early forms of Englyns. At the same time, a broader topic of research was the topic of the possible origin of exact rhymes in continental poetry of all subsequent historical periods from an ancient Welsh poetic source. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that, firstly, within its framework, for the first time in European literary studies, specific features of the metrics of early Welsh Englyns were considered, and secondly, for the first time in poetry, a hypothesis was presented about a possible Welsh source of the origin of the exact rhymes of the poetry of the troubadours and their followers, and this hypothesis was confirmed by separate historical and literary facts, as well as general directions of work with her were indicated. Important conclusions of the author are: 1) the hypothesis about the Welsh origin of European rhymes was considered against the background of the "Arabic" and "Latin" hypotheses and found no less consistent, 2) the considered early samples of Welsh Englyns demonstrated a much greater looseness of the meter than the researchers who wrote about them imagined, exact metric formulas for each of the two mentioned early forms were established, and with the help of these formulas, the non-syllabic character of the early Englins was proved.

Abstract: The subject of this research is the principles of presentation to the reader of the full corpus of poetic texts of troubadours in a specialized publication in form of metrical-strophic reference book. Analysis is conducted on the approaches towards compiling such type of compendium demonstrated By I. Frank and V. B. Tomashevsky in 1950s. The author determines the strong and weak aspects of their prosodic publications. Taking into account the specificity of Old Provencal poetry, the author defines the additional ways of its presentation in the reference book comparable to I. Frank’s “Metrical Repertoire of Troubadour Poetry” that retains scientific fundamentality of the latter and addresses its flaws. The novelty of this research manifests in creation of a range of methods for compiling compendiums of strophic forms of Provencal poetry and conducted classification according to the principle of the volume of strophes, which in this article is presented in appendix page. The author concludes on the need of utilization of various methods of composing reference material, which would maintain apparent connection of strophic forms of different sizes substantiated by plausible genre proximity; possible correlation between the late medieval forms of literature in Romanic languages and forms of troubadour poetry, for establishing genetic affinity with the latter and the subsequent creation of historical poetics of the European strophe.