Cultural translations in medieval romance 9781843846208, 9781800104402, 1843846209

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 - Romantic Wales
2 - Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives
3 - The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation
4 - Women and Werewolves
5 - Gender in Guruns strengleikr (The Lay of Gurun)
6 - Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’
7 - Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon
8 - Trojan Trash?
9 - Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives
10 - Between Epic and Romance
11 - Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine
12 - Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree
13 - Merchants in Shining Armour
Index of Manuscripts
General Index

Citation preview

Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance

Studies in Medieval Romance ISSN 1479–9308 General Editor Corinne Saunders Editorial Board Siobhain Bly Calkin Rhiannon Purdie Robert Allen Rouse This series aims to provide a forum for critical studies of the medieval romance, a genre which plays a crucial role in literary history, clearly reveals medieval secular concerns, and raises complex questions regarding social structures, human relationships, and the psyche. Its scope extends from the early Middle Ages into the Renaissance period, and although its main focus is on English literature, comparative studies are welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to one of the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Corinne Saunders, Department of English, University of Durham, Durham, DH1 3AY Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF

Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the back of this book

Cultural Translations in Medieval Romance Edited by VICTORIA FLOOD and MEGAN G. LEITCH

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2022 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 620 8 hardback ISBN 978 1 80010 440 2 ePDF D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: The King of Arms of the Order of the Golden Fleece Writing about Jacques de Lalaing, Simon Benig, c. 1530, Ms. 114, fol. 10, The J. Paul Getty Museum, acquired in honour of Thomas Kren. Reproduced under the Getty’s Open Content Program.

Contents List of Contributors List of Abbreviations

vii viii

Introduction Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch 1.

Romantic Wales: Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance Helen Fulton

2.

‘Something remains which is not open to my understanding’: Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives and Latin Arthurian Romance Jessica J. Lockhart

1 21

45

3.

The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation: Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Roman de la Rose Tradition Victoria Flood

4.

Women and Werewolves: William of Palerne in Three Cultures Helen Cooper

5.

‘Better a valiant squire than a cowardly knight’: Gender in Guruns strengleikr (The Lay of Gurun) 101 Carl Phelpstead

6.

‘Vinegar upon Nitre’? Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ 117 Neil Cartlidge

7.

The Three Barriers to Closure in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon and the Middle English Translations 135 Rebecca Newby

8.

Trojan Trash? The Seege or Batayle of Troye and the Learning of ‘Popular’ Romance Venetia Bridges

v

65 85

153

Contents 9.

Poaching Romance: Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives 173 Cory James Rushton

10. Between Epic and Romance: The Matter of England and the Chansons de Geste 191 Aisling Byrne 11. Geographies of Loss: Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine 209 Jan Shaw 12. ‘All this will not comfort me’: Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree 227 Laura Ashe 13. Merchants in Shining Armour: Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility in Late Middle English Romance 245 Megan G. Leitch Index of Manuscripts General Index

263 265

vi

Contributors LAURA ASHE, University of Oxford VENETIA BRIDGES, Durham University AISLING BYRNE, University of Reading NEIL CARTLIDGE, Durham University HELEN COOPER, University of Cambridge VICTORIA FLOOD, University of Birmingham HELEN FULTON, University of Bristol MEGAN G. LEITCH, Cardiff University JESSICA J. LOCKHART, University of Toronto REBECCA NEWBY, Bedford College CARL PHELPSTEAD, Cardiff University CORY JAMES RUSHTON, St Francis Xavier University JAN SHAW, University of Sydney

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Abbreviations ANTS ANTS, o.p.s. EETS, o. s. FRETS STC  

Anglo-Norman Text Society Anglo-Norman Text Society, Occasional Publication Series Early English Text Society, original series French of England Translation Series Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England

viii

Introduction Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches VICTORIA FLOOD AND MEGAN G. LEITCH

T

he chapters collected in this volume explore the subject of translation, both linguistic and cultural, in relation to the composition, reception, and dissemination of romance across the languages of late medieval Britain, Ireland, and Iceland. This is a geographical and linguistic zone that we term, in line with its broader interdisciplinary usage, ‘Insular’, extending its application beyond the study of English romance, where ‘insular’ has referred primarily to English and French texts composed in England.1 The chapters included here are based on papers delivered at Cardiff University as part of the 2018 Romance in Medieval Britain conference – a series which has in recent years come to encompass a fuller geographical and linguistic range.2 This is a particularly welcome development, not least in the possibilities that this extended field presents for the connective and comparative study of a much translated and travelled genre, with an illuminating role to play in writing the history of pre-modern translation.3 The volume proposes a recentring, and 1 For significant works exploring the connections between Anglo-Norman and Middle

English romance, see Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellowes, and Morgan Dickson, ed., Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000); Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). For use of Insular to encompass Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia and its languages, see Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood, ‘Insular Connections and Comparisons in the Later Middle Ages’, in Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages, ed. Byrne and Flood (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 1–22 (pp. 2–7). 2 Although the first such conference, in 1988, was held in Wales, at the University of Wales Conference Centre in Gregynog, the proceedings volume was entitled Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991). The present volume, emerging from the conference held on the 30th anniversary of the inaugural one – and the conference’s first turn to the capital of Wales – seems an auspicious forum in which to celebrate and further the field’s multilingual turn. 3 This multiplicity has been traced most notably in multi-authored studies of individual medieval romances in pan-European translation, such as Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević, ed., Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008); see also Lydia Zeldenrust, The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020).

1

Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch extension, of our understanding of the corpus of medieval romance, which, although long considered extra-canonical, has over the previous decades acquired something approaching its own canon – a canon which we might now begin to unsettle, and of which we might ask new questions. In large part, this volume is aligned with broader endeavours to make multilingual and translated medieval content visible. This is not least within English studies – the dominant discipline to which this conference series, and its proceedings, generally speaks – which is now gradually expanding its engagement with romance’s wider linguistic and cultural field(s). This volume employs an extended definition of translation, beyond the purely linguistic. As Michelle Warren observes, translation studies has long regarded translation ‘less as a linguistic event and more as a manifestation of culture’.4 This perspective is of particular utility for medievalists, not least in its destabilisation of the hierarchical relationship between ‘original’ texts and translation. Warren extends her consideration of translation, in its cultural capacity, to what she terms ‘monolingual translatio’: single-language texts (in her examples, Middle English), written with an awareness of a broader cultural context in which translated texts circulate.5 Although we must always tread with care when separating the translative act from linguistic translation altogether (particularly in regard to Middle English, where this goes some way towards diminishing the comparative and connective force of this field of study), the history of translation must necessarily be written alongside that of multilingualism and considerations of cross-cultural textual circulation and access.6 This volume positions the study of romance in translation in relation to cross-border and cross-linguistic transmission and reception, as a part of the cultural conditions that facilitate acts of linguistic translation; and alongside the generic reimaginings of romance, both early and late, that implicate romance in new linguistic, cultural, and social networks. Medieval Romance, Linguistic Translation, and the Construction of Culture The first part of this introduction is engaged with a question that has exercised a number of recent scholars of medieval translation: the appropriateness of its theoretical or critical frameworks.7 The study of romance and translation 4 Michelle Warren, ‘Translation’, in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), pp. 51–67 (pp. 51–52).

5 Warren, ‘Translation’, pp. 58–65. 6 For discussion of recent studies of Insular multilingualism, see Byrne and Flood, ‘Insu-

lar Connections and Comparisons’, p. 3.

7 Ivana Djordjević, ‘Mapping Medieval Translation’, in Medieval Insular Romance, ed.

Weiss, Fellows, and Dickson, pp. 1–24; Emma Campbell and Robert Mills, ed., Rethinking Medieval Translation: Ethics, Politics, Theory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012); Michelle

2

Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches demands alternative conceptual paradigms to those commonly associated with medieval vernacular literary production. Medieval translation is most obviously read in relation to translatio studii et imperii, the transfer, both geographical and eventually linguistic, of political power and learning from the empires of the classical world to medieval Europe. This is a structure that, as Ruth Evans and others have noted, was ‘so deeply written into literary culture that writers may not have even registered it consciously’ in their negotiation of the relationship between vernacular languages and Latin.8 Indeed, the Middle English (ME) and Old French (OF) terms that come closest to a medieval genre designation for romance, romanz (OF) / romaunce (ME), both refer to the vernacular (generally, in English, to a French chivalric source), held in implicit distinction from Latin.9 However, as Rita Copeland suggests (albeit in passing) in her influential analysis of medieval rhetoric and translation, when compared, for example, to Chaucer’s and Gower’s classical ‘translations’, romance, situated largely outside official or institutional culture, is by no means an obvious vehicle for the usurped and transferred authority of Latin.10 Indeed, we might count romance among those genres with a reflexive self-awareness of the conditions and politics of language choice, which are, however, concerned chiefly with entertainment and instruction, positioned in relation to the linguistic and cultural preconditions of audience comprehension and appropriateness of modes of communal address.11 Although in those romances that engage overtly with classical sources and precedents we may well see a relocation and contestation of Latin authority, the origins of romance are not necessarily Latinate.12 Rather, medieval romance belongs to a linguistically plural context, and alongside the better Warren, ‘Modern Theoretical Approaches to Medieval Translation’, in A Companion to Medieval Translation, ed. Jeannette Beer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), pp. 165–74; Ruth Evans, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘The Notion of Vernacular Theory’, in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Vernacular Theory, 1280–1520, ed. Wogan-Browne, Watson, Taylor, and Evans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 314–30 (pp. 316–17). 8 Evans et al., ‘The Notion of Vernacular Theory’, p. 318. 9 ‘Romaunce’, in Middle English Compendium (University of Michigan, 2020) [accessed 17 August 2020]. 10 Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 178. For a discussion of translatio in its institutional contexts, see further, Thomas Hinton, ‘Translation, Authority, and the Valorization of the Vernacular’, in Companion to Medieval Translation, ed. Beer, pp. 97–106. 11 Evans et al., ‘The Notion of Vernacular Theory’, p. 322. 12 For a discussion of the assimilation and displacement of both French and Latin in Middle English writings from the late fourteenth century onwards, including the classical engagements of the Gawain-poet, see Evans et al., ‘The Notion of Vernacular Theory’, pp. 319–20.

3

Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch noted translation of French romance into Middle English (as well as the composition of new English romances), this volume considers the composition of new romances in Latin, and the translation and adaptation of English and French romance materials in Wales, Ireland, and Scandinavia, alongside the debt of French and English romance to mediated aspects of Welsh narrative material. In this respect, the study of Insular romance is a field which must necessarily look beyond romance languages. Indeed, some of the chapters in the present volume discuss the vexed question of the terminology of romance itself, when its allusions are integrated into Welsh poetry, in the broader context of Welsh prose rhamantau, when translated as Old Norse riddarasögur, or in the context of an Irish eachtra. The movement of romance across the Insular world rests on overlapping cultural commonalities, contiguities, and divergences across a wide range of reading communities, each with distinct ideological and cultural preoccupations, social structures, and horizons of expectation. Given the significant linguistic and geographical reach of Insular romance, we might ask what capability of romance facilitated this travel. This is an especially significant question, as, for the most part, romance represents a departure from the more obvious mobility of sacred material, on which a great deal of medieval translation study has understandably focused (and it is surely a fact of unmistakable linguistic and cultural interest that the relics of medieval saints were translated alongside their vitae).13 Indeed, medieval romance, in its various linguistic and geographical iterations, is to a large extent socially and culturally determined, and while remaining recognisably generic its execution is nonetheless in many respects highly culturally specific. As the chapters in this volume show, there are distinctive cultural codes even within conceptualisations of universal chivalry or standards of courtly love, elements which often require some level of reinterpretation in their movement into new socio-linguistic contexts. We may find the key to the mobility of romance within the fundamental textual variation of romances themselves: the phenomenon that Paul Zumthor terms mouvance.14 Zumthor notes that we find a higher level of textual varia13 We might note, for example, the dominant interest in religious materials in the Brepols

Medieval Translator series (the proceedings of the conference series, The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages), alongside (as we might expect) figures such as Chaucer, and only very occasional pieces on medieval romance. Cf. R. Ellis and R. Tixier, ed., The Medieval Translator/ Traduire au Moyen Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996); R. Voaden, R. Tixier, T. Sanchez Roura, and J. R. Rytting, ed., The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003); J. Jenkins and O. Bertrand, ed., The Medieval Translator/ Traduire au Moyen Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); C. Batt and R. Tixier, ed., Booldly bot Meekly: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages in Honour of Roger Ellis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). 14 Paul Zumthor, Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972). Zumthor explores this in relation to a different, but in some respects comparable (and as Aisling Byrne’s chapter in this collection suggests, related) genre, the chanson de geste.

4

Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches tion (in terms of scribal practice within a single language) in anonymous texts as compared to those with named authors; medieval romances are, for the most part, anonymous.15 Indeed, even those romances with named authors, such as the lais of Marie de France, might be understood as translations, drawn from anonymous and polyvocal background traditions. Romances often appear to have decentred authorship, and in this respect are open to new assertions of cultural ownership, rewriting, and reuse.16 In regard to romance, the ‘work’ itself – as Zumthor terms the category encompassing the myriad manuscript variations, to which we might add translations, that constitute ‘text’ – potentially encompasses a particularly broad field.17 Indeed, translation on occasion facilitates further translation, as we find, for example, in those Irish translations of Old French romance that appear to have been mediated through Middle English (perhaps most famously, the Irish Bevis).18 In this respect, the cultural processes with which we are concerned might be understood to be expansive and self-perpetuating. When viewed within this dynamic process, we can approach the translated text as more than a pale imitation of an original source. This is a scholarly prejudice which has long met Middle English romances, once denigrated as doggerel imitations of French originals, although recent decades have seen their considerable recuperation; while the study of translated romances in the context of Scandinavian and Celtic studies is a subject which similarly has started to gain traction only relatively recently.19 The central premise 15 For a discussion of ‘mouvance’ and the mobility of romance motifs in relation to autho-

rial anonymity, see Megan G. Leitch, ‘Middle English Romance: The Motifs and the Critics’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 1–24. 16 For discussion of the linguistic translation of medieval romance in relation to ‘rewriting’, as the production of a translation acceptable within a ‘native literary context’, see Erich Poppe and Regine Reck, ‘Rewriting Bevis in Wales and Ireland’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, pp. 37–50 (p. 39), who draw on Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996). 17 For an alternative discussion of the application of mouvance to Middle English romance, and a critique of its limitations, see Djordjević, ‘Mapping Medieval Translation’, pp. 20–21. In contrast to Djordjević, we here assume that the ‘work’ (the concept which encompasses manuscript variants and translations) carries a necessary level of authority, fundamental to transmission and translation. 18 Poppe and Reck, ‘Rewriting Bevis in Wales and Ireland’. 19 For a critical response to the denigration of Middle English romance, see Nicola McDonald, ed., Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). For a significant treatment of translated romance in Old Norse, see Sif Ríkharðsdóttir, Medieval Translation and Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France, and Scandinavia (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012); and for Wales and Ireland, see Poppe and Reck, ‘Rewriting Bevis in Wales and Ireland’, pp. 37–50; and discussions of medieval crusading romance in

5

Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch for our purposes (as in a number of other recent volumes on the subject, cited throughout this Introduction) is that the imported, translated text is not just an imitation of a product of an external source culture; rather, the conditions of reception can tell us a great deal about the cultural conditions and assumptions of target cultures – including the circumstances of multilingualism or linguistic exchange. The cultural resonance that the translated text acquires must necessarily be understood in line with a new set of cultural codes, as the translated medieval text becomes the site of new, supplementary meanings. The extent of this depends on the retention of what Lawrence Venuti terms ‘foreignized’ elements – that is, those aspects which are not entirely congruent with the cultural expectations or conventions of the target audience, but are deliberately retained.20 In a medieval context, this is dependent largely on familiarity with ‘foreign’ elements among members of the target community, and their broader resonance – for example, the familiarity with French or English references, and terminology, which appears to have been in place for late medieval Welsh, Irish, and Scandinavian audiences. Indeed, these cross-cultural competencies often speak to the very conditions that prompted the translation of romance, including shared sites of imaginative investment. Although translated romances are not necessarily hybrid in a postcolonial sense, that is, suggestive of split or double cultural identities, the history of the translation of romance is one that is defined by movements of political and linguistic power, and in some circumstances it is responsive to postcolonial readings.21 Indeed translation in its dual geographical and linguistic meaning, chapters by Aisling Byrne and Erich Poppe in Crossing Borders, ed. Byrne and Flood, which also contains bibliographical notice of further relevant studies. The comparative study of medieval romance in its fullest Insular sense, beyond the Arthurian, is a relatively new, welcome development. 20 For a useful overview of the applicability of Venuti’s concepts of ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’ to medieval translation, and the modern translation of medieval texts, see Warren, ‘Modern Theoretical Approaches to Medieval Translation’, pp. 169–70. As Campbell and Mills suggest, applications of Venuti to medieval texts must be caveated, in that we do not necessarily find linguistic nationalism of the type we might broadly recognise in the modern world – see Rethinking Medieval Translation, p. 5. For Venuti’s genealogy of ‘foreignized’ translation practices, which begins in the context of nineteenth-century German and English nationalist movements, see Laurence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 83–124. Nonetheless, as a number of the contributions within this volume explore, linguistic plurality and the politics of language choice are fundamental to the articulation of proto-national consciousness within medieval contexts that we might understand to be postcolonial. 21 For discussion of medieval translation and language choice (in relation to Middle English) in a postcolonial framework, see Ruth Evans, ‘Historicizing Postcolonial Criticism: Cultural Difference and the Vernacular’, in The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Wogan-Browne, Watson, Taylor, and Evans, pp. 366–70. For an influential application

6

Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches rooted in the medieval notion of translatio studii et imperii, has been understood as the conceptual foundation by which we might approach a postcolonial analysis of the European Middle Ages.22 Nonetheless, in consideration of the cultural fields of medieval romance across the Insular world, there is no one-size-fits-all analysis. For example, while literary interactions between England and Wales might be understood in a postcolonial context, the model is complicated by Welsh interactions with continental French materials, potentially although not necessarily via England, which in some respects operate outside this framework.23 Similarly, as Aisling Byrne, and Erich Poppe and Regine Reck, have discussed in relation to the translation of French crusading romances and histories in medieval Ireland and Wales, transmission can be contextualised by engagements with pan-European ideological alignments.24 Likewise, as Sif Ríkharðsdóttir has observed, although the circulation of French romance in Iceland and Norway certainly does not belong to a condition of occupation, it might tell us about perceived cultural hegemony (the privileging of French courtly culture), redrawn in line with new culturally specific frameworks.25 It is also in relation to shared, or translatable, interests that we might approach the translation of French romance in England. As Ad Putter and Judith Jefferson suggest, far from an incipient nationalist rejection of French, the writing of romance in Middle English might be understood in relation to the dominant linguistic competencies and interests of its patrons.26 of hybridity to an Insular cultural context, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s discussion of Gerald of Wales, in Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 77–109. 22 Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams, ed., Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). This position is especially clearly articulated in Kabir and Williams, ‘Introduction: A Return to Wonder’, pp. 1–21 (p. 7). 23 For an influential application of postcolonial critique to post-1282 Welsh literature, see Helen Fulton, ‘Class and Nation: Defining the English in Late-Medieval Welsh Poetry’, in Authority and Subjugation in Writings of Medieval Wales, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 191–212. 24 Poppe and Reck, ‘Rewriting Bevis in Wales and Ireland’, p. 38. In addition to Byrne’s chapter 10 in this volume, see Aisling Byrne, ‘Translating the Crusades in Late Medieval Ireland’, in Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages, ed. Byrne and Flood, pp. 161–78. 25 Ríkharðsdóttir, Medieval Translation and Cultural Discourse, p. 9. 26 Ad Putter and Judith Jefferson, ‘Introduction: Forms of Transmission of Medieval Romance’, in The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts, and Early Prints, ed. Ad Putter and Judith Jefferson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 1–15 (pp. 2–5). For discussion of the complex position of French language and literature in England during the Hundred Years’ War, see Joanna Bellis, The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337–1600 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016); Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch While the transmission of romance from French courtly culture to popular English circles, to Wales or Ireland, or to Scandinavia, involved a form of translatio studii that broadly fits the traditional westward (or northward) model, this geographical flow is complicated by various eddies, such as the two-way interplay between Welsh material, on the one hand, and French or English romances, on the other; and by vertical movements, such as those of class. The appetite for English and French romance across the Insular world cannot be explained by any single national or proto-national linguistic phenomenon. However, it in part appears to have been precipitated by an interest in French, and later English, courtly culture, and, on occasion, we might understand the retention of ‘foreignized’ elements as class markers, an issue which is explored in a number of the chapters in this volume. In this respect, the movement of romance material across cultural, linguistic, and geographical communities in Britain, Ireland, and Iceland must be understood in relation to class identities and class values oriented in relation to, and re-inflecting, the aristocratic imaginings of romance. The Mobility of Romance: Cultural, Social, and Generic Beyond and beside linguistic translation, this volume is also concerned with the ways in which insular romances result from, engage with, and make meaning through other types of movement. Even where linguistic translation is not involved, we can understand the ways in which romance moved across cultural and social boundaries and incorporated elements of different genres into its own capacious and malleable frame as types of translatio – in terms of learning, or power, or both. Many of the chapters in this volume explore ways in which Insular romance appropriates or renegotiates forms of cultural authority – whether in the intellectual and ecclesiastical language of Latin or in knowledge of the classical world; in eschatological doctrine; or in earlier high-status genres such as chansons de geste or Continental courtly romance. Medieval romance, especially English romance, has long been seen as upholding the pre-eminence and prestige of the aristocracy in its focus on secular chivalric ideals in operation.27 Yet, in the later Middle Ages new social strata were also exposed to – and, increasingly, able to see themselves reflected in – the traditionally aristocratic genre of romance as social mobility effected transfers of power and as romance itself became a type of cultural authority to be appropriated and interrogated, including through generic hybridity and parody.

27 Stephen Knight, ‘The Social Function of the Middle English Romances’, in Medie-

val Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 99–122.

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Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches We find these interrelated cultural, social, and generic processes at work in parodic texts such as the Tournament of Tottenham, in which peasants wielding flails and protected by sheep-skin armour compete in a tournament for the hand of the local reeve’s daughter, who watches it all with her pet chicken in her lap. Jousting yokels are not the sort of protagonists expected ‘In story as we rede’ – that is, in an explicitly literate medieval narrative mode usually reserved for more elevated subject matter.28 These peasants, like their text, invoke and interrogate the cultural authority of romance’s aristocratic conventions in order to make meaning; dressed up in imitation of knights, they translate the cultural capital of familiarity with romance expectations and values into laughs at the latter’s expense, as well as their own. The parody acquires its humour, and its capacity for critique of ‘the crude sense of conflict and competition that the trappings of chivalry elsewhere elevated to noble and admirable undertakings’, from the fact that romance and its preoccupations are not expected to arise in conjunction with the lower classes.29 However, written in the fifteenth century, at a time when the middle classes could aspire to marry into the gentry, or even (especially if they were aldermen) to a knighthood, the Tournament of Tottenham also – if taken to an extreme – reflects the aspirations of social mobility that shaped later medieval England. Not entirely dissimilar, if slightly less unrealistic, renegotiations of authority feature in the bourgeois and parodic romance The Squire of Low Degree, in which a lowly squire rises to marry a princess and become a king; and which, as Laura Ashe shows in this volume, also draws upon darker elements of the genre of ballad for its treatment of sexual politics, making meaning from generic hybridity. Such movements, while translating romance into new territory, also reveal the essence of how romance works – in its unity and continuity, and in its capacity to adapt, to make connections, to incorporate and make new. Romance has long been understood as a flexible, developing genre, most famously encapsulated in Helen Cooper’s discussion of romance motifs as ‘memes’ that are replicated and adapted as stories and their building blocks are rewritten over time, and as individual romances variously fulfil or frustrate the expectations of the genre.30 Much excellent work on romance’s ability to refashion itself has likewise featured in the volumes emerging from previous conferences in this

28 The Tournament of Tottenham, in Sentimental and Humourous Romances, ed. Erik

Kooper (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005), line 5.

29 Joanna Bellis and Megan G. Leitch, ‘Chivalric Literature’, in A Companion to Chiv-

alry, ed. Robert W. Jones and Peter Coss (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2019), pp. 241–62 (p. 262). 30 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 3–4; see also, more recently, Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, ed. Archibald, Leitch, and Saunders.

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Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch series.31 The explosion of interest in medieval popular romance in recent decades has also included a number of persuasive apologiae for the genre,32 responding to earlier value judgements of its literary quality by highlighting instead its imaginative potential, in its centrality to medieval culture and ‘traditional “appetite” for taboo issues’.33 Where popular romances were once seen as ‘poor stuff’ and ‘fantastic potpourri’, their reading pleasures and scholarly interest are now widely recognised.34 These texts’ ‘popularity’ is understood to embrace not only their status as the opposite of ‘high-culture’ courtly romances, but also their avid consumption during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries – by aristocratic, gentry, and, increasingly, middle-class readers.35 However, popular romance has still sometimes been seen as showing a ‘lack of sophistication’ even by those who defend it.36 Sophistication is, of course, a relative term: such assessments are often the result of comparing popular (Middle English) romance with courtly (French) romance. Continental French and Anglo-Norman romance have been seen as more ‘high culture’ than later Middle English popular romances, and such high-culture objects have been aligned with an expectation of a higher class of reader. Middle English romances have 31 In addition to Medieval Insular Romance; The Transmission of Medieval Romance;

Romance in Medieval England; and The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, see Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994); Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999); The Matter of Identity in Medieval Romance, ed. Philippa Hardman (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002); Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005); Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008); Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011); Medieval Romance and Material Culture, ed. Nicholas Perkins (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015). 32 In addition to Nicola McDonald, ‘A Polemical Introduction’, in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England, ed. McDonald, pp. 1–21, see A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009); and The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman, 2000). 33 Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. Radulescu and Rushton, pp. 1–8 (p. 2); see also Cory James Rushton, ‘Modern and Academic Reception of the Popular Romance’, in the same volume, pp. 165–79. 34 This shift in scholarly perception is encapsulated in the contrast between these two chapters, the first from 1965 and the second from 2011: Derek Pearsall, ‘The Development of Middle English Romance’, Mediaeval Studies, 27 (1965), 91–116; reprinted in Studies in Middle English Romances: Some New Approaches, ed. Derek Brewer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 11–35 (pp. 19 and 20); Derek Pearsall, ‘The Pleasure of Popular Romance’, in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 9–18. 35 McDonald, ‘A Polemical Introduction’. 36 Radulescu and Rushton, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

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Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches often been perceived as prioritising action over interiority, and public ethics over private concerns or erotic encounters; popular romances have been seen as concentrating on plot or narrative drive instead of the sophisticated dilemmas and formal qualities that characterise courtly romances such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Le chevalier de la charrette or Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’.37 Thus, the cultural mobility of romance, in moving between languages and reaching wider audiences in Middle English, has been traditionally characterised as a downward movement: in terms of diminishing textual sophistication, and in terms of a corresponding lowering of the status of romance readerships. In later medieval England the audience for romances specifically in English expanded to embrace new social strata in the gentry and then also the bourgeoisie.38 Yet, as Carol Meale has asserted, ‘the assumption that linguistic difference can be simply equated with social difference – that distinctions can be drawn between romances in the two languages in terms of their intended and actual audiences – can no longer be sustained without qualification’.39 As Nicola McDonald has perceptively observed, outdated value judgements of popular romance went hand in glove with convictions of the lower social class of their readers, on the suspect judgement that the latter could not appreciate finer or more sophisticated texts.40 Although the audience of Middle English romance broadened, its readers were not necessarily less sophisticated or less discriminating than the audiences of Anglo-Norman romance. While McDonald, writing in 2004, exemplified and led the way for nearly two decades of romance scholarship that has productively sidestepped these value judgements, Insular romance has more to tell us about ways in which these hierarchised contrasts can be destabilised. Some of the chapters in this volume confront these value judgements head on, but do so by taking a 37 Christine Chism, ‘Romance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Liter-

ature, 1100–1500, ed. Larry Scanlon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 57–69 (pp. 58–59); Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Putter and Gilbert, pp. 1–38 (pp. 2–3 and 16–20). The Companion to Popular Romance defines the sub-genre as ‘those texts in Middle English, sometimes with origins in Anglo-Norman versions, which show a predominant concern with narrative at the expense of symbolic meaning’: Radulescu and Rushton, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 38 Caroline Barron, ‘Chivalry, Pageantry and Merchant Culture in Medieval London’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 219–41; Tracy Adams, ‘“Noble, wyse and grete lordes, gentilmen and marchauntes”: Caxton’s Prologues as Conduct Books for Merchants’, Parergon, 22.2 (2005), 53–76. 39 Carol M. Meale, ‘Gode men / Wiues maydnes and alle men: Romance and its Audiences’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Meale, pp. 209–25 (pp. 210–11). On female readers of romance, see also, more recently, Rebecca E. Lyons, ‘The Woodville Women, Eleanor Haute, and British Library Royal MS 14 E III’, in The Transmission of Medieval Romance, ed. Putter and Jefferson, pp. 209–32. 40 McDonald, ‘A Polemical Introduction’, pp. 9–10.

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Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch different approach than the apologiae. Where defences of popular romance have often – and very productively – focused on these texts’ cultural work and insights into the medieval imagination, several chapters in this volume complement such approaches by exploring types of learned sophistication that do inhere to popular romance. Knowledge of the classical world or of conventions for the transmission of narrative, strategies of adding to imaginative worlds, and the deployment of generic hybridity are types of learning that some popular romances deploy, in ways that, this volume shows, position them as both participants and stakeholders in processes of translatio studii. Meanwhile, attention to how courtly romances composed in Latin draw upon vernacular romance expectations or motifs inverts and expands our sense of the directions of transmission by which the romance genre and its audiences are shaped. Considering the transmission of romance into Insular languages other than English also shifts attention away from the class-based disparagements that once shaped interpretation of the movement of the genre. In employing the expanded definition of ‘Insular’ as advocated by this volume, we are reminded, for example, that translation of romance into Insular languages was sometimes in conjunction with an interest in the genre among the highest echelons of society: in thirteenth-century Iceland, King Hákon IV encouraged the translation of romances such as Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian texts in order to help his court emulate French and Anglo-Norman courtly and chivalric preoccupations.41 Such currents of translation and transmission cannot be reduced to a simple lowering of class horizons; here we are reminded that ‘the Insular past is not only various, it is also decidedly resistant to any singular framework of analysis’.42 Yet, approaching the preoccupations of medieval English romance, and its motifs, through a lens of class remains very illuminating when we look to see how class has shaped the interests and permutations of romance, rather than using some romances’ presumed superiority or inferiority as evidence of their class origins. Where some chapters in this volume explore what we can gain by considering popular romance in relation to ideas of translatio studii, other chapters address romance in relation to power – whether lateral (east–west) translations of power, or vertical ones (of class). In respect of this, a number of our contributors revise medieval concepts of translatio imperii as a modern critical tool, exploring the ways in which the translation, transmission, and rewriting of romance destabilise and shift cultural ownership. 41 Geraldine Barnes, ‘Arthurian Chivalry in Old Norse’, Arthurian Literature, 7 (1987),

50–102; Geraldine Barnes, ‘Romance in Iceland’, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 266–86; Ríkharðsdóttir, Medieval Translations and Cultural Discourse. 42 Byrne and Flood, ‘Insular Connections and Comparisons’, p. 6.

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Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches This expanded definition of translatio is one of the contributions this volume makes. We see its instrumentality not least in relation to exercises in parody and hybridity by the authors of Middle English romance, which can critique and undermine the aristocratic values and figures customarily supported by the romance genre, but can also sometimes shift power downwards to the middle classes. As romance was received by different societies and different social strata, it was also inflected by those different communities,43 reflecting and reflecting on social mobility, class-based critique, and generic hybridity. As new audiences engaged with romances, the genre was rewritten to accommodate contemporary concerns and connections with different genres. The increasing social mobility of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries produced the likes of Chaucer’s social-climbing pilgrims, familiar enough in their ambitions to serve as contemporary caricatures; saw the Paston family’s upward movement over the course of half a century from yeomen to romance-owning gentry; and witnessed the rise of Elizabeth Woodville, a member of the gentry, to the exalted position of queen of England. Social mobility both made the reading of romance and book ownership more accessible to wider audiences and changed the nature of romance itself. Late Middle English romance was transformed or troubled by contact with new (or newly powerful) class-based ideological agendas. As romance developed over time, the self-conscious deployment and hybridisation of generic conventions became more familiar, sometimes resulting in burlesque or parody, as in the way in which bourgeois interests shape the Squire of Low Degree’s fixation on the funding required for chivalric adventuring to take place. As John Finlayson observes, ‘parody of the romance depends on the audience’s recognition of the standard pattern of romance’.44 But parody, not necessarily an either/or category for the Middle Ages,45 also shaped Anglo-Norman romances in ways that could convey a critique of those who read them. The translation and rewriting of romance can also be conducive to critique, as the reworking of motifs reflects on their original form. This is also reflected in generic hybridity, as romance develops through contact with different cultural and social agendas. This emerges all the more strongly through the ways in which Middle English romance is interwoven with genres with which it has not previously been recognised to have a dialogue (as opposed 43 Cooper, English Romance in Time, p. 30. 44 John Finlayson, ‘Definitions of Middle English Romance’, The Chaucer Review, 15

(1980–81), 43–63 (p. 47).

45 See J. A. Burrow, ‘Sir Thopas in the Sixteenth Century’, Middle English Studies, ed.

Douglas Gray and E. G. Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 69–91; Glenn Wright, ‘Modern Inconveniences: Rethinking Parody in the Tale of Sir Thopas’, Genre, 30 (1997), 167–94 (189–90); and Wim Tigges, ‘Romance and Parody’, in Companion to Middle English Romance, ed. Henk Aertsen and Alasdair A. MacDonald (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990), pp. 129–51.

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Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch to a precedent), such as medieval epic, and through how, on the later end of medieval romance’s trajectory, romance incorporates problematic elements of the ballad. This volume suggests that the latter type of hybridity is one way in which, as the middle classes with their new money became more powerful and more likely to read romances themselves, late romances developed an increasing openness to critiquing aristocratic endeavour. Romance’s flexibility is key to these permutations, conceptualised through the family resemblance theory of genre, according to which any given characteristic of romance (even the customary happy ending) may be absent without obscuring a text’s nature as a romance.46 Here, genre is a form of currency – circulating, and remaining current, as romance develops over time – and types of generic movement such as linguistic translation, parody, and hybridity offer opportunities for commentary on the romance genre itself. The chapters in this volume reveal the various ways in which, in the creation and transformation of romance, translation – whether in terms of language, learning, authority, or form – is always a culturally inflected act. * * * In line with its expanded conceptualisation of ‘Insular’ romance, the chapters of this volume begin with a reappraisal of the relationship between Welsh sources and French and English romance. While among French and English literary scholars the term ‘Celtic’ (a monolithic conceptualisation of principally Welsh and Irish cultural contexts) for a long time served as a way of reading into the blank spaces on the map of romance, the vexed matter of the ‘Celtic’ source is one that has since been put to bed. Scholars for the most part no longer read Welsh or Irish origins into every marvel or mystery of medieval romance. Of course, this is not to say that there are no genuine points of contact between Welsh (in particular) and French and later English romance – as the British personal names of Chrétien de Troyes, for example, so amply testify. A great deal of productive work has, in recent years, sought to refine our understanding of the most plausible lines of influence of Welsh or Breton material on English and Continental romance (especially Arthurian romance). We might note, for example, the particular attention scholars have paid to the role of secular Latin clerics with some knowledge of Welsh background cultures in the mediation of Welsh materials, however modified, 46 Cooper, English Romance in Time, pp. 8–9. The concept is first articulated by Ludwig

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), pp. 31–32, and applied to literary genres more generally in Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 41. See also Yin Liu, ‘Middle English Romance as Prototype Genre’, Chaucer Review, 40.4 (2006), 335–53 for an insightful, methodological encapsulation of this flexible way of categorising of the genre.

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Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches to English and Continental courtly audiences, a line of transmission which in many respects has emerged as more compelling than the familiar figure of the Breton conteur.47 As Helen Fulton suggests in the first chapter of this collection, there are multiple avenues through which Welsh content was remediated for English and Continental audiences. Fulton posits a model of active Welsh co-creation in the writing of ‘romantic Wales’, that is, the creation of Wales as a space of ‘romance phenomena (mystery, adventure, love)’. Fulton traces this influence from the Norman conquests of Wales in the late eleventh century to the fall of the Welsh princes at the end of the thirteenth century. ‘Romantic Wales’ is conceptualised by Fulton in spatial terms, in relation to sites associated with Wales’s Roman past – an interest shared by both Welsh authors and the authors of medieval French and English romance. The post-1300 situation, Fulton suggests, saw a contraction of imaginings of ‘romantic Wales’ to the territories in the north and west recently conquered by Edward I, while the English-controlled towns of the south often appear as a home space for the knights of Middle English romance, even ‘an extended part of England’. An overview of a significant chapter in the geographical imaginings of English and continental romance, Fulton’ contribution presents a model for conceptualising Welsh, English, and French literary interchange within a postcolonial critical context that understands Wales not simply as a place of projection in English and French imaginations (as is so often the case in contemporary scholarship), but a site of European influence, grounded in the material conditions of contact, conquest, and colonisation.48 The second chapter of the collection, by Jessica J. Lockhart, continues the discussion of the mediation of Welsh content through other Insular languages, in relation to two Latin Arthurian texts, sometimes termed romances, produced in a Welsh context or with awareness of Welsh background traditions: the De Ortu Waluuanii Nepotis Arturi and Historia Meriadoci Regis Cambrie, both tentatively dated to the twelfth or thirteenth century.49 In these works, Lockhart identifies the presence of a riddling motif, the Erroneous Watchman, previously noted only in Welsh and Irish vernacular works, a tradition which, 47 Siân Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 2001); Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Did Itinerant Breton “Conteurs” Transmit the Matière de Bretagne?’, Romania, 116 (1998), 72–111. 48 This marks a significant point of departure from recent studies, such as Michael A. Faletra, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the Twelfth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Although appropriate to the material there discussed, projection is not the only phenomenon at work during this period. 49 For the identification of these texts as romances, see Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Arthurian Latin Romance’, in The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature: The Development and Dissemination of the Arthurian Legend in Medieval Latin, ed. Siân Echard (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 132–45.

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Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch she suggests, offers a significant precedent for the representation of the marvels of the romance tradition. Lockhart’s analysis has direct implications for the study of (vernacular) romance in two respects, in terms of both direct source analysis, that is, the debt of romance to these two relatively little-studied works of British Latin Arthuriana, and of the potential for comparative study by way of the analogous operations of wonder across languages and literary spheres. Victoria Flood’s contribution in chapter 3 similarly explores literary transmission and influence between Welsh and other Insular languages, in this case in the literary interests of the Welsh gentry in the period following the Fall of the Princes. In a direct address to the once vexed issue of the Celtic sources of medieval romance and its supernaturalism, Flood explores the distinctive operations of the supernatural company as it is represented in the love poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym (a near-contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer) and the garden of Love of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose. Flood suggests that, rather than searching for Welsh inspiration for the fairy companies of French and English romance, we might look for the influence of romance traditions of writing supernaturalised courtoisie on pre-existing Welsh frameworks of (to borrow a term from Fulton) ‘magic naturalism’.50 Flood suggests that supernatural or marvellous imaginings might be understood as points of cultural specificity, a kind of litmus test for approaching points of similarity and divergence in common engagements with the mainstream of European literature. Continuing the discussion of romance in its broader linguistic contexts, the next two chapters, by Carl Phelpstead and Helen Cooper, explore the legacies of French romance in Norse and Irish translations. Both chapters might be understood in relation to the differences in ‘emotive scripts’ (cultural codes, conventions, and expectations) that we find between source and target cultures, which has attracted significant attention elsewhere in the study of Insular romance.51 In chapter 4 Cooper explores Eachtra Uilliam, the sixteenth-century Irish translation of the Middle English version of William of Palerne, itself based on an Old French original. She traces the continued appeal, and applicability, of the work across cultural and linguistic contexts, and finds a crux in the source-text’s representation of its heroine, Melior, a figure in whom, Cooper suggests, we see ‘little of the misogyny’ of comparable romances. Cooper identifies the greatest level of discrepancy across the three, otherwise largely consistent, versions in their treatment of Melior’s monologue, a deliberation on love and emotion. Yet, while there are some minor differences in execution (in part demanded by form), the changes in the Irish serve only to intensify the meanings we find in the English and the French. We might understand (largely) faithful translation as 50 Helen Fulton, ‘Magic and the Supernatural in Early Welsh Arthurian Narrative: Culh-

wch ac Olwen and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy’, Arthurian Literature, 30 (2013), 1–26.

51 For important work in this area, see Sif Rikhardsdottir, Emotion in Old Norse Litera-

ture: Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017).

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Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches a perception of the authority of the source text or, at the very least, its values – and Cooper understands William of Palerne in all its iterations, including the Middle English, to be fundamentally courtly. Yet, elsewhere the Insular translation of romance certainly does appear to have demanded translations of register, even to the point of critique. In chapter 5 Carl Phelpstead explores the cultural contexts of writing gender and sexuality in Guruns strengleikr (The Lay of Gurun), which appears in the Strengleikar, the Old Norse translations of the lais of Marie de France. Although no French original of the lai survives, as Phelpstead notes, there are multiple plausible lines of transmission of this material, set and invested in an Insular geographical sphere, from Britain to Scandinavia. Yet Guruns strengleikr appears to be suggestive of a certain level of culturally informed rewriting, a reorientation of ‘a new world of courtly values’ in relation to a pre-existing Scandinavian ‘ideology of gender and sexuality’, potentially suggestive of an awareness of the dangers of romance itself, and the threat it presents to normative gendered behaviours. The next three chapters explore the links between romance and forms of cultural authority, such as Latin sources or other high-culture objects or representatives. In chapter 6 Neil Cartlidge considers the surprising way in which the cultural authority of Latin intersects with the expectations of romance in Walter Map’s twelfth-century De nugis curialium. Focusing on Map’s romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’, Cartlidge explores how this courtly Latin text draws upon, but unsettles, the expectations of romance by exposing masculine anxieties and by queering attitudes towards sex and gender. Cultural authority is traditionally viewed as moving uni-directionally from Latin (downward) to the vernaculars, and Latin is a medium in which romance, originating in and aligned with vernacular languages and the popular, is itself unexpected. Here, however, Cartlidge shows that we can understand romance and language translation as a two-way interplay, and suggests a promising approach to romance as a genre ‘always and essentially implicated in an ongoing process of exchange between languages’. Rebecca Newby’s chapter 7 offers an analysis of Ipomedon’s endings and argues that the Cambro-Norman Hue de Rotelande engages with the expectations of more high-culture twelfth-century Continental romance to develop a parody of the genre. This rather early parody of romance’s expectations, as Newby explores, offers a critique directed towards the authority of the insular barony – a different, and perhaps more misogynistic, sort of critique than the bourgeois or lower-class parodies or critiques that arise later in the genre’s development (as discussed in the final two chapters in the volume – and as per the Tournament of Tottenham’s sheepskin-clad chivalric bumpkins). The three Middle English translations of Ipomedon, meanwhile, produced between the late fourteenth and the late fifteenth centuries, on the whole faithfully reproduce Hue’s narrative but negotiate the authority of their source by altering the 17

Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch endings. Despite the fact that the later Middle English versions were written at a time when parody is perhaps more expected in the romance genre, these versions undertake different cultural work. Venetia Bridges’ chapter 8 reconsiders the cultural valuation of the ‘popular’ and the perceived hierarchisation of Latin, French, and English by focusing on the fifteenth-century Middle English Seege or Batayle of Troye. Where (Middle English) popular romance has been viewed as unlearned, Bridges argues that English romances such as the Seege or Batayle of Troye, which uses many Latin and French sources, participate in what has been seen as the more elite and more Latinate intellectual habit of translatio studii. Through the ways in which popular romances retell earlier works in a different language or context, deploying a knowledge of inherited material in their treatment of sources and also deploying a knowledge of the stylistic and performative elements of narrative transmission itself, working with the romance genre’s own conventions can be understood as a type of ‘learning’ that profitably expands our understanding of the types of translatio in which popular romance engages. In chapter 9, the first of two chapters offering new paradigms for understanding the translation of English romances specifically from French sources, Cory James Rushton similarly responds to the erstwhile critical devaluation of popular romances and moves beyond the apologia by approaching the genre through the lens of fan fiction theory. Rushton pinpoints the operations by which popular romances result from acts of translation (whether from a different language, or from an earlier Middle English high-culture text) by analysing Thomas Chestre’s fourteenth-century work and the anonymous The Greene Knight (c. 1500), Sir Gowther (mid- to late fifteenth century), and Torrent of Portyngale (c. 1400) as fan fictions. Where popular romances are concerned, fan fiction theory gives us a new way of understanding authorial intentions or motivations and the resulting additions to the ‘archive’ or imaginative worlds which their texts inhabit. This approach profitably accounts for the way in which popular romances negotiate textual authority with an emphasis on playfulness and pleasure. Aisling Byrne, meanwhile, argues in chapter 10 that two understudied Middle English texts, the anonymous Horn Childe and John Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke, interweave the expectations of romance with those of medieval epic. This innovative analysis expands our sense of the types of hybridity of which Insular romance is capable, since epic, in the form of the French chansons de geste, has primarily been seen as an earlier mode superseded by, rather than later interacting with, romance. In these narratives in which England is invaded, French literary models are deployed, paradoxically, to resist foreign invasion and to give voice to constructions of Englishness and English imperium. In this appropriation of culture from the Continent, used to renegotiate movements of power, one type of translatio (translatio studii) seems to be used to comment upon another (translatio imperii). 18

Insular Romance in Translation: New Approaches Jan Shaw’s chapter 11 similarly explores reimaginings of empire, in the English translation of Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine, the dynastic romance of the house of Lusignan and its fairy founder. Shaw suggests that the English translator foregrounds the account of the decline of the Armenian branch of the dynasty beyond that found in Jean d’Arras, through a subtle reworking of the crime of an ill-fated king who instigates the decline of his line, and its relationship to the representation of dynastic marriage across the English text. Shaw locates the English reception of, and revisions to, the romance in relation to a web of narratives, both English and Continental, concerned with the politics of the Eastern Mediterranean. The chapter gestures to the broader cultural field in which French-language romance with far-reaching imperial ambitions was received in England, and the political dynamics that facilitated both its reception and its adaptation. The final two chapters analyse how some romances negotiate and interrogate the sociopolitical authority represented in – and by – popular romance itself. In chapter 12 Laura Ashe considers a late romance that is marked by social mobility and that critiques or parodies elements traditionally upheld by the genre: the Squire of Low Degree. Ashe offers a striking new reading that illuminates how this critique results from hybridity with the genre of ballad, which has not previously been discussed in relation to this late fifteenth-century romance. Where previous views of the relationship between romance and ballad had seen only a one-way influence – with romance informing ballad, whose extant exemplars are primarily early modern – Ashe shows how remnants of and references to earlier ballads also served as source material for the Squire of Low Degree and reads the crucial scene in which the Squire seeks entry to the Princess’s bedchamber alongside related encounters in ballads such as ‘Glasgerion’. In so doing, Ashe foregrounds a two-way interplay between the genres of romance and ballad – as, earlier in the volume, Cartlidge foregrounds a two-way interplay between Latin and vernacular in the construction and reconfiguration of the possibilities of romance. The social critique that romances – and here, especially, late Middle English romances – can offer is also the subject of the final chapter in the volume, by Megan G. Leitch. This chapter analyses merchant characters in relation to cultural and generic frameworks in which merchants were treated with suspicion and animosity by medieval authorities. Exceptionally, in the late romances Emaré, Sir Degaré, Octavian, and Valentine and Orson – all copied or composed at a time when increasing social mobility gave merchants more opportunity to both read romances and mingle with the upper classes – merchants are positive characters, who intervene on behalf of the oppressed when aristocratic men mistreat ladies. These romance merchants’ chivalrous actions show how late romance is a particularly apt vehicle for two types of translation with which this volume is concerned: a movement of power (in the appropriation of romance and its tropes to offer a critique 19

Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch informed by changing social structures and class politics) and also a movement of texts (in terms of the writing of late romances and their readership and circulation). * * * The new approaches gathered together across this volume highlight the nuance, and at times the self-consciousness, with which medieval romance translates cultural capital to create new literary structures and new significance. It is intended, in part, to bring together new research into the multilingual environments of romance across the Insular world, not least in Wales, Ireland, and Scandinavia, with new insights into the trans-historical and multigeneric development of romance in a sphere that might more conventionally be termed ‘insular’ (with a lower case ‘i’), that is, in its English contexts. In this respect, it pursues an interdisciplinary approach, asking what the study of romance in an English studies context might gain from an increased awareness of romance’s broader multilingual field, as well as an exploration of the ways in which translation might operate as a labile concept through which to approach the reuse of romance material not simply across linguistic groups but also between classes. It is, of course, also aware of the significant overlap between these two concerns (the classed and the linguistic), whether we think of the prestige of French courtoisie in medieval Wales and Scandinavia, or the aspirant bourgeois and gentry reading practices of late medieval and early modern England. This is a sphere of research which we very much hope will continue to build momentum in future conferences, not least in terms of what the history of Insular romance (meant here in its broadest sense) might owe to languages and multilingual contexts beyond the Insular zone, from the circulation and translation of Middle English romance in the Iberian Peninsula, to the Arabic sources and analogues proposed for Geoffrey of Monmouth and Geoffrey Chaucer.52 When approached through the lens of translation, romance emerges as a culturally contingent phenomenon located within a multilingual field. Such an approach makes visible the adaptations, transformations, and reinventions of Insular romance, which, it turns out, was not always so insular after all. 52 Aisling Byrne, ‘From Hólar to Lisbon: Middle English Literature in Medieval Transla-

tion, c.1286–c.1550’, Review of English Studies, 71.300 (2020), 433–59; Shazia Jagot, ‘Fin Amors, Arabic Learning, and the Islamic World in the Work of Geoffrey Chaucer’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Leicester, 2013); Humma Mouzam, ‘Astrology, Prophecy, and the Galfridian Dragon’ (forthcoming PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham). We might note the identification of a number of non-European analogues for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which have been posed by Su Fang Ng and Kenneth Hodges, ‘Saint George, Islam, and Regional Audiences in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 32 (2010), 257–94.

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1 Romantic Wales: Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance HELEN FULTON

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t least since the nineteenth century, with the popularity of Matthew Arnold’s idealised view of a culture he described as ‘Celtic’, Wales has been regarded from the outside as a ‘romantic’ place.1 Arnold did not entirely invent this view of Wales but was drawing on earlier traditions of poetry and travel writing by English writers who each thought they were discovering something new about the landscape and history of Wales. This view of Wales as somewhere undiscovered, somewhere beyond everyday experience, and thus in some sense threatening to the prevailing order of English hegemony, is actually as old as the early encounters between Britons and Saxons in the sixth century, but the origins of the Arnoldian version of Celticity can be located most securely in the centuries from the twelfth to the fifteenth, when the genre of medieval romance flourished and then declined. In this chapter I aim to explore ways in which medieval insular romance worked to construct a place that we might call ‘romantic Wales’, that is, an imagined geographical and topographical site where romance phenomena (mystery, adventure, love) might be found, a place marked for romance like the crusader cities of the East or the enchanted forests of Brittany. But what was the nature of this geographical site which was called ‘Wales’, and does it map onto what we now think of as Wales, as it appears on a modern map of Britain? My approach to answering these questions draws on the field of spatial humanities, especially the assumed link between space and ideology, such that ‘places, including geographies in the medieval context of the romance, did not simply serve as settings or backgrounds and may have been 1 In his lectures published in 1867, Arnold described Wales as a place where ‘the past still

lives’. He compared the ‘melancholy’ of early Welsh poetry with the poetry of Byron, and described ‘Celtic romance’ as imbued with ‘the magical charm of nature’ such that ‘it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts’. Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature and Other Essays (London: Dent, 1976), pp. 14, 118, 120.

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Helen Fulton carefully selected to serve an ideological purpose or awaken meaningful associations’.2 Romantic Wales as an imagined site in medieval literature comes already endowed with a whole set of ‘meaningful associations’ which enable romance writers to use it as a kind of shorthand for the adventures that are to come. Like other imagined spaces in medieval romance, the idea of ‘Wales’ was not stable throughout the Middle Ages. I want to suggest that before about 1300 romantic Wales existed immanently across the whole of the territory, from the Norman lordships to the lands of the independent Welsh princes. After 1300, following the loss of native Welsh rule, romantic Wales no longer comprised the whole geographical country but was reduced in size, occupying only those lands in the north and west which had once belonged to the native princes. This change in the geography of Wales coincided with a loss of control by the Welsh of the dominant narrative of romantic Wales. Before about 1300 this dominant narrative was shared between the Welsh and the Normans; after 1300, with the loss of political and aristocratic power, Welsh writers yielded to the narratives of the English and, in pursuing patronage from a status-conscious gentry, largely turned away from the romantic imagination and focused instead on the material and empirical demands of praise poetry.3 What follows is divided into sections before and after 1300, chosen as the nearest round number after 1282, the date which marks the death of the last independent prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and the conquest of north Wales by Edward I. From then on, Wales was split into two, politically and administratively, between the Marcher lordships in the south and east, and the Principality, the former independent kingdoms of the Welsh princes now annexed to the English crown (Fig. 1).4 This spatial reconfiguration had inevitable cultural and ideological consequences, one of which was that the dominant narrative of romantic Wales came to belong to English writers, and what had once been a dialogic process of literary imagining became a monologic act of redefining the geography of romantic Wales.

2 Patricia Murrieta-Flores and Naomi Howell, ‘Towards the Spatial Analysis of Vague

and Imaginary Place and Space: Evolving the Spatial Humanities through Medieval Romance’, Journal of Map and Geography Libraries, 13.1 (2017), 29–57 (p. 45). 3 This is not to say that there was no ‘romance’ left in Welsh writing after 1300. One of the earliest poets to compose following the trauma of 1282 was Dafydd ap Gwilym (fl. c. 1340–50), whose poetry of love and nature surely counts as ‘romantic’ writing. 4 Some of the lordships in the south-west, especially Carmarthen and Cardigan, were already under the control of the crown and remained so after 1282, so were in administrative terms part of the Principality rather than the March. For a full account of 1282 and its aftermath, see R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 333–90.

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Fig. 1  The Principality and the Marcher Lordships c. 1400

Helen Fulton Romantic Wales before 1300 Between the arrival of the Normans in Wales in 1066 and the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1282, the Welsh were co-producers, along with the Normans, of the dominant narrative of romantic Wales, that is, the Wales that featured as a geographical and cultural marker in fictional texts. Through the Welsh-language prose narratives known collectively as the Mabinogion, Wales was both writing itself and writing back to its colonisers. From the dynastic themes of the Four Branches to the satires of English tradespeople and French Arthurian fantasy, Welsh writers exerted a significant level of control over the construction of romantic Wales.5 Many modern critics writing from a postcolonial perspective assume that Welsh writers had almost no control over the construction of an imagined Wales, and that the whole structure came from the outside to be imposed on a passive and unresisting Wales. Critics such as Michelle Warren and Patricia Clare Ingham have focused on the borders of Wales and England as places where myths of English nationhood were formed.6 Others such as Sharon Kinoshita and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen have written about the cultural hybridity that developed in the Normanised areas of Wales, creating the ambivalences and metaphors that we find in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales.7 But, while claiming a postcolonial approach, such arguments are often colonialist in that they effectively silence the voices of Welsh-language writers. They assume a monologic process by which Wales is dismissed as a nowhere place far from courtly civilisation, whose only function is to provide the setting for an Arthurian origin myth that can be appropriated for England. We can recover some agency and a voice for Wales by recognising that the process of romanticising Wales through literary texts was dialogic rather than monologic – that is, the Welsh and the Normans talked to each other through written (and oral) stories. In these cross-cultural conversations Welsh writers had from the beginning a significant input into the medieval construction of ‘romantic Wales’. By ‘romantic’ I mean something not far removed from the 5 I am thinking here of the events in the Third Branch of the Mabinogi, Manawydan vab

Llŷr, when Manawydan’s skills as an artisan evoke the wrath of the English over the border; and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy, ‘The Dream of Rhonabwy’, the early thirteenth-century satire of Arthur and his kingship. For access to these tales in English translation, see Sioned Davies, trans., The Mabinogion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 6 Michelle Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 7 Sharon Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance sensibility of the English Romantic poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, whose focus on dreams, the imagination, the natural, and the supernatural as ways of expressing emotional experience was anticipated not only by the writers of the earliest French romances but by early Welsh storytellers as well. The particular links between nature and subjectivity explored by the English Romantic poets are also observable in medieval lyric poetry and in romance, where the wilderness outside courtly society is so often the location of knightly interiority and the growth of self-knowledge. These aspects of medieval romanticism were often located in Wales, seen as a challenging site of otherness, a place of otherworldly and supernatural events, mist-covered mountains, caves in the hills, Arthur and Merlin, and that aura of ‘Celtic magic’ which was to be recovered and defined by Arnold. But this was a narrative which Welsh writers co-produced with Norman writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Marie de France. One could argue that it was the Welsh who invented the very idea of romantic Wales, featuring just such a location in the early Arthurian prose tale Culhwch ac Olwen, and in the Myrddin poems from the Black Book of Carmarthen, texts which may well have influenced Geoffrey of Monmouth’s contribution to the romanticising of Wales, while the Welsh in turn engaged with Geoffrey’s history of the British kings.8 There was thus a two-way process of cultural exchange which created the literary narrative of romantic Wales. This exchange between the Normans and the Welsh took place mainly in the areas of Norman settlement, that is, the Marcher lordships along the borders and around the south coast of Wales, but it also spread into the non-Norman areas through social institutions such as marriage and the church. Monastic communities were invariably led by Norman abbots, and many of the leading Welsh aristocratic families intermarried with the Norman nobility. What the Welsh and the Normans had in common was the culture of the church and the culture of the court, and both of these inflected the construction of romantic Wales. Wales already had a prestigious language and literary tradition of its own, supported by the powerful institution of native aristocracy, whose princes and noblemen were patrons of monastic foundations and owners of illustrious 8 The tale of Culhwch ac Olwen has been dated by its most recent editors, mainly on

linguistic grounds, to c. 1100, though later dates have been suggested. See Diana Luft, ‘Commemorating the Past after 1066: Tales from the Mabinogion’, in The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 73–92 (p. 74). The Black Book of Carmarthen dates from the mid-thirteenth century but the Myrddin poems draw on material that is significantly earlier, somewhere between the ninth and eleventh centuries. See John K. Bollard, ‘The Earliest Myrddin Poems’, in Arthur in the Celtic Languages, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019), pp. 35–50. The poems have been translated by Bollard, ‘Myrddin in Early Welsh Tradition’, in The Romance of Merlin: An Anthology, ed. Peter Goodrich (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 13–54.

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Helen Fulton courts enshrined in memory and tradition.9 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Welsh copied from their Norman neighbours the architecture of fortified castles built of stone, and these began to replace the older wooden halls of pre-Norman Wales. As David Crouch has said: ‘In the twelfth century the Welsh royal houses and the lesser Welsh magnate houses came closer together, as both imitated the repertoire of Anglo-French aristocratic attributes: the knightly image, heraldry, the castle, and ecclesiastical patronage.’10 It was this Welsh court culture that provided the most fertile soil for the propagation of French romance in Britain, and which, in turn, provided French writers with story material about Wales. The Welsh courts and the higher nobility supported the poets, storytellers, and scribes who produced early Welsh poetry and prose, including early Arthurian material, which was then transmitted to the Normans, partly through written Latin works such as Geoffrey’s Historia, but also very plausibly via performances at court, aided by cross-cultural factors such as marriage alliances, clerics, and interpreters, and we have sufficient evidence of the effectiveness of all these as cultural transmitters. There were significant cross-cultural marriages between the Welsh and Norman nobilities (starting at the top with Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd, who in 1204 married Joan, the illegitimate daughter of King John) which in themselves would have brought French and Welsh literary traditions into dialogue with each other. Clerics such as Gerald of Wales and Walter Map used their knowledge and experience of Wales to translate Welshness for their readers. Interpreters had been operating on the Welsh and English borders since before the Norman Conquest, as there were already pockets of Norman settlement, such as in Herefordshire, by the middle of the eleventh century.11 One of Arthur’s companions in the Welsh tale Culhwch ac Olwen, dated to about 1100, is called ‘Gwrhyr Gwalstawd Ieithoedd’, ‘Gwrhir Interpreter of Languages’, the epithet gwalstawd borrowed from Old English wealhstod.12 We know that Gerald of Wales took interpreters with him into Wales 9 The Welsh culture of the court is represented most vividly by the gogynfeirdd, court

poets who flourished from about 1050 to 1300, serving the native Welsh princes before the conquest of 1282. For examples of their poetry in English translation, see Joseph P. Clancy, trans., Medieval Welsh Poems (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003). 10 David Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 162. See also Huw Pryce, ‘Welsh Rulers and European Change, c. 1100– 1282’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. Huw Pryce and John Watts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 37–51 (especially p. 40). 11 Constance Bullock-Davies, Professional Interpreters and the Matter of Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966), p. 8. 12 Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans, eds, Culhwch and Olwen: An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), line 346 and note on p. 105.

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance during his tour of Wales with Archbishop Baldwin in 1188. The Domesday Book mentions seven professional interpreters working for William I, one of them called Lewinus Latimarius, whose name suggests that he was Welsh (since ‘Lewinus’ is the Latin rendering of ‘Llywelyn’). He was given land in Herefordshire as payment for his services, again suggesting a Welshman from the border regions.13 Iorwerth Goch, a bilingual (in Welsh and French) nobleman on the Welsh borders in the mid-twelfth century, was one of a family of professional interpreters whose name is commemorated in both Welsh and Norman texts.14 There is plenty of evidence, then, that interpreters and the process of interpretation and translation were a principal means of facilitating communication between Welsh and Normans from the eleventh century onwards, even apart from instances where individuals might have learned the language of the other. As Constance Bullock-Davies expressed it, ‘cyfarwyddiaid (“storytellers”), latimers, and French, Welsh and English minstrels lived together in the same castles along the Welsh Marches from the time of the Conquest. They could not have failed to impart to one another something of each of their native literatures.’15 This dialogism is particularly obvious in the works of Hue de Rotelande, Chrétien de Troyes, and Marie de France. Hue de Rotelande was a contemporary of Gerald of Wales, a cleric who, like Gerald, came from a Norman family on the March of Wales, but in Hue’s case from much further north, the town of Rhuddlan, or Rotelande in Anglo-Norman. Hue’s romance, Ipomedon, written in Anglo-Norman after 1174, is a Marcher text, most likely written in Hereford, where Hue had a home.16 Drawing on the traditions of Old French romances, with echoes of the Roman de Thèbes, the Roman d’Eneas and Thomas’s Tristan, Hue sets his lively poem mainly in Italy, describing the fortunes of his hero, Ipomedon, and his beloved, La Fière, before they are finally united. Hue is clearly interpellating, or calling to, a Marcher audience – not only is the story a humorous pastiche, it alludes to a Welsh king, Ris, who attacked Norman towns on the March of Wales. This is no doubt a reference to Rhys 13 Bullock-Davies, Professional Interpreters, p. 9. She also discusses ‘Bledhericus Late-

meri’, or Bleddri ap Cadifor of Dyfed, an interpreter for (probably) Henry I who is mentioned in the Welsh chronicle Brut y Tywysogion and who is named as the continuator of Chrétien’s Perceval. See also R. S. Loomis, Wales and the Arthurian Legend (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1956), pp. 193–95. 14 The career of Iorwerth Goch has been described by Frederick C. Suppe, ‘The Career and Subsequent Reputation of Iorwerth Goch, Bi-Cultural Denizen of the Medieval Welsh Marches’, North American Journal of Celtic Studies, 2 (2018), 133–54. 15 Bullock-Davies, Professional Interpreters, p. 18. 16 Tony Hunt, ‘Rotelande, Hue de (fl. c. 1175–1185x90)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online (Oxford, 2004) [accessed 10 December 2020].

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Helen Fulton ap Gruffudd, also known as the Lord Rhys, the great ruler of Deheubarth (south Wales) from 1155 until his death in 1197 and at that time the major power in Wales in the native kingdoms outside the March. Hue brings Rhys into the French romance discourse of knighthood and warfare, romanticising the March as a frontier region claimed by two powers, and in doing so he recognises the aristocratic status of the Welsh prince and his right to lay claim to these territories. A more extensive conversation between French and Welsh writers regarding romantic Wales is conducted through the prose adaptations into Welsh of three of the Arthurian romances in verse by Chrétien de Troyes. Owein, neu Chwedl Iarlles y Ffynnawn (‘Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain’) corresponds to Chrétien’s Yvain, Le Chevalier au Lion; Gereint uab Erbin (‘Geraint son of Erbin’) corresponds to Erec et Enide; and Peredur uab Efrawg (‘Peredur son of Efrog’) corresponds to Perceval (Conte del Graal). Chrétien composed his French romances in verse in the 1170s and 1180s, while the Welsh versions are usually dated to the early thirteenth century.17 The relationship between the three pairs of romances has been much debated but they are clearly part of an ongoing dialogue between Welsh and French written texts. Chrétien has drawn on names from Welsh tradition to craft his poems, while Welsh authors have used Chrétien’s plots to relocate Arthurian material back into a Welsh literary and cultural context.18 There are enough differences between each pair to indicate that there may be missing intermediaries somewhere, perhaps oral as well as written ones. It has been suggested that Chrétien wrote his romance of Erec et Enide, probably the first one he wrote, while on a visit to the court of Henry II in England in about 1170, where literary exchanges between Normans and Welsh would have been facilitated.19 Working in the other direction, Walter Map, a cleric 17 The Welsh tales have been translated by Davies, The Mabinogion. While these three Welsh

tales are often described as ‘romances’, as a kind of shorthand, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan offers another perspective in ‘Medieval Welsh Tales or Romances? Problems of Genre and Terminology’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 47 (2004), 41–58. 18 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe have dismissed earlier assumptions that the ‘three romances’ were composed as a group, even perhaps by the same author, on the grounds that ‘the relationship between each of the Welsh tales and its French counterpart is demonstrably different and needs to be assessed in its own terms’. See their chapter, ‘The First Adaptations from French: History and Context of a Debate’, in Arthur in the Celtic Languages, ed. Lloyd-Morgan and Poppe, pp. 110–16 (p. 114). 19 William W. Kibler and Carleton W. Carroll, trans., Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 6. See also Helen C. R. Laurie, ‘Chrétien and the English Court’, Romania, 93 (1972), 85–87. By 1171, Henry II had made truces with at least some of the Welsh princes and met with them on a number of occasions, such as at Gloucester in 1175 and Oxford in 1177. See Davies, Age of Conquest, pp. 290–91; Thomas Jones, ed. and trans., Brut y Tywysogyon, or the Chronicle of the Princes: Red Book of Hergest Version (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955), pp. 154–65.

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance at the court of Henry II and associated with two of the French prose Lancelot stories, Queste del Saint Graal and Mort Artu, visited the court of Champagne in 1179 and may have brought Welsh story material with him.20 The Welsh adaptations of Chrétien’s romances appeared around the same time as other translations from French romance into Welsh, indicating a brisk circulation of French material in Wales and a demand from local patrons for versions in Welsh. Some of the Charlemagne legends were translated into Welsh from Anglo-Norman and Latin manuscripts during the thirteenth century.21 There is also a Welsh translation of the Anglo-Norman romance, Boeve de Haumtone, made some time in the thirteenth century, only a few decades after the Anglo-Norman text appeared and well before the Middle English version was composed early in the fourteenth century.22 We know that a copy of Roman de la Rose in French was owned by a Welshman, Llywelyn Bren, in south Wales around 1300.23 French therefore had the status of a prestige language in Wales, alongside Welsh itself, as one of the two languages of the Welsh nobility. 20 These two French romances of the early thirteenth century claim to be based on Latin

texts written by Walter Map (who died c. 1210). Joshua Byron Smith has discussed Walter’s association with French romance, and the use of Latin as a means of transmission of British story material to the continent, in Walter Map and the Matter of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 150–71. June Hall McCash suggests that Walter ‘collected and translated the Celtic tales at [Henry II’s] behest’. She further speculates that ‘arriving in Troyes, Walter in all likelihood brought with him the story of Lancelot and Guenever’ (a speculation based on the fact that Walter was apparently familiar with stories lying behind the Lancelot-Grail Cycle) and thus may have inspired Chrétien’s Lancelot. See ‘Reconsidering the Order of Chrétien de Troyes’ Romances’, in ‘Le Premerains Vers’: Essays in Honor of Keith Busby, ed. Logan E. Whalen (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 245–60 (p. 248). 21 On the dating of the Charlemagne translations, see Annalee Rejhon, ed., Cân Rolant: The Medieval Welsh Version of the Song of Roland (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 89. This view of the dating is supported by Simon Rodway, who dates the Welsh translation of the Chanson de Roland to the first quarter of the thirteenth century. See ‘The Where, Who, When and Why of Medieval Prose Texts: Some Methodological Considerations’, Studia Celtica, 41 (2006), 47–89. The translation of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle from Latin into Welsh was commissioned by Gruffudd ap Maredudd, lord of Ceredigion, between 1265 and 1282. See Stephen J. Williams, ‘Rhai Cyfieithiadau’, in Y Traddodiad Rhyddiaith yn yr Oesau Canol, ed. Geraint Bowen (Llandysul: Gwasg Gomer, 1974), pp. 303–11 (pp. 303–4). 22 The Middle English version is dated to c. 1324 and has been edited by Jennifer Fellows, ed., Sir Bevis of Hampton, 2 vols, EETS, o.s. 349–50 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). The Welsh text has been edited by Morgan Watkin, ed., Ystorya Bown de Hamtwn (Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifsygol Cymru, 1958). See also Erich Poppe and Regine Reck, ‘Rewriting Bevis in Wales and Ireland’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, ed. Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjevic (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 37–50. 23 The book is listed among the possessions of Llywelyn Bren from Glamorgan who was executed for treason in 1317. See J. H. Matthews, ed., Cardiff Records, 5 vols (Cardiff: Corporation of Cardiff, 1898–1904), IV, p. 56.

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Helen Fulton In the case of Chrétien’s romances and their Welsh versions, the two sets of stories provide a rich case study of the interchanges between Welsh and French texts before 1282, and a number of detailed comparative studies have been undertaken.24 The main point I am making here is that these interchanges worked in both directions – Welsh material went to France (and probably Brittany as well) and French material found its way back to Wales. The transmission route of Welsh names and motifs to the European continent is debatable. I have already suggested that the culture of the courts in Norman Wales and England, with their entourages of clerics, entertainers, and interpreters, was a likely route; another popular theory involves Breton storytellers, and Chrétien refers in the prologue to Erec et Enide, whose hero has a Breton name, to the inadequacies of professional storytellers.25 Siân Echard has documented the importance of Latin literature in the transmission of the Arthurian legends, and Joshua Byron Smith has argued that Latin writing of the kind produced by Walter Map and other twelfth-century clerics near the March of Wales was the main route of transmission of the ‘Matter of Britain’ into a wider European vernacular circulation.26 However Chrétien came by his information about Welsh material, it was clearly quite limited. Though Chrétien made use of Welsh names and locations, he does not seem to have had access to preceding Welsh story material associated with those names. Thus his hero Yvain is called ‘le fils d’Urien’, an exact translation of the Welsh name Owain ab Urien, Owain son of Urien, the heroic father and son of early Welsh poetry who are associated with the northern British kingdom of Rheged. Chrétien shows no signs of knowing anything about the backstory of their fame in battles against the Saxons, first spread via the sixth-century poet Taliesin. He has simply appropriated these and other Welsh names to cast some Celtic magic over stories that he locates in a long-ago Wales and Brittany. As Joshua Smith says, ‘a list of names and a few minor details’ were all that medieval authors needed to create legends of 24 The most recent studies of the Welsh romances, with reference to their French associ-

ations, can be found in Arthur in the Celtic Languages, ed. Lloyd-Morgan and Poppe. See also Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Migrating Narratives: Peredur, Owain and Geraint’, in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, ed. Helen Fulton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 128–42; Helen A. Roberts, ‘Court and Cyuoeth: Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide and the Middle Welsh Gereint’, Arthurian Literature, 21 (2004), 53–72; Helen Fulton, ‘Individual and Society in Owein/Yvain and Gereint/Erec’, in The Individual in Celtic Literatures, ed. J. F. Nagy (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 15–50. 25 Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, vv. 19–22. The ‘Breton minstrel’ theory was first put forward by R. S. Loomis in ‘The Oral Diffusion of the Arthurian Legend’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 52–63. It has subsequently been rejected by Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Did Itinerant Breton Conteurs Transmit the Matière de Bretagne?’, Romania, 116 (1998), 72–111. See also the discussion by Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain, pp. 159–61. 26 Siân Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain, pp. 162–67.

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance Ancient Britain.27 At a later stage, Welsh adapters have engaged dialogically with Chrétien’s vision of romantic Wales. They change the place names from the rather unlikely French choices of Cardigan and Carduel (a form specific to medieval French and English Arthurian romance which may refer to Carlisle) to places in the south-east of Wales, that is, the area around Glamorgan and Monmouth, places such as Caerleon and the Forest of Dean. By doing so, they give the tales a more specific geographical location, which probably coincides with the area of composition and patronage, but they also collude with the French versions in naming Welsh locations as the sites of distinctively ‘romance’ activities (journeys, tasks, heroic display, dealing with the supernatural) that are characteristic of the genre. The origins of this geography of romantic Wales lay, culturally and etymologically, in its Roman past. Geoffrey of Monmouth located the court of King Arthur at Caerleon in south Wales because this was an old Roman settlement whose rich remains still lay visible in the landscape, appropriating this symbol of Roman imperialism for the new imperialists of his own day, the Normans. Geoffrey chose Caerleon because it was the Roman town closest to his own neighbourhood in Monmouth and the one with the most substantial remains, but there were other old Roman settlements in or near Wales – at Segontium or Caer Seint in north Wales near Caernarfon, known in English romance as Synadoun; at Moridunum or Carmarthen, supposedly the city of Merlin, in west Wales; at Cardigan on the west coast; at Venta Silurum or Caerwent near Chepstow; and of course at the great castra itself, Chester, the frontier city on the north-eastern gateway into Wales from England. The Normans took the stones from the Roman ruins to build their castles, appropriating the magic of Rome for their own empire. In the French Vulgate Cycle of the thirteenth century, the Roman province of Britannia Major became the kingdom of Great Britain where adventures happen: ‘car che savons nous bien que en la Grant Bartaigne atendent tout a estre delivré des merveilles et des aventures qui i avienent’ (‘for we well know that in Great Britain, all await to be delivered from the marvels and the adventures that happen there’).28 These visible remains of Roman settlement in Britain represented traces of British civilisation before the coming of the Saxons, the kingdom of Britain ruled by British kings like Vortigern, who were the ancestors of the Welsh people. Both Rome and ancient Britain were appropriated by the Normans as their own inheritance, the cultural bedrock of their imperial history. Welsh writers followed Norman writers like Geoffrey in weaving Roman locations such as Caerleon into their stories, but they also added more names to their map of romantic Wales, foregrounding the locations of the courts of the Welsh 27 Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain, p. 171. 28 Alexandre Micha, ed., Lancelot: Roman en prose du 13e siècle, 9 vols (Geneva: Droz,

1978–83), VII, p. 192.

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Helen Fulton princes – Aberffraw and Harlech in the north, Cardigan and Dinefwr in the west, Arberth in the south-west, Dinas Bran in the north-east. Together, these Roman and Welsh names were the placemarkers of romantic Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The importance of Rome to the French vision of romantic Wales is evident in the work of Marie de France. Somewhere in the Norman empire, possibly in England, Marie de France composed French poems or songs in the late twelfth century about love and death, and some of these are set in Wales, most notably the lais of Yonec and Milun. Yonec’s mother, the princess in the tower, is held captive near Caerwent in Monmouthshire, the Roman town near Chepstow on the river Wye, right in the heart of the Norman March. When her bird-lover is mortally wounded, she follows him through a hillside into his own city, ‘de mur fu close tut entur / n’i ot mesun, sale ne tur / ki ne parust tute d’argent’ (‘completely enclosed by a wall, where there was not a house, hall or tower which did not seem to be made entirely of silver’) (lines 361–63).29 The city is on a river, where more than three hundred ships are moored. Setting aside the familiar trappings of the romantic city, including the luxurious buildings and the trade-based wealth, it seems not impossible that this romantic city is in fact Chepstow. This town lay over the hill from Caerwent and was a walled town belonging to the Norman lordship of the Clares, famous as a port where wine was brought in and timber from the forests of the Wye valley were taken out as exports. Later in the story, after her son Yonec has grown up, the woman goes with her husband to Caerleon to celebrate the feast of St Aaron, a Romano-British saint associated with that town. Like Caerwent, in the twelfth century Caerleon was a Marcher town of the Clares, and both were celebrated by Geffrei Gaimar in the 1130s for their Roman origins, evidence of the Norman inheritance of romanitas: Mais de Guales parlerai, De cez de la vus dirai. En Wales ot plusurs citez Ke mult furent renomez; Cum Karrewein e Karliun E la cite de Snauedun … (But I will speak of Wales, I will tell you of those who were there. In Wales were numerous cities of which many were renowned such as Caerwent and Caerleon and the city of Caer Seint [i.e. Segontium, near Caernarfon] …)30 29 Marie de France, ‘Yonec’, in Lais Bretons (XIIe–XIIIe siècles): Marie de France et

ses contemporains, ed. Nathalie Koble and Mireille Séguy (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018); my translation. 30 Thomas Duffus Hardy and Charles Trice Martin, eds, Lestorie des engles solum la translacion Maistre Geffrei Gaimar, 2 vols (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1888– 89), I, p. 285; my translation. See also Alexander Bell, ‘The Anglo-Norman Description

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance The geography of Marie’s Wales in the lai of Yonec is therefore focused on the Marcher lordship of Glamorgan and its nearby regions, a region familiar to the Norman French and representative of their investment in Britain as a link with the imperialism of the Roman past. In the lai of Milun, Marie announces that her hero was born in south Wales and then connects that region to the rest of the Norman empire: ‘Mut fu coneüz en Irlande / en Norwejë e en Gughtlande / en Logrë e en Albanie’ (‘He was widely known in Ireland, in Norway, and in Gotland [in Sweden], in England and in Scotland’) (lines 15–17).31 Milun’s illegitimate son is brought up in Northumbria but then travels to Brittany to make his reputation as a knight and is reunited with his father at Mont St Michel. The geography of this poem is extensive, but it brings south Wales, as a Norman possession, into the wider Norman empire as part of a geography that is both cartographic and ideological. Wales functions here as a witness to the extent of Norman entitlement as the heirs of romanity. But it is also a Wales familiar to the Welsh themselves, who, like the Normans, constructed a romantic geography from their Roman past, their cultural links with Brittany, and their princely courts. The two early thirteenth-century prose tales Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig (‘The Dream of the Lord Maxen’) and Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys (‘The Story of Lludd and Llefelys’) exemplify this geography, with the former set in Roman Britain, culminating in the founding of Brittany, and the latter (included in a Welsh translation of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae) set in a pre-Saxon past where the Welsh Lludd is king of the whole Island of Britain and his brother, Llefelys, becomes king of France.32 Romantic Wales after 1300 I have been describing a dialogic exchange between French and Welsh traditions in Britain before about 1300, focusing on the cultural links between the two major aristocratic elites in Wales. The French (including the Normans) borrowed Welsh names, themes, and locations, especially those associated with Arthur, while Welsh writers were actively appropriating popular and prestige material (in both Latin and French) from or via the Normans to enrich their own cultural tradition and enhance the status of their aristocratic patrons. of England: An Edition’, in Anglo-Norman Anniversary Essays, ed. Ian Short (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, Birkbeck College, 1993), pp. 31–47, lines 179–84. Gaimar’s ‘Snauedun’, for modern English Snowdon, was not a city and is likely to refer to the old Roman fort of Segontium, near Caernarfon in north Wales, known to medieval writers as Caer Seint. See R. S. Loomis, ‘Segontium, Caer Seint, and Sinadon’, in Wales and the Arthurian Legend, pp. 1–18. 31 Marie de France, ‘Milun’, in Lais Bretons, ed. Koble and Séguy; my translation. 32 Both tales are translated by Davies, Mabinogion. See also Davies’s Introduction, pp. xix–xx.

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Helen Fulton I have suggested that this was a two-way conversation about a shared concept of romantic Wales, one that was derived in part from the Roman and British heritage of Wales. I want to turn now to medieval English romance and the nature of its involvement with Wales after 1300. The conquest of Wales by the armies of Edward I in 1282 had two particularly significant consequences for romantic Wales. Firstly, it meant the loss of the native Welsh aristocracy, the princes of Wales who had governed their territories as quasi-independent lords, and thus the loss of all hope of an independent Wales, which had been the basis of the Welsh literary version of Wales. After 1282, with the death of the last prince, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, who had styled himself ‘Prince of Wales’, Edward I dispossessed the native aristocracy of their lands and made them disappear: the men were killed or exiled and their wives and daughters were put into convents.33 In one fell swoop, all the aristocratic patrons of native Welsh court culture romances had been removed, along with their territories. Secondly, there was the rapid onset of urbanisation and anglicisation around the coasts and borders of Wales, propelled by the big castle towns established by Edward I in north Wales, partly to control the Welsh and partly to create an urban economy in Wales.34 All these new castle towns were populated mainly by English burgesses who were incentivised by favourable trading terms to migrate to the new royal lordships of Wales. Throughout the fourteenth century, then, the whole of Wales, from the Marcher lordships across to the edges of the Principality in the west and north, was gradually anglicised to a greater or lesser degree. The extent of this Englishing can be illustrated by the involvement of one Geoffrey Chaucer in the affairs of Wales. In his professional life, if not in his writing life, Chaucer would have included Wales – or rather the Marcher lordships – in his mental map of England. His various positions in the royal court meant that he knew exactly where the crown and Marcher lordships were and he knew many of the Marcher lords personally and professionally. For example, when the earl of Pembroke died in 1375 leaving only a small child as his heir, his estates were held by the crown until the child attained his majority. In the intervening period, Sir William Beauchamp, the lord of Abergavenny on the eastern March, was granted custody of Pembroke castle in west Wales, along with its surrounding lands, and the surety for this contract, issued in 1378, was

33 Edward’s punishment of the Welsh princely dynasties after 1282 is described by Davies,

Age of Conquest, pp. 361–63. As Davies says, ‘The dynasty of Gwynedd was in effect exterminated’ (p. 361). 34 The new towns included Flint, Denbigh, Conwy, Caernarfon, and Aberystwyth. Other towns in Wales, such as Carmarthen and Cardiff in the south, were largely Norman foundations and were already significantly anglicised by 1282, a process that accelerated after 1300. See Ian Soulsby, The Towns of Medieval Wales (Chichester: Phillimore, 1983); A. J. Taylor, The Welsh Castles of Edward I (London: Hambledon, 1986).

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance Geoffrey Chaucer.35 When Chaucer was clerk of the king’s works, from 1389 to 1391, he worked closely with Richard FitzAlan, the earl of Arundel, who was the lord of Marcher lands along the border including the town of Oswestry.36 Another colleague, Richard Stury, a former knight of the king’s chamber, was justice of south Wales at around the same time that Chaucer was clerk of works.37 Chaucer’s sons, Thomas and Lewis, served as men at arms at Carmarthen castle in 1403, one of the king’s castles in the Principality.38 These details indicate the extent to which both the Principality and the March of Wales were absorbed into the machinery of English governance after 1282 and the reasons why the Welsh would have had no particular love for the English. The power balance was no longer so evenly weighted. Whereas the old Welsh aristocracy considered themselves at least the equals of the Norman lords of the March (and waged almost perpetual war against the Normans, as well as with each other), the new gentry that emerged after 1282, the uchelwyr or ‘high-born men’, had at best only a distant connection with the old aristocracy of Wales and were increasingly subordinate to the great earls and barons of England who were now their masters. This was the great age of Welsh praise poetry to the gentry, when poets talked up their patrons as cultural leaders, and it was the age of manuscript anthologies like the Red Book of Hergest, compiled towards the very end of the fourteenth century to remind the Welsh of their long heritage. French and Latin material continued to be read and translated as a correlative of Welsh prestige, and it is interesting that two of the French Grail romances were translated into Welsh in the late fourteenth century, a reassertion that Arthur was once a British king and that the Welsh were the true owners of Britain.39 But there were no new Welsh romances or prose narratives composed after 1282 – the Welsh version of ‘romantic Wales’, predicated on an independent aristocratic governing class, had become almost completely redundant in the new political and cultural context. Instead, Welsh poets composing for the new gentry were mixing in the bilingual environments of the burgeoning towns of Wales, especially along the 35 Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, eds, Chaucer Life-Records (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1966), pp. 279–80.

36 Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, p. 496. It does not seem likely that Chaucer,

while clerk of the king’s works, had any direct supervision over castles in the Marches. See R. Allen Brown et al., The History of the King’s Works, Vol. 1: The Middle Ages (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1963), pp. 189–92. 37 Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, p. 492. 38 Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, p. 544. Thomas Chaucer also had dealings with suspected Welsh conspirators in Oxford (p. 545n.). 39 These were the early thirteenth-century La Queste del Saint Graal and Perlesvaus, which were translated in abridged form as the text known as Y Seint Greal. See Helen Fulton, ‘Translating Europe in Medieval Wales’, in Writing Europe, 500–1450: Texts and Contexts, ed. Aidan Conti, Orietta da Rold, and Philip Shaw (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 159–74 (especially pp. 170–71).

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Helen Fulton borders of the March, and composing verse that combined backward looks to the heroic past with very contemporary references to the social and political lives of the uchelwyr. There is some evidence from the fifteenth century that Welsh poets had started to draw on romances in English rather than French as part of their source material, though it is impossible to know whether these influences came from written texts or oral transmission, or perhaps a combination of the two.40 There are certainly no English romances recorded in manuscript anthologies from Wales, though it is suggestive that quite a few are preserved in manuscripts compiled along the border with Wales. There is a copy of King Horn in London, British Library, Harley MS 2253, a multilingual anthology dated c. 1310–30 whose main scribe was likely to have been working in or near Ludlow (on the Shropshire side of the modern county border with Herefordshire).41 Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle survives only in a Shropshire manuscript of the mid-fifteenth century, now Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn MS 2.1 (formerly Porkington 10). The Seege or Batayle of Troye is preserved in two fourteenth-century manuscripts from the Welsh borders, London, College of Arms, Arundel MS 22 and London, Lincoln’s Inn Library, MS 150. This latter manuscript, Lincoln’s Inn 150, contains three other romances, Arthour and Merline, King Alisaunder, and Lybeaus Desconus or Libius Desconus in its anglicised form. Lybeaus Desconus is a tail-rhyme romance composed about 1325–50 in the south-east Midlands and based ultimately on a lost twelfth-century French romance, Le Bel Inconnu (‘The Fair Unknown’).42 Intriguingly, the name crops up in a Welsh praise poem of the mid-fifteenth century by Guto’r Glyn, a poet operating in the north-east of Wales near the Marches who has clearly got the name from an English source in the same area. Guto is writing in praise of Syr Siôn Bwrch, or Sir John Burgh (1414–71), a member of the Anglo-Welsh gentry who lived in Wattlesborough, Shropshire, 40 See Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Crossing the Borders: Literary Borrowing in Medie-

val Wales and England’, in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 159–73. 41 Nigel J. Morgan and Rodney M. Thomson, eds, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. II: 1100–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 29–30; Jason O’Rourke, ‘Imagining Book Production in Fourteenth-Century Herefordshire: The Scribe of British Library, Harley 2253 and his “Organizing Principles”’, in Imagining the Book, ed. Stephen Kelly and John J. Thomson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 45–60. For the contents of the manuscript, see Facsimile of British Museum MS Harley 2253, ed. N. R. Ker, EETS, o.s. 255 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. ix–xvi. 42 There are a number of vernacular versions of this story surviving in French, German and Italian. The nearest analogue to the English Lybeaus Desconus is an Old French poem, Li Biaus Descouneus. See the Introduction to Lybeaus Desconus, ed. Maldwyn Mills, EETS, o.s. 261 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 42.

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance and Guto includes a list of romance heroes that starts with Gwalchmai, a very Welsh hero, before leading into a list of English names, perhaps in deference to his English-speaking patron: Trwsio’r wyf tros yr afon, Trof iso’r sir, tref Syr Siôn, I’r Tŵr Gwyn â’r trugeinwyr A’r tai lle mae Gwalchmai’r gwŷr; Marchog aur meirch a gwerin, Maen gwn traws mewn genau trin. Urddol, mawr y gwnair erddaw, Eurddail ym a rydd o’i law. Alarch fal March Amheirchion O achau Mars a cheirw Môn. Syr Siôn biau’r siars yno, Sirif fyth ar y sir fo! Syr Ffwg y sy aer a phen, Syr Gei ieuanc, Syr Gawen, Syr Liwnel, os erlynynt, Syr Libus Disgwynus gynt, Syr Befus, lwyddiannus lw, Siohannes, oes i hwnnw! (lines 23–40) (I’m adorning over the river Sir John’s home, I’m going to the county below, to the White Tower [of London] with its sixty men and to the houses where the Gwalchmai of men is; golden knight of steeds and rank and file, powerful cannonball in the heat of battle. A dignitary, great things are done for his sake, he gives me pieces of gold from his hand. He is a swan like March ap Meirchion from the pedigree of the March and the stags of Anglesey. It’s Sir John who gives the command there, may he be sheriff of the county forever! Sir Fulk heir and chief, young Sir Guy, Sir Gawain, Sir Lionel, if they hound, Sir Libius Disconius of old, Sir Bevis, prospering his vow, Johannes, a long life to him!)43

43 Text and translation online at GutorGlyn.net (University of Wales, 2013) [accessed 10 December 2020], no. 80, ‘Moliant i Syr Siôn Bwrch ap Huw Bwrch o’r Drefrudd’. Trefrudd, in the poem’s title, is the Welsh name of Wattlesborough in Shropshire; many settlements in the March had both English and Welsh names.

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Helen Fulton Just as Wales had once exported the names of Arthur and his men, it was now importing names in their English forms, even the names that were once known in Welsh, such as Bevis, previously known in Welsh as Bown. The English Sir Gawain appears alongside the Welsh Gwalchmai as two separate characters, although they are likely to be doublets of each other (Gwalchmai plays a role in Owein which is comparable to that played by Gauvain in Chrétien’s Yvain). Lybeaus Desconus is taken wholesale from its anglicised form into Welsh orthography. Where Guto’s knowledge of English romance came from, whether from actual manuscripts written on the March or from oral versions, is now impossible to know, but, clearly, English romance had become part of the Welsh cultural context on the borders by the middle of the fifteenth century. Towns such as Ludlow, Shrewsbury, Flint, and Chester were significant contact zones between English and Welsh communities, and the urban context was the most likely environment for textual transmission, in both oral and written forms. But the cultural exchanges between Welsh and English are considerably less dialogic and more monologic than they had been between the Welsh and the Normans before 1300. With the change in the power balance either side of the March, English language and culture were becoming ever more dominant at the expense of Welsh language and culture. The relative absence of Wales from medieval English texts has been noted by a number of critics. Simon Meecham-Jones has referred to the ‘erasure of Wales’ and said that ‘even the appearance of Welsh places and Welsh people are remarkably rare in English medieval culture’.44 Tony Davenport says that ‘Welshness is elided’ in English romance.45 In one sense these critics are not wrong – Wales is not a common feature in English romance and its almost total absence from the works of major writers such as Chaucer and Lydgate is also notable. But, on the other side of the border, England is not often mentioned in Welsh literature either, except in satirical or derogatory terms.46 The two cultures are barely speaking to each other. In fact, compared to other regions of Britain, Wales does quite well as a romance location in English texts. About the only other place outside London that is mentioned more times than Wales is Chester, right on the border, the heart of the north-west Midlands manuscript production and a key route of cultural exchange between Wales and England.

44 Simon Meecham-Jones, ‘Where was Wales? The Erasure of Wales in Medieval English

Culture’, in Authority and Subjugation, ed. Kennedy and Meecham-Jones, pp. 27–55 (p. 29). 45 Tony Davenport, ‘Wales and Welshness in Middle English Romances’, in Authority and Subjugation, ed. Kennedy and Meecham-Jones, pp. 137–58 (p. 141). 46 For examples, see Helen Fulton, ‘Class and Nation: Defining the English in Late-Medieval Welsh Poetry’, in Authority and Subjugation, ed. Kennedy and Meecham-Jones, pp. 191–212.

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance In this monologic context, with Wales divided into two cultures which largely fail to communicate at a literary level, what happens to the concept of romantic Wales? Instead of being distributed around the whole of Wales, associated immanently with the old Roman settlements and the courts of the princes, the imagined geography of romantic Wales is relocated by English writers to the north and west of the country, the areas conquered by Edward I and from which the independent princes were expelled. These were the areas where Gerald of Wales trod carefully, isolated from the more familiar Norman territories and aware of the authority of the Welsh princes and the ‘otherness’ of their lands, which he described as ‘the rudest and roughest of all the Welsh districts’.47 Even after the Edwardian conquest, and the transfer of the lands of the Principality to the crown, the lands of the princes retained their ‘otherness’ relative to the Marcher lordships and England. In other words, after about 1300 the north and west became the terra nullius of the English romantic imagination. The space left by the disappeared princes has become an emptiness into which romantic Wales is conveniently projected. When English writers of romance refer to ‘Wales’ they invariably mean the Principality rather than the Marches.48 For the writers of late medieval English romance, which is essentially an urban genre, in the sense that it constructs urban and mercantile audiences and patrons, the towns of south Wales continued to be useful locations for knightly romance, and are often recognised as being technically in Wales rather than in England, as the scribe of Ywain and Gawain confirms when he says that Arthur held court ‘at Kerdyf that es in Wales’ (line 7).49 However, these towns are often represented as if they were part of an extended England which had seeped across the political border. A good example of a romance where Wales – that is, the Marcher regions of the south – is inscribed as a familiar region of England is Sir Cleges, preserved in two fifteenth-century manuscripts but derived from an earlier unknown source.50 Based on a number of folk-tale 47 Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales / The Description of Wales, trans. Lewis

Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 182. Gerald is referring specifically to Merioneth, but his views about the rest of north Wales are similarly uncomplimentary. 48 This point is also made by R. R. Davies, who said that after 1282 ‘the land of Wales’ in formal documents meant the conquered lands of the native princes. See Davies, Age of Conquest, p. 356. 49 ‘Ywain and Gawain’, in Ywain and Gawain, Sir Percyvell of Gales, The Anturs of Arther, ed. Maldwyn Mills (London: Dent, 1992). The frequent use in late medieval romance of locations such as wilderness and forest, constructed as threatening places outside and beyond ‘civilisation’, confirms the essentially urban perspective of the genre. On mercantile audiences for late Middle English romance, see Megan G. Leitch’s chapter 13 in this volume. 50 ‘Sir Cleges: Introduction’, in Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995). Subsequent quotations are from this edition.

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Helen Fulton motifs such as the Spendthrift Knight, in which the hero gives away all his money and reduces himself to penury as a result of his hospitality, just like Sir Launfal, the romance of Sir Cleges has a charming Christmas context, a devoted family, a religious message, and a happy ending in which Sir Cleges is restored to his wealth and status. What is seldom commented on is the fact that the whole story is set in south Wales, in fact in Cardiff. Like other romances that use Wales as a location, this one is linked to the Arthurian legend, but only tangentially. The king to whom Sir Cleges appeals is not Arthur but Uther Pendragon, the father of Arthur, suggesting a setting even more remote in time, although the tale itself seems remarkably contemporary, with its anxieties about the ups and downs of social mobility, corrupt officials, urban pressures, and the crucial importance of aristocratic patronage for impecunious knights. At the conclusion of the tale, Cleges is, somewhat astonishingly, rewarded with lavish gifts from the king, including the very castle of Cardiff itself: The Kyng gaffe hym anon ryght All that longes to a knyght, To aray hys body with. The castell of Cardyff also With all the pourtenans therto, To hold with pes and grythe. Than he made hym hys stuerd Of all hys londys afterwerd, Off water, lond and frythe.

[appurtenances] [peace and mercy] [steward] [forest] (lines 541–49)

There is clearly a connection between the Welsh location and the vaguely Arthurian context – Wales is the natural home of Arthur. But in other respects, Cardiff is simply a regional English city with the usual bustle of markets, musicians, knights, and burgesses. The king functions as a Marcher lord rather than as a great king ruling over a whole nation or empire. There is, in fact, nothing romantic about this version of Wales, which is the Wales of the south and of the March. It is simply a region of England. By locating the Arthurian court at Cardiff or Caerleon or Cardigan or occasionally at Carlisle (though this is often a mistake for Caerleon or Cardiff, as if there is little difference in the minds of the writers), English romance writers allude to the antiquity and romanity of the Arthurian legend while safely containing it within a contemporary context of English urbanness. It is north Wales which now provides the imagined location of romantic Wales, in the sense of emptiness, wilderness, adventure, and the supernatural. The obvious example of this is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a romance that was composed in the north-west Midlands, that is, in the area of Cheshire and possibly Lancashire, on or close to the north Welsh border. This area had some significant towns in it, from Shrewsbury through Chester and westward 40

Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance to the English towns of Flint and Conwy. Yet the author of the poem deliberately excludes all references to towns and recreates what is imagined to be an older court culture, something closer to the north Wales of Gerald’s journey, where social and cultural life takes place in the courts of the nobility located away from urban centres. Arthur’s court is at Camelot, a conveniently obscure and unidentifiable place suggestive of French courtly romance. Similarly, the castle of the Green Knight is miles from anywhere, certainly nowhere near any habitation. The only geographical markers are those which describe Gawain’s journey around north Wales and the Wirral as he seeks out the Green Knight: Had he no fere bot his fole  by frithes and downes, Ne no gome bot God  by gate with to carpe, Til that he neghed ful negh  into the north Wales. All the iles of Anglesay  on lyft half he holdes, And fares over the fordes  by the forlondes, Over at the Holy Hed,  til he had eft bonke In the wyldrenesse of Wyrale;  woned there bot lyte That other God other gome  with good herte loved. (lines 695–702) (No company had he but his horse by woodlands and downs, nor nobody but God to talk with along the way, until he arrived into north Wales. He kept all the isles of Anglesey on the left side, and passed across the fords by the forelands, over at the Holy Head, until he landed again in the wilderness of Wirral. There dwelt but few that loved either God or man with good heart.) 51

This is a deliberately romantic view of north Wales as an empty and challenging wilderness, but it would also clearly signify an imaginary description to anyone who knew the area. North Wales had a considerable number of townships along the coast, which Sir Gawain would have passed on his journey, including the major towns and castles of Caernarfon, Beaumaris (on Anglesey), Conwy, and Flint, while the Wirral was part of the royal forests of Cheshire, containing more than sixty small towns which comprised the Wirral Hundred in the fourteenth century.52 The romantic vision of wilderness 51 ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, in The Works of the Gawain Poet: Sir Gawain and

the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, ed. Ad Putter and Myra Stokes (London: Penguin, 2014); my translation. Putter and Stokes suggest that Gawain’s journey probably began in Caerleon, in the south-east, and compare his journey with that of Gerald of Wales in 1188 (Works, pp. 657–58). However, unlike Gerald, who was on a tour going clockwise around Wales, Gawain would not have needed to make such a roundabout journey from Caerleon, as he could simply have travelled up the March, where the roads were much easier to pass. To arrive at Anglesey en route to the Wirral, Gawain would have had to start from somewhere in the west, such as Carmarthen or Cardigan. Compare the route taken by Lybeaus Desconus (discussed below), who travels north from Cardiff. 52 Cheshire Forest Eyre Roll, ed. Phyllis Hill, John Heery, and members of the Ranulf Higden Society (Liverpool: Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 2015). It is

41

Helen Fulton created by the Gawain-poet is clearly necessary to the plot in which Gawain undergoes various tests of knighthood and chivalry, but it is also part of the anachronism of the poem which locates the action in some indefinable Arthurian past in which the idea of north Wales, emptied of the Welsh, is used to evoke a wilderness where the romantic individual, specifically an Englishman, experiences an emotional test. A similar journey through Wales is undertaken by the eponymous hero of Lybeaus Desconus. This romance makes a very clear textual distinction between the two Wales – the English knowability of south Wales and the March and the contrasting mystery of north Wales which, with its ghostly absent princes, lies on the very margins of courtly society. The hero’s journey takes him from Arthur’s court at Glastonbury to Caerleon and then Cardiff, but his destination is Synadoun, the old Roman settlement of Segontium near Caernarfon in north Wales. The names of the knights he meets along the way are French, at least to start with, indicating that he is still in the March of Wales. Apparently heading north from Cardiff, up the Marches, the party encounters Sir Otis de Lisle, another French-sounding knight who used to serve the lady of Synadoun but, says the dwarf, ‘He ffled for grete perile / West in-to Wyralle’ (lines 1039–40).53 In other words, Sir Otis (like Sir Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) has fled to the western end of the Wirral peninsula, the farthest from civilisation, to live in exile from his enemies. Lybeaus and his friends are now heading ‘west through the wild forest’, making for the north Welsh coast and the route to Synadoun, in the opposite direction from Sir Otis (and Sir Gawain). At this point there is a break in the story and it is as if the mention of the Wirral has ushered in a more fantastic element to the story, one less rooted in actual geography and more concerned with the romantic world of imaginary places. The story introduces the new adventure with the conventional romance opening:

significant that the place-names in this section of the poem are quite specific, unlike the more vague locations typical of romance wilderness. While Gawain’s journey as far as Anglesey is not given in detail, this part of his route, across the coast of north Wales, is explicitly mapped. The reason, I suggest, is that this is the main trade route to and from Ireland via Anglesey to Liverpool, a route known since Saxon times, which is why the English towns were established along the north Welsh coast, as ports and trading centres. To audiences familiar with trade routes, this would have been a route that they knew. The whole of the poem romanticises wilderness while speaking from an intrinsically urban and commercialised perspective (note also the abundance of rich textiles and commodities in Bertilak’s castle, the products of long-distance trade between towns). 53 Lybeaus Desconus, ed. Mills, Lambeth Palace, MS 306. Further references are to this manuscript and edition. Mills attributes the poem to Thomas Chestre, who also composed Sir Launfal. See Mills’s Introduction, pp. 64–65.

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Imagining Wales in Medieval Insular Romance Hytt be-fell in June, Y wene, Whan ffenell hangeth, al grene Abowte in semely saale; The somerys day is longe, Mery is the ffowlis songe And notis of the nyghtyngale. (lines 1275–80)

This introduction, reminiscent of Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal, cues us in to expect an otherworldly adventure and this is what we get, with Lybeaus now operating in a fantasy world rather than the known geography of south Wales and the March. Although it has an etymological connection to a real place (Segontium), Synadoun is a romantic fiction. The spring opening has provided a transitional border between an actual geography containing the cities of Caerleon and Cardiff and the forest of the Wirral, and a fantasy world of wondrous castles and cities. In other words, Lybeaus has crossed from south Wales into north Wales, a region now associated with mystery and the unknown.54 The lady of Synadoun is held captive by two evil men called Maboun and Yrayne (line 1758), and, in contrast to the earlier French characters, these are names from early Welsh Arthurian legend. Mabon is a character in the Arthurian prose tale, Culhwch ac Olwen, and Yrayne is probably the same name as Urien, the father of Owain, both of them heroes of sixth-century northern Britain and the struggles of the British against the Saxons. The multiple spellings of this name in various versions of Lybeaus Desconus indicate that there is no deliberate attempt to recall the original Urien, who of course was a great hero rather than a villain, as indeed was Mabon. Their sinister characters in the English romance suggest again the baleful atmosphere of north Wales and its threat of an unknown culture. Unlike Chrétien de Troyes, who absorbed Owain son of Urien into his romance as Yvain, exchanging traditions dialogically with Wales, the English composer of Lybeaus Desconus is deaf to Welsh literary tradition and speaks only to English anxieties about Welsh ‘otherness’. The location of Synadoun, near Mount Snowdon, is in the same vicinity as Vortigern’s tower, the one which, according to Nennius in Historia Brittonum, kept falling down until the boy Ambrosius (Geoffrey’s Merlin) diagnosed the problem of the two fighting dragons in the stone vaults, one red and one white.55 54 The chronicler Adam Usk (c. 1350–1430), himself a product of the anglicised March,

described Snowdonia and north Wales, the stronghold of the rebel Owain Glyndŵr, as ‘the source of all the evils in Wales’ (‘unde panditur omne malum Wallie’, ‘whence emanate all the evil of Wales’), confirming the identification of ‘Wales’ with the northwest and the Anglocentric writerly anxiety about this region as a site of disruption. See Chris Given-Wilson, ed., The Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 172 (Latin) and p. 173 (English). 55 The Historia Brittonum locates Vortigern’s tower in Gwynedd (north Wales) in the region of Eryri (Snowdonia). See ‘Historia Brittonum’, chap. 40, in Nennius: British

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Helen Fulton The stunning final scene of Lybeaus Desconus, when the lady of Synadoun emerges from the castle wall in the form of a golden dragon, symbolises the male fear of the power of the female body, but it also has intriguing echoes of the old story about Vortigern and the two dragons in more or less the same spot, appropriating this piece of British history for an English audience. Thus, the whole story of Lybeaus has two quite distinct sections, the first located in south Wales and the March, where the hero fights a routine set of blackguards and giants with familiar French names, and the second located west of the Wirral, in north Wales, where suddenly everything gets very strange and Celtic, with distant echoes of ancient Welsh and Arthurian legend remediated through the discourse of English romance. Romantic Wales is now an entirely English construct, imagined as the unfamiliar region beyond the March which is both threatening and seductive. Conclusion In medieval romance, Wales is an imagined space that reflects back to each audience its own anxieties about regional geography and cultural identity in the context of empire. Before about 1300, the Welsh and the Normans were in dialogue as part of a similar courtly aristocracy, exchanging themes to co-create a romantic Wales that encompassed the whole geographical territory. After the Edwardian conquest, the loss of independent rule and the administrative separation of Wales into the Principality and the March led to a decentring of the nation as it was perceived from the English side of the border. To be politically disempowered is to a large extent to be culturally disempowered. As English began to replace French and the March became more urbanised and anglicised, Wales split into two cultural zones, with the March imagined not as part of Wales but as a region of England. In an articulation of English hegemonic power, romantic Wales was reduced in size and represented monologically as an imaginary and potentially threatening empty space in the north and west – the space where the lost courts of the Welsh princes used to be.

History and the Welsh Annals, ed. and trans. John Morris (London: Phillimore, 1979). See J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and its Early Vernacular Versions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), pp. 63–64.

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2 ‘Something remains which is not open to my understanding’: Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives and Latin Arthurian Romance1 JESSICA J. LOCKHART

T

his chapter concerns a wonder and an enigma. The narrative motif known as the Erroneous Watchman Device is well attested in early Irish sagas and the Welsh Branwen uerch Lyr.2 Although it has not previously been understood to have a place in medieval Latin literature or the insular romance tradition, in this chapter I suggest that we find it in two Latin narratives of legendary Britain in which the execution of the motif has much in common with the marvels of romance.3 The Latin texts, De Ortu Waluuanii Nepotis Arturi and Historia Meriadoci Regis Cambrie, are attributed to the same unknown author, writing sometime between the mid-twelfth and thirteenth centuries and demonstrating a keen interest in the legendary past of Britain, and specifically of Wales. The De Ortu Waluuanii, like Branwen uerch Lyr, features a set piece in which a watchman misrecognises an enemy fleet for a marvellous phenomenon. And, like Branwen, the Historia Meriadoci, I argue, deploys riddling language to explore the narrative alchemy that transforms each set

1 I dedicate this chapter to the memory of A. G. Rigg, in whose sitting room I first read

the Historia Meriadoci and who returned to the text with me in his final year. This chapter has benefited greatly in its development from the acute and insightful comments of Aisling Byrne and Ellen Lockhart as well as the volume editors, Victoria Flood and Megan G. Leitch. 2 Patrick Sims-Williams, Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 95–133; based on previous publication ‘Riddling Treatment of the “Watchman Device” in Branwen and Togail Bruidne Da Derga’’, Studia Celtica, 12–13 (1977–78), 83–117. The apparent absence of the Watchman Device, as well as its erroneous variant, from medieval Latin and French sources forms a part of Sims-Williams’s claim that the ‘erroneous’ device emerged from a ‘common pool of narrative motifs and tale-types’ specific to early medieval Britain and Ireland (pp. 99, 103–4). 3 Both texts are edited in Mildred Leake Day, ed. and trans., Latin Arthurian Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005).

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Jessica J. Lockhart of observations into what Branwen terms chwedleu ryued, strange tidings.4 This chapter offers a reading of the playful workings of this motif in these Latin texts, proposing that the Latin author may well have adapted the motif from Welsh material, perhaps from a version of Branwen itself. Regardless of source, these scenes are a curiosity, indicating that playful and creative adaptation of the Watchman trope translated across languages and extended not only between Welsh and Irish, but into insular Latin. My broader purpose in this chapter is to consider these examples as instances of a different kind of translation: the movement of riddle forms into narrative, especially romance. While distinct in each literary tradition, enigmatic marvels – that is, mysterious and wondrous phenomena that cue in-text and readerly interpretative efforts much like those required to solve a riddle – are a mainstay of romances and Otherworldly texts, moving across languages and barriers of genre. Such marvels are, moreover, found at the heart of the multilingual Arthurian canon, whether in the falling tower of Vortigern on Snowdon, the enigmatic dreams of Arthur, or the ‘god games’ of the Green Knight.5 I propose that these passages reward a dual reading practice, alert to how enigmatic cues and riddling rhetorical structures both operate within a text and position that text within a wider multilingual and multi-generic environment. Such a reading practice can give us fresh purchase on the thorny relationship between adjacent wonder-traditions. Yet, to make this reading possible, we must cast the net wide, and investigate further the role of medieval riddles in shaping the rhetorical force of wonder in medieval romance.

4 On riddles and riddling in early medieval insular contexts, see, for instance, Martha

Bayless, ‘Alcuin’s Disputatio Pippini and the Early Medieval Riddle Tradition’, in Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Guy Halsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 157–78; Dieter Bitterli, Say What I Am Called: the Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville, Riddles at Work in the Early Medieval Tradition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020); Patricia Dailey, ‘Chapter 18: Riddles, Wonder and Responsiveness in Anglo-Saxon Literature’, in The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature, ed. Clare A. Lees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 451–72; and Patrick J. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011). On late medieval insular riddling, a much younger field, see especially Andrew Galloway, ‘The Rhetoric of Riddling in Late-Medieval England: The “Oxford” Riddles, the Secretum philosophorum, and the Riddles in Piers Plowman’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 68–105; Curtis Gruenler, Piers Plowman and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017); Jessica Lockhart, ‘Everyday Wonders and Enigmatic Structures: Riddles from Symphosius to Chaucer’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2017). 5 Tyson Pugh, ‘Gawain and the Godgames’, Christianity and Literature, 51 (2002), 525–51.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives The Watchman Device is a narrative trope extant as far back as the Mahābhārata and Homer’s Iliad, and common across a breadth of oral and written literatures in the ancient and medieval worlds.6 In this motif, two characters hold conversation about distant figures, which one character observes and describes and a second character identifies based on the description.7 In the ‘erroneous’ variant of this device, which Patrick Sims-Williams terms ‘an Insular Celtic innovation’, the initial watchman is unable to make sense of the distant sight and reports an impossible, erroneous, or marvellous description to the in-text audience.8 This reported marvel needs the interpretation of a more perceptive or knowledgeable character to be recognised. Whether played for serious or comic effect, the ensuing back-and-forth of interpretive struggle, or of perplexity and resolution, renders this type of scene also an example of the enigmatic marvel at stake more broadly in this chapter. A particularly elaborate example of the Erroneous Watchman scene may be found in Branwen uerch Lyr, the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, in an episode in which Irish swineherds look out from the coast, observe the distant approach of an invading naval force from Wales, and report what they see to their king. ‘Arglwyd,’ heb wy, ‘mae genhym ni chwedleu ryued: coet rywelsom ar y weilgi, yn y lle ny welsam eiryoet un prenn.’ ‘Llyna beth eres,’ heb ef. ‘A welewch wchi dim namyn hynny?’ ‘Gwelem, Arglwyd,’ heb wy, ‘mynyd mawr gyr llaw y coet, a hwnnw ar gerdet; ac eskeir aruchel ar y mynyd, a llynn o pop parth y’r eskeir; a’r coet, a’r mynyd, a phob peth oll o hynny ar gerdet.’ (‘Lord,’ they said, ‘we have extraordinary news; we have seen a forest on the sea, where we never saw a single tree.’ ‘That’s strange,’ he said. ‘Could you see anything else?’ ‘Yes, lord,’ they said, ‘we could see a huge mountain beside the forest, and it was moving; and there was a very high ridge on the mountain, and a lake on each side of the ridge; and the forest, and the mountain, and all of it was moving.’) 9 6 Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, pp. 95–133; on exceptions (notably medieval Latin

literature, and French), see pp. 99 and 103–4.

7 See Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, pp. 99–103. 8 Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, p. 111. As Megan G. Leitch has observed, this motif

forms an interesting contrast to the many scenes of sagacious, sharp, and even subversive judgements by watchmen and doorkeepers in Welsh and English romance; see Megan G. Leitch, ‘The Servants of Chivalry? Dwarves and Porters in Malory and the Middle English Gawain Romances’, Arthuriana, 27.1 (2017), 3–27. The coastguard in Beowulf, who must make his own judgement on the arrival of Beowulf’s ship, offers another interesting comparator to this trope. 9 Derick S. Thomson, ed., Branwen uerch Lyr: The Second of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1961), p. 10; trans. Sioned Davies, The Mabinogion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 29.

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Jessica J. Lockhart The puzzled king suggests that the messengers ask the disgraced Branwen to interpret these marvels, and she does: [H]eb [Branwen], ‘mi a wnn beth yw hynny: gwyr Ynys y Kedyrn yn dyuot drwod o glybot uym poen a’m amharch.’ ‘Beth yw y coet a welat ar y mor?’ heb wy. ‘g llongeu a hwylbrenni,’ heb hi. ‘Och,’ heb wy, ‘beth oed y mynyd a welit gan ystlys y llongeu?’ ‘Bendigeiduran uym brawt,’ heb hi, ‘oed hwnnw, yn dyuot y ueis. Nyd oed long y kynghanei ef yndi.’ ‘Beth oed yr eskeir aruchel a’r llynn o bop parth y’r eskeir?’ ‘Ef,’ heb hi, ‘yn edrych ar yr ynys honn, llidyawc yw. Y deu lygat ef o pop parth y drwyn yw y dwy lynn o bop parth y’r eskeir.’ ([Branwen] said: ‘[…] I know what it is: it is the men of the Isle of the Mighty coming over, after hearing of my punishment and dishonour.’ ‘What is the forest they saw on the sea?’ they asked. ‘Masts of ships and yard arms,’ she said. ‘Oh!’ they said. ‘What was the mountain they saw alongside the ships?’ ‘That was Bendigeidfran my brother, wading across,’ she said. ‘There was never a ship big enough for him.’ ‘What was the very high ridge and the lake on each side of the ridge?’ ‘That was him, looking at this island,’ she said. ‘He is angry. The two lakes on either side of the ridge are his two eyes on each side of his nose.’)10

As these quotations make clear, when the swineherds attempt to describe what they see but do not understand, what they describe becomes a set of riddles: proposed by the curious swineherds, pondered by the king and the Mabinogi’s audience, and finally solved by Branwen. The progression of this scene – the swineherds see an undisclosed sight; they relate the strange tidings to the king as a series of unsolved propositions; they again propose and untangle them piece by piece with Branwen in the passage quoted above – emphasises the enigmatic structure of the passage. Such enigmatic structures can serve a variety of uses, but I propose that the function of this scene in Branwen is to cultivate wonder. In the Middle Ages, as now, we confer reality to things by engaging with them in our thoughts, expectations, and feelings.11 Branwen dilates and defamiliarises the narrative event of the invasion, rendering it anew as ‘chwedlau ryued’ (‘extraordinary news’), to be imagined, shared, puzzled at, and interpreted. In so doing, Branwen not only devotes narrative 10 Thomson, ed., Branwen uerch Lyr, p. 10; trans. Davies, The Mabinogion, p. 29. 11 See Dailey, ‘Riddles, Wonder and Responsiveness’, pp. 451–72; cf. Norman Holland,

‘The Power (?) of Literature: A Neuropsychological View’, New Literary History, 35 (2004), 395–410; Suzanne Keen, ‘Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions’, Poetics Today, 32.1 (2011), 1–53; David Miall, ‘Emotions and the Structuring of Narrative Responses’, Poetics Today, 32.2 (2011), 323–48.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives space and attention to the wondering perspectives and responses of the Irish characters, the in-text readers of these puzzling signs, but pulls Branwen’s own readers into interacting with the event as a wonder.12 Medieval Wonder and the Poetics of Enigma as Narrative Mode Although the relationship between wonder and marvels in European medieval literatures has received much recent critical attention,13 it may be helpful here to address the place of riddles and the rhetorical trope of enigma in this history. Caroline Walker Bynum’s 1997 formulation of medieval wonder remains a useful starting point: All theories of wonder saw it as a significance-reaction: a flooding with awe, pleasure, or dread owing to something deeper, lurking in the phenomenon. […] Wonder was a response to something novel and bizarre that seemed both to exceed explanation and to indicate that there might be reason (significance – not necessarily cause) behind it.14

Although Bynum does not make the connection explicit, many medieval writers would have recognised the ‘significance-reaction’ or the ‘sense of something deeper’ that she describes as a response to enigma. Underlying the medieval rhetorical tradition, Aristotle in the Poetics defines ainigma [αἴνιγμα] as a type of clever metaphor, a description of ‘a fact in an impossible combination of words’.15 Yet the best-known and earliest-encountered definition of enigma in the medieval period would have been that 12 With regard to the wonder of miracles and also of gaps in reader information, see Ste-

phen Justice, ‘Did the Middle Ages Believe in their Miracles?’ Representations, 103.1 (2008), 1–29, and Stephen Justice, ‘Chaucer’s History-Effect’, in Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013), pp. 169–94. 13 For some recent excellent contributions see Michelle Karnes, ‘Marvels and the Medieval Imagination’, Speculum, 90.2 (2015), 327–65; Michelle Karnes, ‘Wonder, Marvels, and Metaphor in the Squire’s Tale’, ELH, 82.2 (2015), 461–90; Aisling Byrne, Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016); Nicola McDonald, ‘The Wonder of Middle English Romance’, in Thinking Medieval Romance, ed. Nichola McDonald and Catherine Clover Little, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 13–35; Corinne Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010); Tara Williams, Middle English Marvels: Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2018). 14 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Wonder’, The American Historical Review, 102.1 (1997), pp. 1–26, 24, my emphasis; subsequently republished as Chapter 1 of Metamorphosis and Identity (New York: Zone Books, 2001). 15 Aristotle, Poetics 22 [1458a], trans. Ingram Bywater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), p. 33.

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Jessica J. Lockhart of the fourth-century grammarian Donatus in his foundational school text the Ars Maior, ubiquitous throughout the European Middle Ages, where enigma appears as one of the seven species of allegory. Donatus explains, Aenigma est obscura sententia per occultam similitudinem rerum, ut mater me genuit, eadem mox gignitur ex me, cum significet aquam in glaciem concrescere et ex eadem rursus effluere. (An enigma is a sentence not well understood because it plays upon a hidden similarity of things, as, ‘My mother bore me, and soon she will be born from me,’ which signifies water solidifying into ice and melting from it again.)16

Exeter Book Riddles scholar Patrick Murphy can provide additional purchase on Donatus’s formulation of ‘hidden similarity’.17 For Murphy, a riddle consists of a descriptive proposition and paired solution, the ‘fit’ between which is the area of play, and complicated by whatever work the proposition does to reimagine, represent, or disguise the solution.18 Sometimes this ‘fit’ is governed by a ‘focus’, or guiding metaphor (ice is a mother), which can then produce ‘slim chances’ that render the focus unlikely (a living mother can’t be born from her own daughter) and thus lead the recipient towards the solution.19 By emphasising enigma’s initial obscurity, Donatus’s account also aligns itself with a body of biblical and exegetical texts that celebrate enigma’s didactic and ethical potential as an exercise for sharpening wisdom and capturing truths that plain language cannot express.20 In 1 Corinthians 13:12 Paul extends this experience of riddling mediation, of obscurity tending towards dawning revelation, to the relationship between human life on earth and the promise of the divine presence: ‘videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate; tunc autem facie ad faciem; nunc cognosco ex parte tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum’ (‘We see now through a glass in a dark manner [lit. through a reflection in a riddle]; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known’).21 These influences in turn often lend

16 Donatus, Ars Maior ‘De Tropis’, 17c. Translation adapted from Murphy, Unriddling the

Exeter Riddles, p. 19.

17 Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, pp. 1–37. 18 Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, pp. 18–21. 19 Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, pp. 35–37. 20 See in a long list: 1 Kings 10, Judges 14:14, 1 Proverbs 5–6, Numbers 12:6–8, Exodus

33:18–23, 1 Corinthians 13:12 in The Vulgate Bible: Douay-Rheims Translation, ed. Edgar Swift and Angela M. Kinney (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010– 2013). I am indebted in my knowledge of these passages to Nancy Stork, Through a Gloss Darkly: Aldhelm’s Riddles in the British Library MS. Royal 12.C.xxiii (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990), pp. 27–70 (hereafter ALD). 21 1 Corinthians 13:12 (Vulgate Bible); trans. Swift and Kinney; more literal translation alternatives are mine.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives a riddling or enigmatic quality to Christian scholastic discourses on wonder.22 Yet Paul’s words also speak to a much wider phenomenon, as ancient and medieval storytellers in a wide variety of contexts and geographies turned to the rhetorical tools of riddles and enigmatic language to set forth the mysteries, indeterminacies, and revelations of their works, as in Branwen.23 Sims-Williams shows that what may, to modern readers, read as the strangest part of the enigmatic description in Branwen – the lakes and ridge which turn out to be Bendigeidfran’s eyes and nose – is in fact a well-established motif in eye/landscape riddles ranging across a variety of medieval and modern cultures, which compare the eyes and nose to two lakes and a hill.24 To carry this further: what this indicates is that Branwen repurposes a riddle whose challenge and humour rely on the disjuncture of imagining facial features as a massive landscape, and applies it to a marvellous narrative situation in which the character’s features are just that large. This is the kind of playful adaptation which is characteristic of medieval riddle collections themselves. This riddling play in Branwen’s Erroneous Watchman scene is particularly significant because of the ways that scholars have positioned medieval Welsh and Irish literature as having a distinctive narrative relationship to wonder, marvels, and enigma. Scholars have now rightly abandoned the nineteenth-century construction of ‘Celtic magic’.25 However, some elements of the marvels represented prominently in Irish and Welsh material – for instance, as Helen Fulton observes, a preponderance of unexplained supernatural effects and innate abilities rather than ‘agentive magic’ – appear to remain distinctive to these traditions, and invite explanation. Fulton herself draws this distinction about the marvellous of early medieval Irish and Welsh literature as a matter of ‘narrative mode; one that foregrounds 22 See further Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Me-

dieval Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

23 In a wide range of critical literature in this area, see in addition to those already cited

Eleanor Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Antonio Donato, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as a Product of Late Antiquity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 68–73; John Miles Foley, ‘How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse’, in Unlocking the Wordhord: Anglo-Saxon Studies in Memory of Edwrd B. Irving Jr., ed. Marc C. Amodio and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 76–108; Daniel Heller-Roazen, ‘Riddles’, in Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013), pp. 65–82; Sylvia Huot, ‘Unspeakable Horror, Ineffable Bliss: Riddles and Marvels in the Prose Tristan’, Medium Aevum, 71 (2002), 47–65; Adheesh Sathaye, ‘Language of the Zombies: The Vetāla Tales and the Public Sanskrit Culture of Medieval India’, Visiting Lecture for the Department of the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, 27 February 2020, on Śivadāsa’s Vetālapañćavinśati (Vetala Tales) in Sanskrit literature of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries CE. 24 Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, p. 130. 25 Helen Fulton, ‘Magic and the Supernatural in Early Welsh Arthurian Narrative: Culhwch ac Olwen and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy’, Arthurian Literature, 30 (2013), 1–26 (pp. 1–5).

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Jessica J. Lockhart naturalism rather than realism in its storytelling techniques’.26 SimsWilliams likewise addresses narrative mode as the point of distinction, proposing that Welsh and Irish storytellers manifest in narrative what he calls an ‘analogical mode of thought’ which he locates across early medieval riddles, kennings, and wisdom literature in the North Atlantic.27 For Sims-Williams, the ‘analogical mode’ in these riddles and wisdom poems, which essentially superimposes different representations of a situation to generate or exploit ‘metaphoric insights’, finds a different home in the doubled perspective of Irish and Welsh otherworldly visions, as in Immram Brain and other texts.28 On close reflection, then, Branwen’s Erroneous Watchman Device also acts as a vehicle to draw out this ‘analogical mode’, some ‘insights’ immediately apparent – a fleet of wooden ships is, in a sense, a moving forest – and others more obscure. I believe the Erroneous Watchman Device, or something very close to it, does ‘leak’ beyond the Welsh and Irish linguistic contexts where the device has been identified.29 In the remainder of this chapter I turn to enigmatic episodes in two insular Latin texts, De Ortu Waluuanii Nepotis Arturi and Historia Meriadoci Regis Cambrie. These texts form part of the cluster that Elizabeth Archibald describes as a ‘group of rather enigmatic Latin Arthurian romances (for lack of a better descriptive category)’.30 These Latin prose works of adventure are part of a larger group of Latin narratives of legendary Britain written by Welsh and Marcher writers following Geoffrey of Monmouth – yet they also share both structural features and characteristic subject matter with French and English vernacular romance, such that although they are written by and for the Latin-literate, scholars generally agree that they ‘certainly fit the romance mould’.31 I now follow the example of Branwen scholars to consider how the motif works locally in these texts.

26 Fulton, ‘Magic and the Supernatural’, p. 1. 27 Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, pp. 128–33. 28 Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, p. 133. 29 Cf. Foley, ‘How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse’. 30 Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Variations on romance themes in the Historia Meriadoci’, Jour-

nal of the International Arthurian Society, 2.1 (2014), 3–19.

31 A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1992), p. 49; cf. Siân Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Arthurian Latin Romance’, in The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature: The Development and Dissemination of the Arthurian Legend in Medieval Latin, ed. Siân Echard (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 132–48. Neil Cartlidge’s chapter 6 in this volume offers a fascinating alternative perspective on the generic issue raised by of the relationship between Latin and vernacular ‘romance’.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives Enigmatic Marvels and Erroneous Watchmen in De Ortu Waluuanii and the Historia Meriadoci The De Ortu Waluuanii Nepotis Arturi (On the Rise of Gawain, Arthur’s Nephew) and the Historia Meriadoci Regis Cambrie (The History of Meriadoc, King of Wales) are both likely of the mid-twelfth or thirteenth century, and generally attributed to the same author.32 The two romances are found together in London, British Library, Cotton MS Faustina B.vi, where, together with a synopsis of part of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, they form part of a coherent booklet (fols 2r–40v) that can be attributed on palaeographical grounds to the first quarter of the fourteenth century.33 The Historia Meriadoci can also be found in a second manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS B.149, dated to the very late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, and housing a collection of Latin narrative and romance materials including the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri and the only extant copy of Arthur and Gorlagon. Literary assessments of this larger cluster of Latin texts have emphasised their entertaining yet difficult tone, including their knowing approach and at times ‘facetious irreverence’ to romance motifs, such that, in Siân Echard’s words, [E]ach shares Geoffrey [of Monmouth]’s tendency to signal all manner of literary exploration through the manipulation of the narrative process. … The result, as was the case with Geoffrey’s Historia, is that the audience is often left in doubt as to how to read the various signals, generic and otherwise, which the text is apparently sending. Indeed, concerns about

32 Scholars have struggled to agree upon the date and provenance of the Historia Meri-

adoci or the De Ortu Waluuanii, with possible dates ranging between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – in other words, roughly contemporaneous with the composition of the Mabinogi in the form that survives in its extant manuscripts, although the material of Branwen is likely to be much older. The main contender for authorship as presented in particular by the texts’ most recent editor, Mildred Leake Day, has been Robert de Torigny, abbot of Mont Saint Michel in the time of Henry II and librarian to Henry of Huntingdon; see discussion in Mildred Leake Day, ‘Dating De Ortu Waluuanii from Twelfth Century Ship Design’, Arthuriana, 23.4 (2013), 98–110 and Day, ed., Latin Arthurian Literature, pp. 2–11; Elizabeth Archibald, ‘Latin Arthurian Romance’, pp. 132–48, and others. Siân Echard proposes an Angevin origin for the romances and ascribes them to ‘the first half of the twelfth century’ (Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition, p. 132). I find Robert of Torigny somewhat unlikely as a choice, because the romances repeatedly display a nuanced awareness of romance tropes not found in Geoffrey’s Historia and therefore seem more likely to occur slightly later in the tradition. If we were to look for other candidates than Robert, then a Marcher, or perhaps even a Welsh authorship for the texts seems possible. 33 See British Library catalogue entry, H. L. D. Ward and J. A. Herbert, Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 3 vols (London, 1883–1910), I, pp. 374–76.

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Jessica J. Lockhart perception, both within and beyond the world of the texts, are central to both these works, and dramatized on every level of their style and content.34

It seems hitherto to have escaped critical attention that De Ortu and Historia Meriadoci also contain likely instances of the Erroneous Watchman trope. In the following pages I offer a reading of these scenes, proposing that by deepening understanding of this trope in this context we can begin to model a riddle-inflected methodology for analysis of enigmatic marvels in romance more broadly. More than simply being ‘enigmatic’ in the general modern sense of ‘mysterious’, or difficult to interpret because of a loss of context or the gulf of time, I argue that romances are often literally enigmatic in their moments of wonder: that is, they adapt and deploy rhetorical tools and habits of mind cultivated through the diverse and long history of riddling in the British Isles and available within their immediate literary-historical contexts. Romances introducing enigmatic marvels thus induct readers into moments of interpretive gameplay, gameplay which offers one guiding metaphor for the wondering imaginative engagements they solicit. In the relevant scene of the De Ortu Waluuanii, Gawain and a Roman centurion are on board a ship at sea, returning from their successful conquest of an enemy country. The centurion spots a distant sight and describes it together with a mistaken interpretation; Gawain corrects the error and identifies the genuine situation. As with Branwen, the passage immediately preceding takes the perspective of the invading force, leaving no mystery for the reader as to the origin of the sight mysterious to the observers: Fortuitu autem ipse centurio in turre quam loco propugnaculi, in puppe erexerat, Milite cum tunica armature assidente residebat; pelagi late uisu ambiens spacia. Et primatus quidem simulacra contemplatus est que ad galli, aut ad alicuius rei speciem composita malis imponuntur ad experiendum, uidelicet quo flabro agatur carina. Cuicumque namque parti mundi climatum flatus uergitur; semper ei adversa fronte obsunt. Hec igitur malis inuexa, dum nunc ad altiora, nunc ad inferiora, aura agente pellerentur uexilla. Ceyces ratus, gubernatorem nauis aduocat, atque: ‘Heus,’ inquit, ‘ut opinor nobis tempestas ualida imminet. En namque ut ille uolucres pennis applaudentes orbiculatim per inania, cursus dirigunt quasi futurorum prescie sua prelibant gaudia; nostra earum ingluuiei predam fore cadauera. Ferunt quippe imminente procella aues huiusmodi tum gregatim, tum separatim circa remigantes, crebros girando exercere solent uolatus, earumque gestus cladem portendere futuram.’ Miles autem cum tunica armature tunc ei assistens, et rem ut erat intelligens; ‘Tua te,’ ait, ‘Domine, fallit opinio. Aues namque non sunt quas te credis cernere, sed signa summitatibus malorum apposita. Sciasque procul 34 Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition, p. 131. Cf. A. G. Rigg, A History of

Anglo-Latin Literature, p. 51.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives dubio classem aduentare hostile iam dudum a rege tuis subiugato uiribus nos persecutum missam. Forsitan quippe aliqua tempestate urgente, externam coacti sunt petere regionem; quod usque ad presens sibi more causa exstitit. Nunc uero suis uotis aura fauente redeunt. Militibus itaque arma capere impera; nec nos aduersarii inermes repperiant.’ (Now, by chance the centurion was seated in a tower which he had set up in the poop as a place of defence, with the Knight of the Surcoat [Gawain] sitting by; the surrounding space of the ocean was visible in a broad view. And he was first to spot likenesses [simulacra] constructed in the appearance of a cock, or another type of thing, which are set up on the masts to find out by what breezes the ship is driven. For from whatever direction the wind lies, from any part of the world, they always tell against it by facing the opposite. And so these streamers are fluttering on the masts, as they are driven by the gusts of the wind, now higher, now lower. Judging them to be sea birds, the centurion calls to the helmsman. ‘Alas,’ he says, ‘I think a strong storm is bearing down on us. For look: those birds, wheeling through the air beating their wings, are directing their course as if, aware of future events, they foretaste their own joys; our dead bodies will be prey for their gullets. For it’s said that when a storm is imminent, birds circling around in this way, now gathered, now separating, are accustomed to make their flight by wheeling together, and their act foretells a coming disaster.’ But the Knight of the Surcoat was sitting by him then, understanding the matter as it lay; ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘your judgment is mistaken. For these are not birds which you think you see, but signs fixed to the tops of masts. Therefore, know without a doubt that the enemy fleet is approaching to attack us, sent by the king recently subjugated by your men. Maybe indeed they were driven by some storm, and they have been forced to seek an outer region; that was the reason for their behaviour up to now. But now the winds favour their prayers and they return. And so, command the soldiers to take arms, lest these enemies find us defenceless.’)35

There are several striking similarities between this scene and the one addressed above in Branwen. In both instances, the unknown phenomena (seagoing trees, flocking birds) are portentous in their unusual placement and movement, and what they truly signify – the approach of the masts of an enemy fleet – is identical; and their ability to identify correctly this approaching threat showcases the superior wisdom of Branwen and Gawain. Furthermore, like Branwen, this passage also presents a doubled vision of its distant sight: it offers the description together with its true solution, similar to a medieval riddle presented with its title – and then it represents the same sight with the misdirected interpretation leading to a mistaken conclusion, before correcting 35 Day, ed., De ortu Waluuanii nepotis Arturi, in Latin Arthurian Literature, pp. 162–63;

my translation.

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Jessica J. Lockhart again. In turn, this passage sets up what Sims-Williams might call a ‘metaphoric insight’, Murphy a ‘fit’, or Donatus a ‘hidden similarity of things’, in its juxtaposition of the upcoming sea battle as an oncoming storm, and the ships’ kites as flocking carrion birds.36 The Latin diction emphasises this slippage between battle and storm, as the centurion’s descriptor cladem for the coming event translates most directly as ‘slaughter’ or ‘carnage’, a word more fitting for the outcome of a battle than of a disaster at sea. Unlike in Branwen, the passage is not supernatural in its wonder; it explores instead the technological marvel of the navigational weathercocks and, in mistaken interpretation, the naturalistic marvel of birds congregating in anticipation of disaster. However, it is enigmatic, introducing an interpretive challenge which tests its characters on one level, and amplifies the thematic resonance of the work on another. This much is clear in Siân Echard’s analysis of this scene as an interpretive crux which provides implicit training in how to interpret the romance’s broader play with the ambiguity of signs. Echard argues that ‘while Gawain’s judgment is true, so too, at another level of interpretation, is the centurion’s’, and proposes that through this scene, ‘[t]he game of the text thus conveys a serious message about the reception and interpretation of truth as mediated through language and through narrative’.37 If, as I propose, this scene also references the Erroneous Watchman Device, then this passage constitutes a bridge between Welsh and Latin enigmatic marvel, as, like Branwen, De Ortu embeds riddling structures for narrative effect. This interest in enigmatic marvel also inflects the Historia Meriadoci Regis Cambrie, the romance believed to share an author with De Ortu. Although the text itself is replete with supernatural and otherworldly encounters, its possible instance of the Erroneous Watchman trope is mundane. It occurs as Arthur and his court wait for the return of the untried youth Meriadoc from his battle with a mysterious and fearsome challenger, the Black Knight of the Black Forest: Moram autem Meriadoco diucius nectente iussit quendam rex Arturus summam arcem ascendere, si quoquam eum repedantem [R.p.108] aduerteret. Speculator uero turri conscensa oculisque contra uiam que ad Nigrum Saltum ducebat erectis, ‘Quendam,’ exclamauit ‘aduenientem longius intueor, quem incessus moderacior et splendor armorum Meriadocum testantur. Trilicem enim loricam habebat auream, scutum interlucentibus gemmis aureis totum obductum laminis in cuius equi falleris, nil nisi et pallor electri et fulua auri radiabat species. Sed et alium’ ait ‘a dextra equitem nigerrimis

36 Cf. Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, p. 133; Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, p.

18; Donatus, Ars Maior ‘De Tropis’, 17c, quoted in Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles, p. 19. 37 Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition, p. 141.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives armis secum adducit quem quantum arma et gestus indicant Nigrum Militem de Nigro Saltu esse prenuncio.’ [F.f.11r] Rex autem hoc pre admiracione credere non potuit, sed et friuolum esse asserens quod annunciabat, dicebat tam probum et exercitatum militatem, ab inberbi adolescente inpossibile fore deuinci. Illis autem inde sermocinantibus, et diuersa proferentibus, Meriadocus cum Nigro Milite de Nigro Saltu, quem manu ducebat, regiam dignus omnibus spectaculo factus subiit. (But as the promise to Meriadoc prolonged the wait, King Arthur commanded someone to climb the highest tower, in order to face him in any direction if he was returning. But having climbed the tower and turned his eyes to the road which led to the Black Forest, the watchman shouted: ‘In the distance I see someone coming, whose steady gait and brilliance of armour attest him to be Meriadoc! For he has a triple-threaded golden mailcoat, a shield entirely overspread with sparkling gems and gold plate, and you would not fail to add of his horse that its appearance shone with the paleness of amber and tawny colour of gold. But also,’ he said, ‘he leads another knight with him by the hand, in the blackest armour; I declare that his arms and bearing show him to be the Black Knight of the Black Forest.’ But the king could not believe this for amazement and, claiming that his news was an idle tale [frivolum; trifle], he said that it was impossible for such a powerful and warlike knight to be defeated by an unbearded teenager. But as they were bantering, and proposing different things, Meriadoc entered the court with the Black Knight of the Black Forest, whom he led by the hand, and the worthy action was a spectacle for everyone.) 38

This passage offers a playful twist on the Erroneous Watchman motif: it is the interlocutor, King Arthur, who is mistaken as he declares the watchman’s interpretation to be erroneous and reacts to it as an impossibility. This is one playful instance among many, as the Historia Meriadoci often takes a distinctly tongue-in-cheek if not gently parodic approach to Arthurian conventions, such as the preponderance of adventures interrupting Arthur’s every quiet moment, or the dubious nobility of his knights.39 Yet there is an additional possible valence to this passage which is worth teasing out. This moment in the Historia Meriadoci is in close harmony with the Latin riddling tradition in its language and its imagery, and in its fascination with wondrous visions. We can take Arthur’s term frivolum as an entry point to this tradition, one coherent strand of which runs from the fifth-century poet Symphosius through to fourteenth-century Latin marginal riddles and riddling 38 Day, ed., Historia Meriadoci regis Cambrie, in Latin Arthurian Literature, p. 156; my

translation.

39 See Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition, p. 207; Aisling Byrne, ‘Ar-

thur’s Refusal to Eat: Ritual and Control in the Romance Feast’, Journal of Medieval History, 37 (2011), 62–74.

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Jessica J. Lockhart treatises.40 Symphosius, likely North African and of the late fifth century, wrote a collection of ninety-nine (or one hundred) enigmata.41 In the collection’s tongue-in-cheek explanatory preface, Symphosius positions the collection to follow as a post-hoc contribution to a Saturnalian riddle game, described in the following terms: nescio quas passim magno tentamine nugas est meditata diu; sed frivola multa locuta est. non mediocre fuit, magni certaminis instar, ponere diverse vel solvere quaequae vicissim. (In a great contest, a long time was spent considering I don’t know what trifles [nugas] – but many a silly thing [frivola] was said. It was no little thing, but like a massive competition, to propose or solve each different thing in turn.) 42

Symphosius’s riddle collection was immediately and lastingly influential. Several of its riddles were incorporated into the Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, of the fifth or sixth century, one of the earliest and most enduring Latin romances, and one which itself invests heavily in enigmatic marvels and wondrous revelations which, while rarely supernatural, are certainly heart tugging. Symphosius’s riddles occur at the romance’s climactic reunion between Apollonius and his long-lost daughter, whose riddle competition allows them to wage an emotional argument that culminates in their solving the riddle of their mutual identity. The Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri’s similarity in title to the Historia Meriadoci Regis Cambrie (both listing themselves as the history of a king of a region), and its presence in the same manuscript as the Historia Meriadoci and Arthur and Gorlagon in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS B.149, may imply a perceived generic resemblance. Symphosius’s collection also prompted a vogue for Latin riddle collections, beginning in the seventh century with the Bern collection and Aldhelm’s own influential collection of a hundred Enigmata, and continuing in Latin and Old English at least through to the eleventh century.43

40 A caveat: neither impossibile nor frivolum is a particularly unusual word in itself, espe-

cially in scholastic contexts. The Brepolis Library of Latin Texts identifies thousands of medieval iterations of ‘impossibile’, and hundreds of ‘frivolum’, peaking in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – although the works of a few prolific and famous scholars such as Thomas Aquinas, Ramon Llull, and William of Ockham account for the majority of these instances in that archive. My argument concerns the narrative and contextual deployment of this vocabulary. 41 See T. J. Leary, ed. and trans., Symphosius: The Aenigmata: An Introduction, Text and Commentary (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 42 Symphosius, Praefatio 9–12, text Leary, ed. Symphosius, 39; my translation. 43 See Bitterli, Say What I am Called, pp. 3–5.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives Aldhelm’s collection returns defensively to Symphosius’s term ‘frivola’ at key points throughout the collection, in particular as part of the riddling challenge or in meta-commentaries upon his own practice where he addresses a reader’s incredulity. One brief example will suffice: Iam referam verbis tibi quod vix credere possis, cum constet verum fallant nec frivola mentem. (Now I will relate to you in words what you are scarcely able to believe, though it be true and trifles do not trip up the mind.) 44

The composers of riddle collections in Old English and Latin in Aldhelm’s wake often exploit the divergence in perspective between the riddle’s presentation and plain observation of mundane scenes. Alcuin’s wisdom-dialogue Disputatio Pippini cum Albino Scholastico turns abruptly to riddling in the seventieth exchange, when Pippin asks Albinus to define a wonder, prompting a series of brief prose riddles referred to as ‘mira’ (‘wonders’).45 Alcuin’s doubled narrative, illustrating wonder by presenting ordinary events in extraordinary lights, shares much in common with Sims-Williams’s discussion of otherworldly sights in Welsh and Irish literature of a similar period. Wonder is also commonly the first thing the Exeter Book Riddles announce, in phrases such as ‘Ic eom wunderlicu wiht’ (‘I am a wondrous creature’),46 and ‘Ic wiht geseah on wege feran, / seo wæs wrætlice wundrum gegierwed’ (‘I saw a creature travel on her way, / she was marvellously adorned with wonders’).47 In my view, the shared focus on the relationship between the marvellous and the riddling generates the contours of a web which can link insular Latinate scholastic riddling with Welsh and Irish otherworld and wonder-texts, and with medieval Latin and vernacular romance narratology and rhetorical praxis.

44 ALD 85.1–2. Text and numbering in Stork, ed., In a Gloss Darkly; my translation.

The hundredth and culminating riddle in Aldhelm’s collection, Creatura, returns to this language: ‘Auscultate mei credentes famina verbi, / pandere quae poterit gnarus vix ore magister / et tamen infitians non retur frivola lector! / Sciscitor inflatos, fungar quo nomine, sofos’ (‘Listen, believers, to the utterances of my word / which scarcely an experienced master will be able to unfold / yet nonetheless, a reader does not, denying, consider them trifles! / I ask overblown sages what name I perform’) (ALD 100.80–83). 45 See text in Bayless, ‘Alcuin’s Disputatio Pippini and the Early Medieval Riddle Tradition’, pp. 157–78; my translation. P. Quid est mirum? – / A. Nuper vidi hominem stantem, mortuum ambulantem [MS: molientem ambulantem], qui nunquam fuit. / P. Quomodo potest esse, pande mihi? / A. Imago in aqua. 46 See George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, eds, The Exeter Book (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936) (hereafter EXE), the Exeter Book Riddles EXE 18.1, EXE 20.1, EXE 24.1, EXE 25.1. I use their numbering system for convenience. 47 EXE 36.1–2; EXE 68.1–2.

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Jessica J. Lockhart This discourse linking wonder, riddling, and textual creativity continues into late-medieval Latin riddles which provide a more immediate possible context for the Historia Meriadoci and De Ortu Waluuanii. In the folios of the mid-fifteenth-century manuscript London, British Library, Harley MS 3362 are a number of brief riddles. Enigma 6 from Harley 3362 reads: Floribus et lignis quoddam mirabile vas fit Quod cum sit plenum nil plus tunc ponderat ipsum. (A certain vase is marvellously made; When it’s full of flowers and staves, it doesn’t weigh the more for it.) 48

Like its counterparts from the early and high medieval period, this riddle, solved by Andrew Galloway as wax ‘writing tablet(s)’, plays on a collapse of the distinction between writing and reality. The flowers and twigs that might render the strange vase heavier are instead rhetorical, literary flores and insubstantial staves of text. This riddle also draws out what Sims-Williams would call a ‘metaphoric insight’, in the peculiarity that a flat writing surface is actually a container like a vase, and the enigma that allows us to perceive this reality is itself among the floribus et lignis that the book before us contains.49 Another insular late-medieval riddling text, the Secretum Philosophorum (likely of the fourteenth century), playfully explains a relationship between wonder, riddling, and the marvellous in this way: Rethorica docet ornate loqui. In multis autem prevalet ornatus modus loquendi quia aliquando proferuntur verba ornate que propter eorum variam et ornatam prolacionem apparent mirabilia, que si expresse proferentur reputarentur truffe, ut sunt divinaciones. Verbi gratia: [1] Inimici mei venerunt ad domum meam et domus mea exivit perforamina et ego solus remansi inter inimicos meos. Istud videretur inpossibile, quod domus exiret per foramina; si tamen exprimatur necessarium est, cuius expositio est de pisce capto in reti. (Rhetoric teaches a person to speak ornately. But in many respects one adorned way of speaking is outstanding, in that sometimes subjects proposed in ornate words seem like wonders on account of their diverse and elaborate propounding, that would be considered trifles (as divinations are), if proposed directly. For example: ‘My enemies came to my home. My house left 48 Harley 3362 Enigma 6 (fol. 33r). Galloway, ‘The Rhetoric of Riddling’, p. 99 and n.

102 on solution; my translation.

49 The concept of writing as a wondrous, weightless burden is a very old and popular rid-

dle conceit – it exists in the seventh-century Bern riddles, for example. See Bern Riddle 24 ‘De Membrana’ in Fr. Glorie (ed.), Variae collectiones aenigmatvm Merovingicae aetatis (pars altera), Corpvs Christianorvm, Series Latina, 133a (Turnhout: Brepols, 1968), p. 570.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives through the windows, and I alone remained amongst my enemies.’ It would seem impossible that the house could leave through the windows, but if it is explained it is necessary, for its exposition is about a fish caught in a net.) 50

For the Secretum Philosophorum, adorned and dilated ways of speaking have the ability to create wonders that direct and plain speech would make seem silly; under these circumstances the point of apparent impossibility is also the key to the description’s accuracy. With this generic context, let us return, then, to the Historia Meriadoci: Rex autem hoc pre admiracione credere non potuit, sed et friuolum esse asserens quod annunciabat, dicebat tam probum et exercitatum militatem, ab inberbi adolescente inpossibile fore deuinci. Illis autem inde sermocinantibus, et diuersa proferentibus, Meriadocus cum Nigro Milite de Nigro Saltu, quem manu ducebat, regiam dignus omnibus spectaculo factus subiit. (But the king could not believe this for amazement and, claiming that his news was an idle tale [frivolum; trifle], he said that it was impossible for such a powerful and warlike knight to be defeated by an unbearded teenager. But as they were bantering, and proposing different things, Meriadoc entered the court with the Black Knight of the Black Forest, whom he led by the hand, and the worthy action was a spectacle for everyone.) 51

Thus, when a wondering and disbelieving Arthur responds to his watchman, decrying his account of Meriadoc’s return as a frivolum on account of its impossibility, it may be no more than a lighthearted representation of a character attempting to call out a lie. However, the register of Arthur’s comment taps into a deep and multilingual network of insular discourse on enigmatic wonder which still had currency in the text’s likely period – and within the text, his incredulity prompts a bantering exchange on a similar order of playfulness with Symphosian enigma. It is worth reflecting on the marvel in this passage, the one which places Arthur in such a state of admiracio. It is not the Black Knight’s existence or distinctive appearance – at this point in the plot he is already a familiar challenger. The marvel is the report of the dignum factum (worthy action), first of Meriadoc’s improbable victory over the knight, and secondly of the peace he makes with him, symbolised by his leading the Black Knight by the hand. One could say that Meriadoc’s friendship with the Black Knight 50 Secretum Philosophorum, Introduction, Book 2. Text edited in Galloway, ‘The Rhetoric

of Riddling’, p. 74; my translation. The author reiterates this point later, merging an Abel-riddle with the biblical paradox: ‘Hoc videretur impossibile set tamen non est, nam Abel, filius Ade, fuit natus ante patrem’ (‘This might seem impossible, but it’s not, for Abel, the son of Adam, was born before his father’). 51 Day, ed., Historia Meriadoci regis Cambrie, in Latin Arthurian Literature, p. 156; my translation.

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Jessica J. Lockhart from Arthur’s perspective almost embodies Aristotelian enigma as ‘impossible combination’. In this conjunction the wonder of the Black Knight now redounds to Meriadoc, in his prowess in showing such promise at such a young age – as it will again in his boldness in taking up the part of the Black Knight against Arthur himself. This type of enigmatic marvel should give scholars of romance wonders some pause. When romances have identified their stories as being or holding wonders, we have tended to turn to medieval theories of the supernatural, or of the triad of magic, marvel, and miracle, to find our guiding metaphors and first interpretive lenses for this language.52 These lenses are certainly valid. Yet, as the Secretum Philosophorum observes in play, ‘propter eorum variam et ornatam prolacionem apparent mirabilia’ (‘wonders may appear on account of their diverse and ornate propounding’). The ‘extraordinary news’ of Branwen, or the ambiguous propositions and resonant juxtapositions of these Latin romances, point towards another guiding metaphor for wonder, whereby reported narrative – and indeed, perceived experience – may take on the wondrous aspects and ‘metaphoric insights’ of a riddle. These enigmatic moments in turn invite both intext characters and romance readers to take up medieval riddlers’ tools: flexibility of thought, a readiness to perceive the nuances of an analogy, critical thinking to identify the ‘necessity’ in the impossible and undo the shackles of misapprehension and deception. These are the tools used by Merlin in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae to perceive and interpret the portentious dragons beneath Vortigern’s mysteriously falling tower.53 They are the tools of the wondering king in Arthur and Gorlagon who observes the mysterious behaviour of a wolf, identifies that ‘there is something remaining, which is not open to my understanding’ (‘aliquid aliud … superest, quod mee non patet noticie’, lines 11–12), and takes wise steps to solve the mystery.54 They are the tools not used by the hubristic King Edelsi in the Lai de Haveloc, who before his final battle receives Haveloc’s threat with incredulous frivolity, ‘I have heard amazing 52 See Nicola McDonald’s beautiful analysis of collapses between Middle English ro-

mances and ‘woundres wryte[n]’ in her excellent chapter, ‘The Wonder of Middle English Romance’, p. 34. McDonald’s analysis emphasises the indeterminacy of Middle English romance and the ways their wonders invite readerly response: ‘as they confound us, they get us thinking; and in doing so, they incite us to ask, “hwat may this mene?”’ (p. 35). I propose that a riddle-inflected methodology, including a gaze beyond Middle English romances specifically, would be a helpful next step in that field. 53 See Book 6 §106, 108, 111–12, 118–19 in Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve and trans. Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), pp. 136–61. 54 Day, ed., Narratio de Arthuro rege Britanniae et rege Gorlagon lycanthropo, in Latin Arhurian Literature, p. 226; my translation.

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Enigmatic Marvels in Welsh Otherworld Narratives news about […] one of my scullions […] I will make my cooks joust with him, with trivets and cauldrons, with pots and pans’; and a brief while later surrenders, unable to penetrate the grisly enigmatic marvel of their apparently reinforced enemy army as dead soldiers propped on sticks.55 To return to my own focus: if the resemblances between the Erroneous Watchman device and these Latin episodes of the centurion and Gawain, and of Arthur and his watchman, are more than coincidence, then this tells us several things. It would indicate that the writer of these romances is familiar enough with the (Welsh, Irish) Erroneous Watchman trope to return to it multiple times, to nod to one of its most famous Welsh usages, and to invert it for humour at this point in the Historia Meriadoci. At the extreme end of supposition, the author’s use in the Historia Meriadoci scene of what I have described as a Latin riddling rhetoric – terming a marvel of apparent impossibility a frivolum instead – might likewise indicate that this author is aware of vernacular uses of riddles for wondrous ends in scenes of this type, for which Branwen provides an extant example, and is wittily responding by incorporating a Latinate riddle challenge instead. If so, this is the kind of intertextual conversation that may also be found commonly across riddle collections in the early and high medieval period, where one poet will either render a new version of an old riddle using different clues, or offer a riddle on an adjacent subject in playful homage to the exemplar, sometimes moving from vernacular to Latin or back again. A similar phenomenon of playfully innovative homage might be detected in the close relationship between the magical portentous enemy mastheads on the sea in Branwen and the naturalistically portentous weathercocks tied to enemy mastheads on the sea in De Ortu. We need not go so far as to accept that this degree of attunement is happening in this case. Ultimately, collectively, these two examples suggest a scholastic Latin author who, like the authors of the extant text of Branwen, enjoys the beauty of superimposing two interpretations on the same ambiguously perceived moment; who finds a persistent interest in representing the workings of a character’s mind in a moment of wonder; and who likewise takes care to draw out particular moments in the narrative for comic or wondrous effect on his readers using rhetorical tools shared by riddles. If, as Sims-Williams has argued, early Britain and Ireland shared a collective pool of motifs such as the Erroneous Watchman, then these understudied Latin romances occupy a kind of alluvial plain, mingling and synthesising 55 ‘The Lai of Haveloc’, in The Birth of Romance in England: The Romance of Horn,

the Folie Tristan, the Lai d’Haveloc, and Amis and Amilun: Four Twelfth-Century Romances in the French of England, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009), pp. 155–69 (pp. 167–68). Edelsi’s army’s failure to interpret the unnaturally increased army comes close, rhetorically, to an Erroneous Watchman Device.

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Jessica J. Lockhart from Welsh supernatural narratives, Latin histories, and French and English romance.56 They deserve more sustained attention by scholars of these fields. In recent years scholars have made considerable advances, exploring the underpinnings of romance marvels in medieval insular concepts of the supernatural and in specific historical circumstances in which they resonate, often in moments of cultural transmission, translation, appropriation, and exchange. Sims-Williams’s approach of tracing and comparing highly specific motifs across Irish and Welsh literature offers an additional lens by which to consider how marvels iterate across cultural or linguistic boundaries as textual situations; in this we may note that his method complements Helen Cooper’s influential analysis of the romance meme.57 Yet the history of wonders in medieval literatures is also the history of medieval narration and rhetorical theory, as put into practice by medieval poets. Thus, in addition to the magic and marvellous objects and events to be found in medieval romance, we must also consider the wide range of ‘marvellous tidings’, and textual moments marked out in romance as enigmatic or puzzling. Comparing these Erroneous Watchman scenes in Branwen, the De Ortu Waluuanii, and Historia Meriadoci finally reminds us that treating a passage as enigmatic requires alertness to the diversity and complexity of the enigmatic traditions from which the poets draw. Medieval riddles themselves were works of poetry and crafted prose which ranged in presentation of their subjects from the bathetic, to the scholastic, to the deeply philosophical and epic; sometimes holding multiple modes at once, or alternating within the space of a few lines. The enigmatic marvels of romance have the same versatility in directing wonder, with potential narrative and affective functions ranging from character comedy and dramatic irony, to ‘metaphoric insight’ or scientific inquiry, to set pieces of suspense and awe.

56 Cf. Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, pp. 99, 103–4. 57 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of

Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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3 The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation: Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Roman de la Rose Tradition VICTORIA FLOOD

T

his chapter frames a new response to the Celtic source hypothesis long, and problematically, applied to the fairies of English and French romance.1 As Richard Firth Green notes, ‘Fairies are to be found from Iceland to Sicily and from the Pyrenees to the Ruhr, but the notion that Wales, Scotland and Ireland have a particular claim on them is deeply ingrained in the English speaking world.’2 The particular Welsh associations of King Arthur, and the later fairy narratives associated with Avalon, may well have played a part in the persistence of this assumption – although, as I have argued elsewhere, the addition of the fairy narrative to the Avalon legend is most likely to have been an English and Continental innovation.3 The perception has also almost certainly been fuelled by the long legacy of an English nineteenth-century critical conflation of magic, nature, and a monolithic conception of ‘Celtic culture’, a framework into which the fairies of the Anglo-Continental tradition have been all too often inserted by twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars of romance.4

1 This has been most famously posed by Dorena Allen in relation to the fairy-taken of

Sir Orfeo, in ‘Orpheus and Orfeo: The Dead and the “Taken”’, Medium Ævum, 33.2 (1964), 102–11. However, Allen also draws attention to significant Latin analogues to the Middle English romance, revisited recently by Richard Firth Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 163–67. For comprehensive studies on the fairy of medieval romance, which (very sensibly) elide the question of the Celtic source, see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 173–217, and James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 2 Firth Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars, p. 5. 3 Victoria Flood, ‘Arthur’s Return from Avalon: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Development of the Legend’, Arthuriana, 25 (2015), 84–110. 4 On post-medieval constructions of ‘Celtic’ culture see Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Visionary Celt: The Construction of an Ethnic Preconception’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 11 (1986), 71–96; Helen Fulton, ‘Matthew Arnold and the Canon of Medieval

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Victoria Flood The course of analysis pursued in this chapter suggests a new approach, exploring what the supernatural imaginings of late medieval Welsh poetry might owe to romance paradigms, rather than vice versa. Its central argument is rooted in the cultural specificity of Welsh representations of the supernatural company, which operate in a marked contrast to the fairies of English and French romance – a distinction that is nowhere so clear as when Welsh authors engage with the cultural cues of romance. Taking as its focus the cywyddau serch (love poems) of Dafydd ap Gwilym (c. 1315–50), it explores Dafydd’s reimagining of the supernaturalised court of Love, and the garden of Pleasure, of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose (c. 1230).5 It considers the ways in which Dafydd overlays Guillaume’s mythology of love with Welsh legendary and cultural frameworks, drawing on the precedent of the noble household in Wales in the generations following the Edwardian conquest of 1282–83. I approach this topic as a discrete chapter in the relationship between the Roman and other vernacular literary cultures of the late Middle Ages, and understand Dafydd’s use of the Roman, or related traditions, as a movement we might place alongside that of his English counterpart, Geoffrey Chaucer.6 Although there is no Welsh translation of the Roman, and the extent to which the French text circulated in Wales remains unclear, I suggest that Dafydd was familiar with Guillaume’s formulations, whether directly or indirectly, and made them his own – a re-situation which we might understand as a type of cultural translation. As Rachel Bromwich notes, ‘The Roman de la Rose was not an isolated work. It was, rather, the culminating expression of a whole trend or tradition in thirteenth-century poetry, from which it sprang, and which it continued to

Welsh Literature’, Review of English Studies, NS 63 (2011), 204–24. With thanks to Helen Fulton for her comments on an early draft of this chapter. 5 For previous discussions of Dafydd’s engagements with the Roman (both Guillaume’s and Jean de Meun’s) see Rachel Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym: Selected Papers (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986), pp. 73–75 and 78; Helen Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym and the European Context (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1989), pp. 189–90, 215, and 223–24; Huw M. Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym: Influences and Analogues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 158–65 and 214–32; Heather Williams, ‘Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Debt to Europe’, Études Celtiques, 34 (1998), 185–213 (pp. 188, 193). For significant earlier observations concerning Dafydd’s relationship to the Roman, see T. M. Chotzen, Recherches sur la poésie de Dafydd ab Gwilym (Amsterdam, 1927), pp. 331–32. 6 For an account of the reception of the Roman de la Rose, including Chaucer’s engagement with the text, see Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, eds, Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’: Text, Image, Reception (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992). For comparison between Chaucer and Dafydd, see Stephen Knight, ‘Chaucer’s British Rival’, Leeds Studies in English, NS 20 (1989), 87–98; Stephen Knight, ‘“Love’s Altar is the Forest Glade”: Chaucer in the Light of Dafydd ap Gwilym’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 63 (1999), 172–88.

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation exist alongside.’7 The basis of the broader convention with which I am concerned, as we find it also in Guillaume’s Roman, is that of the dream-vision of a Maytime forest or garden, where birdsong heralds the appearance of the god or goddess of love, who arbitrates over matters of the heart.8 Although, as Huw Edwards has observed, in Dafydd’s poetry ‘there is no God of Love, no Venus, no divine commandments, and no “Garden of Love”, the earthly paradise of the trouvères and of the Roman de la Rose, where all is governed by the noble etiquette of courtoisie’, I propose that Dafydd nonetheless made use of this scene.9 This is not least in his associations of ‘Paradwys’ (‘Paradise’) with birdsong, love, and May – but more than this, Dafydd’s work on occasion engages with an otherworldly court analogous to the type we find in Guillaume’s Roman, substituted by constructions informed by a store of Welsh legendary material and Dafydd’s own immediate social contexts among the gentry of post-conquest Wales. French Romance in Wales Dafydd’s engagement with the court of Love is aligned with, and was facilitated by, a broader class-based interest in French literature. The fall of the Welsh princes in the late thirteenth century saw the emergence of a new class of Welsh-language literary patrons: the uchelwyr, descendants of the displaced Welsh nobility, who acted in administrative roles for the English crown in Wales. Correspondingly, the post-conquest collapse of the bardic orders saw a new type of poet in search of patronage: the cywyddwyr (poets of the nobility), who pioneered the development of cywydd meter and its use as a vehicle for praise poetry. During this period, the uchelwyr participated in Francophone, and later English-language, courtly contexts and elite discourses alongside Welsh, and their multilingual reading habits informed certain aspects of the work of the cywyddwyr.10 The Roman was read alongside Welsh-language 7 Rachel Bromwich, Tradition and Innovation in the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym (Car-

diff: University of Wales Press, 1972), p. 31; Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 75. 8 I exclude from my discussion Dafydd’s engagements with the Continental dream vision, alongside the Welsh, in ‘Y Breuddwyd’ (‘The Dream’) and ‘Y Cloc’ (‘The Clock’). Although ‘Y Breuddwyd’ in particular possesses a number of interesting markers in common with European romance conventions, we do not there encounter a courtly company of the type with which this chapter is concerned. See further, Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 66; Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 164; Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 198–201. 9 Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 206–07. See further Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 81. 10 Dafydd Johnston, ‘“Ceidwad yr hen iaith?” Beirdd yr Uchelwyr a’r Iaith Saesneg’, Y Traethodydd (2000), 16–24. For a recent discussion of the multilingual contexts of uchelwyr book production, see Helen Fulton, ‘The Red Book and the White: Gentry

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Victoria Flood materials by at least one Welsh nobleman in the generation before Dafydd. A copy of the Roman, alongside Welsh and other French manuscripts, is listed at Glamorgan (later home to Dafydd’s patron, Ifor Hael) among the possessions of the nobleman Llywelyn Bren, who was executed for rebellion against the English crown in 1317.11 I mention this not to imply that Dafydd knew this particular book, or even to suggest that the Roman circulated particularly widely in Wales; rather, it evidences the presence of French materials of this type in Welsh literary contexts. Interest in the Roman or related material must also be oriented within a longer historical reception of French, or Anglo-Norman, romance in Wales, from the late twelfth or thirteenth century onwards, including Welsh translations of the Charlemagne romances and Bevis of Hampton.12 Indeed, prior to the mid-fifteenth century Welsh translations from vernacular material were predominately derived from French-language sources, and the earliest use of English rather than French in trilingual manuscripts (alongside Welsh and Latin) dates to the mid-fifteenth century.13 We might note also the three Welsh Arthurian prose works found in the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch with affinities to the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, of which they are generally, although by no means universally, understood as adaptive translations, and which show, at the very least, a Welsh engagement with French literary fashions. These are categorised as ‘rhamant’ (‘romance’), a term which is at once illuminating and problematic in its application. As Erich Libraries in Medieval Wales’, in Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages, ed. Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 23–46. For an influential statement of multilingualism in Dafydd’s immediate context, see Saunders Lewis, ‘Dafydd ap Gwilym’, in Presenting Saunders Lewis, ed. A. R. Jones and Gwyn Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973), pp. 159–63 (p. 161): ‘We shall not get a proper idea of the cultural climate of the late Middle Ages in Britain unless we recognize that Anglo-French and Middle English and Welsh were all cheek by jowl in the Welsh Marches and the Crown Lordships.’ For discussion of Dafydd’s class contexts, see Helen Fulton, ‘The Poetic Construction of Authority: Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Uchelwyr’, Parergon, 10.1 (1992), 15–34. 11 Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 220. 12 Cf. Erich Poppe, ‘Charlemagne in Wales and Ireland: Some Preliminaries on Transfer and Transmission’, in Rittersagas: Übersetzung, Überlieferung, Transmission, ed. Jürg Glauser and Susanne Kramarz-Bein (Tubingen: A. Francke Verlag, 2014), pp. 169–89; Erich Poppe and Regina Reck, ‘Rewriting Bevis in Wales and Ireland’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, ed. Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 37–50. 13 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Crossing the Borders: Literary Borrowing in Medieval Wales and England’, in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 159–71 (p. 168); Victoria Flood, ‘Early Tudor Translation of English Prophecy in Wales’, in Crossing Borders, ed. Byrne and Flood, pp. 65–88 (p. 68).

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation Poppe and Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan observe in their treatment of the Arthurian rhamantau, while this designation ‘has the advantage of distinguishing them from native Welsh tales with no counterpart, [it] carries the danger of creating false expectations or applying an inappropriate yardstick in reading them’.14 Welsh does, and does not, have romance: even while romance content is naturalised, ‘romance’ remains a French construction. Yet, the cultural debt is profound. As Helen Fulton notes, even in the four branches of the Mabinogi (found alongside the Arthurian prose tales in the Red and White books), generally understood as prime representatives of an independent Welsh literary culture, we encounter occasional French loan words and ‘customs of courtoisie’.15 Supernatural Companies in France and Wales In Continental contexts (as indeed in English), the supernatural, or fairy, company in many respects presents a magnification of the ostentation and display of a terrestrial court. The cultural codes which inform the company of Guillaume’s Roman operate in relation to aristocratic French ideologies, which, even and especially in the context of an imagined otherworldly scene, speak to perceived class values: the valorisation of nobility of birth, of beauty, and of leisure (values pastiched by Jean de Meun in his later continuation of the Roman).16 In the Maytime garden of Pleasure, into which Idleness leads him, the dreamer-narrator observes a handsome company dancing, who are as beautiful as angels: S’avoit si bele gent o soi, Que quant je les vi, je ne soi Dont si très beles gens pooient Estre venu; car il sembloient Tout por voir anges empennés, Si beles gens ne vit homs nés. (lines 737–42) 14 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe, ‘The First Adaptations from French: History

and Context of a Debate’, in Arthur in the Celtic Languages: The Arthurian Legend in Celtic Literatures and Traditions, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2019), pp. 110–16 (p. 114). 15 Helen Fulton, ‘Translating Europe in Medieval Wales’, in Writing Empire 500–1450: Texts and Contexts, ed. Aidan Conti, Orietta da Rold, and Philip Shaw (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 158–74 (p. 165). 16 For a succinct discussion of the ‘broad’ and ‘narrow’ definitions of courtly love (i.e. the universality of the mode, or its very specific ideologies as we find it in twelfth-century Provence), see Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 4–5. As Fulton observes, engagements with the concept across different socio-historical contexts might be understood as acts of ‘reinvention’. It is in this respect that we might understand both the formulations of the Roman, and of Dafydd’s poetry.

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Victoria Flood (He [Pleasure] had such handsome people with him that when I saw them I could not tell where they came from, for in truth they seemed to be winged angels: no men ever living saw such fair folk).17

This description gestures towards the fairy company of medieval romance, conventionally described through an affinity with the angelic (although this is often fraught), and located in a Maytime locus amoenus.18 This is not to say that Guillaume’s company are fairies – they are, of course, allegorical; rather, he makes use of otherworldly cues as part of his courtly imagining. On occasion, Guillaume’s mythology of love draws the fairy of French romance directly within its representational system. He writes of the elegant appearance of Venus: ‘El resemblait Déesse ou Fée’ (‘She looked like a goddess or fairy’) (line 3552).19 Guillaume’s use of goddess and fairy as synonyms rests on classical precedent, and the etymological relationship of fée to the classical fatae (the Fates), an association which sits coherently with the author’s reimagined Ovidian scene.20 This is similarly a feature of other Old French romances. We might consider, for example, the three witches in Amadas et Ydoine who masquerade as fairies: ‘Em beles figures de fées; / Si se tiegnent à destinées’ (they [the witches] took on the appearance of beautiful fairies and pretended to be Fates) (lines 2090–91).21 The phrasing we find here is fairly conventional, and we might note an affinity between the ‘beles figures’ of Amadas et Ydoine and the ‘beles gens’ of the Roman. Dafydd would not have necessarily had any particular interest in the Old French fée. The works of French and Anglo-Norman romance that saw Welsh transmission, either in the original or in translation, do not include a single fairy romance (although we might note that within the corpus of medieval romance, fairies are a relatively minor theme). There is the possible fifteenth-century Welsh circulation of a Middle English fairy romance, the Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, although, as James Wade observes, this is not a typically courtly romance, and the extent of its Welsh circulation remains

17 All quotations from the Old French are taken from Pierre Marteau, ed., Le Roman de la

Rose par Guillaume de Lorris et Jean de Meung: Tome I (Paris, 1878). My translation follows that of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 13. Hereafter Romance of the Rose. 18 The long historical association of fairies with the angels – in particular, fallen angels – is a foundational observation in two of the most significant studies on the medieval fairy: Laurence Harf-Lancner, Les fées au moyen âge: Morgane et Mélusine, La naissance des fées (Paris: Editions Champion, 1984); Firth Green, Elf Queens and Holy Friars. 19 Trans. Romance of the Rose, p. 52. 20 The relationship between fée and parcae is discussed by Harf-Lancner, Les feés au moyen âge, pp. 1–25. 21 C. Hippeau, ed., Amadas et Ydoine: Poeme d’Aventures (Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1863).

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation uncertain.22 This absence is not entirely surprising: Welsh literary culture had its own distinct legendary points of reference, which performed functionally similar work to the fairies of medieval romance. The Roman is, at present, the only possible vehicle for French fairy content (or at least, a court with fairy affinities) of which I know, feasibly in Welsh circulation – which accrued new meanings when applied by Dafydd in a Welsh context. There is no cognate term for fée or fairy in Welsh. Although encounters with elements in common with the fairies of romance can be found in the writings of twelfth-century Latin authors such as Walter Map and Gerald of Wales, with possible or very likely Welsh background narratives, the Latin terminology used gives no indication of any Welsh category term.23 The first attested Welsh term which we might understand to correspond to fairy appears in a fifteenth-century cywydd, apocryphally ascribed to Dafydd ap Gwilym: the ‘Tylwyth Teg’ (‘the fair company’). Unlike the fairy of romance, the ‘Tylwyth Teg’ are associated not with the Maytime garden or sylvan scene, but with darkness, winter, and disrupted journeys. The cywydd, ‘Y Niwl Hudolus’ (‘The Enchanted Mist’), tells of the delay of the poet-narrator in his attempt to visit his mistress, following his encounter with a cold, ugly mist which he compares to the home of the ‘Tylwyth Teg’ (line 36).24 The work is thematically close to one of Dafydd’s hindrance poems (cywyddau rhwystr), ‘Y 22 James Wade, ‘Ungallant Knights’, in Heroes and Antiheroes in Medieval Romance,

ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 201–18. Decontextualised passages from Thomas are found in Welsh manuscripts from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although these are lifted from only the prophecies, and there is no evidence that the romance component of the text was known in Wales. For discussion of a fifteenth-century fragment in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 26, see Victoria Flood, Prophecy, Politics, and Place: Political Prophecy in England from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Ercleodune (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), p. 142. Material from Thomas is also integrated in a sequence of English prophecies in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 94 (c. 1600). 23 As Brynley F. Roberts notes, one of the supernatural bride narratives recorded by Walter Map in De Nugis Curialium (the tale of Wastin Wastiniog) has strong claims to a Welsh language background narrative. ‘Melusina: Medieval Welsh and English Analogues’, in Mélusines continentales et insulaires, ed. Jeanne-Marie Boivin and Proinsias MacCana (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999), pp. 281–95. Walter uses the term fata, clearly informed by Latin fairy/succubus mistress accounts, such as those elsewhere in De Nugis. There is also an early allusion to a supernatural subterranean company in the account of the priest Elidorus in Gerald of Wales’s Opera: Giraldi Cambrensis, Opera, 8 vols, ed. J. S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, and George F. Warner (London: Longman and Co., 1868), VI, pp. 75–66; Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales / The Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 133–35. Gerald uses the similarly classical ‘pygmaei’. For Welsh fairy bride narratives, see further P. C. Bartrum, ‘Fairy Mothers’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 19 (1962), 6–8; Juliette Wood, ‘The Fairy Bride Legend in Wales’, Folklore, 103 (1992), 56–72. 24 ‘Y Niwl Hudolus’, in Dafydd ap Gwilym Apocrypha, ed. and trans. Helen Fulton (Llandysol: Gomer Press, 1999), pp. 118–21.

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Victoria Flood Niwl’ (‘The Mist’), where the poet refers to the titular mist as ‘tylwyth Gwyn’ (‘household of Gwyn’ or ‘retinue of Gwyn’) (line 32).25 This allusion rests on an apparently long-lived association of winter with the forces of the Welsh otherworld, Annwfn, and its lord, Gwyn ap Nudd.26 In the works of the cywyddwyr, and one known medical charm, Gwyn is understood to be representative of winter, juxtaposed with his seasonal counterpart, Haf (Summer).27 Gwyn is associated with seasonal change from his very first attested appearance in Welsh literature, in the twelfth century.28 From this early date, he is also understood as the noble leader of a warband or hunting party, and the subject of praise; although in Dafydd’s work the company is used to connote the uncourtly. The latter may well have been Dafydd’s own innovation but, if so, it seems to have precipitated a broader shift in the representation of the theme. Although ‘Tylwyth Teg’ might plausibly be understood as a calque of the ‘beles gens’ of Continental romance, there is no reason to assume that these constructions did not arise independently, and the Welsh name reads 25 All quotations from Dafydd ap Gwilym’s poetry are taken from Dafydd Johnston, Huw

Meirion Edwards, Dylan Foster Evans, A. Cynfael Lake, Elisa Moras, and Sara Elin Roberts, ed. and trans., Cerddi Dafydd ap Gwilym (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010). Unless stated otherwise, Modern English translations are my own, informed by the volume’s Modern Welsh translations and parallel Modern English translations of Dafydd’s poetry at Dafydd ap Gwilym.net (Swansea University) [accessed 22 January 2020]. 26 For discussion of the relationship of Gwyn to the Irish Fionn, see Patrick Sims-Williams, Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 10–11. The two names are cognate, and appear to point to a common, or related, mythological context in circulation in the Irish Sea zone, although how early we can date this remains uncertain. 27 Eurys Rowlands, ‘Cyfeiriadau Dafydd ap Gwilym at Annwn’, Llên Cymru, 5 (1959), 122–35; Eurys Rowlands, ‘Cywydd Dafydd ap Gwilym i Fis Mai’, Llên Cymru, 5 (1959), 1–25; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Gwyn ap Nudd’, Llên Cymru, 13 (1980–81), 283–89 (pp. 287–89). With the exception of a medical charming practice (noted by Roberts) condemned in a fifteenth-century manuscript of the Speculum Christiani (apparently produced in Wales), connections to folk practices raised by these authors are difficult to fully substantiate and, as Roberts notes, the precise dimensions of the charm itself remain obscure. I approach Gwyn in relation to a set of Welsh legendary cultural meanings which clearly held value for Dafydd ap Gwilym’s uchelwyr audience, not least in the invocation of legendary households. This is to say, if the concepts were operating on the popular level, their execution in Dafydd’s poetry may well be class specific. 28 The earliest references to Gwyn are in Culhwch ac Olwen (c. 1100) and ‘Ymddiddan Gwyn ap Nudd a Gwyddno Garanhir’ (c. 1150). Gwyn is associated with Annwfn, and the abduction of Creiddylad, which has been read as a myth of seasonal change. See further, Roberts, ‘Gwyn ap Nudd’; Stephen Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society (New York: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 18–19. The ‘Ymddiddan’ is printed in Jenny Rowland, Early Welsh Saga Poetry: A Study and Edition of the Englynion (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), pp. 462–63, trans. p. 507. See also Rachel Bromwich and R. Brynley Jones, ed., Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1978), pp. 311–18.

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation ironically: the ugliness of Gwyn’s company is emphasised in cywyddau into the seventeenth century.29 If we are to identify in Dafydd’s work a company closer in its courtly formulation to that of the Roman, we find it in his representation of the court of the personified Mai (the month of May). We might understand Dafydd’s representation of Mai in line with the ‘magic naturalism’ that Helen Fulton has observed in the Welsh prose tales – that is, supernatural qualities intrinsic to the environment of the tales, which function in sharp contrast to the agentive magic of English and French romance (including, first and foremost, fairy romance).30 Similarly, Rachel Bromwich locates Dafydd’s poetry between the ‘realism’ of his detailed descriptions of the natural world and the ‘fantasy’ through which that world is implicated in the emotional life of the poet-narrator, not only animate but personified and reactive.31 One of the primary functions of the supernatural company in a Middle Welsh poetic context is the representation of the seasons and seasonal change – a feature which might be understood in relation to Dafydd’s uses of dyfalu (comparison), an extended description of an object or person (in this case a month or season) using a series of metaphors, applied most commonly by Dafydd to scenes of the natural world. This material possesses little by way of conceptual affinity to the otherworldly companies of French or English romance. This is with one significant exception: the court of Love as we find it in Guillaume’s Roman, which draws the arrival of love, and the company of the god of Love, in conjunction with the arrival of May – a reimagining of the popular form of the reverdie, populated by a supernatural cast. In his own engagement with the reverdie, Dafydd is clearly indebted to European popular song (a debt which is at once potentially vast and irresolvable in terms of precise lines of transmission), combined with what Fulton usefully terms ‘native equivalents’ of writing the Maytime scene.32 Yet, among this matrix of cross-lingual influences we might also include the Roman-tradition, for in the poetic potential of the Maytime scene as a site of supernatural encounter we find a nodal point between two traditions of writing the supernatural company: the French and the Welsh.

29 Roberts, ‘Gwyn ap Nudd’, p. 285. 30 Helen Fulton, ‘Magic and the Supernatural in Early Welsh Arthurian Narrative: Culh-

wch ac Olwen and Breuddwyd Rhonabwy’, Arthurian Literature, 30 (2013), 1–26. This is a striking reformulation of Matthew Arnold’s notion of ‘transparent naturalism’ or ‘natural magic’, located more fully in the specific conditions of Middle Welsh literature. See above, note 4. 31 Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 36. 32 Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 153.

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Victoria Flood Cywyddau Serch While Dafydd shows no obvious interest in the allegorical and psychological applications of the French court of love, the courtly situation of love (in terms of the court as a social and material space) is fundamental to his cywyddau serch, even and especially as they engage with the natural world. Although the garden is absent from Dafydd’s love poetry, his sylvan scene is not necessarily a marker of rusticity. In the place of the court of Love and the garden of Pleasure, Dafydd presents the house in the woods. Perhaps the most famous example of this is ‘Y Deildy’ (‘The Leafy Hut’), in which Dafydd imagines a house of trees for himself and ‘claerwawr’ (‘a bright lady’) (line 18), a description consistent with those elsewhere applied to his lover, Morfudd. While rooted in prior traditions of the woodland tryst (the oed), Dafydd’s engagement with the sylvan scene reads as a re-situation of the uchelwyr household and two of its primary cultural institutions: marriage and poetic patronage.33 In their house of trees, the poet-narrator and his lover are entertained by poetry of a type with that addressed by Dafydd to his patrons: Yno y cawn yn y coed Clywed siarad gan adar, Clerwyr coed, claerwawr a’u câr: Cywyddau, gweau gwiail, Cywion, priodolion dail (lines 16–20) (There in the wood we will Hear chattering of birds, Minstrels of the wood, bright lady will love them: Cywyddau of young birds, Natives of the leaves [in] a web of saplings)

While the term ‘clerwyr’ (or clêr) may be used pejoratively to refer to a lower class of popular entertainers, here it may be used to mean ‘poets’ or ‘love poets’ (and it is selected, fittingly, for its alliteration with ‘claerwawr’, Dafydd’s courtly sylvan lover), although the connotations of wandering minstrelsy are also appropriate to the setting.34 Like the poets of the uchelwyr, Dafydd’s birds compose cywyddau, the seven-syllable rhyming couplets written in cynghanedd (the system of alliteration and internal rhyme governing Welsh strict-meter poetry), for an audience of lovers in a noble 33 For the association of the deildy with the uchelwyr household, its political interests, and

its values, see Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym, esp. pp. 153–60 and 168–70.

34 Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 1–37. For Dafydd’s uses of, and association with, the

term, see also Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 190–92; Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 19.

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation (sylvan) house. Dafydd’s forest is as constructed and as courtly a space as the garden of Pleasure.35 This passage utilises the Welsh motif of the bird as llatai (love messenger), a development in which Dafydd’s verse was potentially instrumental, although with a relationship to earlier uses of the animal messenger preserved in Welsh prose and with possible affinities in sub-bardic verse.36 Yet it also possesses an affinity with the first description of the avian inhabitants of the garden of the Roman. Guillaume’s dreamer-narrator listens to the many varieties of birds in the garden, which, with all the spatial indeterminacies of a dream, encompasses woodland: Et mains oisiaus qui par ces gaus Et par ces bois où il habitent, En lor biau chanter se délitent. (lines 674–76) (and many birds throughout the groves and woods where they lived, taking pleasure in their lovely singing.)37

The two cultural frameworks are potentially brought into conjunction in Dafydd’s description of the thrush in ‘Y Ceiliog Bronfraith’ (‘The Cock Thrush’). The lover-narrator asks that the bird llatai, ‘Brydydd serch’ (‘a love poet’), be allowed entry ‘i Baradwys’ (‘into Paradise’) (line 48), an allusion both to the courtly Maytime scene where the poet thinks upon his lover and to the imagined paradise of love reciprocated (the two are in many respects treated as synonymous in the poem). While this allusion may well also rest on an association of the thrush with otherworldly messengers, such as the birds of Rhiannon in the second branch of the Mabinogi, invoked in this particular context ‘Paradwys’ reads tellingly in relation to the scene of the Roman.38 In his reverdie opening, Guillaume’s dreamer-narrator perceives such beauty in the garden of Pleasure that he believes himself to be in Paradise:

35 As Fulton observes of the patrons of the cywyddwyr, ‘Though their audiences were

still elitist, they now included wealthy members of the administrative class or of the Church, who may not have possessed their own “courts” in the traditional sense of the word’, but were nonetheless engaged with courtly imaginings. Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 112. 36 We might think, for example, of the starling messenger of Branwen, in the second branch of the Mabinogi. See further, Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 125–38. 37 Trans. Romance of the Rose, p. 12. 38 For association of the thrush with the birds of Rhiannon, see Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 118. For discussion of the earthly paradise in medieval literature, see Aisling Byrne, Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Dafydd also associates ‘adar Paradwys’ (‘birds of paradise’) (line 29) with a Welsh woodland scene in his poem on the holly grove, ‘Y Llwyn Celyn’.

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Victoria Flood Car si cum il m’iert lors avis, Ne féist en nul Paradis Si bon estre, cum il faisoit Ou vergier qui tant me plaisoit. (lines 655–58) (In fact, I thought then, there is no paradise so good to be in as that garden, which gave me such pleasure.)39

‘Paradwys’ (a borrowing from British Latin) is found in Welsh language poetry from at least the thirteenth century (and was very likely used earlier), referring to the earthly paradise as a geographical concept derived from early medieval Latin sources such as Isidore of Seville, but Dafydd here applies the term in keeping with an explicitly courtly register; a resonance which was surely facilitated by the common appearance of the word in both Welsh and French.40 Elsewhere in his poetry, Dafydd refers to ‘Paradwys’ in a possible association with content from the Roman. For example, in ‘Yr Haf’ (‘Summer’), the poet writes of the beauty of the season, ‘Paradwys, iddo prydaf’ (‘[It is] Paradise, I sing to it’) (line 15), in the context of the summer anxieties of Eiddig, a figure in common with the Jealous Husband of the Roman (although the character does have a broader place in fabliaux). In the same poem Dafydd refers to himself as ‘Dyn Ofydd’ (‘Ovid’s man’) (line 29), which might be taken as an allusion to his engagement with the Ovidian matter of the Roman.41 This correspondence matters first and foremost in terms not of direct borrowing, but of broader conceptual influences and tonal congruities, indicative of Dafydd’s understanding of the Maytime scene, and its magic, as fundamentally courtly. The cultural specificity of this is encapsulated particularly clearly in Dafydd’s description of the building of the woodland house in ‘Y Deildy’: ‘Dewin fy nhŷ a’i dawnha, / Dwylo Mai a’i hadeila’ (‘A magician will bless my house, / The hands of May will weave [or wattle] it’) (lines 23–24). The term ‘dewin’ is used here as a synonym for ‘Mai’, which is here personified, 39 Trans. Romance of the Rose, p. 11. 40 Cf. ‘Kanu y Byt Mawr’, in Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, ed. and trans.

Marged Haycock (Aberystwyth: CMCS, 2015), pp. 514–25. In this cosmological poem, we read of ‘Paradwys’ (line 44) as a temperate region, in line with Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae. Although preserved in the fourteenth-century Book of Taliesin, either this poem or a related source was known to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who in his Vita Merlini (c. 1155) ascribes content of this type to Thelgesin (Taliesin), which might be understood to provide a terminus ad quem for the poem. For notice of early uses of the term, see Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language (University of Wales, 2020), [accessed 13 August 2020]. Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru attests usage only from the thirteenth century. 41 Alternatively, a case has also been made for Dafydd’s direct acquaintance with Ovid, specifically his Amores. See Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 72–73.

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation and drawn into a supernatural frame of reference. ‘Dewin’ has a potentially broad range of meanings, including bard or prophet, and it may here gesture to the transformative powers of the cywydd itself, which writes the house in the woods into being. The term is first attested in the Book of Taliesin in reference to Taliesin’s prophetic knowledge.42 It may also be functioning in relation to the wild-man prophet, Myrddin, who is associated with a sylvan scene and an amorous encounter in the prophecies of the Black Book of Carmarthen, and who features elsewhere in Dafydd’s poetry.43 This is not to say that Dafydd’s poem is explicitly political in the manner of prophecy, or that the reference to ‘dewin’ is an explicitly political marker – rather, the poem draws on an elite, and historical, discourse, recognisable to Dafydd’s patrons. Dafydd locates his uchelwyr readers in a powerful subject position, as patrons of poetry and prophecy; and draws on a long-lived convention orienting the cywyddwyr within a high-status tradition of divinely inspired poetry, stretching back to Taliesin.44 The personification of Mai is a feature of Dafydd’s engagements with the supernaturalised reverdie more broadly. In ‘Mis Mai’ (‘May’), ‘Harddwas teg’ (‘a fair, noble youth’) (line 9), May enriches the poet, and is the chief builder of a court. We read of the growth of sylvan greenery as an impressively rapid, and magnificent, building project overseen by the lordly month: Paun asgellas dinastai, Pa un o’r mil? Penna’r Mai. Pwy o ddail a’i hadeiliai Yn oed y mis onid Mai? (lines 39–42) (Green-winged peacock of a court, Which one of a thousand? May is chief. Who but May might build it from leaves in the space of a month?)

42 ‘Dewin’, in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru [ac-

cessed 13 August 2020].

43 For example, Dafydd appears to allude to the Myrddin legend in ‘Marwnad Madog

Benfras’, where the birch trees (among which Myrddin prophesies in the Black Book) mourn their teacher (Madog, cast in the fashion of Myrddin) (line 41). Myrddin is associated with an otherworldly house in the forest in the works of later cywyddwyr, for which see further Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 119. A house of glass, this almost certainly draws on the identification of Annwfn with ‘caer wydyr’ (‘a fortress of glass’) as we find in the early Arthurian poem ‘Preiddeu Annwfn’. Haycock, Legendary Poems, pp. 433–51. 44 For Dafydd’s association with Taliesin, and his identification of his patrons with figures of the Welsh legendary past, see Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 20, 62 and 141–42.

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Victoria Flood Dafydd’s representation of the lordly Mai aligns with Welsh bardic conventions: assuming the role of the poet’s patron, the month inspires, and creates, the conditions for poetry and love, both of which are oriented in a household context (as in ‘Y Deildy’). Dafydd also draws on a body of legendary Welsh material. Mai, and his counterpart Haf (Summer), consistently are positioned in Dafydd’s work in opposition to winter and the forces of Annwfn (elsewhere represented by Gwyn ap Nudd), a resonance suggestive of Dafydd’s engagement with Welsh mythologies of seasonal change.45 Within this framework we find a significant point of departure from the Roman-tradition: unlike the Roman, with its god of Love, Dafydd’s Maytime poetry is located in an explicitly Christian context.46 The bounty which Mai brings to the poet is understood in relation to the beneficence of God and the Virgin Mary: ‘Duw ddoeth gadarn a farnai / A Mair i gynnal y Mai’ (‘May wise and mighty God give judgement / and may Mary keep May’) (lines 51–52). The wonders of the natural world during this fortuitous month are celebrated as a part of creation in its fullest historical, and apocalyptic, sense. There is a clear bardic convention behind this also: the duty of the bard to praise God and his patron, for which we might again read the nobleman Mai.47 For all the cultural specificity of its execution, there is a functional affinity between the poet-narrator’s service at the court of Mai and the homage of Guillaume’s dreamer-narrator to the Ovidian god of Love, whose banner he bears. The nobility of Love, and the dreamer-narrator, is fundamental to the exchange between the two in Guillaume’s Roman. The god invites the dreamer-narrator to kiss him, in homage, observing: Je n’i lesse mie atouchier Chascun vilain, chascun porchier; Ains doit estre cortois et frans Cil de qui tel servise prens. (lines 2011–14) (I do not allow every peasant and swineherd to touch my mouth; the man whom I thus take into my service must be courteous and noble.)48

45 Rowlands has drawn attention to the affinity between the feathered walls of the

court of Mai and the dwellings thatched with feathers found in Irish stories of the Otherworld – although as Patrick Sims-Williams implies in his brief discussion of the narrative metaphor, the affinity may well rest on ‘metaphorical resources’ rooted in similar riddling traditions, rather than shared frameworks of belief. Rowlands, ‘Cywydd Dafydd ap Gwilym i Fis Mai’, p. 23; Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, pp. 130–31. 46 Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 245. 47 For discussion of Dafydd’s broader engagement with conventions of bardic praise, see Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 109. 48 Trans. Romance of the Rose, p. 30.

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation Similarly, in Dafydd’s engagement with the Maytime scene, love is not for churls. In ‘Mis Mai a Mis Tachwedd’ (‘May and November’), Dafydd makes a sharp distinction between the noble May and the churl of winter. May is a knight, and an ally to lovers: Cadarn farchog, serchog sâl, Cadwynwyrdd feistr coed anial, Cyfaill cariad ac adar, Cof y serchogion a’u câr (lines 3–6) (Mighty knight, lover’s reward, Green-chained master of wild wood, Companion of love and birds, Memory of lovers and their friend)49

The winter month, meanwhile, is the enemy of lovers, and brings rain, short days, frailty and mortality, and the poet curses the month for its ‘[g]wladeiddrwydd’ (‘rusticity’ or ‘discourtesy’): ‘Dêl iddo, rhyw addo rhwydd, / Deuddrwg am ei wladeiddrwydd’ (‘May two misfortunes come to him (an easy kind of vow) for his discourtesy’) (lines 43–44). Although in many respects the poem again makes use of Welsh seasonal mythologies, we might also detect the influence of a broader tradition found in French and Anglo-Norman popular and courtly song (and, as Edwards notes, at least one Middle English lyric), which draw the youth and courtliness of May into contrast with the rusticity and age of the winter months.50 This construction is broadly in line with Guillaume’s Roman, where the month of May is also associated with youth: we might note, for example, the marked youth of the various figures the dreamer-narrator encounters in the allegorical court of Love. The lordly Mai operates for Dafydd in a close conjunction with the specifically class-based connotations of love and the Maytime scene – class interests which are also signalled through an engagement with the Roman tradition and other Francophone models, drawn into correspondence with legendary Welsh content. Thematic allusions to the Roman or related traditions might be understood to function as a type of class marker: Dafydd’s work flatters uchelwyr readers through the assumption of recognition; it assumes an audience well 49 The poem is elsewhere entitled ‘Mis Mai a Mis Ionawr’ (‘May and January’), as the

name of the second month is not given in the poem. The argument for November is made by Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 276, which I here follow in my title, as do the editors of Dafydd ap Gwilym.net [accessed 13 August 2020], and Cerddi Dafydd ap Gwilym. 50 For notice of this broader tradition in French literature, see Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 277. This mode of personification finds a similar manifestation in the fabliau, recreated in an English context in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale’. For the Roman as a possible site of influence for this aspect of Dafydd’s work, see Bromwich, Aspects of the Poetry of Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 74.

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Victoria Flood versed in courtly codes. Indeed, for Dafydd, the courtliness of the scene in which love might occur, as a social and material precondition for courtoisie, is a cipher for nobility. Cywyddau Rhwystr Dafydd’s engagement with summer lordship and love finds a counterpart in the winter discomforts explored in his cywyddau rhwystr, featuring another otherworldly company: that of Gwyn ap Nudd. In ‘Y Pwll Mawn’ (‘The Peat Pit’), while on a nocturnal journey to meet his mistress, the lover-narrator is thwarted by his fall into a bog: Pysgodlyn i Wyn yw ef, Ab Nudd, wb ynn ei oddef! Pydew rhwng gwaun a cheunant, Plas yr ellyllon a’u plant. Y dwfr o’m bodd nid yfwn, Eu braint a’u hennaint yw hwn. (lines 29–34) (It’s a fish-pond belonging to Gwyn ap Nudd, Alas that we should suffer it! A pit between heath and ravine, The place of phantoms [ellyllon] and their brood. I’d not willingly drink that water, It’s their privilege and bathing-place.)51

The scene of cold discomfort finds a familiar connection to Gwyn ap Nudd and Annwfn. By this period, Gwyn’s name has acquired a humorous, or bathetic, resonance. The word ellyllon, here applied to Gwyn’s reimagined company, is commonly used by poets in a satirical context – for example, in the satires of the Red Book of Hergest, where it is used alongside its near synonym ‘ŵyll’ (‘goblin, witch, apparition’), as well as elsewhere in Dafydd’s poetry.52 In ‘Dan Y Bargod’ (‘Under the Eaves’) the poet-narrator haunts his lover’s window, like an ‘ellyll’ (‘phantom’), in the rain and cold (line 42). Similarly, in ‘Y Dylluan’ (‘The Owl’), the titular owl who keeps the poet-narrator from his sleep is described as ‘ellylles adar’ (‘witch/hag of birds’) (line 32), ‘Edn i Wyn ap Nudd’ (‘Gwyn ap Nudd’s bird’) (line 40), and ‘ŵyll ffladr’ (‘garrulous witch’) (line 41). Dafydd’s use of Gwyn and his company in the context of dyfalu, not least in his hindrance poetry, stands in a particular relationship to traditions of bardic satire, although, as 51 Translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym.net

[accessed 22 January 2021].

52 Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, p. 63. ‘Ellyll’ is also associated with madness, specifical-

ly battle madness, in the Welsh Triads. See Bromwich, Trioedd, pp. 179–80.

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation we have seen in Dafydd’s representation of Mai, dyfalu is a marked feature of descriptions of the natural world also.53 Dafydd is not alone in the association he draws between Annwfn, bogs, and otherworldly delays or impediments to a journey through the Welsh winter or nocturnal landscape – it is a feature of late medieval and early modern Welsh strict-meter poetry, where the theme is similarly a subject of humour.54 It presumably rests on the notion of a journey to Annwfn over water, or under it, turned to bathetic or comic effect.55 Yet Dafydd’s specific vein of humour stands in a suggestive relationship to the positioning of the otherworldly court of Love, and rests on a very specific cross-linguistic, and cross-cultural, field of allusion. The dreamer-narrator of the Roman discovers the garden of Pleasure in a meadow, beside a river, on a fair, warm day: D’ung tertre qui près d’iluec iere Descendoit l’iave grant et roide, Clere, bruiant, et aussi froide Comme puiz, ou comme fontaine, Et estoit poi mendre de Saine, Més qu’ele iere plus espanduë. Onques més n’avoie véuë Cele iave qui si bien coroit: Moult m’abelissoit et séoit A regarder le leu plaisant. De l’iave clere et reluisant Mon vis rafreschi et lavé. Si vi tot covert et pavé Le fons de l’iave de gravele; La praérie grant et bele Très au pié de l’iave batoit, Clere et serie et bele estoit La matinée et atrempée. (lines 110–27) (The water fell swiftly and abundantly from a nearby hill; it was clear and cold as a well or a spring, not quite so great as the Seine, but wider. Never before had I seen that stream, which was so beautifully situated, and I gazed on the delightful spot with pleasure and happiness. As I cooled and 53 Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 138–40. 54 Roberts, ‘Gwyn ap Nudd’, pp. 284–85. 55 A number of possible references to the depth at which Annwfn is found are noted

by Haycock, Legendary Poems, p. 440. See also John Carey, ‘The Location of the Otherworld in Irish Tradition’, in The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature, ed. J. Wooding (Dublin: Four Courts, 2000), pp. 113–19 (Welsh material is discussed on pp. 118–19). This chapter was first published in Éigse: A Journal of Irish Studies, 19 (1982–83), 36–43. See further Sims-Williams, Irish Influence, pp. 57–58.

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Victoria Flood washed my face in the clear, shining water, I saw that the bed of the stream was all covered and paved with gravel. The fair, broad meadow descended to the water’s edge, and the morning was clear and calm and mild.)56

This is a relatively common scene for an otherworldly encounter in medieval romance, of which Dafydd’s peat pit reads as a distortion.57 ‘Y Pwll Mawn’ potentially presents a deliberate pastiche of the otherworldly scene of the French tradition, of which Dafydd makes positive use in his cywyddau serch. In line with Gwyn’s associations with winter and cold, the water is muddy rather than clear; the weather is grim; and the lover does not wash his face; rather, this is the wash house of ellyllon.58 Elsewhere in his poetry, Dafydd positions the winter landscape and its bogs in direct comparison with the beauty, and courtesy, of the month of May. In ‘Mis Mai’ we read: ‘Pyllog, gorau pe pallai, / Y gaeaf, mwynaf yw Mai’ (‘Winter is full of pools, best if perished, / May is most courteous’) (lines 45–46). There is a Welsh legendary background to this, and antipathy between summer and winter is a feature of Dafydd’s poetry which was plausibly drawn from independent Welsh traditions. Yet, most interesting for my purposes is Dafydd’s socio-political (re)positioning of this material, both French and Welsh. In his interest in Annwfn, the poet is engaged, as we find in his cywyddau serch, with the precedent of the noble household. Much as Mai builds his court in the woodland glade, the company of Gwyn ap Nudd have their home in the bog. The description inverts the values of praise poetry: whilst in the home of a uchelwr patron, such as Ifor Hael, good drink flows freely, the wine of the ellyllon is such that no one ought to consume it, and it is fit only for pigs:59 Llyn gwin egr, llanw gwineugoch, Lloches lle’r ymolches moch, Llygrais achlân f’hosanau Cersi o Gaer mewn cors gau. (lines 35–38)

56 Trans. Romance of the Rose, p. 4. 57 Helen Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune: Romance as Prophecy’, in Cultural Encounters

in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 171–88 (p. 178). As Helen Cooper notes, this feature of fairy romance functions analogously, and potentially in relation to, the French pastourelle. For the possible influence of the pastourelle on medieval Welsh poetry, see Edwards, Dafydd ap Gwilym, pp. 195–96, and Dafydd may well be drawing on this also. 58 This was a favourite allusion of Dafydd. In ‘Y Niwl’ (‘The Mist’), he describes the mist as ‘Ennaint gwrachïod Annwn’ (‘washing-house of the witches of Annwfn’) (line 44). 59 In his ‘Awdl i Ifor Hael’, Dafydd celebrates Ifor as ‘Hardd eisyllydd rhydd, rhodd ddidor – meddlyn’ (‘Fair generous descendant, a ceaseless gift of mead’) (line 33). His epithet ‘Hael’ find a precedent in the Three Generous Men of the Welsh Triads, one of whom, Nudd, is mentioned in line 26.

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The Supernatural Company in Cultural Translation (A lake of acrid wine, a tide of reddish brown, a haven where pigs washed themselves. I ruined entirely my kersey stockings from Carmarthen in a hollow bog.)60

The home of the ellyllon is brought into conjunction with a recognisable cipher for bourgeois values in Dafydd’s poetry: the poet-narrator’s kersey (woven) stockings from English-controlled Carmarthen.61 Stockings feature elsewhere in Dafydd’s poetry as an intentionally humorous detail, associated with social pretensions and a love that is less than ennobling. We might note, for example, Dafydd’s representation of Elen Nordd, the wife of the English merchant Robin Nordd (‘North’), who pays Dafydd in stockings for his poetry and love. In ‘Dewis Un o Bedair’ (‘Choosing One from Four’), which juxtaposes Elen with the well-born Welshwomen, Morfudd and Dyddgu, and an unnamed fourth love (who, Stephen Knight has convincingly suggested, may be Welsh sovereignty itself),62 Dafydd addresses Elen: Fy anrhaith, â’r lediaith lud, Brenhines, arglwyddes gwlân, Brethyndai bro eithindan (lines 18–20) (My treasure [or storehouse], with the obdurately incorrect pronunciation, Lady of wool, queen of cloth-houses of gorse-fired land)

The allusion to Elen as a monolingual English queen (or at least, an Englishwoman who cannot quite get her mouth around Welsh words), ruling over her cloth-houses and their decidedly uncourtly environs, must be read alongside Dafydd’s description of their encounter at the home of Robin Nordd.63 He meets Elen ‘Wrth lyn y porthmonyn moel, / Gwragennus, esgus osgordd’ (‘at the feast [lit. drink] of the bald merchant, / humpbacked, [with] a sham retinue’) (lines 14–15).64 The Norths share a bathetic quality with the court of the ellyllon, whose wine (the water of the peat pit itself) is as undesirable 60 Translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym.net

[accessed 22 January 2021].

61 For a discussion of anti-English sentiment in Dafydd’s poetry, alongside both natu-

ralised and self-conscious references to English merchandise in the work of Dafydd and his contemporaries, see Helen Fulton, ‘Class and Nation: Defining the English in Late-Medieval Welsh Poetry’, in Authority and Subjugation, pp. 191–212. 62 Knight, ‘Chaucer’s British Rival’, p. 92. 63 For an interesting discussion of Dafydd’s perception of a lack of linguistic dexterity, even ugliness of speech, among the English, in relation to Elen and other English figures in his poetry, see Knight, ‘“Love’s Altar is the Forest Glade”’, p. 182. 64 Punctuation of these lines is as given in the entry for ‘Gwragennus’, in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru [accessed 22 January 2021], which informs the reading and translation I here give.

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Victoria Flood as the surrounding landscape. Both scenes are decidedly uncourtly, and the household of Robin, and Elen’s rule over the cloth-house, tonally has much in common with Gwyn’s lordship of the bog. Indeed, in ‘Y Pwll Mawn’, Englishness (signified by the poet-narrator’s kersey stockings) is invoked as a point of contrast to the courtly values of the Maytime scene, just as Elen (associated with the world of work rather than the idleness of love, a key principle of the Roman tradition) is outside Dafydd’s re-situated conceptualisation of courtoisie. Englishness is a point of bathos, a marker of the ignoble company, of work, of darkness, and of winter, and it seems that there is a distinction in Dafydd’s thought between signifiers understood to be English, and those understood to be French. First and foremost, among the latter, I suggest that we find the sylvan paradise of the Roman, reimagined by Dafydd as a naturalised Welsh courtly space, endorsed by its Francophone associations. Conclusion This chapter has pursued the central thesis that the social and cultural specificity of supernatural frameworks might present the grounds for analysis of cultural translation, approached as a litmus test for points of commonality and divergence. It proposes that we ask not what the fairies of English and French romance owe to the legendary content of literature in the Celtic languages; rather, that we approach the two as an exercise in the study of moments of correspondence and departure, regarding representations of the supernatural company as a historically and culturally situated phenomenon. Dafydd’s poetry presents cultivated points of intersection, the work of an author thinking across Welsh and French poetic and cultural contexts. His work draws on distinctively Welsh legendary material, praise conventions, and representations of the natural world, alongside, I suggest, French conventions of writing love, aristocratic leisure, and the courtly locus amoenus, which in the Roman de la Rose tradition appear in a supernatural framework of meaning which supplements, although by no means substitutes, Dafydd’s Welsh cultural formations. His work is not comprised of disjunctive cultural elements; rather, these frame part of a coherently socio-politically positioned worldview, drawing French content into dialogue with Welsh. The courtliness of the one informs, and intensifies, the courtliness of the other. In Dafydd’s work, the reimagined courtly paradise of the Roman becomes synonymous with Welshness, as it is constructed within the class context, and classed imaginings, of his uchelwyr patrons.

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4 Women and Werewolves: William of Palerne in Three Cultures HELEN COOPER

W

illiam of Palerne, otherwise known more engagingly as William and the Werewolf, survives in Middle English in only one manuscript, but it was much more widely known than that would suggest.1 The romance was originally composed in continental French in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, for a ‘countess Yolande’, probably a countess of Hainault who died c. 1212.2 The mid-fourteenth-century Middle English translation – and despite its chosen form of alliterative rather than rhymed verse, it frequently comes closer to being a translation than the kind of free adaptation made of many French or Anglo-Norman romances into English – was composed, as the translator (himself called William) tells us, for a grandson of Edward I, Humphrey de Bohun, sixth earl of Hereford, who died in 1361. Both these versions, the French and the English, were printed in prose renderings in the sixteenth century. The French prose, based on the original Guillaume, was produced some time before 1535, and went through a number of editions into the seventeenth century.3 It was preceded by the English prose, printed 1 King’s College, Cambridge, MS 13: William of Palerne: An Alliterative Romance, ed.

G. H. V. Bunt (Groningen: Bouma’s Boekhuis, 1985). References to William are to this edition. 2 Guillaume de Palerne: Roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. Alexandre Micha (Geneva: Droz, 1990); references to Guillaume are to this edition. It makes the claim that it was itself translated from Latin, but claims of that kind were by no means unusual and can rarely be backed by any evidence. There is a detailed analysis of this version, in particular of its folktale connections, in the classic study by Charles W. Dunn, The Foundling and the Werwolf: A Literary-Historical Study of Guillaume de Palerne (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1960). The identity of the countess Yolande is not certain: Christine de Ferlampin-Archer discusses a range of other options in the extensive introduction to her modern French translation, Guillaume de Palerne (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012), pp. 32–48. 3 A Paris edition of 1535 is in the Columbina Library, Seville, so predating the 1552 edition cited by Bunt (p. 21), Ferlampin-Archer (p. 48) and Georges Doutrepont, Les Mises en prose des épopées et des romans chevaleresques du XIVe au XVIe siècle (Brussels:

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Helen Cooper around 1515 by Wynkyn de Worde complete with woodcuts. This survives in the form of only two leaves from near the end of the story, though that is sufficient to demonstrate that, exceptionally among prose romances, it was based on the Middle English poem, not on any French version.4 Those leaves are also enough to show that it was the immediate source of the Irish Eachtra Uilliam, ‘the deeds of William’ (or, as one might put it in a more medieval formulation, the Gesta Guilielmi). It was composed probably towards the end of the sixteenth century for the high-ranking Anglo-Irish Dillon family of county Mayo.5 This version too is predominantly in prose but, like many Irish romances, it also contains a number of inset lais such as are recurrently found in other Irish romances, but apparently never elsewhere in one translated from another language.6 All of these, except for the French prose, survive in only a single copy. The rest of this chapter will focus primarily on three of those various texts, the octosyllabic French, the alliterative English, and the prose with interspersed verse of the Irish; but, taken together with the printed prose versions, they indicate how attractive the story was found across a range of cultures, languages, and prosodic forms into the early modern period. Translation practice is now often divided into the ‘domesticated’, adapted for the target audience, and ‘foreignized’, intentionally retaining the sense of cultural difference from its original.7 The terms do not sit comfortably with Guillaume and its derivatives, however. Apart from the choice of a verse form alien to French, there is very little domestication, or apparent need for it, in the English William. In the Irish, besides the lais, frequent passages of vivid description, in particular for clothing, the sea, or emotions that can be compared to those, add their own level of cultural difference that recurrently marks it out from all the earlier texts, but those are decorative

4 5

6 7

Palais des Académies, 1939), pp. 295–97. The 1535 date is confirmed not only by typographic details of the volume but by its date of acquisition for the Columbina (August 1535, for the price of 24 ‘dineros’, deniers): my thanks to Edward Wilson-Lee for the information. For its grounding in the English William, see Bunt’s edition, pp. 23–26; for the text, see pp. 328–31. Eachtra Uilliam: An Irish Version of William of Palerne, ed. and trans. Cecile O’Rahilly (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1949), from Dublin, Royal Irish Academy MS Stowe A.v.2; Aisling Byrne gives more information about the manuscript in her ‘Writing Westwards: Medieval English Romances and their early modern Irish Audiences’, in Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper, ed. Andrew King and Matthew Woodcock (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 73–89 (p. 82). References to Eachtra are to O’Rahilly’s text and translation; sadly, I have had to work from the translation, though I gratefully acknowledge further assistance from Dr Byrne. See Erich Poppe, ‘The Early Modern Irish Version of Beves of Hamtoun’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 23 (1992), 77–98 (p. 81); Byrne, ‘Writing Westwards’, p. 82. See Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 1995).

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Women and Werewolves flourishes added to an identical story.8 The extensive similarity of all the versions across its long and varied reception history invites a question as to why it retained such appeal, and how much adaptation it needed to make those transitions – or, rather, why it might have needed less cultural translation than might be expected, especially since (or perhaps because) all its various texts recurrently contradict many of our received generalisations or assumptions about medieval romance: assumptions about historicisation, transmission, form, gender, and popularisation. The question deserves to be asked, not least since William of Palerne has received little sustained critical attention in any of its redactions. That we know the patrons of all three versions would seem to invite historicist readings, but they have not to my knowledge been attempted. Palermo, the ‘Palerne’ of the title, was the capital of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, which was a key part of the various Norman rulerships that extended across the Mediterranean to the Near East. If Yolande was indeed the countess most widely accepted, she was the eldest daughter of count Baudouin IV of Hainault and Flanders; she married two successive counts, and her nephew Baudouin VI eventually briefly became the first Latin emperor of Constantinople (1204–5). It is, however, very hard to pin down such links in the text beyond a general sense of the interconnectedness of the Mediterranean world,9 and they were too far in the past to mean much for the later versions, though its general topographic accuracy is maintained. The lack of historicist attention is perhaps more surprising for the Middle English, given that it is the only verse romance before 1400 for which we have a known patron and date, and that the patron himself is of such high standing; but by the fourteenth century, and even more by the sixteenth, its value seems to have lain entirely in the story, not in any political context. Humphrey de Bohun headed a high aristocratic family with close links to royalty, and so was very different in class terms from the gentry families who can be linked to other Middle English romances. The author tells us that he was composing it at the earl’s command ‘for hem þat knowe no Frensche’ (line 5531), presumably his household. Its place of composition was probably at one of Humphrey’s manors in Gloucestershire, a location that would also fit with the numerous West Midland features of its dialect.10 There has been 8 On the Irish fondness for such ‘alliterating strings’ of near-synonymous adjectives, see

Poppe, ‘Early Modern Irish Versions’, pp. 82–83; and pp. 78–79 for the contrasting freedom of adaptation found in most imported romances. 9 For a general study of Sicily in Mediterranean politics and in Middle English romance (though not William) see David Wallace, ‘Origination and Mediation: Sicily’, in the Routledge Companion of Medieval English Literature in a Trans-European Context, 1100–1500, ed. Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir (London: Routledge, 2021), [forthcoming]. 10 See Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1977), pp. 40–41. On details of the language, see Bunt, pp. 37–76.

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Helen Cooper an assumption that it is a ‘popular’ romance, presumably on the grounds that any romance translated from French into Middle English cannot continue to be courtly; but the work is generally so faithful to its original that to make a sharp distinction between the two does not make sense for William, despite its choice of alliteration. The earl’s manors were not the royal court, but they still contained a great baronial household. Much of what critical attention the alliterative William has received is limited to brief mentions in general accounts of Middle English romance, but they tend to be dismissive. Three noteworthy exceptions are the excavations into Humphrey’s life by Richard Firth Green;11 a sympathetic and well-informed article by Arlyn Diamond;12 and a study of the religious tenor of the narrative style by Roger Dalrymple.13 All are unusual in recognising its virtues, an approach not always shared by other scholars. Studies of the alliterative revival give it little space, perhaps because its early date makes it anomalous in terms of prosodic development: it may be the earliest alliterative Middle English poem we have. Its translator has been accused of incompetence in mastering the alliterative line, but if he were indeed the first person to use it at all extensively, what is more striking is the confidence with which he handles it.14 It was probably another few decades before the Gawain-poet, who set the highest standards for a rule-bound alliterative verse, produced his own work. Many of the other alliterative poems were also associated with the West Midlands: the setting of Piers Plowman in the Malverns is the most familiar example of that regional association, while the Gawain-poet’s language indicates a provenance from somewhat further north, in the Cheshire/Derbyshire area. William’s baronial provenance, however, makes it hard to categorise simply as provincial – just as an association with the royal court has often been suggested for the works of the linguistically provincial Gawain-poet. As an alliterative romance, William is also anomalous in generic terms. The standard metrical forms for Middle English romance were tetrameter couplets and tail-rhyme. Alliterative poetry seems to have been primarily associated with either male-focused social or ethical issues (such as Winnere and Wastoure, often taken to be the earliest example alongside William) or with epic:

11 Richard F. Green, ‘Humphrey and the Werewolf’, in Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Es-

says in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed. John A. Burrow and Hoyt N. Duggan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 107–24. 12 Arlyn Diamond, ‘Loving Beasts: The Romance of Guillaume de Palerne’, in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 142–56; see p. 144 for some examples of less favourable critics, and Bunt pp. 109–11 for a wider range of views. 13 Roger Dalrymple, Language and Piety in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 64–81. 14 See the extensive analysis in Bunt, pp. 77–88.

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Women and Werewolves Alexander, Arthur, Troy, the destruction of Jerusalem.15 Even the alliterative romance with the lowest proportion of battle to other interests (interests that include a marked interest in childhood experience), the Chevalere Assigne, has its original in the laisses of the Old French Knight of the Swan cycle. There are still plenty of battle scenes in William (though they are somewhat abbreviated from the French), but it has far more of the characteristics that are generally taken to indicate an interest for women: its concerns with love, emotion, and marriage, in addition to its initial patronage by Yolande, would seem to make it a prime subject for the broad field of women’s studies. It also contains a cross-dressing episode when the heroine’s cousin Alisaundrine disguises herself as a scullion, a widow (William’s mother) who rules as a notably competent regent, and a marked emphasis on the heroine herself. It seems at present, however, to be attracting more critics interested in animal studies than in women’s studies.16 If a gender-oriented approach would fit well with the provenance of the French – a female emphasis for a work commissioned by a woman – that would seem at first glance to be markedly at odds with its English avatar. Earl Humphrey never married, so it might be assumed that his household, for whose anglophone members we are told it was written, was overwhelmingly male, including a good proportion of clerks and knights. His will, however, offers an intriguing modification of such a view. It lists a good number of his servants by name, very largely male, but including one woman who may have been in charge of his personal effects, and three ‘damoysels’ to whom he left his bedlinen and, in one instance, money for a dowry.17 The earl’s primary language was very likely French, though by this date the nobility were at home in English too; and he presumably liked the original version well enough to think it appropriate for the members of his retinue, of whatever gender, who knew only English. The family of his nephew (another Humphrey), who inherited the title when his uncle died childless, certainly contained some prominent women. The nephew’s wife, Joan Fitzalan, indeed seems to have been quite a formidable character, especially after she was widowed in 1373. She commissioned Hoccleve’s Complaint of the Virgin, as is noted at the end of the poem. It may also have been she who commissioned two fine, illuminated devotional manuscripts, now in Copenhagen, for her daughters Eleanor, 15 See Rosalind Field, ‘The Anglo-Norman Background to Alliterative Romance’, in

Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, ed. David A. Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 54–69. 16 See for instance Norman Hinton, ‘The Werewolf as Eiron: Freedom and Comedy in William of Palerne’, in Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 133–46: an article that points out how much of the action in the romance is dependent on the assistance of the werewolf. See also Peggy McCracken’s study of the French Guillaume, cited in note 24 below. 17 See Green, ‘Humphrey and the Werewolf’, pp. 119–20.

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Helen Cooper who married Thomas of Woodstock, uncle of Richard II, and Mary, who married Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV.18 Both these great-nieces also owned French romances, including a Chevalier au Cygne and a Lancelot.19 It is impossible to make any direct links between the bachelor Humphrey and the interests of his nephew’s family, but they do give some idea both of the standing of the Bohuns and of their openness to cultural interests. The centrality of women is, however, a notable feature of the romance, in all its versions. Most of that attraction is focused on the heroine, Melior, who is given consistent prominence. She is sufficiently notable to have joined William in the title of both the English and French prose redactions. For Richard Hyrd, whose translation of Vives’ Instruction of a Christen Woman made for Katherine of Aragon was published in 1529, ‘Wyllyam and Miliour’ was one of the English romances that he added to Vives’ list of ‘ungratious bokes’ that he thought might lead the young astray, but the citation doubles as an indicator of its popularity.20 The key words of the title of the French prose (which expands to form a kind of plot summary) are Lhistoire du noble tres preux et vaillant cheualier guillaume de palerne et de la belle melior. The story itself is immensely complicated, but four high-standing women play key roles, and even a peasant woman is given sympathetic attention. It starts with the abduction of the infant William, heir to the kingdoms of Apulia and Sicily, by a werewolf who is himself the rightful heir to the kingdom of Spain but under an enchantment inflicted by his stepmother. The toddler is discovered by a cowherd, who, with his wife, proceeds to bring him up lovingly for the next seven years. After being spotted by the emperor of Rome in the course of a hunt, he is placed in the household of his daughter Melior. They fall in love – for William, with some additional fixing by way of a dream engineered for him by Melior’s cousin Alisaundrine. When Melior is faced with the prospect of marrying the son of the emperor of Greece, they elope: initially with Alisaundrine’s help in disguise as white bears, then with essential assistance from the werewolf, who also provides them with a fresh disguise as deer. For all Melior’s determination as to her choice of husband and William’s prowess as a warrior, as demonstrated in a number of lengthy battle scenes, the lovers show singularly little initiative in actually controlling their lives: that is outsourced to Alisaundrine and the werewolf. It is with the werewolf’s help 18 See Marina Vidas, The Copenhagen Bohun Manuscripts: Women, Representation, and

Reception in Late Fourteenth-Century England (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2019), pp. 15–33. The Copenhagen manuscripts are most likely to date from after the death of the seventh earl in 1373, but a date in Humphrey’s lifetime is not impossible; one of the illuminators was working at Pleshey, one of his manors, before his death (pp. 17, 33). 19 Turville-Petre, Alliterative Revival, p. 42. 20 Richard Hyrd, A very frvteful and pleasant boke callyd the Instrvction of a Cristen woman (1529), cap. v (Eiva).

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Women and Werewolves that they eventually arrive at the court of Sicily, capably ruled by William’s widowed mother, who, along with Melior, experiences a dream that tracks the progress of the plot;21 and she too briefly disguises herself in a deerskin to meet the lovers. Eventually everyone, including the restored werewolf, is given an appropriate marriage and succeeds to their rightful kingdom; and Melior is sent off to assume her role as empress with a long speech of advice from her father on good female rule, which alongside instruction on fair taxation and the defence of the church slips in a line on being nice to her mother-in-law, given additional emphasis in the Irish.22 In the Middle English, even the cowherd and his wife are brought into the great court scene at the end and given a castle, lands, and the promise of assistance in governing them.23 There is little in this of the misogyny that is such a feature of so much medieval literature. If Peggy McCracken, in her study of animals in French literature, is right in her association of animal disguise with sovereignty, it is notable that, in contrast to most disguises of the male hero in medieval romances, both Melior and William’s mother also adopt such disguises;24 and it is Melior who, as the heiress to an empire, represents the highest sovereignty, with the promise of good rule already exemplified by her mother-in-law. The animal skins assumed as disguise by the lovers and briefly by William’s mother moreover hide their royalty, but not their gender. It is true that it is a woman who turns her stepson into a werewolf, an act that likewise leaves his inherent royalty intact; but such an action is in keeping with similar transformations in other medieval texts (the adulterous wives of Marie de France’s Bisclavret and the Cambro-Latin Arthur and Gorlagon are the best-known examples). The stepmother is first introduced in the English as being ‘worchipful’ and led astray by her knowledge of ‘nigramauncy’.25 The werewolf’s first reaction to his transformation is to attempt to throttle her, as happens again when he first sees her at the end of the story; but her preservation is necessary to de-enchant him, and even she, the wicked stepmother, is allowed to repent in a passage that presents her with surprising sympathy, in marked contrast to the harsh punishments inflicted on such women elsewhere. Her wickedness is treated as 21 The dreams are studied by Jamie McKinstry, Middle English Romance and the Craft of

Memory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), pp. 120–24.

22 William, 5113–35 (5119–20); Guillaume, 9019–35 (9026–70); Eachtra, pp. 130–32,

trans. p. 223, which notes that women often fail to treat their mothers-in-law with proper respect. 23 William, 5359–98, based on only a hint in the French (9419–23; and see Green, ‘Humphrey and the Werewolf’, pp. 121–22). It is not clear from the surviving leaves of the English prose redaction as to whether it included the cowherd (ed. Bunt, William, pp. 328–31); it is also missing from the Irish manuscript. 24 Peggy McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 78–98. 25 William, lines 115–19; in Guillaume, by contrast, she is simply ‘engien et mal’ (line 286). The opening pages are missing from Eachtra.

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Helen Cooper aberrant, and she is accepted back into the society of all the other characters at the end. The romance in all its versions presents a world in which women recurrently take centre stage, and that is assumed to be their natural place. From its inception in the original Guillaume, Melior’s role was distinctive. Other twelfth-century romances sometimes give concentrated attention to their heroines: the Lavine of the Roman d’Eneas, for instance, is given far more space than Virgil ever gives Lavinia, but she still dominates only its last third. Melior is also never tainted with anti-feminist commentary, as happens with La Fière of Ipomedon (though she is given a more consistently sympathetic treatment in its English versions). All these heroines are part of a lineage, originating with Lavine and carried forward through heroines such as the Soredamors of Chretien de Troyes’ Cligès, who present a striking alternative to both the conventional courtly image of the adulterous lady (who is herself almost non-existent in English before Malory) and the homiletic ideal of the chaste, silent, and obedient woman.26 They reject the sexual partners chosen for them by their parents; their chastity consists of a passionate faithfulness to the man on whom they themselves have set their hearts; and they describe their passion in long soliloquies that allow no space for audience dissent – soliloquies that tend towards the Augustinian sense of internal debates, and not least Melior’s. Those emphases extend across the English and Irish as well as the French depictions of her. She agonises over submitting to her emotions rather than her reason, but finally determines, with a firm conviction of right, that her emotion is itself rational; she refuses to follow her father’s plans for an imperial marriage, settling for a foundling of unknown origin; they escape in disguise in sub-human form, as beasts; and she argues the validity of her choice in speeches that demonstrate an impassioned eloquence. All this is backed, furthermore, by consistent and frequent appeals to God and Christ from the young lovers, and their appeals are presented as valid: the plotline has divine endorsement.27 The alliterative poem even has the werewolf thank God in reported thought when the infant William is taken in by the cowherd, where the French narration just embeds a prayer for his safety (William, 26 On this representation of the romance heroine, see further Helen Cooper, The English

Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 222–29; and her ‘Passionate, Eloquent and Determined: Heroines’ Tales and Feminine Poetics’, Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, Journal of the British Academy, 4 (2016), 221–44. Soredamors is compelled to marry a man she does not love, but famously manages to avoid giving her body to anyone who does not have her heart (Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes II: Cligès, ed. Alexandre Micha (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1982); see in particular her soliloquy, lines 458–527). Soredamors is presented as an explicit contrast to Isolde, who is another of these early female soliloquisers but is compelled to marry. 27 Dalrymple, Language and Piety, pp. 64–81, studies the romance’s extensive use of formulae on God as creator; on their augmentation from the French, p. 65.

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Women and Werewolves 102–3; Guillaume, 268–69). The possibility of anti-feminist, or even patriarchal, resistance from the audience is in effect ruled out. The love aspects of the romance are dominated by Melior. She is a heroine who resists being treated as a commodity traded between men, in the classic anthropological definition.28 She is certainly a material asset as well as an object of desire, but she decides her own destiny and chooses her own object of desire – even if putting that choice into practice depends very much on Alisaundrine. That emphasis on her own will is demonstrated from almost the first moment she is mentioned in the story, in a lengthy soliloquy contained in all the versions, in which she describes her love for William as she tosses and turns sleepless in bed: a passage that precedes anything about his own feelings for her. Up to this point, the romance has been the story solely of the abduction and early history of William. Melior’s soliloquy not only rebalances that emphasis but goes inside her mind, so that she is the first character we get to know intimately, not as object but with her own subjecthood. It is a commonplace of criticism that Middle English versions of French romances both abbreviate their originals and prioritise action over feeling; but not in William. In French, her speech runs for 120 octosyllabic lines. The English Melior’s is substantially longer, at over 140 longer alliterative lines (its exact length is impossible to determine as it starts on a leaf missing from the manuscript, though probably not much has been lost). And the Irish Melior is given, if anything, even more striking attention, since we are given the monologue twice, in some ninety lines of printed prose, and embedded within that, a further forty-four lines of verse that repeat similar material with variations in lyric form.29 William shows no signs of comparable feelings until he experiences the dream sent him by Alisaundrine, in which the lovesick Melior comes to him lamenting, and he wakes to find himself hugging his pillow. Melior’s description of her feelings is worth analysing in detail, as it allows close comparison between the three versions at a point where modern cultural expectations might predict divergences in both length and content but where surprisingly little is to be found. In all of them, like other early heroines, Melior works through many of the paradoxes and contradictions later associated with the male lover but which may have been instigated for women. The style in which this is conveyed shows a marked difference only in the Irish: when she sets out the mixture of heat and cold she endures, the Eachtra intensifies it with a preliminary narrative comparison to the ‘stinging, venomous ice of the 28 See Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’,

in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157–210. 29 Guillaume, lines 829–949; William, lines 433–571; Eachtra, lines 212–343, of which lines 247–91 are verse; translation on pp. 140–42. That the missing opening of the soliloquy in William followed the French closely is confirmed by the similarity of the French and Irish, for which the English text was the intermediary.

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Helen Cooper fierce month of February’ and ‘burning red embers’30 – a vivid elaboration of a kind deployed extensively across the Irish text, and which contributes much of its defamiliarisation.31 In all the versions, she describes the combined misery and pleasure of having William lodged in her heart: Seþþe sike I and sing samen togedere, And melt neiȝh for mourning, and moche joie make. (William, lines 433–34) (Hence I sigh and sing both at once, almost melt for grief and make great joy.)

Such sentiments are most familiar now from love-monologues put into the mouths of male lovers; but here, it is all done with a consciousness that it is a woman speaking – and a young and generally innocent woman at that. One striking feature of the passage is what it does with the idea of gazing, and the transfer of what is conventionally the male gaze to Melior herself.32 There has been no physical description of Melior up to this point – nothing about her hair, face, figure, and so on, of the kind standard in many romances – though that the young William is good looking has been mentioned on various occasions, along with the qualities that make him a favourite at court. In Melior’s monologue, however, we are shown him through her eyes, not in terms of physical appearance but in terms of the impression he makes on her. As with Lavine and the heroines of Cligès and Ipomedon, the emphasis falls on her own looking, on the female gaze: Voirement n’est de sa persoune, Tant come li siecles aviroune, Nus demoisiax, ce m’est avis, N’a si bel angle en paradis Comme il est au mien essiënt: Si me merveil de ce forment Qu’adès port sa semblance escrite Ens en mon cuer, et si confite Que tant ne sui poissans ne fors Que je le puisse esrachier fors … Dont ai je tort qui en blasmoie Mon cuer de rien, ce m’est avis. 30 Eachtra, p. 6, trans. p. 140. 31 Other instances of such vivid elaboration often concentrate on the sea, but for another

emotional example, see the highly coloured account of Melior’s changing complexion, crimson, white, and blue (Eachtra, p. 11; trans., p. 143). 32 The classic studies are by Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, reprinted in her Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14–26, and for medieval literature, A. C. Spearing, Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For opposing evidence of women’s gazing at men, see Cooper, ‘Passionate, Eloquent and Determined’.

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Women and Werewolves Cui dont? Mes iex qui l’i ont mis En cele voie et mené la. (Guillaume, lines 847–56, 862–5) (Truly, to my mind, there is no young man in the whole world, nor any angel in paradise no matter how fair, who to my knowledge is like him. I marvel at how I hold his likeness inscribed in my heart, so firmly that I am incapable of tearing it out … So I am wrong to blame my heart for anything, I believe. Whom then? My eyes, that have set me on this path and led me along it.)

In the Middle English, that emphasis on looking as the female gaze is markedly increased, with multiple repetitions of ‘sight’, ‘beholding’, ‘eyes’, ‘looking’; but her gaze is directed inwards, not to him but into her own heart. Prince is none his pere, ne in paradiȝs non aungel, as he semes in mi siȝt, so faire is þat burne. I have him portreide an paynted in mi hert wiþinne, þat he sittus in mi siȝt, me þinkes, evermore … Þeiȝh I winne wiþ mi werk þe worse evermore, so gret liking and love I have þat lud to bihold, þat I have lever þat love þan lac al mi harmes … Whom schal I it wite but mi wicked eyiȝen, þat lad myn hert þrouȝ loking þis langour to drye? (William, lines 443–46, 451–53, 458–59) (No prince is his equal, nor any angel in paradise, as he seems in my sight, so handsome is that man. I have drawn and pictured him within my heart, so that it seems to me he always stays in my sight … Were I to be worse off for ever because of what I do, I have such great pleasure and love in looking at that man that I had rather have that love than be without all my troubles … Whom shall I blame but my wicked eyes, which through gazing brought my heart to suffer this grief?)

Her delight in imagining him is set sharply against the wickedness of her eyes in making her do so. One gets the impression, however, that even she doesn’t believe in that wickedness: a disbelief confirmed by her counter-argument that follows, as she recounts her admiration for his qualities. She works through a debate between her eyes and her heart as to which is to blame for her passion, concluding with a determination not to let her eyes rule her heart when what it desires is a foundling from the forest – but a consideration of how he is universally loved and respected makes her change her mind, to acknowledge the rightness of her heart’s choice. Such a debate was already established as a rhetorical set piece, especially in homiletic contexts, where it was deployed to deplore passion and extol reason. In that form, it was already well established before the Guillaume poet

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Helen Cooper adopted it.33 In other versions, and especially those put into women’s mouths and which take love as their subject, the debates have a very different outcome, as Melior’s eventually does. Chrétien’s Soredamors is given a soliloquy along similar lines (Cligès, lines 458–527), and it was still a familiar trope when Shakespeare wrote his sonnet ‘Mine eyes and heart are at a mortal war’ – a poem that, as with the paradoxes of love, represents the male appropriation of a motif established early in love contexts for women’s voices. It is possible to charge the image with conventionality, but counter-intuitively, just because it was familiar as a line of thought, it comes over as psychologically plausible. Every age analyses itself in terms familiar to it; hence the dictum that when Sir Philip Sidney looked into his heart to find material for writing, he found it full of scraps of Petrarch. The motif of eyes versus heart may have started with writers rather than actual lovers, but, if that were so, it is still no reason to think that it did not rapidly spread to young medieval and early modern lovers themselves: after all, the emphasis on the ethical basis of behaviour encouraged them to find their hearts full of such contradictions and debates. It was familiar enough to make the transition unchanged into the Irish Melior who responds to the consciousness of Uilliam in her heart in just the same ways. She declares, I have written his love in my heart, and in sleep or rest, in movement or walking, it seems to me always that he is in my presence. Nor is that to be wondered at, for he is not like a human being but rather one of God’s angels (Eachtra, pp. 6–7; trans., p. 140)

and this self-analysis leads immediately into a narrative summary of her internal debate, partly in indirect speech: And she began to blame her heart and reproach it … She said that her heart should not be blamed for inspiring that great love, but rather her eyes which saw him.

She concludes with a comparison, unparalleled in the other versions, that is distinctively Irish in content: ‘Though among the birds the seagull has the unhappiest life, yet my life is more unhappy than hers’ (trans., p. 141). Up to this point, her monologue has been presented in prose; but the gist is then repeated in verse, in one of the best of those lyric passages that are interspersed at intervals throughout the romance. This alternation of prose and verse is a feature of many Irish romances, but Melior’s lai here has received the additional endorsement of being independently anthologised.34 Its eleven rhyming quatrains repeat the main elements of the preceding prose, including 33 For an account of its history, see J. H. Hanford, ‘The Debate of Heart and Eye’, Modern

Language Notes, 26 (1911), 161–65.

34 O’Rahilly, ed., Eachtra, p. xvi.

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Women and Werewolves the comparison of herself with the gull, but add qualities of rhythm, assonance, and alliteration, which the original Irish is needed to convey: Om ghrádh don nua naoidheanta, o dháil cá dáil as deacra? Acht gidh olc an fhaoilbheatha, as measa go mór mo bheatha. (Eachtra, lines 252–55) (What fate is harder than mine because of my love for this youth? Yet though wretched the life of the seagull, my life is much worse.) (trans. p. 141)

While it would be interpreting the poem too far to ascribe it solely to Melior’s psychology rather than display on the part of the author, it still makes a claim for her eloquence, and through her – as with all these articulate heroines – more broadly for the minds and capacities of women. The French is widely assumed to be the highest example of skilled rhetoric among the various versions, but that is not something that should be taken for granted. The next stage in the monologue has Melior explaining to herself her determination to override her emotions on the grounds that she can’t possibly love a foundling, and that her father would never allow such a marriage. On the other hand, William is so noble and worthy in every other respect that she wonders if he must really be high born; and so, since he presents himself as the ideal lover, her love must be rational, and she has been blaming her heart unfairly. She accordingly commits herself to loving him, though she still agonises over how she might communicate her love to him. She ends by comparing herself to a boat without mast or sail, and prays God to send her safe to harbour: Or va ma nes sans gouvernal, Si va par haute mer najant; Sans mast, sans voile vait siglant. Diex le laist a bon port venir! (Guillaume, lines 946–49) (Now my boat goes without any rudder as it floats through the high seas; it voyages without mast or sail. May God bring it to good harbour!)

The Middle English intensifies her appeals to Christ and the Virgin, and expands the image of the ship: I sayle now in þe see as schip boute mast, boute anker or ore or ani semlyche sayle; but heiȝh hevene King to gode havene me sende, oþer laske me liif-daywes wiþinne a litel terme! (William, lines 567–70) (I sail now in the sea like a ship without a mast, without anchor or oar or any fit sail; but may the high King of heaven send me to good harbour, or speedily cut short the days of my life!) 97

Helen Cooper And the Irish, in a move characteristic of every mention of the sea throughout a romance packed with sea voyages, elaborates the sea imagery into a full storm and piles on the adjectives in an exercise in amplification: Now I am like a great, slender, laden ship in the stormy sea, with her tackle and her anchors broken, her masts and fair sails smashed by the violent, rough onslaught of the sharp, piercing wind and by the rebellious conflict of the elements contending and striving together, so that there can be no chance to help or succour her. (Eachtra, trans., p. 142)

The sea was of course much more central to Irish culture than to English or French, and in the Eachtra, as here, it is usually stormy: elsewhere in the text it is also many-monstered, occasionally even with mermaids, and almost invariably green. In tune with its more threatening description here, Melior is given no final prayer, nor is there any mention of a hope to come safe to harbour. In due course, however, the lovers do indeed come to a good haven, in a comprehensive personal and political happy ending, as William succeeds to the throne of Sicily and, through his wife, of the Roman Empire. They do so with extensive help from the werewolf and, in all the versions, with the recurrent and insistent implication of God’s help too. All the versions, but especially the English, stress God’s shaping power over and above the transformations and disguises undergone by the characters, not least when the lovers finally resume their human forms and the true identities of William and the werewolf are revealed. At the end, this emphasis on God’s plan is carried through primarily by an emphasis on the religious elements in the rituals of weddings and coronations, but also by a foretaste of the good rule of William and his wife. Her own success in the role is underlined by another unusual emphasis on her, in the long passage of advice given her by her reconciled father on what constitutes good female rulership, more extensive in English than French and doubled in the Irish with a lyric repeat of the subject. Nor is it just the lovers who are restored. Every character in the story is given a happy ending. The werewolf is returned to human shape by the stepmother who had enchanted him in the first place, and he accedes to the throne of Spain; and even she is allowed to repent and to resume her place in society. The nursemaids who connived in the abduction of William fear execution, but are despatched to a hermitage. All the members of the younger generation (and there are a good many of them, as the story ranges from Spain to Greece) are married to appropriate spouses, and the rightful succession to the various kingdoms and empires is assured through to their own offspring. The English text incorporates the cowherd and his wife at some length into the happy ending; and it adds at the end an account of the audience that earl Humphrey envisaged for it, and the hope that those who pray for him will enter everlasting joy, ‘pertli in paradis’ (William, line 5540). 98

Women and Werewolves Various of those closing elements of the English – the additional attention given to the peasant couple, who are treated every bit as respectfully as the royal characters; the target audience who ‘knowe no Frensche, ne never underston’ (line 5533) – raise again the question of what constitutes courtliness. French was still the courtly language in mid-fourteenth-century England, a decade or so before Chaucer produced the first indisputably courtly English-language poem in the Book of the Duchess, but the English William explores both love and chivalry with as much care as Guillaume, with no apparent loss in either semantics or content. The French of Guillaume was the vernacular not only of Yolande and her court, but of the lower social ranks too, so the work would have been just as accessible to her household as the English was to earl Humphrey’s; and he himself presumably spoke both languages and could have enjoyed the English work he commissioned as well as its French original. The Dillon family had no royal connections, but they were raised to a viscountcy in 1624, some time after the likely composition of the Eachtra but possibly about the time the surviving manuscript was copied; and it is likely that the family could have enjoyed the Irish Eachtra equally with the English, even if the translation helped to extend its reception further down the social scale. For all the tendency of the English metrical romances to posit male audiences of ‘lordings’, none of the texts is revolutionary in its sympathetic treatment of the heroine: that had started in French and Anglo-Norman romance, though English preserves it more frequently and faithfully, and Irish narratives often give a prominent place to women. The work’s sympathy for its peasants and the attention it gives them are distinctly more unusual, but not at all fostering of revolution in any social sense. The widespread critical dismissal of the romance may be in part due to its fantasy elements, but to decry those is to dismiss the genre altogether; and if one can accept enchanted werewolves, the implausibility of the white bear disguise is not so much to swallow, and especially as the work itself recognises its uselessness as camouflage. The unqualified happiness of the ending is stronger than in many romances, but the amount of opposition that has to be overcome in order to reach it is not dismissed, and the constant appeals to God guarantee a providential outcome. Charm is not a word that carries critical conviction, but it is a quality very hard to do well; and passages such as the successive delight and devastation of the ‘litel child’ William when he is frightened back into the flowery retreat that the werewolf had made for him by the cowherd’s dog,35 or the gentle comedy of the young adult William finding himself embracing a pillow rather than Melior, are difficult to describe any other way. It is a serious romance that does not take itself too seriously – and that too suggests a degree of 35 William, 20–45, expanded from the French; see also Diamond, ‘Loving Beasts’, p.

149–50.

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Helen Cooper sophistication that is in keeping with a courtly audience, whatever the language of the final work. If the textual history of the romance is anything to go by, it is more attuned to a medieval courtly than to a modern academic reception. William is not a work that can be fitted into any of the standard critical categories. In the English in particular, it falls between courtly romance matter and vernacular alliterative (and perhaps popular) form, and between the (overstated) binaries of gender reception. It does not belong in any of the standard ‘matters’ of romance, of classical Rome, Carolingian France, and Arthurian Britain. If the French takes its location from the Norman kingdom of Sicily, any sense of a historical or political setting is lost by the detail of the narrative, and as time passes it becomes little more than another fantasy element in a story that happens ‘somewhere else’. It is much easier to note William’s exceptionality than to explain its continuing faithfulness to its original across its various versions. Any answer would seem to rely on its quality as story, as something close to quintessential romance (lost heirs, inheritance, love analysed and love triumphant, prowess, enchantment, disguise, the Bildungsroman of both hero and heroine), rather than on any theoretical or academic categories; and that disruption in itself makes it deserving of more critical attention, however hard it may be to analyse. The most consistent elements in its attractiveness are the thrill attaching to any story that has a werewolf as a major character, and the sympathy with which the young lovers, and not least Melior, are treated; and those remain consistent through all its linguistic and cultural transitions across western Europe in space and four medieval centuries in time.

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5 ‘Better a valiant squire than a cowardly knight’: Gender in Guruns strengleikr (The Lay of Gurun) CARL PHELPSTEAD n bok þessor er hinn virðulege hacon konongr let norrna or volsko male ma hæita lioða bok. þui at af þæim sogum er þæssir bok birtir gærðo skolld i syðra brætlande er liggr i frannz lioðsonga. þa er gærazc i horpum gigiom. Simphanom. Organom. Timpanom. Sallterium. ok corom. ok allzkonar oðrum strænglæikum er menn gera ser ok oðrum til skemtanar þæssa lifs.1

A

(This book, which the esteemed King Hákon had translated into Norse from the French language, may be called ‘Book of Lays’, because from the stories which this book makes known, poets in Brittany – which is in France – composed lais, which are performed on harps, fiddles, hurdy-gurdies, lyres, dulcimers, psalteries, rotes, and other stringed instruments of all kinds which men make to amuse themselves and others in this world).2

lthough it here names itself ‘Book of Lays’ (‘lioða bok’), the mid-thirteenth-century translation of French lais into Old Norse prose has been known, since the first printed edition in 1850, by a title derived from later in this passage: Strengleikar (the word appears in the dative plural in the above quotation and literally means ‘stringed instruments’, though it corresponds to ‘lay’ in titles of texts).3 Much of the scholarship on Strengleikar has compared

1 Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane, eds and trans., Strengleikar: An Old Norse Transla-

tion of Twenty-one Old French Lais Edited from the Manuscript Uppsala De la Gardie 4–7 – AM 666 b 4º (Oslo: Norsk historisk kjeldeskrift-institutt, 1979), pp. 4–6. All quotations from and (except where stated) translations of Strengleikar in this chapter are from Cook and Tveitane’s diplomatic edition with facing page translation. For an edition in modernised Icelandic spelling see Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, ed., Strengleikar (Reykjavík: Bókmenntafræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands, 2006). 2 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 5–7. 3 On the term strengleikar see further Kate Heslop, ‘A Norse Nightingale: The Circulation of Music and Writing in Strengleikar’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia, 15 (2019), 103–26 (pp. 114–16).

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Carl Phelpstead the Norse tales with surviving texts of their French sources.4 This chapter sets out instead to illuminate the process of cultural transmission by looking at one of four lays in Strengleikar for which no French version survives: the narrative known variously as Gurun, Guruns ljóð, or Guruns strengleikr.5 Gurun is the eleventh of the twenty-one lays in Strengleikar. It is a short text, just over five pages long in a modern edition.6 This chapter begins by examining the relationship of the Norwegian text to insular romance. It then explores gender issues in Gurun from two complementary perspectives. First, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorisation of the homosocial provides a starting point from which to analyse the relationships between the text’s four main characters: the knight Gurun, the woman he falls in love with, her dwarf-guardian, and the harper whom Gurun employs as a go-between. I then show how a single sentence in which the dwarf articulates an ideal of masculinity relates the text’s gender ideology to a specifically Norse cultural context. Finally, this reading of gender in Gurun leads to some reflections on the process of cultural transmission and adaptation which accompanied the act of translation from French to Norse.7 As we have seen, the Prologue to the Strengleikar collection attributes the translation to a commission from ‘the esteemed King Hákon’, Hákon Hákonarson of Norway (r. 1217–63). Hákon is credited with initiating the translation of French literature into Old Norse, beginning with Brother Robert’s Norse translation of Thomas of Britain’s Tristan as Tristrams saga in 1226. Translations of French poems instigated by Hákon were made into prose, which was already established as the usual medium for narrative in Old Norse and more suitable for extended storytelling than either eddic or skaldic verse 4 Amongst recent work see especially Sif Rikhardsdottir, Medieval Translations and

Cultural Discourse: The Movement of Texts in England, France and Scandinavia (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), ch. 1, which appeared in an earlier version as ‘The Imperial Implications of Medieval Translations: Old Norse and Middle English Versions of Marie de France’s Lais’, Studies in Philology, 105.2 (2008), 144–64. 5 It is printed under the title Gurun in Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 168–81, but begins ‘her er Guruns strengleicr’ (‘Here begins “The Lay of Gurun”’; pp. 170/71). Towards the end of the text the eponymous Gurun’s harper composes a lai about Gurun’s adventures ‘ok heitir Gurun’ (‘and [it] is called “Gurun”’; pp. 180/81). The title Guruns ljóð (‘The Lay of Gurun’) does not appear in the text itself, but is used in the only previous article devoted to the tale: Francis P. Magoun, Jr, ‘Scottish History in the “Lay of Gurun” (Guruns ljóð)’, Studia Neophilologica, 14 (1941–42), 1–24. In this chapter I use the spelling ‘lai’ for French texts but ‘lay’ when referring to the genre as a whole or to examples in Old Norse or Middle English. 6 Folios 35r to 36v in the manuscript, Uppsala, University Library, De la Gardie MS 4–7. 7 Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the 16th Biennial Medieval Insular Romance Conference, Cardiff, in 2018 and as the keynote lecture at the Norse in the North conference, York, in 2019. I am grateful for the questions and suggestions on both occasions. Erin Goeres also provided very helpful comments on a draft of the chapter.

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Gender in Guruns strengleikr forms.8 Translation typically involved contraction, and all the Strengleikar lays that can be compared to extant French versions have been abbreviated, but by very different amounts: from 5 per cent shorter to 49.5 per cent. The Norse versions often cut descriptive passages, including description of mental and emotional states, and so resemble more closely the matter-of-fact narrative style favoured in sagas of Icelanders or kings’ sagas.9 The Strengleikar collection must have been translated between 1226 and about 1250, though the text survives only in a single slightly later manuscript of about 1270, most of which is now Uppsala, University Library, De la Gardie MS 4-7.10 Fragments originally from the same manuscript are now in Copenhagen, Arnamagnæan Institute, MS AM 666 b 4to; these leaves were discovered stiffening a bishop’s mitre in Iceland in 1703. The manuscript now split between Uppsala and Copenhagen was produced in south-west Norway, either in or south of Bergen. Besides Strengleikar, the manuscript includes other texts translated from Latin and French and is especially valuable because, although the texts it contains are not the first translations to be made from French into Old Norse, earlier translations, such as Tristrams saga, now survive only in later Icelandic manuscripts: the Uppsala manuscript and Copenhagen fragments together comprise the oldest surviving manuscript of translations of French courtly literature into Old Norse.11 8 On Old Norse and Icelandic romance and the genre’s origins in translation from

French see, for example, Geraldine Barnes, ‘Romance in Iceland’, in Old Icelandic Literature and Society, ed. Margaret Clunies Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 266–86; Jürg Glauser, ‘Romance (Translated Riddarasögur)’, in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture, ed. Rory McTurk (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 372–87; Karl G. Johansson and Else Mundal, eds, Riddarasögur: The Translation of European Court Culture in Medieval Scandinavia (Oslo: Novus Forlag, 2014); Rikhardsdottir, Medieval Translations, and Marianne E. Kalinke, Stories Set Forth with Fair Words: The Evolution of Medieval Romance in Iceland (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2017); specifically on the lays see also Carolyne Larrington, ‘The Translated Lais’, in The Arthur of the North: The Arthurian Legend in the Norse and Rus’ Realms, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 77–97, and chapters in Karl G. Johansson and Rune Flaten, eds, Francia et Germania: Studies in Strengleikar and Þiðreks saga af Bern (Oslo: Novus, 2012). 9 See Sif Rikhardsdottir, Emotion in Old Norse Literature: Translations, Voices, Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017), ch. 1, for a stimulating account of how the transmission and reception of courtly romance in Old Norse involved adapting texts to the emotive literary identities of the receiving reading communities while also instituting new emotive mentalities that would in turn find literary expression. 10 On the manuscript and dating of Strengleikar, see Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. ix–xi, xiv–xv. 11 It is also the only manuscript of Norse translations from French that preserves the original Norwegian dialect: other Norwegian translations survive only in Icelandicised versions.

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Carl Phelpstead Strengleikar includes prose translations of eleven of the twelve lais attributed to Marie de France in the mid-thirteenth-century English manuscript London, British Library, Harley MS 978 (there is no translation of the last and longest of Marie’s lais, Eliduc). The Norse translations were, however, evidently made from a different, lost manuscript. Alongside these translations of Marie’s lais, Strengleikar also includes translations of six anonymous lais preserved elsewhere in French versions.12 The remaining four lays in Strengleikar do not survive in French. Two of these are in the part of the manuscript that was used in the lining of the bishop’s mitre and so consist only of fragments. Having not been recycled in episcopal headwear, Gurun is one of the two intact tales for which no French version is known to survive (the other is Strandar strengleikr). It is theoretically possible that the four lays in Strengleikar which do not survive in French versions are not actually translations but, rather, original compositions in Old Norse inspired by French models. Erin Goeres has recently raised such a possibility (no more) in her discussion of Strandar strengleikr.13 However, the preservation of these four lays in the Strengleikar collection alongside texts known to be translations and with a Prologue describing the translation of the whole work from French strongly supports the idea that they are translations from now lost French texts. No French lai of Gurun survives, but several texts in French, as well as Gottfried von Strassburg in German, mention a story of Gurun (Guirun/Gurûn), though without providing details of its plot. Thomas of Britain’s description of a lai of Gurun makes it an example of the ‘eaten heart’ topos in which a lady is given her lover’s heart to eat; this is a completely different story from that of the Norse Gurun.14 Some critics have thought that, despite the difference, the French lai referred to by Thomas may indeed have been the source of the Norse text; others have thought it more likely that two different stories were referred to by the same name.15 Cook and Tveitane believe that Thomas was referring to the source of the Norse translation, but mistakenly associated it with the eaten heart story.16 The etymology of the eponymous Gurun’s name is suggestive of a possible origin for the story in a Celtic language; Francis P. 12 Five are in Continental French in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Nouvelles acquisitions

françaises MS 1104 and one in Anglo-Norman in Cologny, Bodmer Foundation/Library, Bodmer MS 82. 13 Erin Goeres, ‘Sounds of Silence: The Translation of Women’s Voices from Marie de France to the Old Norse Strengleikar’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 113.3 (2014), 279–309 (p. 294). 14 Thomas of Britain, Le roman de Tristan: poème du XIIe siècle, ed. Joseph Bédier (Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot, 1902–5), lines 833–42. 15 See, for example, Henry Goddard Leach, Angevin Britain and Scandinavia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), p. 220. 16 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 168.

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Gender in Guruns strengleikr Magoun notes that it means ‘the manly one’ or ‘the brave one’, is cognate with Latin vir, and presumably derives from Primitive Celtic ver- as represented by Middle Welsh gwr.17 Gurun and Insular Romance As we have seen, the prologue to Strengleikar says that the lays it contains were composed originally in Brittany: ‘i syðra brætlande er liggr i frannz’ (literally ‘in Southern Britain which is in France’ [my trans.]). The Breton lai may be regarded either as a sub-genre of romance or as a separate, but very closely related, genre.18 Whether or not it drew on (oral) Breton sources, this type of narrative was, if not actually insular in origin, very strongly associated with Britain from its beginnings.19 Marie de France (whoever she was) is usually thought to have composed at least some of her lais in England, where they were certainly known and were preserved in an undoubtedly English manuscript, Harley 978.20 Norway had strong trading and other links with England during the thirteenth century and Hákon’s reign saw the introduction of English styles of

17 Magoun, ‘Scottish History’, p. 16. However, an unrelated character also called Gurun

appears in the lay of Eskia, the Norse translation of Marie de France’s Le Fresne in the Strengleikar collection (Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 52, 56), so a writer in Norse could conceivably have invented a story with a protagonist bearing a name already familiar from the Breton lai genre. 18 Like (other) romances, the Breton lais feature loving relationships in an aristocratic milieu; they are distinguished primarily by their claims to oral Breton origins and their brevity. See Mortimer J. Donovan, The Breton Lay: A Guide to Varieties (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969) for a comparative study of French lais and the Middle English lays adapted from or modelled on them. 19 Indeed, the distinction between Britain and Brittany is elided by the use of the same word to refer to both in medieval French, English, and Latin. On Bretagne, li Bretun and related terms in Marie’s lais see, for example, Emily K. Yoder, ‘Chaucer and the “Breton” Lay’, The Chaucer Review, 12 (1977–78), 74–77 (pp. 74–75) and Marie-Thérèse Brouland’s Le substrat celtique du lai breton anglais Sir Orfeo (Paris: Didier erudition, 1990), pp. 17–23. On Middle English Britoun/Briton as likewise meaning either ‘a Briton’ or ‘a Breton’ see Yoder, ‘Chaucer’, p. 75, citing evidence from the Middle English Dictionary. Latin Britannia similarly ‘could refer to Brittany […], or to the island of Britain or to the British [i.e. Brittonic-speaking] part of the island’ (J. E. Caerwyn Williams, ‘Brittany and the Arthurian Legend’, in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature, ed. Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), pp. 249–72 (p. 271 n. 86)). 20 For orientation in scholarly debate on Marie’s identity, biography, and insular connections see R. Howard Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 1–7. Her lais all take place in Northern France and/or the British and Irish Isles.

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Carl Phelpstead painting, sculpture, and architecture into Norway.21 Nearly a hundred years ago, Henry Goddard Leach argued in his still useful study of Angevin Britain and Scandinavia that the translator of Strengleikar used an Anglo-Norman rather than continental French text of the lais he translated.22 Some of the most recent scholarship on Strengleikar posits an even more central role for Anglo-Norman England in the transmission of Francophone culture to Norse-speaking countries. Erin Goeres has recently maintained that ‘it is likely that most of the romances translated into Old Norse were brought from England along with other imported goods’.23 It has been assumed since the nineteenth century that the translation of French texts into Old Norse was undertaken in Norway, but no French manuscripts survive in Norway and there are no references to them ever having been there. In her 2009 Bergen PhD and in a more recent article in English, Ingvil Brügger Budal argues that, rather than merely the place from which French texts were brought to Norway for translation, England was where the translation of Strengleikar was made.24 Budal lists sixteen Norwegian clerics known to have spent time in England in the right period and, on the basis of their known connections, suggests that Oxford or Reading abbey are likely places where the translations could have been made.25 One of these sixteen Norwegians who visited England was archdeacon of Shetland, a reminder that Old Norse was one of the languages spoken in Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages.26 In the mid-thirteenth century, Norse would still have been used in Shetland, Orkney, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, all of which belonged at that time not to the kings of England or Scotland, but to the same Norwegian King Hákon who commissioned Strengleikar. If someone had brought a manuscript of Strengleikar to the Northern or Western Isles of Scotland at the time it was composed, people would have been able to understand it. 21 On Anglo-Norwegian relations in Hákon’s reign see further references in Sif Rikhards-

dottir, Medieval Translations, p. 18 n. 48.

22 Leach, Angevin Britain and Scandinavia, p. 206. 23 Erin Michelle Goeres, ‘Translating Romance in Medieval Norway: Marie de France

and Strengleikar’, in A Companion to Medieval Translation, ed. Jeanette Beer (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2019), pp. 75–83 (p. 75). 24 Ingvil Brügger Budal, ‘Strengleikar og Lais. Høviske noveller i omsetjing frå gammalfransk til gammalnorsk’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Bergen, 2009), available online at , and ‘The Genesis of Strengleikar: Scribes, Translators, and Place of Origin’, in Eddic, Skaldic, and Beyond: Poetic Variety in Medieval Iceland and Norway, ed. Martin S. Chase (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 31–43. 25 Unlike Cook and Tveitane, who maintain that Strengleikar is a collection of translations by different hands (Strengleikar, pp. xxiii–xxviii), Budal argues that the collection was the work of a single translator (‘Strengleikar og Lais’, I: 417–20). The arguments on both sides are mainly linguistic and stylistic. 26 Budal, ‘Genesis’, p. 36.

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Gender in Guruns strengleikr Erin Goeres has recently argued that Strengleikar as a whole ‘demonstrates a sustained interest in the role of Britain as a setting for the romance text’,27 and Gurun specifically has a thoroughly insular setting: the events it recounts take place in Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall, with a brief appearance by the son of an Irish king. Assuming that Gurun is a translation from French, it seems probable that the lost original came from Britain rather than France. The text begins by saying that the lai is known to those who live in a town called Svsvezun (or Suspezun).28 The text’s first editors thought this might be Soissons in northern France, but their successors Cook and Tveitane maintain that ‘it is better to declare ignorance on this point’.29 It is in any case clear that the narrator is not from that town, so even if it could be identified, that would not necessarily tell us anything about the location of the writer of the lai. Given that the setting of the tale is thoroughly insular and that more than half of the lays in Strengleikar are based on those attributed to Marie de France, which are likely to have been written and were certainly preserved in England, it is very plausible that Gurun (and the three other Strengleikar lays surviving only in Norse) would originally have been of insular provenance. This hypothesis becomes all the more likely if one accepts Budal’s recent argument that the translation from French into Norse was done in England. In the only published article devoted entirely to Gurun, Francis P. Magoun Jr writes that ‘There are no psychological complexities of moment and no folklore motifs connected with this straightforward, not unattractive little romance.’30 He argues that the lost French source of Gurun was composed around historical events, and that the lay contains clear echoes of Scottish history in the period 1107–18: Scotland and Scottish affairs occupy the centre of the historical stage and […] the suppression of an insurrection emanating from the district of Moray and directed against the Scottish kingdom is the historical event most dwelt upon.31

Having considered various possible parallels in early twelfth-century Scottish history, Magoun finds that the closest to the lay’s narrative is the revolt of Moray in 1118.32 He concludes that 27 Erin Goeres, ‘Britain as Sjónhverfing: Decoding the Landscape in Strengleikar’, Scan-

dinavian Studies, 87 (2015), 147–66 (p. 148).

28 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 170. 29 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 170 n. 1. 30 Magoun, ‘Scottish History’, pp. 8–9. 31 Magoun, ‘Scottish History’, p. 18. To make the story fit a Scottish historical context

better, Magoun argues that the Vales over whom Gurun is made earl were not the Welsh of Wales, who were never subject to the Scottish crown, but the Cumbrian Welsh: Cumbria was an earldom of the Scottish crown from 1107 (pp. 15, 20–21). 32 Magoun, ‘Scottish History’, p. 22.

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Carl Phelpstead In view of the emphasis on and obvious pretty detailed knowledge of Scottish affairs I am inclined to think that Gurun is, like the OFr Fergus and certain other romances, the product of some Norman court in Scotland or Galloway […] I feel quite confident that we have here to do with a clear echo of history and not with fiction or mere coincidence. The story itself we may reasonably assume to have been put together in French octosyllabic couplets not many years after 1118.33

Others have not, however, shared Magoun’s confidence. Cook and Tveitane write that This would be a strikingly early date, and Magoun’s thesis must be regarded with scepticism, since it rests on unproved identifications and on the assumption that a historical lay must be composed soon after the events it describes. In any case, the main interest in Gurun is romantic and not historical.34

Cook and Tveitane are similarly dismissive of Magoun’s attempt in another article to see Strandar strengleikr, another lay in Strengleikar for which no French version survives, as closely reflecting historical events: in both cases their scepticism is justified.35 So much is uncertain about the prehistory of Gurun that it is not possible to be definitive about its insular origins or connections. At the very least, it has an insular setting and belongs to a genre, the Breton lai, that is strongly associated with Britain. At the other extreme, if one were to accept the arguments of both Magoun (on the French source) and Budal (on the place of translation), then Gurun would be the unique witness to a lost French lai composed in Scotland and translated into Norse in England, at the request of a Norwegian king.36 Between Men in Gurun The programme of translation from French to Norse which King Hákon instigated was part of a broader cultural shift involving the dissemination of new courtly values as well as new courtly literary genres in Norway. Stephen Jaeger has documented the fear of feminisation which the transition to courtliness provoked among clerical writers across Europe. He notes that the most forceful critic of the new courtliness was Saxo Grammaticus, who was 33 Magoun, ‘Scottish History’, pp. 23–24. 34 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 169. 35 Francis P. Magoun, Jr, ‘Norman History in the “Lay of the Beach” (Strandar ljóð)’,

Modern Language Notes, 57 (1942), 11–16; Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 201.

36 If it is indeed a translation rather than an original composition, then it is ‘possible’ that

Gurun, ‘like its immediate neighbours in the Uppsala manuscript, is a considerably abridged translation’ (Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 169).

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Gender in Guruns strengleikr writing in a neighbouring Scandinavian kingdom only a decade or two before Strengleikar was translated into Norse at Hákon of Norway’s request.37 In her discussion of the gendered implications of translation in Strengleikar, Goeres notes that fear of the feminising potential of courtliness could resonate in a thirteenth-century Norwegian context in which King Hákon was deliberately introducing new fashions.38 Goeres does not specifically discuss Gurun in this connection, but in what follows I argue that the lay both recognises the legitimacy of fears of feminisation and also offers reassurance that such peril can be avoided. The relationships between the four main characters in Gurun can be understood in the light of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential hypothesis of the ‘potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual’.39 More specifically, her observation that ‘in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power’ provides a starting point from which to analyse the ways in which the three main male characters relate both to each other and to the woman who finds herself, in the terms of Sedgwick’s book title, ‘between men’.40 Gurun’s family are said to be ‘af brettlande’, where his father is a powerful king.41 Given the geography of the rest of the tale, this is most likely to mean that they were British, but, as Norse (like Latin, Old French, and Middle English) uses the same word for Britain and Brittany, it might mean that they were Breton.42 The young Gurun is sent to live with his mother’s brother, the king of Scotland. His uncle knights him and then makes him ‘iarl yuir þeim monnvm er vales heita’ (‘earl over those people who are called Welsh’).43 At the Scottish court Gurun falls in love with a maiden who is the queen’s niece but whose name we never learn. Gurun’s harper, who is ‘kunnigar allar meyiar þess rikis’ (‘acquainted with all the maidens in the kingdom’), praises most the lady with whom Gurun is in love, which leads Gurun to embrace the harper (‘þa lagðe hann henndr um hals honum’; ‘Gurun put his arms around his neck’) and confess his love for the maiden. In return for the harper’s help and advice Gurun says (arms presumably still around the man’s neck) that ‘Ec vil 37 C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness – Civilizing Trends and the Formation of

Courtly Ideals – 939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), pp. 176–94. See also Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 189–230 (esp. pp. 226–29). 38 Goeres, ‘Sounds of Silence’, p. 291. 39 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 1. 40 Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 25. 41 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 170. 42 Cook and Tveitane think it ‘probable’ that Bretland here refers to Great Britain rather than Brittany: Strengleikar, p. 171 n.2. 43 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 170–71.

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Carl Phelpstead gera allt þat er þér vel licar’ (‘I will do everything that will please you’).44 This offer, and the physicality of Gurun’s friendship with his harper, is noteworthy as hinting at the erotic potential in homosocial relationships. The harper offers to assist Gurun and, when later entertaining the women of the court, he tells the maiden of Gurun’s love. The maiden informs the harper that her father has told her to follow the advice of her dwarf-guardian if she wishes to love anyone and she must therefore consult the dwarf: even leaving the absent father out of consideration, this sets up a complex set of triangular relationships. The harper is an intermediary between Gurun and the woman he loves; Gurun and the dwarf are rivals for different kinds of possession of the maiden; and the harper now becomes an intermediary in negotiations between Gurun and the dwarf. The harper advises Gurun to win the dwarf over with gifts, but Gurun’s attempt to bribe the dwarf with a silver cup and costly silk cloak fails because the dwarf sees through it. When the dwarf and maiden later discuss Gurun, the dwarf says that although Gurun is good and generous he wants to stay at home too much and is unwilling to enter tournaments: ‘Ef hann villdi i viðrskifti riddare vera. þa mynde hann frægiaz af riddaraskap. betre er raustr skialldsveinn en ragr riddare. En þo mæli ec ei þetta til hans.’45 (‘If he were willing to be a knight in battle, he would be famous for his chivalry. Better is a valiant squire than a cowardly knight – though I don’t mean him by this.’)46

The dwarf here gives expression to an ideal of masculinity: knights should fight, not stay at home. As we will see in discussion below of the phrase from this passage quoted in this chapter’s title, the accusation of cowardice here is gendered: there is an implicit fear of feminisation and a clear prescription for its prevention by undertaking appropriately masculine activity. The maiden’s response underlines the reality of the danger to masculine ideals: she asks if the dwarf wants Gurun to kill himself for her sake, leading the dwarf to accuse her of having succumbed to the harpist’s pandering and fallen in love. However, the go-between harpist (whom the dwarf has just called hordoms maðr)47 has overheard this exchange and insults the dwarf, saying that he deserves to be kicked in the chest (a cruel allusion to his stature). The dwarf replies:

44 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 170–73. 45 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 174. 46 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 175. 47 Cook and Tveitane translate this a little politely as ‘panderer’: it might alternatively be

rendered ‘fornicator’ or ‘adulterer’.

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Gender in Guruns strengleikr ‘Eigi em ec vandr maðr ec em,’ kvað hann, ‘gvðs skepna. ok heuir nattura geuit mér vit ok skynsemd. kurteisi ok goða kvnnasto. En þu hevir illa syslu. ok vand atǽvi.’48 (‘I am not an evil man. I am’, he said, ‘a creature of God, and nature has given me intelligence and reason, courtesy and understanding. But you have a wicked office and evil behavior.’)49

Rather than condemn courtliness, the dwarf here lays claim to specifically courtly virtues, even using the French loanword, kurteisi. The maiden succeeds in making peace between the two men and they shake hands and become felagar (translated by Cook as ‘comrades’).50 This creates another triangular relationship in which bonds between two men have been established through a woman. The harper and dwarf now arrange for Gurun to meet the maiden; she accepts his wooing and they then kiss for a long time, leading the laughing dwarf to remark that ‘þessi riddare […] kann vel kyssa. macara vǽre at hann kynni iamvel riða. með riddara vapnvm.’51 (‘This knight […] knows well how to kiss; it would be more suitable for him to know just as well how to ride with knightly weapons.’)52

Perhaps with this passage in mind, Cook and Tveitane write that ‘the most interesting character’ in the tale is the dwarf, who sometimes appears malicious but who must ultimately be regarded as acting out of concern for his ward’s welfare […] It is this dwarf who articulates the main idea of the poem: that a knight should balance the obligations of love and of prowess in arms.53 48 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 174. 49 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 175. 50 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 175. The word is cognate with English ‘fellow’ and

its use might be compared with Thomas Malory’s promotion of homosocial ‘fellowship’ in his Morte Darthur. 51 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 176. 52 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 177. Helen Cooper has pointed out to me the possibility of a phallic double entendre on ‘knightly weapons’ (e.g. lance, sword) here, which would accord well with the dwarf’s laughter. 53 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 169. For an overview of dwarfs in medieval French romance, see Anne Martineau, Le Nain et le chevalier: Essai sur les nains français du Moyen Âge (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2003). The frequency with which women in romances are entrusted to dwarf guardians may suggest that dwarfish masculinity was not perceived as a threat to women sexually, a perception that would fit with Rebekah Huber’s reading of the dwarf in Thomas Malory’s Tale of Sir Gareth as a passive, feminised foil to Gareth’s masculinity: see her ‘“Delyver Me My Dwarff!”: Gareth’s Dwarf and Chivalric Identity’, Arthuriana, 16.2 (2006), 49–53. Megan G. Leitch, on the other hand, has recently read dwarfs in Middle English

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Carl Phelpstead As he articulates this idea, we see the dwarf recognising the perceived dangers inherent in courtliness (that knights will stop fighting and spend all their time kissing) while also suggesting how those dangers can be avoided (by martial exploits). The dwarf’s perspective is widely paralleled in contemporary romance, perhaps most famously in Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide: after his marriage to Enide, Erec neglects tournaments and other martial exploits, leading his companions to complain that he has become a recreant knight who loves Enide excessively. The Norse version of Chrétien’s romance, Erex saga, typically abbreviates the key passage: Síðan sez Erex um kyrt ok ann svá mikit sinni unnustu at hann fyrirlætr alla gleði ok skemtan ungra manna. Vel er hann virðr af öllum góðum mönnum, en þó fær hann nokkut ámæli fyrir sitt hóglífi. Ok angrar þat hans frú mjök er hún heyrir honum hallmælt. (After this Erex settles into a life of ease, and he loves his beloved so much that he forsakes all the pleasures and amusements of young men. He is esteemed by all good men, and yet he receives some blame for his life of ease. And it distresses his wife greatly when she hears him reproached.)54

An opportunity for Gurun to demonstrate his prowess presents itself when an army from Murray (Moray) rises in rebellion against the Scottish king. Gurun fights for his king with the maiden’s silk sleeve as a favour on his lance. In the battle he unhorses the son of the king of Ireland and kills a knight from Gotland, but is wounded by an arrow, which so enrages his uncle the Scottish king that it inspires him to defeat the rebels. The maiden is concerned for Gurun and sends the dwarf to see if he will live, claiming that if he dies she will too. The dwarf takes a rather dim view of such excess: ‘Ef þessi deyr þa mattv brat fa nyia ást. þuiat engi kona verðr raðláus nema of gomul se.’55

romance as more active embodiments of a non-chivalric and non-clerical masculinity in her ‘The Servants of Chivalry? Dwarves and Porters in Malory and the Middle English Gawain Romances’, Arthuriana, 27.1 (2017), 3–27. A Norwegian audience might have brought expectations of dwarfs grounded in rather different Scandinavian folk tradition to their reading, but I do not detect any influence from that tradition on how the dwarf is presented within the text of Gurun. 54 Erex saga, ed. and trans. Marianne E. Kalinke in Norse Romance II. Knights of the Round Table, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 217–65 (pp. 236–37). 55 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 178.

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Gender in Guruns strengleikr (‘If this man dies, you can soon find a new love, for no woman is helpless unless she is too old.’)56

Taking exception to this combination of misogyny and ageism, the maiden tells the dwarf that he has a wicked nature. She also maintains that ‘Eigi heui ec þat lunnderni. ok ei vil ec hafa er kallat er hverflynde’ (‘I do not have, and I do not wish to have, that temperament which is called fickle’).57 Gurun is only lightly injured by the arrow. He asks the harper to make a new song about ‘hinn bazta vin sinn, ok upphaf astar hans. ok fram færðer’ (‘his best friend Gurun and the beginning of his love and its progress’):58 this song is understood to be the (fictional) source for the tale. Once Gurun has recovered from his injury, ‘tóc hann á launnvngu meyna or drotnengar lofte eftir raðom harparans. ok mestr var hann vin hans (‘he secretly took the maiden from the queen’s chamber, according to the advice of the harper who was his best friend’).59 No explanation is offered as to why it was necessary to abduct the maiden in this way. If this is a translation that has (like all the tales in Strengleikar that can be compared with extant French versions) been abbreviated from its source, perhaps further explanation was provided in the original lai. This is the second time in quick succession that the harpist – about whose neck Gurun hung his arms near the start of the story – has been referred to as Gurun’s ‘best friend’ (the first time by Gurun himself). The text seems determined to validate homosocial bonds between men at precisely the moment when they might be thought to be threatened by Gurun’s new heterosexual relationship with the maiden. What is even more surprising than the abduction, however, is that it does not only involve Gurun and the maiden: ‘ok hafðe baða með ser dverginn ok harparann. ok foro oll saman i cornbreta lannd’ (‘He took both the dwarf and the harper, and all four of them went together to Cornwall’).60 So the tale ends with the establishment of a kind of ménage à quatre in Cornwall involving three men bound to one another by different kinds of relationship to the one woman.61 As a final reassurance that such domestic bliss has not unmanned him, the narrator informs readers that Gurun was afterwards the best of knights, powerful, strong, and valiant.

56 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 179. 57 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 178/79. 58 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 178/79. 59 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 180/81. 60 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 180/81. 61 Cornbreta land could alternatively be Cornouaille on the south Breton coast, but Cook

and Tveitane think Cornwall more likely, given the other insular locations in the text (Strengleikar, p. 181 n. 6).

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Carl Phelpstead A ragr riddare: Translation and Cultural Transmission The final part of this chapter homes in on the single sentence quoted in its title. As we have seen, the dwarf’s initial view of Gurun is that ‘Ef hann villdi i viðrskifti riddare vera. þa mynde hann frægiaz af riddaraskap. betre er raustr skialldsveinn en ragr riddare.’62 (‘If he were willing to be a knight in battle, he would be famous for his chivalry. Better is a valiant squire than a cowardly knight.’)63

This is a rather gnomic dwarf, and the second of those sentences has a proverbial ring to it that is enhanced by alliteration, contrasting raustr (valiant) with ragr riddare (cowardly knight). The adjective ragr, a term which is used nowhere else in the Strengleikar collection, merits closer attention. Cook appropriately translates it as ‘cowardly’, but the term had a much wider semantic range, one that resonates with the reading of Gurun that I am offering here. Ragr was a slanderous term associated with sexualised insults forbidden by law in both Norway and Iceland.64 Appearing in metathesised forms as argr or ragr and related to the noun ergi and verb ergjask, the essential and primary meaning is sexual; Preben Meulengracht Sørensen writes that: ‘The man who is argr is willing or inclined to play or interested in playing the female part in sexual relations.’65 Additional associations with witchcraft are not relevant to the tale of Gurun, but, as Sørensen says, the third and most important meaning of the words argr and ragr is ‘cowardly, unmanly, effeminate’ with regard to morals and character. […] The line of thought […] is that a man who subjects himself to another in sexual affairs will do the same in other respects.66

To some extent, the sexual aspect becomes symbolic: accusing a man of gender-inappropriate sexual activity becomes a way of claiming that he is a coward. Since the presumed French source for Gurun no longer survives, we cannot know what phrasing the dwarf’s term ragr riddare is translating (indeed, the 62 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 174. 63 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, p. 175. 64 The term is one of three expressly forbidden in the Icelandic law collection known

as Grágás. Similar sexualised slander (níð) was also forbidden in the Norwegian Gulathing lawcode, in force in Western Norway when the Strengleikar translation was made, but that code does not specify the term ragr. On these and related terms the essential studies are Folke Strom, Níð, Ergi and Old Norse Moral Attitudes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1974) and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society, trans. Joan Turville-Petre (Odense: Odense University Press, 1983). 65 Sørensen, Unmanly Man, p. 15. 66 Sørensen, Unmanly Man, pp. 19–20.

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Gender in Guruns strengleikr alliterative patterning of raustr and ragr riddare might lead one to wonder how closely the Norse writer is following a French source at this point). No Old French term has quite the same semantic range as ragr. The Norse adjective is, however, ideally suited to its context. The meaning of ragr ranges beyond merely ‘cowardly’ to encompass ideas of unmanliness, effeminacy, and adopting a stigmatised passive role in homosexual intercourse. This means that the dwarf’s choice of the term resonates perfectly with anxieties that we have seen recur throughout the text regarding the potential for courtly romance to feminise or unman a man. If, as Sedgwick maintains, relations between men span a homosocial continuum which includes the homosexual, then societies in which patriarchy is bound up with homophobia, as has historically almost always been the case, must invest ideologically in defining and policing a boundary between sexual and non-sexual relations.67 In Gurun the term ragr is doing precisely that kind of ideological work in a text where the boundary between homosocial and homosexual might otherwise appear all too easily permeable, as Gurun’s remarkably close friendship with his harper, for example, suggests. The term ragr can also be used to insult women, but it does not then mean ‘inclined to play the female part in sexual relations’, since that would not be an insult. When applied to women the term is usually understood as an accusation of nymphomania, a claim that the woman is, as Sørensen puts it, ‘generally immodest, perverted or lecherous’.68 No woman in Gurun is described as ragr, but it is possible that the charge hovers unspoken in an exchange between the maiden and her dwarf guardian. When the maiden is advised by the dwarf that if her beloved dies she can soon find someone else, she maintains that ‘Eigi heui ec þat lunnderni. ok ei vil ec hafa er kallat er hverflynde’ (‘I do not have, and I do not wish to have, that temperament which is called fickle’).69 A Norwegian familiar with the specific meaning of ragr/argr when applied to a woman might well read this response as the maiden repudiating a charge of ergi: she has not succumbed to the indiscriminate lechery characteristic of female romantic excess, just as Gurun has avoided being feminised by his love for the maiden by fighting manfully.

67 Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 2–5. Sedgwick offers ancient Greece as a rare example of

a non-homophobic patriarchal culture.

68 Sørensen, Unmanly Man, p. 18. Bjørn Bandlien, however, argues that for women ergi

is more specifically desire for a man of lower social status rather than nymphomania as such: see Bjørn Bandlien, Strategies of Passion: Love and Marriage in Old Norse Society (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), p. 30 n. 28. 69 Cook and Tveitane, Strengleikar, pp. 178/79.

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Carl Phelpstead Conclusion The lay of Gurun recognises that courtliness and courtly romance, with their new emphasis on heterosexual love, are potentially disruptive both of existing ideals of martial masculinity and of the homosocial bonds between men that flourished in a culture focused more on battle than on love-making. The dwarf gives voice to concerns that Gurun may be so inclined to stay at home and so preoccupied with kissing a woman that he will fail to win fame as a knight and runs the risk of being seen not merely as cowardly, but as having been unmanned. Yet, Gurun proves his prowess in battle and so demonstrates that knightly combat and love of a woman are not incompatible: a balance can be struck. The dangers are real, but they can be avoided. Indeed, it is possible to strike such a balance without abandoning those much-valued relationships between men: the harper is just as surely Gurun’s best friend at the end of the text and Gurun has acquired a new friend in his beloved’s former guardian, the dwarf who joins their ménage in Cornwall. The lai of Gurun could have achieved that ideological work in its original French version. But in the context of thirteenth-century Norway, where courtly French narratives and values were being introduced for the first time through translation, the tale will have taken on additional resonance from its deployment of the term ragr, with connotations familiar to a Norse-speaking audience. To speak of a ragr riddande would have been to help that audience understand better the nature of the threat to norms of gendered behaviour and then enjoy more fully the avoiding of that danger in this narrative. Gurun allows a Norwegian audience to make sense of a new world of courtly values in terms of their existing ideology of gender and sexuality. In doing so, it provides us with a valuable insight into the way in which textual translation was part of a broader process of cultural transmission and assimilation.

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6 ‘Vinegar upon Nitre’? Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ NEIL CARTLIDGE

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alter Map’s story of ‘Sadius and Galo’ is the longest self-contained narrative in Map’s only extant work, the collection of anecdotes, satires, marvels and historical narratives now generally known as De nugis curialium (Of Courtiers’ Trifles).1 It is often characterised as a ‘courtly romance’ in Latin prose,2 but this classification is implicitly a contradiction in terms, since originally and by strict definition the word ‘romance’ applies only to compositions in the vernacular languages, rather than (or indeed, as opposed to) those in Latin.3 So how is this apparent contradiction to be explained? Is Map’s tale simply an appropriation of the romance mode into a language environment in which it is essentially foreign, a text that consistently borrows distinctively ‘romantic’ themes and motifs in such a way as to offer what is, in effect, a translation of the romance mode into the language of ‘clerks’? Or should it 1 Walter Map: De nugis curialium: Courtiers’ Trifles, ed. and trans. M. R. James, revised

by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) [henceforth C], dist. III, c. 2, pp. 210–47. Unless stated otherwise, the text is given here from C, but the translations are mine. One part of De nugis circulated widely on its own, the ‘Dissuasion of Valerius’ (dist. IV, c. 3, C, pp. 289–313): for an edition, see Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves, ed. Ralpha Hanna III and Traugott Lawler (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), pp. 121–47. 2 See e.g. C, p. xxi, where ‘Sadius and Galo’ is described as ‘a romance [designed] to point a moral, in which subtlety of dialogue akin to Chrétien’s is combined with a somewhat crude antifeminism, and yet the form of a romance is preserved’; and R. E. Bennett, ‘Walter Map’s Sadius and Galo’, Speculum, 16 (1941), 34–56, p. 34, where it is described as ‘the best romance, and the nearest approach to an Arthurian romance, which we have from the pen of a man who had in his own age a preeminent reputation as a storyteller’. For further discussion of Map as a writer of romance (including his supposed authorship of the Vulgate Lancelot), see my article ‘Masters in the Art of Lying? The Literary Relationship between Hugh of Rhuddlan and Walter Map’, Modern Language Review, 106 (2011), 1–16, at pp. 2–3, and the further references given there. 3 For other examples of Latin ‘romances’, see The Ruodlieb, ed. and trans. C. W. Grocock (Warminster: Aris & Phillips/Chicago: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1985); and Latin Arthurian Literature, ed. and trans. Mildred Leake Day (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005).

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Neil Cartlidge be seen rather as an illustration of the extent to which Latin could also be seen as a natural vehicle for courtly romance, itself fully embodying the creative energies of the genre, without necessarily deferring to, or being subordinate to, other languages? Or would it be more useful to seek a tertium quid here, to rethink the genre of courtly romance in such a way as to emphasise both its essential vernacularity (together with the values implicit in its vernacularity, such as its secularity and its popular appeal) and its simultaneous openness to influence by, and interference from, clerkly Latin-language culture, thus defining it as a genre that is always and essentially implicated in an ongoing process of exchange between languages?4 From this perspective, ‘Sadius and Galo’ might perhaps be seen as a particularly clear example of this process in action: as a literary text that expresses, but also exploits, the inherent tensions between vernacular and Latin culture. ‘Sadius and Galo’ certainly suggests a confident familiarity with the narrative conventions and implied ideology of vernacular courtly romance, displaying none of the lack of confidence that might be expected of a text that is consciously at odds with its own identity. In fact, Map’s work is more than just confidently familiar with its romance models. The tale he tells is carefully constructed in such a way as to accommodate a remarkably intense accumulation of ‘romantic’ themes and motifs within a relatively brief compass. The very virtuosity with which these elements are woven together suggests a certain demonstrativeness, as if Map were trying to show not just that he could ‘do’ vernacular romance, but even, in some respects, ‘outdo’ it: to produce something like a ‘meta-romance’.5 As such, his version of courtly romance could be read as a kind of commentary on the genre as a whole, a pointedly new ‘take’ on an established form. It allows Map to show off his understanding, not just of romance’s defining rules and assumptions, but also of how these might, in effect, be ‘foreignized’.6 However, Map’s tale-telling also has a distinct rationale of its own: ‘Sadius and Galo’ is not just a creative response to the genre of courtly romance, but also a significant contribution to the complex and distinctive thematics of De nugis as a whole. Indeed, it is only by considering 4 Cf. Ian Short’s suggestion that it would be ‘misleading to view developments in ver-

nacular literatures in isolation from the Latin culture with which they co-existed and of which they formed part’ (in ‘Language and Literature’, in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), pp. 191–213 (p. 211). 5 Cf. also Siân Echard’s characterisation of ‘Sadius and Galo’ as a ‘challenging introverted romance, which both plays upon and confounds the reader’s generic expectations, [and is] wrapped up in metafictional comment’ (in ‘Map’s Metafiction: Author, Narrator and Reader in De nugis curialium’, Exemplaria, 8 (1996), 287–314, at p. 306). 6 ‘Foreignizing translation signifies the differences of the foreign text […] by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the translating language’ (Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge: New York, 1997; new edn, 2018), p. 15).

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Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ Map’s tale-telling in its own terms, and the thematics characteristic of De nugis more generally, that we can really begin to assess what he might have learned from vernacular romancers – or they from him. In this chapter I would like to make three interlinked observations about ‘Sadius and Galo’. The first is that the current standard edition of De nugis curialium, the 1983 Clarendon edition produced by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (which is essentially a lightly revised version of the text and translation published by M. R. James in 1914 and 1923, respectively) offers an understanding of this story that is in several key respects significantly deficient, and much more deficient than most of its users probably realise. The bashfulness of the Clarendon translation is at some points relatively obvious, but it occasionally misdirects the reader in ways that are more difficult to spot, and all of these moments together contribute to a limiting of the tale’s ultimate impact. The second observation is that, partly as a consequence of the uncertainties created by this translation, it is all too easy to underestimate just how precisely focused, and how precisely mischievous, Map’s romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ actually is.7 This is actually a text that is underpinned by a very distinct set of attitudes to sex and gender; and it uses romance motifs to assert an understanding of sexual identities that seems, on the face of it, to be sharply at odds with the values and ideals that vernacular romance typically avows. My third observation is that ‘Sadius and Galo’ therefore invites a reconsideration of the implied sexual dynamics of vernacular romances. It does so precisely because its own assumptions in this respect seem to be so unsettlingly different from theirs. In making startlingly explicit several of the anxieties or alternative perspectives that romances are generally careful to suppress, it rather draws attention to the fact that they have been suppressed. In effect, ‘Sadius and Galo’ could be seen as a kind of literary Trojan horse. While outwardly it resembles vernacular romance closely enough to be able to ‘infiltrate’ it, inwardly it is freighted with possibilities that implicitly do violence to the usual expectations of the genre. In particular, it lays bare some of the anxieties about masculinity that vernacular romances themselves generally tend to ignore or deny. ‘Sadius and Galo’ is a story about two knights serving at the court of a noble king, who happen to be united in a passionate friendship. Galo is unfortunate enough to attract the unwanted affections of the king’s (beautiful) queen, who becomes so besotted with him that she subjects him to a relentless campaign of harassment. ‘Whatever love usually suggests to those it maddens,

7 On the utility of the term ‘mischief’ in such contexts, see my chapter ‘Medieval Ro-

mance Mischief’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance: A Tribute to Helen Cooper, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 27–47.

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Neil Cartlidge she attempts’.8 Eventually, his friend Sadius decides to try to rescue him from this predicament by telling the queen (in confidence) that Galo is sexually incapable, hoping thereby that the queen’s ardour will be cooled. Specifically, what Sadius says is that Galo would deserve great praise for his determination to remain chaste, were it not for the fact that he happens to be impotent. The Latin at this point reads ‘si non ei Veneris usum neget inpotencia’:9 that is, ‘if impotence had not denied him the use of Venus’, where ‘usum Veneris’ is clearly a decorative locution for ‘sex’ (literally: the employment, exercise or enjoyment of Venus, i.e. the goddess of Love). The Clarendon translation here reads ‘did nature allow of his going astray’, but this rendering is more than just distractingly coy. Indeed, it seems to have been crafted in such a way as to create ambiguity where there is none in the Latin: specifically, in such a way as to allow (or encourage) the innocent and/or unwary reader to believe that, according to Sadius, Galo is by nature morally incapable of doing anything so sinful (as to commit adultery) – without at the same time contradicting what Sadius is actually saying, which is that Galo is physically incapable of having sex. In fact, Sadius makes no mention of Galo’s ‘nature’ in the Latin, nor of anyone going ‘astray’: he refers simply to his ‘inpotencia’. The Clarendon’s phrase ‘going astray’ is thus not just a rather weak rendering of ‘Veneris usum’, but a translation that injects vague moral disapproval just at a point where it does not exist, and where it is significant that it does not exist. Sadius’s point is that Galo’s refusal of the queen has nothing at all to do with morality, and therefore the question of whether he deserves praise for his ‘chastity’ is irrelevant: his ‘chastity’ is simply the inevitable consequence of his ‘inpotencia’. The obvious interpretation is that Sadius is referring not to lack of potency in any general or abstract sense, but to impotence specifically as a medical condition.10 The very unsqueamishness with which he announces this is significant: it is as if he hopes the queen will be convinced of the truth of what he says by the very matter-of-factness with which he says it. This is clearly a bold strategy on Sadius’s part, but his explicitness about Galo’s impotence also seems jarringly out of place in the context of courtly romance. After all, romance, as a genre, is often the vehicle for what seems like an obsessive celebration of different kinds of masculine potency. It consistently defines manliness in terms of those particular kinds of strength that it expects to be the essential attributes of chivalric excellence (mental, physical, or moral), and indeed it does so so obsessively that the whole genre often seems fixated on celebrating ideals of manhood. Such texts are generally 8 C, p. 212. 9 C, p. 214. 10 Such cases are occasionally recognised in medieval literature: see, for example, Marvin

Colker, ‘Causa viri ementulati et eius uxoris petentis fieri divorsium’, Medievalia et Humanistica, 12 (1958), 11–15.

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Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ constructed in such a way as to allow their protagonists not just to put their virtues to the test, but to do so in satisfyingly spectacular ways. As Erich Auerbach famously observed, romance depicts a world that is ‘specifically created and designed to give the knight opportunity to prove himself’, to the extent even that his adventures are ‘raised to the status of a fated and graduated test of election’.11 When the hero of such a text finally triumphs, and in this way completes his ‘test of election’, his reward almost invariably comes in the form of a superlatively good marriage, which in turn usually entails the happy foundation of a dynasty. It seems that the authors of romances were ready to assume that there must be some sort of automatic link between chivalric prowess and sexual (re)productivity: as if the knight’s ‘test of election’ preliminary to his marriage were somehow a guarantee of his virility, and so of his capacity to father children as excellent as himself. In this context, even the suggestion that a male hero might be unable to consummate a sexual relationship seems strangely discordant with the underlying assumptions of the genre. It is as if Sadius has committed a breach of literary decorum by referring directly to a possibility that romances in general seem reluctant to admit: the possibility that there is no correlation at all between masculine identity and sexual/procreative capacity. In reality, of course, that is precisely the case: there is no correlation. As a medical condition, the causes of sexual impotence are complex but often ultimately random, and so not necessarily any reflection at all on how a man is constituted otherwise, whether mentally, physically, or morally. Yet, in the world of romance, the very possibility that a knight as excellent as Galo might lack even the capacity for fatherhood implicitly upsets the genre’s determined belief in the natural heritability of excellence, which in turn disrupts the aristocratic assumptions justifying its characteristic admiration for the privileges and pre-eminence of knights as a class. At the same time, the very fact that it is Galo’s ‘fast friend’ Sadius who casts doubt on his ability to consummate his relationship with a woman implicitly invites questions about the cause of his impotence. Sadius seems happy to leave the queen with the impression that Galo is physically inhibited in some way, and his apparent matter-of-factness about his friend’s impotence is perhaps intended to encourage her to think in this way: as if Galo was simply the victim of some sort of unlucky affliction. Sadius is disarmingly frank about his friend’s disqualification from the pursuits of Venus (i.e. from sex as represented by a female divinity), but this still leaves open the possibility that it is only sex with women from which Galo is disbarred. At this point in the text there is nothing to contradict the possibility that Galo’s fixed indifference to the queen’s attractions is actually explained by the fact that his preferences are exclusively homosexual, in which case the unusually strong bond between 11 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.

Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953; repr. 1991), p. 136.

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Neil Cartlidge the two men almost begs to be read as a relationship between two lovers.12 It is certainly striking that even as Sadius insists on his friend’s ‘inpotencia’, he insists at the same time on the intimacy between them: ‘“My Galo,” he says, “who, although he is capable of getting everything from women, confesses – but to me alone – that he is completely devoid of sex”’ (‘“Meus”, inquit “Galo, cum omnia possit a mulieribus euincere, uacuum se penitus fatetur ab opere, sed michi soli”’).13 The word ‘Meus’ (‘my’) is here strongly emphasised at the head of the sentence. To Sadius, Galo is ‘My Galo’. The phrase ‘sed michi soli’ (‘but to me alone’) literally qualifies ‘fatetur’ (‘he confesses […] but to me alone’), but is grammatically loose enough at least to hint at a deeper exclusivity (i.e. ‘he confesses that he is completely void of sexual desire, [but he belongs] to me alone’). Similarly, ‘vacuum … ab opere’ (‘void of sex) is an expression that seems so awkwardly elaborate as to draw attention to itself, although the Clarendon edition obscures this by translating simply ‘he cannot’. The word opere is a form of ‘opus’, literally ‘work’ or ‘labour’, but here it is probably to be understood as euphemism for sexual activity (as it often is in medieval Latin).14 Meanwhile, vacuus means ‘empty/void (of)’, so that ‘vacuum … ab opere’ literally means ‘empty of the labour [of sex]’, which might be taken simply as a way of repeating that Galo is impotent (i.e. that ‘he cannot’, as the Clarendon puts it). However, ‘vacuus’ can also mean ‘free (of)’, or even ‘at liberty from’/‘unencumbered by’.15 This means that Sadius’s phrasing is at least ambiguous enough to suggest that Galo’s distentanglement from such ‘opus’ represents what he would regard as a happy escape. The logic is possibly that he is fortunate in being freed of any temptation to give up his chastity, and all the moral and spiritual advantages that chastity might be thought to convey (particularly in the view of medieval Christianity). Alternatively, this might be taken to mean that, as an exclusively homosexual man, Galo naturally regards heterosexual sex as a form of ‘labour’ that he would be happy to avoid. Sadius also reports Galo’s assertion that, being fortunate in everything except his ‘inpotencia’, it is only in this respect that he is damned (‘in hoc solo dampnauit’), or ‘rather, as he himself often says, saved’ (‘sed ut ipse satis asserit saluauit’).16 Again, this might be taken as an indication 12 Exclusively homosexual identities are certainly recognised in medieval literature: for

a particularly clear example, see my chapter ‘Homosexuality and Marriage in a Fifteenth-Century Italian Humanist Comedy: The Debate between Cavichiolus and his Wife’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 15 (2005), 25–66; and, more generally, John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 13 C, p. 214. 14 See J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982; repr. 1990), pp. 156–57. 15 See Oxford Latin Dictionary, s.v. ‘vacuus’ a., esp. senses 10–12. 16 C, p. 214.

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Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ that Galo thinks of his enforced chastity as a blessing in disguise (and this is clearly what Sadius wants the queen to believe). However, it could also be interpreted as a hint that, whatever Galo’s condition is, it is not something that he experiences as an affliction, but as a source of happiness; and this in turn would perhaps make much more sense in relation to homosexuality than to any medical condition. Sadius thus evokes the possibility of Galo’s ‘inpotencia’ in such a way as at least to allow Map’s readers/hearers to interpret his description of Galo’s impotence as a sotto voce admission of the two men’s homosexuality. In this way, he perhaps carefully ensures that he tells the queen no actual lies, while at the same time allowing her to assume that he means something entirely different. This could perhaps be seen as a repetition of tactics that Map himself deploys at the very beginning of the tale. He emphasises from the outset that the two men’s relationship is exceptionally faithful and affectionate and that they ‘loved each other with mutual and honest affections’ (‘paribus alterutrum se diligebant et honestis amoribus’): a description that fits an ideal homosexual relationship almost too obviously, indeed so obviously that it seems almost literal-minded to think that this is precisely what Map is talking about. Much depends here on what is meant by ‘honestis amoribus’. On the face of it, this looks like an assurance that the men’s relationship was entirely ‘respectable’, but of course respectability lies only in the eye of the beholder. (‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’, after all.) Map is merely saying that the love between the two men is not of a kind that he would regard as anything other than ‘honest’, in this way encouraging his readers/hearers to imagine their relationship in any way that they might find admirable, but not actually ruling out homosexuality. Map was presumably well aware that many of his readers/hearers would have been conditioned to think of an ideal relationship between two men in ‘Platonic’ terms (i.e. non-sexually), by the venerable literary/philosophical tradition of celebrating friendship going back to Cicero’s De amicitia, and which is represented strongly in the Middle Ages by the various medieval imitations of Cicero’s work that emerged (particularly) in the context of celibate monasticism.17 For Cicero, friendship was itself an index of virtue, a state that only ‘good men’ can realise (‘nisi in bonis amicitiam esse non posse’),18 and Map’s description of the relationship between Sadius and Galo is perhaps 17 M. Tullius Cicero, Laelius de amicitia, ed. Max Faltner as Laelius über die Freundschaft

(1961; repr. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014). See further Brian Patrick Maguire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience 350–1250 (1988; repr. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealization of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Verena Epp, Amicitia: Zur Geschichte personaler, sozialer, politischer und geistlicher Beziehungen im frühen Mittelalter, Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 44 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1999). 18 Cicero, De amicitia, 18.

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Neil Cartlidge deliberately Ciceronian in both vocabulary and style. For example, Map’s report that his protagonists loved each other equally (‘paribus … amoribus’) perhaps directly reflects Cicero’s assertion that true friends are equal in love (‘pares in amore’).19 Yet, in this context, such resonances are possibly only a deliberate camouflage. It may well be that Map is explaining the nature of the men’s relationship here quite explicitly – i.e. that they are lovers – while at the same time encouraging his readers/hearers to interpret this in terms of a framework that specifically excludes anything sexual. If Sadius’s revelation to the queen is indeed a confession of homosexuality that he expects her not to understand, then, as it turns out, her inability (or unwillingness) to understand it only creates more trouble for Galo. Far from putting the queen off, his information only prompts her to put his information to the test, thus taking her campaign of harassment to a new level of invasiveness. What she decides to do, specifically, is to send one of her serving-maids to Galo with instructions ‘to introduce her hand to his private parts [manum … inicere pudendis], and, without being unchaste herself, to ascertain whether Galo is impotent or not [utrum possit an non]’.20 Again, the Clarendon text is misleadingly inexplicit: here the maid is told ‘to put her finger on the spot, and without risking herself, to bring back word whether he was a man or no’. As Robert Levine puts it, the translation is at this point ‘somewhat Victorian in its decorum, and retreats from the practical directness of the instructions’.21 What the queen seems to be assuming is that a physical examination of this kind would necessarily reveal any physical abnormality of a kind that would cause impotence, but also that any man in good sexual health could not help but show signs of sexual arousal when faced with an attractive young woman determined to grope his genitals (‘manum … inicere pudendis’). In this way, the queen hopes to test the accuracy of Sadius’s ‘diagnosis’, but it never seems to occur to her that this test might be flawed. She clearly never considers the possibility that he might be healthily constituted, but yet unattracted to women, and this is presumably because she is too naive, and/or single-mindedly heterosexual herself, to think of it. Her behaviour might seem remarkably ignorant (as well as weirdly intrusive and insensitive), but it is possibly the very narrowness of her heterosexual mentality that largely qualifies her for the role of arch-villain within the particular moral economy of Map’s tale. The underlying assumption seems to be that women like the queen naturally pose an annoyance, or even a threat, to homosexual men: not just because of their unwillingness to take ‘no’ for an answer, but also because of the way 19 C, pp. 210–12; Cicero, De amicitia, 32. 20 C, p. 214. 21 Robert Levine, ‘How to Read Walter Map’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch, 23 (1988),

91–105 (p. 99).

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Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ they fail even to acknowledge (let alone respect) the existence of male–male preferences. This, in itself, seems to be enough to make her into a hate-figure within the text. Map seems to relish his subsequent contemplation of the way in which she insists on torturing herself both with anxiety about the nature of Galo’s ‘inpotencia’ and with jealousy of her maid. In all of this, the reticence of the Clarendon’s translation is unhelpfully at odds with the agonising directness with which the queen’s thinking is explicated in the Latin. So, for example, Map shows her trying to convince herself at one point that Sadius is a reliable informant after all: ‘O, sed eram immemor! Vere fidelis et verus est Sadius: amisit genitalia.’22 (‘O, but I was heedless! Of course Sadius is loyal and truthful. Galo has lost his genitals!’)

The Clarendon translation here reads: ‘O, but I had forgotten! Sadius is faithful and true: Galo is not the man he was.’ The queen is at this point clearly trying to come to terms with what would be (for her) a worst-case scenario: one in which Sadius is telling the truth, and Galo’s inpotencia is the consequence of some sort of physical emasculation (i.e. he is not just ‘not the man he was’ in any general sense, but specifically someone who has lost, or lost the use of, his ‘genitals’). This, she reassures herself, might explain his apparent indifference to her beauty (in which she continues to be vainly confident), but she still cannot bring herself to believe in such a scenario, since of course it would mean an end to all her hopes. And so she goes on to try to imagine how she herself might have explored his body, had she been able to: ‘Numquid et Galo fatuus, qui a me probra sua [celavit], qui se non permisit attrectari, qui me repulit ne repellerem ipsum? Vere si michi fauisset, iunctissimis ei nexibus adesissem, et si moram in eo reperissem, illuc manus errasset quo certissime posset deprehendi femina vel mas, aut neutrum.’23 (‘Was Galo really a fool for concealing his disgrace from me, for not allowing himself to be fondled [attrectari]24 by me, and for rejecting me in order to prevent me rejecting him? Certainly, if he had allowed me to be joined to him in the most intimate of embraces, and if I had then encountered any hesitation on his part, my hand would have wandered to where it could have been detected for certain whether he is female or male, or neither.’)

Again, the Clarendon translation is coyly inexplicit, just when it is crucial that there is no such inexplicitness: 22 C, p. 216. 23 C, p. 216. 24 On the connotations of this term, see Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary, pp. 186–87.

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Neil Cartlidge ‘The more fool he, to conceal his shortcomings from me, to keep me at arm’s length, and spurn me that I might not spurn him in my turn! Had he been kind, I would have been his closest friend, and, were he slow to respond, I could have found out for myself how the land lies.’

It is the sheer determination with which the queen insists on knowing precisely how much truth there is in Sadius’s report that is the primary cause both of her own pain (as she wrestles with her ongoing uncertainty about the meaning of his words) and of the ruthlessness with which she orders the continued sexual harassment of her victim (by means of her serving-maid). Her desire is not to know ‘how the land lies’, or anything so unspecific as that: what she wants to know is what a physical examination would tell her, as definitely and unambiguously as possible, about the condition of Galo’s genitals. Her jealousy of the serving-maid is equally imaginative. Indeed, on her return, the queen clearly accuses her of having ignored the instruction to remain ‘chaste’ herself. The Clarendon translation obscures the whole logic of her attack, apparently suggesting that the queen thinks the maid was slow to return because she took so long about setting off on her mission: Regina: ‘Nunc? Ab hac hora precepti mei posses a decem redisse milibus, sed egredi nisi culta noluisti; numquid nuptum ibas?’25 (Queen: ‘Between now and the time of my order to you, you could have come back from ten miles off; but you would not go without decking yourself out. Were you going to your wedding?)

However, the queen’s anxiety is surely that the maid has been reluctant to come back from Galo (because she has been having too much fun with him): Regina: ‘Nunc ab hac hora praecepti mei posses a decem redisse milibus! Sed egredi nisi “culta” noluisti! Numquid nuptatum ibas?’26 (Queen: ‘Since the time when I gave you your instructions, you could have come back from ten miles away! But you did not want to leave until you had been “tilled”! Didn’t you go out in order to be “married”?’)

The image implicit in the word ‘culta’ seems to be demeaningly agricultural: the queen imagines that the serving-maid did not want to leave him until she had been properly ‘tilled’ (or ‘ploughed’).27 The meaning of ‘nuptatum’ is that the maid went out with the intention of behaving like a bride (i.e. of being a 25 C, p. 222. 26 This is my re-editing of this passage (based on the sole extant MS of De nugis, Oxford,

Bodleian Library, Bodley MS 851, SC 3041), as part of the new edition with translation that I am working on for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library. 27 Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary, pp. 82–85.

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Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ willing sexual partner).28 However, the maid is quite frank about the nature of her activities. She rejects the allegation that she was selfishly enjoying herself with Galo on the grounds that it was necessary for her try to please him (sexually), in order to find out if she could get a (sexual) response from him, and in this way prove that he is not impotent: ‘Bonum erat ut placere possem ei donec scirem; et placui fere, sensique uirum integrum et promptum, si te sensisset. Sed ut a[d]vertit quod minor, quod minus habilis, quod non idonea fui sicut tu, statim eiecta sum.’29 (‘It was good that I could please him, until I knew for sure. And I pleased him almost completely, finding him to be a whole man – and he would have been a responsive one too, if it had been you he sensed. But as soon as he noticed that I am a lesser than you, less adroit and not so well-suited, I was immediately thrown out.’)

In other words, she discovers that Galo is physically complete, and also potentially responsive (‘promptum’) to her touch, and so presumably not impotent in any medical sense: however, Galo immediately recoils from her as soon as he realises who his companion is. In her panic at her mistress’s all too evident anger, the maid attempts to appease her by concluding that Galo’s lack of interest in herself is most likely explained by his preference for the queen instead of her. However, she has no evidence to support this deduction, and it is perhaps just as likely that Galo rejects her because he prefers the company of somebody else entirely. That the maid’s interpretation is too obviously an attempt at flattery is suggested by the queen’s incredulous response: ‘Nunc scio quod nequiter adulteraris’ (‘Now I know that you have been wickedly fornicating!’ or, as the Clarendon has it, ‘Now I know that you are a shameless wanton!’) The type-scenario of the bright young lad who finds himself in the embarrassing position of having attracted the unwanted or unexpected attentions of a lady who is his social superior is, of course, recurrent in courtly romance. The ultimate archetype for such situations is probably the story of Potiphar’s wife in Genesis 39:5–20: but medieval romances depart also from the biblical model in a number of particular ways. So, for example, the desiring woman is not necessarily married (in many romances, she is a lord’s unmarried daughter or an independently wealthy woman);30 nor do the protagonists necessarily succeed in resisting the lady’s advances.31 However, what they all have in 28 Adams, Latin Sexual Vocabulary, pp. 159–61. 29 C, p. 222. 30 See Judith Weiss, ‘The Wooing Woman in Anglo-Norman Romance’, in Romance in

Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 149–61. 31 E.g. Amis and Amiloun, ed. E. Kölbing (Heilbronn, 1884), pp. 111–84; also ed. Hideka Fukui, as Amys e Amyllyoun, ANTS Plain Texts 7 (London: ANTS, 1990); trans. Judith Weiss in The Birth of Romance in England: The ‘Romance of Horn’, The ‘Folie

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Neil Cartlidge common is the assumption that the predicament is essentially rather flattering: implicitly a tribute to the chivalric hero’s perceived military prowess, moral virtue and/or physical beauty. Despite the potential dangers either in acceding to the lady’s wishes (such as the risk of being accused of adultery or disparagement, of conception out of wedlock, or of simply being caught in flagrante) or in not acceding to them (such as the lady taking revenge for her rejection by making false allegations), it is generally understood that the ultimate cause of such problems is the hero’s own supreme desirability, while the lady in such stories is almost always said to be exceptionally attractive. From this point of view such stories can usually be read as (masculine) wish-fulfilment fantasies. Map himself hints at this reading of the situation when he observes that the queen’s advances on Galo were ‘a misfortune that someone else would perhaps regard as a success’ (‘infortunium, quod forsitan alii videretur successus’).32 Yet, in making use of this type-scenario, Map is not just borrowing from, or imitating, courtly romance: he also seems to rewrite it in such a way as to contradict the assumptions typically attached to it in the vernacular analogues. Far from being in any way flattering, Galo’s treatment by the queen seems deeply demeaning. Her determination to expose him – quite literally if necessary – is not just disrespectful of his personal privacy, but potentially very cruel, since if he were indeed impotent, then this could well be a source of distress that he might very well want to hide. At the same time, Map makes clear that her very ruthlessness – her willingness to stop at nothing in order to get the certainty that she wants – might be seen as an illustration of the ferocity and insatiability that is (he suggests) typical of feminine desire. Certainly, ‘Sadius and Galo’ is a story in which female sexuality seems to exist only as a kind of constant threat. One obvious explanation for this is that what Map is dramatising in this tale particularly is the discomfort of homosexual men faced directly with blatant heterosexuality. From that point of view, the tale is not really about impotence at all: Map seems to present both impotence and emasculation only as (pointedly inaccurate) ways of referring to masculine homosexuality: as what could be described a kind of camouflage. Yet, even as he does so, he seems to acknowledge that homosexuality might be seen as a failure to live up to the procreative/dynastic responsibilities of masculinity as asserted (for example) by courtly romances, so that, at least from this perspective, it does indeed constitute a form of emasculation. However, Sadius’s use of impotence as a fig leaf for the homosexuality he shares with Galo could also be seen as an instance of linguistic reappropriation. On Tristan’, The ‘Lai of Haveloc’, and Amis and Amilun: Four Twelfth-Century Romances in the French of England, FRETS 4 (Tempe AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009), pp. 171–88, lines 251–312. On the influence of this text on ‘Sadius and Galo’, see Kathryn Hume, ‘The Composition of a Medieval Romance: Walter Map’s “Sadius and Galo”’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 76 (1975), 415–423. 32 Cf. C, pp. 212–13.

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Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ the one hand, the disparaging implications of the identification of homosexuality with impotence are effectively neutralised by the unapologetic boldness with which Sadius adopts the term as a description of Galo’s ‘condition’; on the other hand, it is perhaps implicit in his willingness to do so that (in his view) even impotence would be better than heterosexuality. Distaste for women (and for women’s sexuality in particular) is expressed with a similar degree of extravagance in two of the other tales in Distinction III of De nugis curialium. In ‘De Rasone et eius uxore’, Raso’s wife betrays her husband by stooping so low as to give herself to a prisoner in her charge, a man who is not even a Christian. As Map complains: Hec auis, hec uulpa, hec femina tot bonas uiderat fidei sue facies, tot audierat et non exaudierat diuitum preces, et a facie Sarraceni captiui exlegis et attenuati capta exlex facta est et uilis et adultera legis et uiri …33 (This bird, this vixen, this woman had beheld so many countenances belonging to her own faith, had heard but not heeded the beseechings of so many rich men, and yet once she had been captivated by the countenance of a captive Saracen, outlawed and emaciated, she became an outlaw herself, vilely betraying both the law and her husband …)

After various adventures in which the lady repeatedly shows herself to be as unscrupulous as she is unfaithful, Raso is on the point of being ambushed by her latest lover and his men, when he is rescued by his favourite horse, who neighs so as to give him warning, and in this way rescues him from death. Throughout this tale, the woman and the horse are clearly being compared, and the message is very clear: the horse is much more reliable than the woman. In ‘De Rollone et eius uxore’ (c. 5), Rollo’s wife is willing to commit adultery with their neighbour Resus, who, as it happens, Rollo himself has praised highly in her hearing. When she (ill-advisedly) tells Resus of Rollo’s high opinion of him, he immediately rejects her, having realised that it would be discourteous to repay Rollo’s benevolence (‘benignitas’) towards him by doing him such an injury. In effect, Resus pointedly chooses homosociality over heterosexuality. Of course, this means that he also chooses not to breach the marital bond either, but it is significant that he seems to have had no qualms about that until the wife reminds him of Rollo’s ‘benignitas’. The whole tale seems to be constructed in such a way as to lead up to a dramatic rejection of female sexuality. Resus refuses the woman when she is literally lying in bed urging him into her arms: ‘ecce tibi desideratas offero leta delicias’34 (‘here I happily offer you the delights that you have desired’). In both tales, Map’s misogyny seems so fundamental as to be a given: what makes them distinctive is the particular ingenuity and flamboyance with which they 33 C, p. 270. 34 C, p. 274.

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Neil Cartlidge express it. The same is probably true of the ‘Dissuasion of Valerius’, the one part of De nugis curialium that circulated widely on its own.35 In the past I was prepared to view the misogyny of this diatribe against marriage as so obviously over the top that it could be read only as tongue in cheek: as a satirical ‘canular’ (or ‘hoax’), i.e. a pose adopted primarily for its provocative effect.36 These days I take Map’s misogyny more seriously. There is no doubt that he saw it as vehicle or opportunity for the exercise of his wit, and that is often pointedly extravagant: however, underlying all this seems to be an attitude towards women, and to women’s sexuality in particular, that seems almost phobic. His depiction of women in De nugis curialium is not just hostile, but so elaborately violent, and so persistently linked with fantasies of physical invasion, exposure and/or degradation, that it seems pathological. In the context of all this, it seems inevitable to read Galo’s subsequent adventures in the mysterious ivory city as a working-out of the thematics of impotence and emasculation established in these opening scenes. These adventures are narrated in the form of a reluctant confession that is modelled most obviously (and probably consciously) on Calogrenant’s confession at the beginning of Chrétien’s Yvain.37 Galo explains how in his wanderings he discovered a mysterious otherworldly city, strangely empty of inhabitants, where he encountered a beautiful maiden ‘seated like a queen on a silken cloth’ (‘puellam […] panno serico regaliter insidentem’).38 After she failed to respond to his presence in any way (so he tells us), he decided that it would be shameful to turn back without getting any response; and so ‘shameful though it is it relate it’ (‘quodque fateri dedecus est’), he prepared himself to violate her where she lay (‘ipsam supinam … violare’), making use of unrestrained force (‘uiolencia tota’) so that he might win her maidenhead (‘ut primicias pudoris acciperem’).39 Here again, the Clarendon translation is unduly coy: it says that Galo ‘set to work to lay her flat and be the first to violate her modesty with an embrace’. On the face of it, this attempt at rape would seem to contradict the idea that Galo is exclusively homosexual, or indeed that he is sexually impotent. Yet, despite the threat of violence, Galo’s attempt at rape 35 See note 1, above. 36 See Neil Cartlidge, ‘Misogyny in a Medieval University? The “Hoc contra malos”

Commentary on Walter Map’s Dissuasio Valerii’, Journal of Medieval Latin, 8 (1998), 156–91, at p. 157. This term ‘canular’ is taken from Philippe Delhaye, ‘Le dossier antimatrimonial de l’Advenus Jovinianum et son influence sur quelques écrits latins au Xlle siècle’, Mediaeval Studies, 13 (1951), 65–86 (p. 80). 37 Le Chevalier au lion (Yvain), ed. David F. Hult, in Chrétien de Troyes: Romans (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1994; repr. 2011), pp. 705–936, lines 53–580. 38 C, p. 226. 39 For another use of the phrase ‘primicias pudoris’, see Peter of Blois’s poem, ‘Olim militaveram’, str. 4a, ed. Peter Dronke, in ‘Peter of Blois and Poetry at the Court of Henry II’, Mediæval Studies, 28 (1976), 185–235, repr. in The Medieval Poet and His World (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1984), pp. 281–339 (pp. 337–38).

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Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ seems oddly desultory. He claims only that he prepared himself (‘paraui’), not that he put his preparations into action. His whole motivation seems to lie in his determination to get some sort of response (‘signum’) from the otherwise unresponsive maiden, and perhaps his assumption is that the threat of rape is a relatively certain way of extracting one. Ultimately, it seems as if he is going through the motions of knightly predation largely for the sake of appearances; and indeed it does seem as if he is somewhat perfunctorily performing what he knows to be a proscribed role, aware perhaps of such models as the lai of ‘Lanval’, in which a wandering knight likewise encounters a mysterious lady, in this case one sitting on cloth ‘that was worth as much as a castle’.40 Unlike Lanval’s lady, however, Galo’s does not readily succumb to the knight’s attentions, and indeed subsequent events lead only to yet another suggestion that Galo is (at least relatively) impotent, for the maiden is immediately rescued from Galo’s attentions by a giant who easily defeats him, effortlessly casting him into the fork of a nearby tree and then pinning him there at the end of the full length of his lance (‘tota longitudine lancee’).41 Galo’s ability to fight the giant is limited by the effects of a recent illness (as he has explained), but his fate is nevertheless humiliating, and indeed the particular nature of his humiliation seems oddly phallic. Even this attempt by Galo at asserting his sexual potency results only in putting him at the end of another man’s lance: an image that surely recalls the doubts already established in the tale about the reliability of Galo’s own ‘lance’, and also the suggestions that he might be homosexual. At the very least, the whole scene seems like a deliberately provocative unwriting of the scenario of knightly (hetero)sexual conquest that we find in so many medieval romances. In this way ‘Sadius and Galo’ shows that it was possible, even in the Middle Ages, for courtly romance to be rewritten in ways that are anything but comfortably heteronormative. It is not necessarily wholly wide of the mark, therefore, to detect acknowledgements of anxiety about masculinity even in texts that otherwise enthusiastically endorse the ideal of the uncompromisingly virile knight. A convenient illustration of this is provided by Eger and Grime, a late Scottish romance that, as it happens, shares a great deal with ‘Sadius and Galo’ in terms of plot-structure: so much indeed that the two

40 ‘Lanval’, ed. A. Ewert, in Marie de France: Lais (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), pp. 58–74,

line 98. See also Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), esp. pp. 187–233. 41 C, p. 228. ‘Sadius and Galo’ also resembles ‘Lanval’ in the sense that the possibility of the protagonist’s homosexuality is evoked there too, this time by King Arthur’s jealous queen (who is clearly a narrative cognate of the jealous queen in ‘Sadius and Galo’). Piqued at Lanval’s rejection of her in favour of his fairy-mistress, the queen lashes out at him by accusing him of having ‘no desire for women [because instead] you have well-trained boys and you enjoy yourself with them’ (‘Lanval’, lines 280–82).

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Neil Cartlidge texts are almost certainly related in some way.42 For example, both romances celebrate the close friendship of a pair of knights. Both describe how one of them goes off on an adventure but returns in humiliation, having been completely outmatched in battle by a formidable opponent. Both show the defeated knight’s friend proposing an exchange of identities, so that the friend can fight this opponent on the defeated knight’s behalf. However, one of the significant differences between the two texts is that while the giant in ‘Sadius and Galo’ humiliates Galo by pinning him to a tree, the opponent in Eger and Grime chooses to humiliate Eger by chopping off his finger.43 It subsequently emerges that this is how he routinely treats the men he has vanquished.44 Eger himself interprets his defeat to mean that his ‘manhood is lost for euermore’.45 When Grime later overcomes this mysterious opponent, he explicitly takes revenge for Eger’s lost finger by removing the man’s hand, complete with glove, which is perhaps at least a distant reflection of the fact that in ‘Sadius and Galo’ the mysterious giant is eventually killed only after his hand is chopped off in combat.46 However, the key point here is that, in place of Walter Map’s explicit emphasis on impotence and emasculation, Eger and Grime offers something that looks more like a figurative castration. It could even be seen as a deliberate euphemisation. While Map directly considers the possibility that one of its protagonists might have been emasculated (‘amisit genitalia’), before describing his defeat at the hands of a gigantic knight, Eger and Grime prefers to exchange the implicitly missing phallus for an actually missing finger. Yet, even if medieval romance generally prefers to address the (masculine) anxieties implied by such moments much more euphemistically than Map does, it never eliminates them entirely, and indeed it perhaps exploits the suggestiveness generated by such themes to a much greater extent than is usually recognised. After all, it could be argued that an implied castration is central even to one of medieval romance’s most foundational texts, Chrétien’s Perceval – where the custodian of the Holy Grail, the Fisher King, is said to

42 Eger and Grime: A parallel-text edition of the Percy and Huntington-Laing Versions

of the Romance, with an Introductory Study, ed. James Ralston Caldwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, 3 vols (London: Trübner, 1868; repr. Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1968), I, pp. 341–400. There is clear evidence that this romance was in existence in some form by the middle of the sixteenth century, but it is now extant only in the mid-seventeenth-century Percy Folio Manuscript, and in three closely related Scottish prints from 1669, 1687 (both published by Robert Sanders in Glasgow), and 1711 (published by James Nicol in Aberdeen). 43 Percy text, line 192; Huntington text, line 209 (Caldwell, pp. 192–93). 44 Percy, line 196; Huntington, line 212 (Caldwell, pp. 192–93). 45 Percy, line 84; Huntington, line 76 (Caldwell, pp. 184–85). 46 Percy, line 1106; Huntington, line 1641 (Caldwell, pp. 284–85): cf. C, p. 242.

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Walter Map’s Romance of ‘Sadius and Galo’ have been maimed by an injury between his thighs.47 From this perspective, Map’s interest in the implications of impotence or emasculation or castration is perhaps not so foreign to courtly romance after all. Joshua Byron Smith has written that Map’s romances ‘reassert what we might call traditional male values, usually at the expense of women’:48 however, Walter Map’s attitude to masculinity (and indeed to women) seems to me anything but safely ‘traditional’. In ‘Sadius and Galo’ he combines a celebration of a passionate friendship between two men with a demonstratively extreme distaste for feminine desire. He focuses on ‘impotence’ and ‘emasculation’ in part because these are provocatively obvious terms in which to caricature homosexuality. Teasingly implicit throughout the tale is the possibility that the real explanation for Galo’s apparent horror even at the very idea of the queen’s approaches is that his ‘friendship’ with Sadius is already sexually exclusive. The reader/hearer is perhaps invited to experience the queen’s insistent heterosexuality, not just as an embarrassment or an annoyance, but as something deeply repellant. Indeed, the sheer corrosiveness of Map’s antipathy towards women is perhaps explicitly acknowledged in the biblical image he deploys in his prelude to the tale, where he explains that the effect of the ‘songs’ that Sadius sang was like the action of ‘vinegar on nitre’ (‘acetum in nitro’).49 In other words, it will resemble the pouring of one powerful chemical on another in such a way as to create an explosive reaction that destroys both. What this signifies, according to the Bible, is the depth of the futility of singing songs to an ‘evil heart’: however, in the context of ‘Sadius and Galo’, the powerful and unpleasant chemistry evoked here might also be taken as an illustration of the violence of feeling that the tale is intended to provoke.

47 Perceval, ed. Charles Méla, in Chrétien de Troyes: Romans, pp. 937–1211, lines 3450–

51. Cf. Anna Roberts, ‘Queer Fisher King: Castration as a Site of Queer Representation (Perceval, Stabat Mater, The City of God)’, Arthuriana, 11 (2001), 49–88. 48 Joshua Byron Smith, Walter Map and the Matter of Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), p. 31. 49 C, p. 210. Cf. Proverbs 25: 20.

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7 The Three Barriers to Closure in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon and the Middle English Translations REBECCA NEWBY

T

he ending of Hue de Rotelande’s ‘letter-perfect pastiche’ of romance, Ipomedon, might raise a few eyebrows amongst readers of the tradition.1 The hero, Ipomedon, and his on-off sweetheart, La Fière, ‘The Proud’ duchess of Calabria, are finally brought back together after being at cross purposes for some time, driven apart, paradoxically, by their devotion to the same set of chivalric ideals and equally afraid to commit to each other at different points of the story. Yet, in a departure from the virtuous tone of other such ‘tremblante’ romance reunions, their happy marriage is cast as something of an orgy: ‘Or(e) s’entreaiment tant par amur, / K’il s’entrefoutent tute jur’ (‘Now they are so much in love with each other / That they fuck each other all day long’).2 This salacious account of their crowning marriage is only the tip of the iceberg. In fact, it pales next to the lewd epilogue, more closely aligned to the register of a fabliau, in which ‘Hue’ propositions his female audience with a finely veiled innuendo: A Credenhulle a ma meisun, Chartre ai de l’absoluciun: S’il i ad [u] dame u pucele, U riche vedve u damsiele, Ne voille creire, ke jo l’ai, Venge la: jo li musterai; Ainz ke d’iloc s’en seit turne, La charter li ert enbreve, 1 Susan Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, in Insular Romance: Politics,

Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 143. 2 All references are to Hue de Rotelande, Ipomedon, ed. E. Kölbing and E. Koschwitz (Breslau: Wilhelm Koebner, 1889), p. 178, lines 10514–15; Kölbing’s edition substitutes ‘entrebeisent’ for ‘entrefoutent’; for their reunion as ‘tremblante’, see line 10421; all translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

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Rebecca Newby E ço n’ert pas trop grant damages, Se li seaus li pent as nages. (lines 10569–78) (In Credenhill at my house, / I have a charter of absolution: / If there is a lady or girl, / Or fine widow or maid, / Who does not believe, that I have it, / Let her come here: I’ll show it to her; / Before she turns from there, / The charter will be written down for her / And it won’t be so very bad / If the seal hangs down from her ass-cheeks.)

Medievalists understandably find this manner of ending variously ‘boisterous’, ‘sudden, crude’, ‘provocative’, misogynistic; for Brenda Hosington it is a ‘literary hoax’, and for M. Dominica Legge it is ‘too shameless to be quoted’.3 This ending is an acquired taste, and seems to provoke critical revulsion because it parodies the squeaky-clean spectacles of devotion which often mark the close of romance by suggesting they are merely a smokescreen for sexual debauchery. Carnal desire is the true motivation behind rituals of courtly love and the dynastic marriage is only an excuse for the unbridled gratification of base impulses. Most surprising is that Ipomedon, written ‘not long’ after 1180, is early in the development of the genre, since we tend to think of parody as a possibility that inheres to ‘late’ romances.4 Unusually for his time, then, Hue’s conclusion pushes against some of the more virtuous representations of knights and ladies in the endings of classical and Continental romance literature of the day. That said, the mention of the house in Credenhill locates Hue 3 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 172; Nora Mayer, ‘An Edition of

the Ipomedon B and C Texts’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of York, 2011), p. 15; Suzanne Kocher, ‘Desire, Parody, and Sexual Mores in the Ending of Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon: An Invitation Through the Looking Glass’, in Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: New Approaches to a Fundamental Cultural-Historical and Literary-Anthropological Theme, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 429–48 (p. 429); Roberta Krueger, ‘Misogyny, Manipulation, and the Female Reader in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, Selected Papers from the Fifth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Keith Busby and Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), p. 405; Brenda Hosington, ‘The Englishing of the Comic Technique in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, in Medieval Translators and Their Craft, ed. Jeanette Beer (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), pp. 247–64 (p. 250); M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 93. 4 On the dating of Ipomedon, see A. J. Holden, ed., Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon (Paris: Klincksieck, 1979), p. 11; also Rhiannon Purdie, ‘The Translator and His Source’, in Ipomadon, ed. Rhiannon Purdie, EETS o.s. 316 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. lxi; ‘Faus franceis and dreit engleis: On Language’, in Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120–c. 1450, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert W. Russell (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 9–88 (p. 36); on early parody, see Siân Echard, ‘Map’s Metafiction: Author, Narrative and Reader in De Nugis curialium’, Exemplaria, 82.3 (1996), 287–314.

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Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon firmly within Herefordshire and emphasises his Anglo-Norman or, specifically, Cambro-Norman literary heritage. At the end of Protheselaus, the sequel to Ipomedon, we learn that Hugh of Rhuddlan’s patron was Gilbert Fitzbaderon, fourth lord of Monmouth (1176–91).5 Whether Hue also wrote Ipomedon (Protheselaus’s father) for Gilbert is uncertain. But this acknowledgement, together with his professed acquaintance with fellow clerk Walter Map (line 7184), from whom Neil Cartlidge suggests Hue might have inherited some of his ‘extravagant misogyny’, and his familiarity with the siege of Rouen in 1174 (lines 5348–49), indicates that he was also writing in and for a noble milieu.6 Hue’s deliberate localisation of the text suggests that the ending of his parodic romance might be a more specific interrogation of the tastes of the Marcher lords in the second half of the twelfth century.7 Popular works like The Romance of Horn (1170), in which the rollercoaster of Horn and Rigmel’s love affair ends with an exemplary picture of married life after the hero reconquers his native Suddene, suggest that such insular audiences enjoyed transcendence and finality at the end of their romance narratives. Among the classical and Continental romances that Hue references are the Roman de Thebes (c. 1150; line 10517) and Thomas d’Angleterre’s Tristan (c. 1155–60; from line 10537 ff.). It is likely that Hue was also influenced by the other romans d’antiquité, such as Enéas (c. 1160), in which the hero’s love for Lavinia leads to his triumph in war and their marriage, and possibly the earlier works of his contemporary Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide (c. 1169) and Cligès (c. 1176), both of which end with the marriage and coronation of the courtly couples. In fact, with its demanding duchess, hesitant knight-lover, failures of recognition, disguises, and three-day tournament, Hue’s work calls attention to romance motifs and stock episodes so often that it begins to feel ‘clichéd’.8 But the sequence of events becomes increasingly illogical and frustratingly repetitive, and the abrupt and improbable denouement is ineffective as a means to resolve the issues raised or to explain why characters behave in the way they do, especially because Hue, like his hero, becomes ever more evasive. The happy marriage loses much of its impact as a device of closure because it is depicted as a relationship of never-ending fornication, prefaced by a turn of events so implausible as to be fantastical – the sudden appearance of Ipomedon’s former best friend and long-lost brother Capaneus – 5 Hue de Rotelande, Protheselaus, ed. A. J. Holden, 3 vols (London: Anglo Norman Text

Society, 1991–3), lines 12697–701; also, Sanchez-Marti, ‘Reconstructing the Audiences of the Middle English Versions of Ipomedon’, Studies in Philology, 103.2 (2006), 153–77 (pp. 166–67). 6 Neil Cartlidge, ‘Masters in the Art of Lying? The Literary Relationship between Hugh of Rhuddlan and Walter Map’, Modern Language Review, 106.1 (2011), 1–16 (p. 11). 7 For a discussion of Hue’s work in its Marcher context, see Helen Fulton’s chapter 1 in this volume. 8 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 159.

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Rebecca Newby and followed by that ‘obscene’ epilogue, Hue’s dating profile targeted at all women in the vicinity.9 The ending generates anxiety, then, not only because it admits a sexual subtext into courtly literature, but because the final sequence of events disturbs the sense of closure expected at the end of romances concerned with ‘the consolidation and regeneration of the family history’.10 Most of the commentary on the ending of Ipomedon concentrates on how Hue’s epilogue parodies Thomas d’Angleterre’s final ‘farewell’ to all lovers, and lampoons to the last the disparity between some of the more optimistic romance ideas about love and the truth of amatory encounters in the real world.11 Some critics feel, however, that, while he refuses to do so until the last moment, Hue does ultimately ‘synthesise these contradictory movements’ in the plot.12 It is also true that, in theory, Hue provides all the apparatus for a cogent romance conclusion: a reunion, a marriage, and an epilogue. Nevertheless, this chapter will argue that there are three distinct barriers to narrative closure in Ipomedon, almost indistinguishable from these components, which together preclude the resolution of its various narrative conflicts. These barriers are the play of parody and misogyny in the treatment of courtly love; the recognition of Ipomedon by Capaneus; and the open-ended invitation of Hue’s epilogue. While it is tempting to accept A. J. Holden’s inference that all this evasiveness is simply part of a campaign to reject the motifs of Continental romance, Hue’s acute awareness of a present audience at the end suggests that his ironies have a target closer to home: the Anglo-Norman barony.13 These nobles must have been served, or at least entertained, by this critique, however, since neither this nor the naughty ending seems to have diminished the work’s popularity. It survives in three manuscript copies and two fragments, and was translated three times into Middle English.14 This chapter also reflects on how the revisionary trend of these later Middle English romances, Ipomadon (A; c. 1390–1400), The Lyfe of Ipomydon (B; c. 1460–80), and the prose Ipomedon (C; c. 1461–83), illuminates the lack of 9 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 160. 10 David L. Jeffrey, ‘Literature in an Apocalyptic Age; or, How to End a Romance’, Dal-

housie Review, 61 (1981), 426–46 (p. 431).

11 See note 3; Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas, poeme du XIIe siecle, vol. 1., ed. Joseph Bédi-

er (Paris: Firmin Didot et Cie, 1902–5), p. 416, line 3125; Holden, Ipomedon, pp. 51–56.

12 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 158; Ronald Spensley, ‘The Struc-

ture of Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, Romania, 95 (1974), 341–51 (p. 380).

13 Holden, Ipomedon, p. 55; Penny Eley, ‘The Subversion of Meaning in Hue de

Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, Reading Medieval Studies, 26 (2000), 97–112 (p. 98).

14 London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian A. VII. (mid-fourteenth century);

London, British Library, Egerton MS 2515 (early fourteenth century); Dublin, Trinity College, MS 523 (mid-fourteenth century). Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson MS Miscellanea D. 913 contains a fragment of 162 lines; C. H. Livingston’s MS 1942, the only surviving fragment not of English origin, suggests Ipomedon circulated on the Continent.

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Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon closure for Hue’s romance. These later works are cultural as well as linguistic translations, and the stronger sense of closure that we gain at the end of these versions is part of a larger effort to smooth over the tensions of the source for their fourteenth- and fifteenth-century audiences. This chapter will finally argue, however, that while there is no lasting sense of closure for Ipomedon’s own narrative, the work as a whole achieves an extradiegetic unity through the three barriers to closure, which simultaneously function as an elaborate trick constructed by Hue to both deride and delight his audience. Medieval Conceptions of Closure The advice contained in the contemporaneous medieval artes poeticae can help to explain how and why the ending of Ipomedon is not a formula for secure closure. The end of a romance is often key to establishing a sense of stability and resolution and usually features an event which in our non-literary experience is associated with finality and repose, what A. C. Spearing calls ‘boundary events’: the return home, coronation, marriage, or death.15 Moreover, once they have reunited the hero with his community, married him to his lover, crowned him king, or followed him to death, romance poets tend to emphatically posit the ‘fine’ (Tristan) or ‘endinge’ (Havelok) of their poems in the epilogue.16 Aside from these sorts of closural allusions (words that thematically announce the approach of the end), the poet might use a recapitulation of the story or an invocation to God to assure readers that their characters are unlikely to generate further narrative material.17 As well as creating a sense of stasis, the end of a medieval poem was expected to present itself as the logical outcome of its narrative pattern in a way that epitomised the meaning of the whole. Nevertheless, Spearing notes, it seems to be ‘generally taken for granted’ that the ends of romance are achieved in a ‘mechanical way’, by the imposition of formulaic conventions and devices.18 Instructions on how to finish a poem and the devices available for this purpose are found in the artes poeticae, the treatises on poetry that Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendôme developed from Cicero’s Rhetorica 15 A. C. Spearing, ‘Narrative Closure: The End of Troilus and Criseyde’, in Readings in

Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 116; on ‘terminal’ events in poetry, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 172. 16 Le Roman de Tristan par Thomas, poeme du XIIe siecle, vol. 1., ed. Joseph Bédier (Paris: Firmin Didot et Cie, 1902–5), p. 416, line 3125; cited in Constance B. Bouchard, ‘The Possible Non-Existence of Thomas, Author of Tristan and Isolde’, Modern Philology, 79.1 (1981), 66–72 (p. 67); The Lay of Havelok the Dane, ed. W. W. Skeat, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), line 3001. 17 Spearing, ‘Narrative Closure’, pp. 111–15; on closural allusions, see Smith, Poetic Closure, pp. 172–81. 18 Spearing, ‘Narrative Closure’, p. 111.

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Rebecca Newby ad Herennium around the turn of the thirteenth century. These works are, Spearing writes, ‘of great interest for the basic assumptions they state, or sometimes consciously imply, about what poems are’.19 On ending a poem, Geoffrey recommends retrospective reference to the body of work, a proverb or an exemplum, and the linking of conclusion and beginning.20 Towards the beginning of the Poetria nova (c. 1208–13), he advises the poet to have the end of the text in mind when setting its foundations to paper (lines 58–59). In Ars Versificatoria (c. 1175), Matthew suggests a few more possibilities: he proposes a recapitulation of meaning, an emendation to the work, a plea for indulgence, a demonstration of pride, an expression of thanks, or praise of God.21 Though not exactly contemporary with Hue, the guidelines written by these scholars might reflect views that were prevalent in the courtly and monastic culture of Hereford in the later part of the twelfth century.22 However, strong closure is not an inherent feature of romance, and many of the Old French and insular works end with more questions than they answer. Lanval, Le Conte du Graal, Le Bel Inconnu, and later works like Horn Childe and Sir Orfeo, are just some of the romances from across the tradition that do not develop strong closure. Indeed, the romance genre is complex, plural, and heterogeneous, and it was continually evolving as poets rewrote and adjusted its conventions. It makes sense, then, that the ends of romance are not always happy or satisfactory; irony often goes with serious elements, and closure is not always as straightforward or simple as the rhetoricians imply.23 As a poet clearly engaged with the work and culture of his predecessors and contemporaries, Hue cannot simply be mocking romance’s happy endings, if only because they are rarely absolute in their happiness, or entirely resolute. The next part of this chapter will consider the three textual circumstances that frustrate the movement towards closure, and what might have been Hue’s purpose in taking the potential for thematic inconclusiveness in the romance genre to such an extreme.

19 A. C. Spearing, ‘Introduction’, in The Knight’s Tale, from the Canterbury Tales, ed. A.

C. Spearing (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 33–34.

20 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, in Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle:

Recherches et documents sur la technique littéraire du moyen âge, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris: Champion, 1923), pp. 194–262, lines 113–15. 21 Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria: The Art of Versemaker, trans. Roger P. Parr (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1981), pp. 105–6; for the Latin, see Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria, in Les Arts poétiques, ed. Faral, pp. 191–93. 22 ‘Part VI. 1. Two Essays: England and French’, in Vernacular Literary Theory, pp. 401–30 (p. 408). 23 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 158.

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Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon The Treatment of Love and Chivalry The first barrier to narrative closure in Ipomedon is the parodic treatment of the chivalry topos. Because of their individual commitment to chivalric ideals, Ipomedon and La Fière become increasingly estranged from each other, working against the narrative drive towards reunion and resolution. Moreover, when the denouement finally arrives after ten thousand lines, the reader’s only reward is an absurd anti-climax: the announcement that the hero’s marriage will be one of carnal convenience. It is true that, in medieval romance, the road to ending is not always straightforward and closure is not always absolute. Nevertheless, the conclusions to the Old French romances of love and adventure tend to emphasise the power of love to transform members of the aristocratic class for the greater good, even if, as in Cligès and Lancelot, the hero’s conduct is questionable or other themes are left unresolved. In fact, Ipomedon’s ‘mestre’ Tholomeu articulates this view when he congratulates Ipomedon on finding love with La Fière towards the beginning: ‘Kar cil, ki aime par amur, / De plus conquert pris & valur’ (‘Indeed for those [who love], it is love that makes them aim / to win more renown and valour’; lines 1596– 97). However, as the narrative progresses, it becomes clear that Ipomedon is not interested in the transformative experience of love. From the outset, Hue allows Ipomedon and La Fière to privilege their own personal goals, a strategy which for the couple is mostly self-defeating. In the anti-feminist tradition of fickle and injudicious women so common to this age, La Fière wants to have her cake and eat it: to marry her ‘vadlet estrange’ and to also marry the best knight in the world (lines 2469–508). In fact, Hue only ever allows for the most ungenerous interpretations of the heroine’s actions, as if to justify the hero’s almost relentless punishment of her. After La Fière’s plan to cajole Ipomedon into chivalric pursuits backfires, he goes on something of a rampage, increasing his own prowess in secret and picking up the queen of Sicily and duchess’s maid along the way. In fact, Hue chastises Ipomedon for rejecting Ismeine’s advances (biting her as he does so): ‘Dehez ait il, se il ne la fut!’ (‘Damn him, if he does not fuck her!’; line 8648). Though knight and lady are after the same thing – to make Ipomedon the greatest knight in the world – their incongruous visions of how this goal is to be accomplished create a vicious cycle of reunion and abandonment. Like a caricatured version of Enéas’ Lavinia, La Fière pines for her ‘va […] ha […] Vahalet’ (lines 1496–524), but pushes him away with her misjudged ruse; Ipomedon storms off, and looks everywhere for opportunities to prove his worth, but knowingly becomes involved with other women to do so; he returns to rescue the duchess from troublesome situations, but always keeps his identity hidden, and never so much as greets her.24 24 Helen Cooper, ‘Desirable Desire: “I Am Wholly Given Over To Thee”’, in The English

Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of

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Rebecca Newby This narrative conflict comes to a head at the end of the three-day tournament, when Ipomedon makes a swift exit despite winning the grand prize of La Fière herself (lines 3129–6471). By having the hero avoid the expected reconciliation, Hue prevents a move towards the logical conclusion: the reward of lady and land. In a further frustration of closure for this episode, neither Ipomedon’s reasoning nor his motives are made explicit. The implication is that Ipomedon feels he has not yet won sufficient fame to satisfy La Fière’s pride. But by this point, La Fière has more than paid her dues for her earlier missteps, and there can now be little doubt about Ipomedon’s prowess. In his determination to view Ipomedon as a more sympathetic figure, Ronald Spensley speculates that his fear of commitment might be explained by a desire to find his brother, though there is no textual evidence for the ‘half-brother motive’.25 It would have been equally understandable if Ipomedon had wanted to avoid the kind of uxoriousness that disgraced earlier heroes like Chrétien’s Erec. However, Ipomedon leaps to the opposite end of the scale: he is like Yvain, but without a conscience, and without an explanation for his actions. Even when Ipomedon recounts his history to Capaneus at the end, he skilfully dodges questions about his more puzzling behaviour. As Lucy Gay writes, it ‘is no tale of courtly love that we have in Ipomedon, but the tale of a man in love with a maid whom he intends to marry when he is ready’: needless to say, this is not the way that knights are meant to view love in romance; it is, however, what we might expect a clerk steeped in the church Fathers’ misogyny and in feudal patriarchy to write about women.26 Far from synthesising the swirling dichotomy of feeling and action that has brewed over the course of the romance, the final act of Ipomedon doubles down on its topsy-turvy conception of love and chivalry as mutually detrimental. Rather than claiming victory for himself, Ipomedon tricks everyone into believing that La Fière’s aggressive suitor Leonin has won the combat by disguising himself as his opponent, and terrorising the duchess and her people: ‘E recomança estrange ovre’ (‘He begins to act strangely again’; line 9916). While there is something darkly entertaining about this cartoonish episode of cat-and-mouse, with the hero’s ‘dernière mystification’, as Robert W. Hanning writes, ‘the story

Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 235 ff.; Paola Scarpini, ‘Locating the Audience(s) in Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, in In Search of the Medieval Voice: Expressions of Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Lorna Bleach, Katariina Närä, Sian Prosser, and Paola Scarpini (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 98–100. 25 Spensley, ‘The Structure of Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, p. 345. 26 Lucy M. Gay, ‘Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomédon and Chrétien de Troyes’, PMLA, 32.2 (1917), 468–91 (p. 477); Simon Gaunt, ‘The Knight Meets His Match: Romance’, Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 85.

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Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon seems destined to continue indefinitely’.27 He goes on to argue that Ipomedon’s misbehaviour in this episode shows his ‘mastery of the world’, as one who is able to postpone the satisfaction of the internal and external audience’s desire for an end to his courtly travails and ‘the reconciliation we now fully expect’.28 However, this mastery narrative only holds weight until Capaneus arrives, and single-handedly brings the romance to an end. Capaneus’s fortuitous and arbitrary return is a deus ex machina moment which serves in lieu of an organic process of resolution. Ipomedon does not seek to reconcile with La Fière until he is pushed by his brother, nor does he seek forgiveness for his deception, and it is questionable whether he would have stayed had Capaneus not given him the last-minute opportunity; La Fière’s continued desire for Ipomedon despite this uncourtly behaviour is far fetched, and she is uncharacteristically quiet about his misconduct. Nonetheless, there is a great emphasis on the ‘joie’ of the new king and queen of Apulia and of the whole ‘cuntree’ (lines 10436–48); indeed, for Crane, the couple eventually ‘find expressions for their desire that are consonant with the rigid codes of their noble world’.29 But this does not bear out in the final lines, in which Hue snidely praises the lovers for holding onto their ‘virginite’, and then, rather than waxing lyrical about social integration or euphemising the details of their union, he uses the word for ‘fuck’ to lay bare the crude sensuality of their marriage (lines 10479–82). The reunion of the couple might have been the stabilising final gesture of the romance, yet in this case it not only seems incidental, but suggests the hero’s new life will be anything but settled and stable. Thus, the end of Ipomedon rejects the happy marriage as a concrete form of closure and reveals Hue’s scepticism about the representation of courtly relationships in romance. The Return of Capaneus The second barrier to narrative closure is the contrived recognition scene that takes place between Ipomedon and Capaneus. Failures of recognition unless or until a token like a ring is produced, as in Horn, are widespread in the genre, but in Ipomedon the motif is made absurd by the brothers’ frequent encounters earlier in the romance. The two exchange vehement blows over ‘Leonin’s’ intimidation of the Calabrian people until Capaneus spots Ipomedon’s ring and realises that his adversary is his brother: ‘Cel anel d’or, ki vus duna?’ (‘That gold ring, where did you get it from?’; line 10219). This 27 Holden, Ipomedon, pp. 56–57; Robert W. Hanning, ‘Engin in Twelfth Century Ro-

mance: An Examination of the Roman d‘Enéas and Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon’, Yale French Studies, 51 (1974), 82–101 (p. 94). 28 Hanning, Engin, pp. 97, 100. 29 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 163.

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Rebecca Newby moment of recognition interrupts the combat and leads to the ‘happy’ ending of the romance. However, it is unclear why Capaneus did not notice the ring on Ipomedon’s finger before: Ipomedon served as the ‘druz la reine’ for two years in Sicily after receiving the ring from his mother, and during this time Capaneus, as the king’s nephew, was not only another prominent member of the court but one of his close friends. Once again, this reunion is not the revelatory experience it might have been: readers have already been introduced to Capaneus, and no further details about their history are provided; Capaneus, who is impressively pragmatic, merely observes that ‘nus eumes divers peres, / Mes nus une mere avion’ (‘We had different fathers, / But we have one mother’; lines 10282–83). Hue’s ‘gotcha’ moment is overwhelmingly bathetic. Hanning argues that with this family reunion Hue replaces the adversarial vision of human relationships endorsed by prowess with ‘a sense of shared humanity’, and this forms a basis for reconciliation; for him, Ipomedon’s series of unexpected revelations over the course of the tournament means that readers are well prepared for this contrived and ‘abrupt’ turn of events, and therefore ‘can respond with profound sympathy’.30 But any reader who gives this ‘boundary event’ considered thought cannot respond with anything but bewilderment. Indeed, in this moment, Hue takes the contrivances of the conventional recognition scene to new and extreme heights. In Horn, the lovers have been separated for some time during the hero’s exile in Ireland, but Rigmel recognises Horn after he drops his ring into her goblet. Thus, the recognition scene is a logical consequence of their separation and leads nicely into their marriage and the reunion which forms the final stage of the romance. In Ipomedon, on the other hand, readers are left in the dark about the circumstances that have caused the half-brothers to ‘misrecognise’ each other up to this point, and so reading the text becomes a retrospective exercise, a futile quest for some vital missing clue or detail in the previous nine thousand lines. In Chrétien’s Conte du Graal (c. 1180s), Perceval’s family members are vital in helping him to repent for his wrongdoing, and in the later continuations the remorseful recognition scene becomes a key source of closure.31 But while Capaneus prompts Ipomedon to provide an account of his history, he does not inspire Ipomedon to make amends for his earlier conduct, and Hue quickly moves onto his vignette of the lovers’ voracious sensuality. The reader is left with the impression, then, that Capaneus is introduced at this point only so as to resolve the love story, and that the fraternal reunion is merely a gimmick, a plot device designed to expedite the reversal of Ipomedon’s decision to desert his lady. And it is an unconvincing path to resolution: 30 Hanning, Engin, pp. 100–1. 31 Thomas Hinton, The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval, the Contin-

uations, and French Arthurian Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), passim, esp. p. 146.

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Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon Ipomedon seems to stay only because he is reluctant to leave his newly discovered brother, not because of his love for La Fière. Though it is the catalyst for the ending, then, this pastiche of the final recognition scene nullifies the denouement of the love story and interferes with the sense of closure that readers of romance might expect to gain from such a family reunion. The Epilogue The final barrier to narrative closure is Hue’s epilogue, which suggests that Hue is using misogyny to ironic effect and leaves the textual discourse on a bawdy cliff-hanger (lines 10551–78). Depicting himself as the patron saint of sexual transgressors, Hue claims to own a ‘Chartre ai de l’absoluciun’ for the promiscuous, and chivalrously welcomes any ‘dame u pucele, / U riche vedve u damsiele’ of Herefordshire to come and see ‘it’ at his house in Credenhill (line 10570–78). It would be a great shame, he adds, if the rolled-up letter and seal does not hang from said ladies’ backsides; as Purdie writes, ‘the image is embarrassingly clear’.32 The combination of provocative and misogynistic subject matter with the Christian metaphor of absolution in this passage makes it by far the most irreverent part of the text, and the sexual innuendo has been fully elucidated by previous scholars.33 While it is tempting to see Hue’s parody of romance as providing the perfect outlet for pedestrian clerical misogyny, as Neil Cartlidge and R. Howard Bloch independently observe, his routine humiliation of women in love across the poem is so inefficient, irrational, perverse, and ‘inappropriate to the context’ that he seems to be pushing anti-feminist clichés to their limit to ‘unmask their internal incoherences’.34 More specific to the purpose of this argument, however, the epilogue removes any possibility of closure and makes a mockery of those readers who might have looked to the epilogue for explanation or reassurance. Following Holden, multiple scholars note that the opening section of Hue’s epilogue satirises Thomas’s hope that any in doubt may find consolation in the preceding pages.35 His ‘tuz amanz salut’ (farewell to all lovers; lines 820–21) becomes ‘Ipomedon a tuz amanz / Mande saluz […] Par cest Hue de Rotelande’ (‘Ipomedon to all lovers / sends greetings […] Through this Hue of Rotelande’; lines 10559–60), the pretext for Hue’s literary masturbation. In the prologue, Hue had emphasised his clerical duty to share wisdom in the vernacular for the benefit of all (lines 1–48); in the epilogue, however, 32 Purdie, Ipomadon, p. lxxvi. 33 Purdie, Ipomadon, pp. lxxvi–lxxvii; Kocher, ‘Desire, Parody, and Sexual Mores’, pp.

429–48; Eley, ‘The Subversion of Meaning’, pp. 106–8.

34 Cartlidge, ‘Masters in the Art of Lying?’, p. 14; R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny

and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 4. 35 Holden, Ipomedon, pp. 55–56.

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Rebecca Newby Hue offers only his warped sens that love means sex alone, undermining any consonance of beginning and end. Indeed, Ipomedon’s epilogue proves that even if an ending sums up the poet’s total meaning, recapitulation alone is not sufficient for closure. There is no proverb or exemplum beyond Hue’s profane charter and seal, and no statement of the ‘fine’ or end of the text; on the contrary, the implication of the final line is the metaphorical equivalent of a trailing ellipsis. Just like Hue, the reader is left waiting to be gratified. Yet, at the same time, the epilogue creates an impasse for the reader: the only exit from the text is to become part of the depraved elite that this parody creates, or instead risk not being ‘in on it’, relegated to the position of the one being laughed at. The reader must either accept Hue’s invitation to sexual frivolity or become the butt of the joke. Hue’s reconstruction of the local milieu of Herefordshire suggests that his alternative ideology of romance, with its accompanying ironic commentary, is designed to communicate his reservations about courtly poetics to the Anglo-Norman nobility. The English barons held land in fief from the king, and more often from lesser lords, but, because they had fewer legal rights over their baronies, and no right to private war or ownership of castles, they did not enjoy as much autonomy as their counterparts on the Continent.36 The ideological tool of literature may therefore have been more important not only to the cultural identity of this class but also to the preservation and justification of their power. Crane discusses the way in which chivalric ideals, the order of knighthood, and courtly social behaviour became more important in the later Middle Ages as the Anglo-Norman nobility’s power was eroded by royal encroachment, famine, plague, and unrest, and diluted by social mobility.37 Yet Hue’s attitude towards the practices of the elite in Ipomedon, and especially courtly love, which he portrays as comically inept, suggests that their reliance on courtly ideals may already have been an issue in the second half of the twelfth century. This epilogue is not ‘mere frivolity’ or even simple literary parody, then; it may well have been intended to tease, in an amiable way, the Anglo-Norman nobles, who may have already been exploiting courtly formulas to make claims to superiority and special rights.38 Appropriately, then, the irony pressures the audience into complicity: to affirm the ironist’s message and thus join the elite community the irony creates, or make themselves the target of the joke. However, in this case, submission is a promise to gratify Hue the poet-narrator, reversing the usual terms of the literary contract. Hue’s mock misogyny here, 36 Crane, Insular Romance, pp. 5–6. 37 Crane, Insular Romance, p. 7. 38 In her introduction, Crane argues that the barony’s waning dominance in the later Mid-

dle Ages led them to draw on ‘sources of status external to its landholding’, and the ideals expounded by courtly romances became ‘important sources of justification for the barony’s remaining rights’: Crane, Insular Romance, pp. 8–9.

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Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon then, is a roast of a class deeply immersed in the cultural codes of courtly love. But the poet is serving his audience as well as critiquing it; as Cartlidge writes of Walter Map, he is ‘manipulating generic markers to unsettle the audience and encourage it to question the codes by which it creates literary meaning’.39 Yet, however well-meaning Hue’s critique, his suite of contradictions and the impasse it creates are not a recipe for narrative closure. Critics often imply that the epilogue consolidates the link between Ipomedon and Hue’s narratorial persona, with Hue’s manipulation seen to reflect Ipomedon’s cunning in the narrative.40 However, Hue’s extradiegetic stunt is equally reminiscent of two textual moments involving La Fière: first, when she makes a fool of Jason to communicate her displeasure to Ipomedon, and later when she manipulates her barons so that she might marry the man she loves. Hanning argues that while La Fière has her ‘share’ of ingenuity, she is only the less attractive foil for Ipomedon’s unique series of tricks and illusions, which soon ‘dominates’ the action.41 Yet, as Helen Cooper shows, the ‘pillow soliloquies’ of the female characters, in which they invariably objectify Ipomedon, give them an extensive internal life indicative of male narcissism and authorial ventriloquism.42 Hue thus develops multiple possibilities for analogies between the figures internal and external to the story: Hue is Ipomedon, but he is also La Fière and the other noblewomen, further frustrating interpretation, and creating an ‘interpretative gridlock’.43 This seems to be part of what Penny Eley identifies as Ipomedon’s ‘systematic blocking of every avenue of interpretation’, an approach to narrative composition which for her leads to the absence of sens.44 Yet Hue’s poetic strategy also allows for multiple interpretations to hold weight at the same time. Considered from this perspective, it can be true that the epilogue brings a serious message about the inadequacy of courtly conventions into the homes of Herefordshire nobles, and equally true that Hue’s parting shot to women should not be taken too seriously. Like his heroes, Hue’s un/serious epilogue is only a trick, and his anti-feminist comments, reminiscent of fabliaux, are a performance designed to attract attention to his social critique. 39 Cartlidge, ‘Masters in the Art of Lying?’, p. 16; citing Echard, ‘Map’s Metafiction’, p.

306. For a further discussion of Walter Map’s engagements with romance, see Cartlidge’s chapter 6 in this volume. 40 Eley, ‘The Subversion of Meaning’, p. 104; Kocher, ‘Desire, Parody, and Sexual Mores’, p. 446; D. H. Green, Irony in the Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 363. 41 Hanning, Engin, pp. 92–93, 95–69. 42 Cooper, ‘Desirable Desire’, pp. 235–37. 43 Eley, ‘The Subversion of Meaning’, p. 102. 44 Eley, ‘The Subversion of Meaning’, p. 98.

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Rebecca Newby The Translated Endings of the Middle English Ipomedon In any case, Cooper writes, ‘by the time it has crossed the language barrier into English both the irony and the antifeminism have gone, to leave a romance that concentrates the experience of love strongly and directly on the women’.45 All three of the Middle English translations omit Hue’s epilogue, replacing it with more stabilising versions of the boundary events and reassuring commentary, a modification which illuminates the lack of closure in the Anglo-Norman version. The relative similarity of the Middle English translations, despite the textual evidence that all three were translated independently of one another, suggests that Hue’s romance offered a specific cultural opportunity to Middle English poets.46 M. D. Legge attributes Ipomedon’s popularity with Middle English adapters to the fact that it is ‘a parody of the courtly romance’ and well suited to the English detachment from French romance.47 And yet, rather than using the opportunity provided by parodic source material to develop ludicrous travesties of courtly conventions and even more ludicrous conclusions, as we might expect from later parodic romances, the Middle English translators rehabilitate the ironic and misogynistic tensions of Hue’s ending so extensively as to transform the story into a noble exemplar.48 Love and chivalry are shown to be mutually compatible, Capaneus makes the hero’s behaviour into a practical, accessible ‘lesson’, and historiography and prayer take the place of the profane epilogue.49 These consistent revisions liberate both the characters and targets of Hue’s original from his piquant ironies, making their actions and motivations socially palatable, and redeeming the symbolic value of this romance plot for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This idealistic veneer significantly improves the ability of the later endings to impart a sense of closure, which becomes more emphatic, and thus more secure. However, while Ipomadon (A), The Lyfe of Ipomydon (B), and Ipomedon (C) all strive for a more secure form of closure than their source, the translators had slightly different ideas about how this was to be achieved, and the ending to the story metamorphoses over the course of the three adaptations. The late fourteenth-century A version of Ipomadon (c. 1390–1400) is extraordinarily faithful to Hue’s poem, as well as being the longest tail-rhyme romance in

45 Cooper, ‘Desirable Desire’, p. 235. 46 On the independent translation, see Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the

Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge, 1968; 2011), p. 40; Laura Hibbard Loomis, Medieval Romance in England (New York: Benjamin Franklin, 1960), p. 225; Hosington, ‘The Englishing of the Comic Technique’, p. 247; Purdie, Ipomadon, p. lxv. 47 M. D. Legge, ‘The Rise and Fall of Anglo-Norman Literature’, Mosaic, 8.4 (1974–75), 1–6 (p. 4); also, Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 173. 48 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 207. 49 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, pp. 210–11; Purdie, Ipomadon, p. lxx.

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Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon English.50 Crane, Purdie, and Hosington show that the near-verbatim translation of numerous lines means that Hue’s puckish presence looms large across the poem. Yet, as part of his remodelling process, the translator omits Hue’s beloved tirades against women, his in-jokes and Credenhill persona, as well as anything else that might undermine the ‘dignity’ of the principal characters or disconcert his audience, who would have been far removed from the sociocultural debates of Hue’s day.51 But this does not mean the humour is lost, and the translator dresses up his didacticism with dramatic irony and substitutes comic vignettes for sarcasm and sensuality, including a much expanded and memorably hyperbolic caricature of Leonine with his ‘Neke as an ape, nebe as an owle’.52 In the lead-up to the denouement, Cabanus once again arrives ‘just in time’, so there is the same sense of arbitrariness. The reasoning for Ipomadon’s strange behaviour, that he does not believe he has fulfilled the Fere’s ‘vowe’, is made more explicit (lines 8156–61), but his indefensible threat to carry the Fere off to ‘Yndde’ remains (lines 8147). Nevertheless, after this point the ending is formulaic. There is a succinct description of the lovers’ wedding, followed by an exemplary, and neutered, portrait of their ‘grett delyte’: ‘Was there neuer non that louyd so’ (line 8799– 836). The translator uses this opportunity to emphatically posit the ‘ende’ of his romance (line 8800), before providing additional information about King Ipomadon’s ‘sonys’, his death at Thebes, and the Fere’s after him, amplifying the ‘pure love’ described in the previous lines (lines 8834–63), all taken from Protheselaus (lines 47–69). This sort of prolepsis is key to securing closure because it follows the hero to the end of his life, discouraging production of further narrative material. The A version ends by prescribing ‘poynttis of grette pette’ for ‘lovys wounde’ (lines 8880–81), and follows this up with a Christian invocation (lines 8888–91).53 Where other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century parodic romances like The Squire of Low Degree and The Tournament of Tottenham caricature the mores and ideals of the French tales to the point of absurdity, the end of the Middle English Ipomadon develops a concept of love as a common human experience and test of character, and makes all this a learning exercise; in this respect it is an ‘alien’ in Middle English romance.54 In general, scholars do not look in detail at how this ending develops in the other two Middle English versions in the context of Hue’s comparatively anti-climactic conclusion. Whereas the A version survives in only one manuscript (Chetham Library MS 8009, fols 191r–335v) and was not included in any major collections of romances, the late fifteenth-century Lyfe of Ipomydon 50 Mehl, The Middle English Romances, p. 40. 51 Purdie, Ipomadon, pp. lxvii and lxxiii. 52 Hosington, ‘The Englishing of the Comic Technique’, pp. 255–59; all references are to

Ipomadon, ed. Purdie, line 6162.

53 Purdie, Ipomadon, p. lxxvii. 54 Mehl, The Middle English Romances, p. 47.

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Rebecca Newby (c. 1460–80) is extant in the famous ‘commonplace book’ British Library, Harley MS 2252 (fols 54r–84r) and there are fragments of a version printed by Wynkyn de Worde. All this suggests that Ipomydon B could have been the more popular of the Middle English verse translations.55 This might be because, despite the formal choice of rhyming couplets, the condensed B version shares more thematically with other Middle English poems in its focus on plot and action over introspection, and detachment from the formulas of the roman courtois: the hero is distracted from love primarily by his delight in adventure and disguise. Yet, it is interesting that in B, as in A, Campanus is still the agent of peripeteia at the end, and there is no attempt to rationalise some of Ipomydon’s more extreme misdeeds, such as his impersonation of Duke Geron, formerly known as Leonin.56 Considering that the B poet skips over many of the finer points of Hue’s poem and the A version, it is also significant that there is a far greater emphasis on the ‘game and glee’ of the marriage festivities in the concluding portion. Glossing over Hue’s obscenities in relation to the lovers’ happiness (‘Halfe there joye I can not say’; line 2212), the translator goes on to describe at length ‘fourty days’ of feasts, minstrels, and merriment, making more of a crescendo of the wedding, before positing the ‘ende’ of his text (lines 2243–334). As Mehl notes, even the ‘heuyn-blysse’ prayed for in the final lines seems to be a prayer for joy, game, and glee (lines 2341–46).57 Like the A translator, though in less detail, the poet of Ipomydon follows his protagonists to ‘dethe’ after using a closural allusion to tell of how they lived as king and queen in ‘myche myrthe for euyrmore’ (lines 2332–33), presumably with the intention of closing his poem to further adaptation. Nonetheless, the prose Ipomedon (c. 1461–83) also appeared in the fifteenth century, though the text has come down to us in an unfinished state.58 The shift into prose, H. J. Chaytor writes, satisfied readers ‘who wanted a story devoid of the padding and prolixity which delayed the action in the verse narratives’.59 In line with this preference for expeditiousness, the prose Ipomedon has the feel of a historical piece, and does not seek to gratify its reader through suspense and revelation.60 As Nora Mayer notes, by the second folio 55 Mehl, The Middle English Romances, p. 41. 56 All references are The Lyfe of Ipomydon: Vol. 1, ed. Tadahiro Ikegami (Tokyo: Seijo

University, 1983), lines 1949–54.

57 Mehl, The Middle English Romances, p. 47. 58 There are several leaves missing from Longleat House, MS 257, including the ending

of Ipomedon C.

59 H. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature

(Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1945), p. 83.

60 On the sudden new fashion for prose romance, see Helen Cooper, ‘Counter-Romance:

Civil Strife and Father-Killing in the Prose Romances’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Oxford

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Hue de Rotelande’s Ipomedon the author has already revealed the hero’s future triumph and his familial tie with Capanius, and in that sense there are no difficulties of plot to resolve.61 The C translation does, however, provide a stronger sense of closure through elucidation of the hero’s actions. Even though the C text retains Ipomedon’s threat to cart the Feers off to India, the translator offers a clearer, if anticipatory, explanation of the hero’s decision to pose as the giant: he needs to remain incognito so that he can win praise at the last moment and thus increase his reputation (lines 5–13).62 Though we do not have the final lines of the prose version, and Ipomadon A is something of an anomaly in its fidelity to Hue, in general the Middle English translations of Ipomedon, which delete and revise, but stay relatively close to the overarching plot of their twelfth-century source, reflect the trend of English translated romances.63 They successfully censor and fortify Hue’s ending without losing his main plot points. As parodic romances, however, the cultural work of these three translations suggests that some English poets viewed parody as an opportunity for edification and consolation and not just as a space for the ridicule of courtly convention. Where Hue’s three-part ending of the misrecognition, the marriage bed, and the outrageous epilogue repeatedly deny readers a consolatory ending, closure is finally secured in the Middle English Ipomedon. Even though the English ‘Capaneus’ persists in his role as the catalyst for the denouement, which means that the reconciliation of the lovers is not as organic as it could have been, both the closural allusions and the more sociable gestures of historiography and prayer signal to readers that the story has come to a definite end. Yet something is lost in these later versions: not just the spirit of the original, but Hue’s special unity. Textual Frustration and the Three-Part Trick It is true that Hue’s interpretation of romance in Ipomedon is not conducive to closure, the impossibility of resolution arising from the opposition in which Hue places the two principal characters, the return of Capaneus, and the epilogue. Yet the three barriers to narrative closure play out simultaneously like three parts of a magic trick. It seems significant that Ipomedon’s courtly hoax also comes in three parts, and three times he demonstrates the superficiality of society’s judgement, first as the vadlet estrange, then as the dru la reine, and finally as the fool. The poet in turn presents us with a romance narrative that initially seems conventional, but which becomes increasingly strange and University Press, 1997), pp. 141–62; Megan G. Leitch, Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 61 Mayer, ‘An Edition’, pp. 10–11. 62 Mayer, ‘An Edition’, p. 17. 63 Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 207.

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Rebecca Newby distorted. Then the poet makes the narrative do something extraordinary and inexplicable in the fraternal recognition scene. These two levels of misdirection conceal the ultimate trick: accept Hue’s invitation and accept that promiscuous enjoyment is the lesson of Ipomedon, or be relegated to the position of ‘outsider’. While preventing closure for the narrative, these three layers of misdirection provide the text with an extradiegetic unity. There are, then, two ways of interpreting the narrative structure of Ipomedon: on the one hand, the unsatisfactory nature of the boundary events prevents the textual gratification of the reader and the provision of closure, but, on the other hand, Hue integrates his romance into a single entity through the unifying power of the authorial trick. As Crane points out, there are always two possible readings of Ipomedon’s life, orthodox and ironic, and it seems that Hue maintains this dual logic even at the level of his thematic structure. Just as Ipomedon’s trickery converts an ‘exercise in chivalry’ like the tournament into an ‘exercise in consciousness raising’, Hue’s ending is not designed to provide answers but, rather, encourages readers to consider the disconnect between chivalric ideals and social realities, the contradictions inherent in noble life, and the ‘latent qualities of chivalric literature’.64 Its popularity in the manuscripts might suggest that insular audiences did not always want easy resolutions or entirely satisfying closure; they wanted something coy, ambiguous, and productive, something to debate. If this was in fact the case, Hue is gratifying his readers in an unconventional way, since with the final obscene part of his trick, he leaves his audience suspended between the text and the world to debate his charter for all eternity.

64 Hanning, Engin, p. 98; Crane, ‘Measuring Conventions of Courtliness’, p. 171.

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8 Trojan Trash? The Seege or Batayle of Troye and the Learning of ‘Popular’ Romance VENETIA BRIDGES

I

t may seem a contradiction in terms to think seriously about the ‘learning’ of romance, especially so-called ‘popular romance’. Despite the genre’s increasingly acknowledged fluidity and open-endedness, and notwithstanding our greater understanding of the social, cultural, and material contexts for its production and dissemination, romance is still implicitly characterised as ‘not learned’, positioned on the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum from the kind of religious and classically derived texts that numerically dominate surviving medieval literature. ‘Popular’ romance or ‘pulp fictions’, the lowest of this ‘low’ genre, is surely beyond the cerebral pale: seen by some modern critics as ‘degenerate in form and style’, a ‘banal … pleasure’, such romances are tacitly equated with a lack of interest in ‘learned’ literary culture.1 Even when medieval romance seeks to instruct in its hagiographic or more generally didactic modes, it is rarely seen as ‘learned’ in the traditional textual sense outlined above. This is partly because of the lesser intellectual status still denoted by English as a language in contrast to Latin and French, an anxiety seen clearly in other English romances, for example Of Arthour and of Merlin.2 And yet romance texts share with aspects of that more elite and often Latinate/French linguistic culture the vital intellectual habit of translatio studii, retelling an old work for a new audience in a different context or 1 Nicola McDonald, ‘A Polemical Introduction’, in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England:

Essays in Medieval Romance, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 1–21 (p. 12). McDonald is characterising critical views here, not stating her own. 2 This romance claims that ‘Auauntages þai hauen þare/Freynsch and Latin eueraywhare’ before belligerently asserting ‘On Inglische tel mi tale’ (Of Arthour and of Merlin, ed. O. D. Macrae-Gibson, 2 vols, EETS o.s. 268 and 279 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973 and 1979), AM, i, lines 17–18, 29): see Patrick Butler, ‘A Failure to Communicate: Multilingualism in the Prologue to Of Arthour and of Merlin’, in The Auchinleck Manuscript: New Perspectives, ed. Susanna Fein (York: York Medieval Press, 2016), pp. 52–66.

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Venetia Bridges language, whether that story be a prestigious narrative of the ancient pagan world, a Christian tale of an Arthurian knight, a crusading hero, or a vernacular presentation of Christian doctrine.3 If we conceive of ‘learning’ as not just including a knowledge of inherited material but also referring to the various practices involved in retelling such material, then this allows us to consider the ways in which popular romance may be integrated into the wider intellectual framework of later medieval literature, and to recuperate it from the charge of being merely ‘a collection of “dirty books”’ with a limited relationship to literary cultures.4 I shall consider the Middle English Seege or Batayle of Troye (SBT) and its presentation of learning from a wider perspective, therefore, focusing not only on its relationship with classical material but also on the generic and stylistic features of that relationship, in an attempt to demonstrate that its intellectual and literary translatio is more diverse than has been previously imagined. Material and Critical Contexts SBT’s status as both a ‘popular’ romance and also a high-status inherited narrative makes it a contradiction in terms. A relatively short narrative treatment of the Trojan War, probably composed in the late thirteenth or the first part of the fourteenth century, its modern critical reception has been both limited and scathing, especially with reference to its ‘learning’ in the traditional sense of the text’s adherence to the orthodox narrative of Troy. Derek Pearsall claimed that it represents ‘third-rate fumbling in an enfeebled tradition’ and C. David Benson thought that it takes a ‘crude unlearned approach’ to the story, not fit ‘for any serious audience’.5 These views damn not only the romance’s lack of scholarly learning but also by implication its stylistic performance of translatio (‘third-rate fumbling’) and even perhaps later romance as a genre (‘an enfeebled tradition’). Given the date of these opinions, both over forty years old, it is perhaps unfair to hold their authors to them too closely now, but despite the increased interest in romance in recent decades there is little scholarship on SBT that 3 Representatives of these types of narrative in later medieval Britain are John Lydgate’s

Siege of Thebes, the romances Of Arthour and of Merlin and Richard Coeur de Lion, and the hagiography of St Julian the Hospitaller in the Scottish Legendary. 4 McDonald, ‘A Polemical Introduction’, p. 17. 5 Derek Pearsall, ‘The Development of Middle English Romance’, Mediaeval Studies, 27 (1965), pp. 91–116 (p. 104), and C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1980), p. 134. Both critics’ opinions are cited in Nicola F. McDonald, ‘The Seege of Troye: “ffor wham was wakened al this wo?”’, in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 181–99 (p. 181).

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Trojan Trash? contradicts them. Consideration of the romance’s relationship to learning has effectively been restricted to the text’s classical (in)accuracy, without much interest in its potential interactions with other kinds of intellectual inheritance, including translatio. Yet of course SBT’s textual relationships are not simply focused on classical traditions. Another important context in which to analyse the poem’s relationship to ‘learning’ is that of history and historiography. Although romances are frequently set in a timeless world that seems to remove them from chronology, for medieval authors the prestigious Troy narrative was itself history, and it provided a basis for dynastic claims throughout much of Europe.6 The Troy story is therefore often approached with claims of historical awareness and sensitivity by romance authors, a phenomenon that argues for a ‘learned’ awareness of chronological and cultural distance.7 Crucially, such authors often seek to establish their accounts as historical works in implicit (or overt) contrast to romance ‘fictions’, suggesting that in practice the relationship between the two genres could be characterised by blurred boundaries. This anxiety about the status of romance for the translatio of such an important historical narrative tradition is thus an important intellectual and generic context for SBT that needs to be borne in mind. The contextual importance of genre for SBT’s approach to ‘learning’ is supported by the poem’s manuscript situation. It is found alongside other romances in two of its four extant witnesses, London, British Library, Egerton MS 2862 and London, Lincoln’s Inn, MS 150, suggesting that the scribes and/or compilers of those manuscripts perceived it to have commonalities with romances such as Libeaus Desconus, Kyng Alisaunder, Of Arthour and of Merlin, Richard Coeur de Lion, Bevis of Hampton, Sir Degaré, Floris and Blancheflour, Amis and Amiloun, and Sir Eglamour.8 These companion pieces place SBT within a generic grouping that is narratively wide ranging, encompassing not just other classically derived accounts (Kyng Alisaunder) but also tales of English historical heroes (Arthur, Richard, Bevis) as well as romances focusing on common themes such as chivalric achievements and erotic love

6 The ahistorical approach of many romances (for example in terms of their settings) is

a commonplace, especially in Arthurian literature, with its frequent interest in implausible aventure and the supernatural (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example). Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae claims Trojan origins for the settlers of Britain and their descendants. 7 Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie, discussed later in this chapter, is a striking example of such claims. 8 Libeaus Desconus, Kyng Alisaunder and Of Arthour and of Merlin are all found in Lincoln 150; the other romances are in Egerton 2862. For an overview of all the manuscripts, see The Seege or Batayle of Troye, ed. Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, EETS, o.s. 172 (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. ix–xviii.

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Venetia Bridges (Sir Degaré, Floris and Blancheflour). SBT is primarily contextualised here in terms of romance, not classical, traditions.9 The fact that SBT exists today in four manuscripts lends some material weight to the idea that the romance was valued more greatly in the later Middle Ages than most modern critics have allowed. The four manuscripts – College of Arms, Arundel MS XXII (mid or late fourteenth century), Egerton 2862 (c. 1400), Lincoln 150 (1400–25), and British Library, Harley MS 525 (second half of the fifteenth century) – are thought to be independent copies of a ‘common original’.10 Arundel XXII, Egerton 2862 and Lincoln 150 all present similar versions of the text, but in the latest manuscript (Harley 525) the work has undergone a more systematic process of rewriting, so that (for example) the Judgement of Paris narrative contained in the Troy romance in the other three copies is significantly altered. This rewriting raises the intriguing question as to what characteristics of SBT might have necessitated editorial attention by the scribe or compiler of Harley 525.11 One possibility is that, in line with modern scholars, a medieval reader found the romance’s classical learning to be inadequate, but there may be other significant factors that led to its rewriting. One potential factor is that Harley 525 is the latest in date of all the witnesses by at least twenty-five years and probably more, placing it at a chronological distance from the other three books, which were copied closer together in time. The period from roughly 1400 to 1450 sees a great increase in the number of surviving Middle English romances as English cements its position as a language of literary expression, meaning that habits and conventions in that genre become more established and better known.12 So the text of Harley 525, copied substantially later than the other three witnesses and during or after an era of expansion for romance as a genre, may be the product of a different generic and literary landscape from these, one that might reflect changing ideas about romance approaches.13 Against this background, Harley 525’s version of SBT may be better viewed not as an attempt to ‘correct’ the poem in terms of its classical learning but, rather, as a response to shifting 9 It should be noted, however, that in Arundel XII SBT’s surroundings are more histori-

cist, since it is found there with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie and Wace’s Roman de Brut. 10 SBT, ed. Barnicle, pp. xxxvii–lvi (at p. xxxviii). 11 This sort of editorial work is one of the features of medieval textual mouvance described by Paul Zumthor in his classic work Essai de poétique mediévale (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972). 12 It is noteworthy that three of the four large anthologies of Middle English romances date from the fifteenth century (‘Lincoln Thornton’, Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91, Cambridge, University Library, MS Ff.2.38 and London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ii). 13 Pearsall’s reference to the ‘enfeebled tradition’ of romance also suggests such a change (in his view a decline) in the genre by the fifteenth century (Pearsall, ‘The Development of Middle English Romance’, p. 104).

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Trojan Trash? cultural attitudes within this particular genre. The existence of Harley 525’s SBT allows a comparison of the two versions, which will shed more light on the nature of the text’s learning in its later incarnation. Two more recent chapters have also sought to view SBT in a more wide-ranging fashion, moving away from the question of its classicism alone to situate it helpfully in the generic context of popular romance.14 Firstly, Nicola McDonald’s structural analysis convincingly highlights the romance’s fundamental interest in material acquisition, seeing it as a work in which ‘adventure is after all an economic enterprise’, and which is therefore worthy of consideration using a wider range of literary criteria than a traditional, classically focused viewpoint might allow. In her view, the narrative is ‘preserving a sense of the amplitude of Trojan history … while condensing and streamlining the twists and turns of a capacious plot’, resulting in ‘a highly wrought and at times obtrusive structure’.15 In this reading, SBT might reflect the probable social background and preoccupations of its likely audience, as exemplified by the ‘moderately prosperous’ provincial readers who are thought to have owned the Egerton and Lincoln’s Inn manuscripts.16 Neither aristocratic nor otherwise elite, such readers were probably directly or indirectly engaged in mercantile and commercial pursuits, meaning that SBT’s transformation of the supposedly erotically driven Troy narrative into a tale where ‘the desire to possess precious objects controls the narrative trajectory’ well reflects its initial readers’ interests.17 This analysis defines SBT not as an ignorant reworking of a half-comprehended account but as a skilled retelling of the Troy story whose focus has moved away from traditional forms of intellectual learning and towards a more modern engagement with the commercial possibilities of a narrative featuring East–West interactions and transactions.18 In this sense, McDonald’s study situates SBT as a participant in the developing culture of romance as a ‘popular’ genre, meaning both read by many and also engaging with themes relevant to and enjoyed by its medieval audience even if unappreciated by critics.19 If SBT 14 For a useful conceptualisation of popular romance, see Jane Gilbert, ‘A Theoretical Intro-

duction’, in The Spirit of Medieval Popular Romance, ed. Putter and Gilbert, pp. 15–38, and McDonald, ‘A Polemical Introduction’. See also A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. Raluca Radulescu and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009). 15 McDonald, ‘The Seege of Troye’, p. 196 and p. 184. 16 McDonald, ‘The Seege of Troye’, p. 182. The quotation is McDonald’s view of the MSS, but the extrapolation from this to a possible audience for the text is my own. 17 McDonald, ‘The Seege of Troye’, p. 183. 18 McDonald reads narratives based on the Troy myth, particularly SBT, as ‘elaborate fictions designed to mask the commercial heart of an imperialist desire to control the trade routes that link Europe to Asia’ (‘The Seege of Troye’, p. 182). 19 McDonald highlights a broader scholarly distaste for romance more generally as both centuries old and ongoing: ‘From its inception, scholarship on the Middle English

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Venetia Bridges is a product of this literary taste for romance, then this supports the idea that its ‘learning’ relates at least in part to romance’s conventions and fashions rather than to traditionally defined classical knowledge. Nancy Mason Bradbury’s study also emphasises the need to employ different criteria in reading SBT via consideration of the relationship between oral and literate transmission, in her terms, ‘the vibrant interaction of writing, oral performance from memory, and limited improvisation’.20 More explicitly than McDonald, Bradbury demonstrates that when assessing the interactions of oral and literate features the criteria used are less conventional, or even reversed, so that for example repeated language can be not a sign of lack of poetic skill but, rather, an indication of a collective cultural understanding: ‘while neither densely textured nor original, and distinctly ill-suited to psychological probing or to philosophical dispute, such repeated language, when skilfully used, can convey the social and cultural concerns that lie at the heart of a traditional society’.21 From this perspective, aspects of SBT such as repetition and ‘extranarrative remarks’ highlight the romance’s probable oral transmission, demonstrating another aspect of its ‘popular’ existence beyond its easily recoverable manuscript history. Bradbury’s analysis, like McDonald’s, is therefore a reminder that ‘learning’ in SBT may take a variety of forms, in this instance in terms of performance and transmission. Both McDonald and Bradbury interpret SBT’s text in Harley 525 as a revision that has increased its ‘literary’ qualities: Harley 525’s reworking has ‘traditionally been read as a more than commonly sophisticated rendering of the original text’ that makes the romance suitable ‘for a more literate audience’.22 This might indicate that there are different literary criteria that come into play during the period of its revision in the fifteenth century, as mentioned earlier; however, both critics can be interpreted as suggesting that such criteria relate to more traditional ideas of learning, given that both mention increased literary sophistication. This does not necessarily contradict my earlier point about Harley 525 as potentially a sign of a shift in romance fashions in the popular romances has been characterised by a thinly – if at all – veiled repugnance to the romances themselves, not only to their poetic form but their subject matter and the medieval audience who is imagined to enjoy them’ (‘A Polemical Introduction’, in Pulp Fictions, ed. McDonald, p. 5). 20 Nancy Mason Bradbury, ‘Literacy, Orality, and the Poetics of Middle English Romance’, in Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, ed. Mark C. Amodio and Sarah Gray Miller (New York: Garland, 1994), pp. 39–69, p. 64. This mediation between orality and literacy overlaps with Putter and Gilbert’s discussion of the ‘revisionist’ and ‘romantic’ conceptions of popular romance in Ad Putter, ‘A Historical Introduction’, The Spirit of Medieval Popular Romance, ed. Putter and Gilbert, pp. 1–38, especially p. 3, pp. 4–11. 21 Bradbury, ‘Poetics of Middle English Romance’, p. 53. 22 McDonald, ‘The Seege of Troye’, p. 196, and Bradbury, ‘Poetics of Middle English Romance’, p. 47.

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Trojan Trash? later fifteenth century, however, since it is possible that increased intellectual and literary sophistication could be part of such a shift. The following analysis will therefore build on the idea of learning in SBT as both relating to traditional classical knowledge (Pearsall and Benson) and also engaging with conventions of translatio habitual within contemporary Middle English romance, such as ‘popular’ features (McDonald and Bradbury), initially in the earlier version represented by the Arundel, Egerton, and Lincoln’s Inn manuscripts and subsequently in the Harley 525 text. The study will first consider ideas of learning as seen in the text’s relationship to its sources. SBT’s Relationship with Its Sources Considering the nature of SBT’s sources, and how the poet used them, is vital in developing a sense of the romance’s relationship to ‘learning’ in both narrative and stylistic contexts. Despite modern critical opinion of the text as ‘unlearned’, it is clear that the poet used a wide variety of material, whether directly or indirectly. Dares’ sixth-century Latin prose version of the Troy narrative is, unsurprisingly, a key source, as is Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s French verse romance the Roman de Troie (c. 1165), but the SBT poet has a complex relationship with these works, as he often uses them in short order one after another.23 So, instead of relying on a single major source and adapting it, the poet was synthesising material from several places, which suggests translatio that is conscious and focused. As well as these two well-known Troy works, SBT also appears to use other sources for parts of its narrative, the Excidium Troiae and the Compendium Historiae Troianae-Romanae. The Excidium Troiae is a Latin prose work that falls into three parts: the first is a description of the Trojan War from Thetis’ marriage to the deception of the Trojan horse, the second is an account of Troy’s fall and Aeneas’ wanderings based on the Aeneid, and the final section describes the founding of Rome up to Augustus.24 The work is independent of both Dares and Dictys, dating from at latest the end of the ninth century and probably before, and appears to have influenced Troy narratives in other vernaculars, such as the Trojanische Krieg and Bulgarian and Norse versions.25 Crucially, it appears to contain episodes that differ in details from Dares and the Roman de Troie, details that appear in SBT. For example, the narrative of Paris’ youth, in which he is secreted away from Troy due to a dream Hecuba had whilst pregnant with him, includes the 23 SBT, ed. Barnicle, p. lx. 24 Excidium Troiae, ed. E. Bagby Atwood and Virgil K. Whitaker (Cambridge, MA: Me-

diaeval Academy of America, 1944), p. xi. See also E. Bagby Atwood, ‘The Rawlinson Excidium Troiae – A Study of Source Problems in Medieval Troy Literature’, Speculum, 9 (1934), pp. 379–404 (pp. 387–88). 25 Excidium Troiae, ed. Bagby Atwood and Whitaker, p. xi, and Bagby Atwood, ‘The Rawlinson Excidium Troiae’, p. 379 and p. 382.

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Venetia Bridges facts that he lives as a swineherd and is summoned back to Troy by Priam when he is discovered to be wise.26 Bagby Atwood lists five major episodes in which the Excidium Troiae is used in SBT, clearly demonstrating its status as a source used at a level of narrative feature (rather than plot structure) and thus showing that again the SBT poet is actively synthesising material from a variety of texts, in this instance in terms of significant detail. Similarly, the tenth-century Compendium Historiae Troianae-Romanae is another Latin prose account that the SBT poet seems to have turned to for details, again for example in the description of Paris’ youth.27 As well as these four Troy texts, Barnicle suggests the SBT author also knew Ovid and Statius in some form, hardly a surprising claim, given these poets’ popularity during the later Middle Ages.28 The picture constructed by this brief overview of SBT’s major known sources highlights two key points. Firstly, the range of sources used, in two languages (Latin and French), and the way in which the poet attempts to create a synthesis using this range, suggests that his approach can be seen as a ‘learned’ one in terms of access to material and conjointure: rather than simply copying and/ or translating from a single source relatively uncritically, he is judging what is appropriate from a lot of material and making deliberate decisions about what to include or exclude. Secondly, the nature of this synthesis and the poet’s translatio more generally indicates a level of poetic craftsmanship that can also be seen as ‘learned’. McDonald’s observations about SBT’s shortened narrative structure, noted earlier, show this clearly.29 The fact that SBT is only around 2,000 lines long (in comparison with the Roman de Troie’s monstrous sprawl of over 30,000 lines, for example) indicates the terse and deliberate abbreviatio that characterises the Middle English poet’s approach, a sign of poetic skill and judgement.30 Both these points, then, suggest that the poet and his approach are ‘learned’ in terms that are appropriate to a Middle English romance author of the fourteenth century: aware of and able to access key sources in both French and Latin, and skilled at reworking the narratives and details derived from these into English in an appropriately structured form. The condensed nature of SBT’s narrative leads to another feature, namely the aspects that the poet chooses to leave out or to cut drastically. This is particularly relevant in terms of SBT’s relationship with the Roman de Troie, 26 Egerton, Lincoln and Arundel 257–94, Harley 273–94. Barnicle’s edition uses the same

line numbers for each manuscript text, so the apparent similarities conceal lines that are omitted, for example. See Bagby Atwood, ‘The Rawlinson Excidium Troiae’, p. 382. 27 E. Bagby Atwood, ‘The Judgment of Paris in the Seege of Troye’, PMLA, 57 (1942), pp. 343–53 (p. 344). 28 SBT, ed. Barnicle, p. lxxiv. 29 McDonald, ‘Seege of Troye’, p. 183. 30 A similar abbreviatio characterises another ‘popular’ Troy romance, the prose Siege of Troy: see Megan G. Leitch, Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 64–84.

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Trojan Trash? since that text is so expansive. Given the short length of SBT, it is unsurprising to find that the fighting is reduced: there are ten battles to Troie’s twenty-three, for example, and the proportion of text occupied by fighting in SBT is less than that in Dares’ account (one quarter and slightly under half, respectively).31 This is in line with McDonald’s identification of the more mercantile ethos of the poem, as military prowess has become less of a priority. However, there is a moment that appears to contradict this potential downgrading of militarism. In SBT, instead of stealing Helen, Paris openly attacks Menelaus’ city: ‘on þe Citee þey begyn / þere þat þe king and þe Queene lay yn’ (lines 735–36).32 This alteration is not found in any of the four major source texts, which all depict Paris as attempting to steal Helen, and fighting only when opposed in doing so. This alteration has the effect of presenting Paris in subtly more positive terms, since it depicts him as a straightforward and noble knight rather than in effect a thief, which is perhaps the reason for the change. Yet it also emphasises Helen’s rape as a military activity, which contrasts thematically with the condensed battle narratives more generally characteristic of the romance. Despite the reduction in fighting during the work, then, the translatio of military activity is not the same throughout. What is perhaps more interesting is the realisation that what might be thought of as episodes typical of romance’s interest in erotic love are not included. For example, the love triangle between Troilus, Briseida, and Diomedes that is a repeated feature of Troie does not occur in SBT at all.33 This might be because it is not in Dares’ text either, but, given its prominence in Troie, after which it is of course seized upon and elaborated further by Boccaccio and Chaucer, its absence is intriguing. However, SBT is not interested in the depiction of erotic love more generally, as the portrayal of Helen demonstrates: more a precious commodity than an emblem of love, her depiction again indicates a more mercantile set of priorities.34 It seems to be the case that the poet’s translatio is not primarily focused on the erotic, in contrast to other Troy authors like Boccaccio and Chaucer later in the fourteenth century, although this lack of

31 In Dares, the battles are not distinguished from one another numerically, so assessing their

relationship to SBT’s versions is less straightforward, but sections 19 to 36 out of a total of 44 are primarily concerned with relating the course of the fighting, meaning that it occupies slightly under half of the whole narrative. In SBT, lines 1058–173 describe the first five battles, lines 1378–512 the sixth battle and Hector’s death, lines 1584–640 the seventh battle, lines 1712–67 the eighth battle and Achilles’ death, lines 1778–851 the ninth battle and Paris’ death, and lines 1962–2013 the tenth (the sack of Troy itself) for a total of c. 485 lines, or 23 per cent of the text in the Lincoln, Egerton and Arundel versions. 32 SBT, ed. Barnicle. 33 There are three separate episodes featuring these lovers, at Troie lines 13261–866, lines 14959–5186, and lines 20202–340. 34 McDonald, ‘Seege of Troye’, pp. 182–83.

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Venetia Bridges erotic interest can be paralleled in Middle English romances more widely.35 Yet this lack of interest in one significant generic feature of romance does not mean that other features are treated similarly. The episodes depicting Paris’ youth and Achilles’ birth are elaborated using familiar romance tropes: Paris is an extremely beautiful child who displays a precocious interest in chivalry even though he is living as a swineherd (lines 260–94), in line with romances like Libeaus Desconus, for example. Achilles has a miraculous semi-divine parentage (reminiscent of Alexander in Kyng Alisaunder) and is bathed in ‘water of enchauntement’ to make his skin hard (line 1215), magic of course being another frequent feature of romance. Both these episodes are found in the Excidium Troiae, but the details about Paris’ beauty and the use of magic in Achilles’ protection are new.36 Such details are again frequently found in romance (Horn’s miraculous beauty as a child in the Roman de Horn and the use of preservative magic in Cligès come to mind), and suggest a form of adaptive translatio at work that is conscious of the genre and its expectations. Especially pertinent here is the replacement of the river-water of the Styx (‘aqua inferiorum que Stix nuncupatur’) with ‘water of enchauntement’. It could be argued that this is done out of ignorance on the part of the SBT author as to what the Styx was, and thus is a sign of lack of classical awareness and learning, but the more important point surely is that the author chooses to replace the unknown river with explicitly magical waters, that is, with a familiar romance feature. The elaboration of episodes like this, which focus on marvellous or exotic phenomena but are strictly speaking not relevant to the narrative, is another indication of a romance habit. So, although SBT does not preoccupy itself with erotic elements (aligning itself in this with contemporary Middle English romances), it certainly makes use of other romance motifs, demonstrating its ‘learning’ in terms of awareness of generic habits. This survey of SBT’s relationships with its sources has highlighted that its translatio is characterised by conscious selection and choice, often in the form of abbreviation, and that some aspects of this choice suggest awareness of romance’s generic features. This surely indicates that the text is ‘learned’ in its performance of contextually apposite translatio, even if it is not always imbued with ‘correct’ classical learning. 35 The lesser interest of Middle English romances in erotic episodes, in contrast to French

works, has often been noted: see Corinne Saunders, ‘Love and Loyalty in Middle English Romance’, in Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. Helen Cooney (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 45–62. 36 For the Paris episode, see Excidium Troiae, ed. Bagby Atwood and Whitaker, p. 4, lines 1–22 (there including a battle with Mars impersonating a bull). For the Achilles passage, see Excidium Troiae p. 10, line 21 to p. 11, line 10. The Compendium also has the Paris story but not the Achilles account: see H. Simonsfeld’, Compendium Historiae Troianae-Romanae’, Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, 11 (1886), pp. 241–51 (p. 242).

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Trojan Trash? ‘Ffele aventures’: Concepts of Learning in the Prologue This sense of learning based on effective translatio and generic awareness suggests an engaged and informed approach to the sources, one that may be paralleled elsewhere in SBT. As mentioned above, historical accuracy is a key aspect of the Troy story’s romance translatio. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, for example, claims to prefer Dares’ account of the Trojan War to that of Homer, the ‘clerc merveillous’ (line 99) (to whom of course he had no direct access), because the former was an eyewitness: ‘Chascun jor ensi l’escriveit / Come il o ses ieuz le veeit’ (‘Each day he thus wrote down / what he saw before his eyes’) (lines 105–6).37 Here Benoît exercises historical judgement based on proximity to the events in question, a sign of an intellectual and chronologically aware historicist translatio (in theory). A similarly factually accurate approach is seen in his vaunted relationship to Troie’s sources, in which he claims ‘le latin sivrai e la letre’ (‘I follow the Latin and the text’), although he allows himself some poetic licence by including more expansive ‘buen dit’.38 Benoît’s Prologue to his romance, then, explicitly engages with different models of historiography as part of an intellectual approach to his sources and his text that implicitly justifies the genre’s ability to convey historical narrative. Since the author of the SBT used Dares as an important source, Benoît’s example may be instructive for his approach too. In SBT’s Prologue the poet explicitly discusses his sources in terms of their language and literary heritage. And so sayth a kyng þat þer was, The huche men kallyd syre adryas; Al þe doing he knewe, san fayle, And wrot in grew al the batayle. And seethe a mayster of sotel engynne Wrot hyt out of grew into latyne; And of latyn, wel y wote, Into englis hit ys wrote. (lines 15–22)39

Here the studied performance of translatio between languages is carefully delineated, suggesting a similar linguistic awareness to that of Benoît. There is an important difference, however: whereas Troie’s Prologue highlighted the author’s desire to follow his Latin text accurately (‘le latin sivrai e la letre’), and therefore the potential slippage in the act of translatio, here in SBT the movement between languages is wholly unproblematic. The complex linguistic relationship between ‘grew’, ‘latyne’, and ‘englis’ is summed up simply, even concealed, in the repeated verb ‘wrot/e’, indicating the physical 37 Troie, ed. Constans, i. 38 Troie, ed. Constans, i. 39 SBT, ed. Barnicle.

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Venetia Bridges act of writing but little of the mental creativity behind this act. The chronological separation between the three languages is also concealed within the verb; there is no sense of historical trajectory here. In terms of the linguistic performance of translatio, then, it seems that these lines position SBT very differently from Troie, since they conceal rather than reveal its complexities. SBT’s relationship with the historicity of its narrative, as seen in the Prologue, follows a similar pattern. The very first lines demonstrate a lack of concern for historicity, claiming ignorance of history’s events: ‘Syth god tyhys worle had wroȝt … ffele aventures hauet be-falle / We þat now leuyn con noȝt telle alle’ (lines 1, 3–4). So much has happened since Creation that cannot be told, an idea displaying not just lack of interest in ‘ffele aventures’ but perhaps also active ignorance of them, an ignorance that is seen explicitly in the Egerton MS, where this line reads ‘we ne woot him noȝt alle’ (line 4). This lack of interest in, even ignorance of, history is strengthened by the immediate beginning of the narrative proper, which is set in an ahistorical world: ‘Tyle in grece þer was / a pryns þat hyht pollyas’ (Arundel 23–24), ‘Lordynges, in Grece sum tyme þer was / A knyȝt þat hiȝt Pallaas’ (Egerton 23–24). This unconcern for historical context is highlighted further in the Arundel scribe’s mangling of Greek names, giving ‘adryas’ and ‘pollyas’ for Egerton’s ‘sir Daryes’ and ‘Pallaas’. Although in practice Benoît’s apparently more historically engaged romance also frequently inhabits a similarly timeless background, his claims to historical and source-related accuracy in Troie’s Prologue contrast strikingly with the lack of engagement with these phenomena in SBT. It seems, from the Prologue at least, that SBT is not interested in, and even ignorant of, the historicity of the narrative that it retells. Yet, once again this is perhaps as much a sign of a different set of priorities as it is of simple historical ignorance. The invocation of God at the very start of the poem is a reminder that SBT is set in a different religious era from the pagan classical period, highlighting the fact that the ‘aventures’ of the past are distant for a medieval audience. This distance is primarily religious, rather than historical, however, since this pointer explicitly places the ‘ffele aventures’ in a Judaeo-Christian context, despite the classical narrative universe of the poem. The Prologue is therefore deliberately setting its narrative in a contemporary religious context, which casts its apparent lack of interest in history in a different light: it is not primarily ignorance of history that drives the translatio, although that may indeed be a factor, but, rather, a concern to retell an inherited narrative in a more recognisable and generically apposite context for its fourteenth-century audience. A Judaeo-Christian context is of course a more frequent setting for romances than the antique world of classical narratives.40 So, whilst it is not a clearly defined ‘romance feature’, the setting acts as a hint that the poem’s 40 Arthurian romances, such as Of Arthour and of Merlin with which SBT is found in

Lincoln 150, are a good example of this tendency.

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Trojan Trash? priorities are not primarily historical accuracy but, potentially, appropriate narrative reworking, in line with the habits of romance translatio more widely.41 Again, what seems to be a lack of learning – here meaning ignorance of historical distance and limited classical knowledge – is possibly better conceptualised as a desire to rework the inherited Troy narrative in line with contemporary romance practices. ‘Ladies of eluen londe’: Concepts of Learning in the Judgement of Paris Moving on from the Prologue, another significant episode in which to consider SBT’s relationship with learning is the Judgement of Paris scene. Reworking a story that exists in different versions from antiquity, this scene as mentioned above uses Dares and the Excidium Troiae but does not take its narrative primarily from either.42 Instead, according to Margaret J. Ehrhart (focusing on the episode’s poetics), the poet seems to have ‘handled his material with almost complete freedom’ and ‘unhampered by any scholarly impulse’.43 This characterisation of the Judgement of Paris episode as both poetically free and also unscholarly (i.e. lacking in classical knowledge) indicates that it is an apt place to consider translatio in relation to traditional ‘learning’. The episode is around a hundred lines long in the Arundel, Egerton, and Lincoln’s Inn manuscripts (507–616) and around seventy in Harley (400–62, 608–14); the first three versions will be discussed here. It begins with Paris going hunting and getting lost before he falls asleep and dreams of four ladies, who ask him to judge who shall receive a golden ball as the most beautiful; he chooses Venus, as she promises him the fairest woman in the world for his wife. This follows the well-known narrative in outline, but some of its details are peculiar to SBT (as far as is known). A particularly eye-catching change is the renaming of the four ladies, traditionally the three goddesses Juno, Minerva, and Venus, as Saturnus, Jubiter, Mercurius, and Venus, that is, as members of the male classical pantheon save for Venus. This strange 41 For discussion of the lack of historical priority in the translatio of Middle English

romances related to SBT, see Venetia Bridges, Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 194–236. 42 On the Judgement’s antique history, see Ehrhart, Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris, pp. 1–34. Dares’ account of this episode is only a couple of lines long, while the Excidium Troiae is around 20; for these texts, see The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian, trans. R. M. Frazer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 138–39 (section 7), and Excidium Troiae, ed. Bagby Atwood and Whitaker, p. 4 (line 23) and p. 5 (line 18). On the sources, see Bagby Atwood, ‘Judgment of Paris’, p. 363. It is worth noting that not only vernacular Troy narratives incorporate the goddesses’ speeches in the Judgement of Paris scene, since speeches are also a feature of the Ylias: see II, lines 237–606 in Joseph Iscanus: Werke und Briefe, ed. Ludwig Gompf (Leiden: Brill, 1970). 43 Ehrhart, Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris, pp. 53–54.

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Venetia Bridges alteration has naturally been seized upon as a sign of the poet’s ignorance of classical history, enabling the whole scene to be termed ‘prolix and corrupt’.44 However, since the female characters except for Venus are renamed using the correct names for some of their male counterparts, it is less clear that this is a straightforward indication of ignorance: behind the error lies a conscious editorial decision. Some light is shed on the addition of a fourth goddess by the Roman de Troie, in which at this point Mercury leads the three goddesses to Paris: ‘Mercurion / Juno, Venus e Minerva / Ces treis deuesses m’amena’ (‘Mercury / brought those three goddesses to me [Paris], / Juno, Venus and Minerva’) (lines 3874–76).45 However, this use of Troie does not explain the change in names for the other three goddesses. Why would the author have decided to rename these characters, misgendering them in the process? The misgendering is useful, as it suggests this renaming was in part an error, since despite the masculine names the text clearly states they are female (they are ‘ladies’, line 507/8). Perhaps Juno and Minerva were less well-known names and the SBT poet decided to replace them with better-known Saturn and Jupiter, although this seems less likely perhaps with reference to Saturn. Whatever the reason for the choice, the effect is that it moves the episode away from its classical roots, as it demonstrates ignorance of key facts. This ignorance, deriving from conscious choice or not, could well be seen as a sign of the ‘unlearned’ nature of the passage’s translatio. However, once again there is another perspective available, one that relates to romance habits and fashions. McDonald notes that the classical goddesses have become ‘astute businesswomen’ who each offer Paris rewards,46 so that the lessened classicism moves the focus away from divine powers and towards Paris’ human mercantile decisions. These decisions are themselves intriguingly reported in some detail by Paris in his role as narrator: in considering each offer (wealth, strength, beauty, love of women), Paris analyses whether he needs it or not (‘Me þouȝt y was reche/strong/fayre y-now þo’) before deciding to accept Venus’ option.47 His decisions are hence based on a sense of personal profit, very much in line with McDonald’s ideas about the mercantile nature of SBT’s translatio. This focus on Paris’ human instincts, rather than divine powers, is therefore part of the romance’s contemporary approach to its subject, even if it is in part the result of a lack of classical ‘learning’. This awareness of romance is heightened in another important aspect of the Judgement of Paris episode in the earlier version, namely its apparent interest in ‘Celticism’, or what might be more usefully conceived of as supernatural or ‘otherworldly’ elements, given recent recognition 44 Bagby Atwood, ‘Judgment of Paris’, p. 344. 45 Troie, ed. Constans, i. 46 McDonald, ‘Seege of Troye’, p. 193. 47 SBT, ed. Barnicle, lines 563, 577, 587 (in L, E, and A).

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Trojan Trash? of the problems inherent in defining what is meant by ‘Celtic’.48 Barnicle describes the scene as ‘wholly Celtic and mediaeval’, referring to crucial features that are frequently found in romance that relate to the supernatural.49 These features are the ‘gret myst’ (Egerton and Lincoln, 494) that separates Paris from his companions, his falling asleep in the forest, his subsequent solitude (although presumably he is alone in other versions of the tale too), and, most of all, the fact that the four women who are usually goddesses are here described as ladies ‘of eluen londe’ (line 508). Ehrhart suggests that this ‘Celticisation’ is the result of the Roman de Troie’s influence, claiming that the Troy romance’s ‘aura of a Celtic tale’ in the Judgement of Paris is accentuated in SBT.50 This may be the case, although Troie both at this point and in general is not noticeably ‘Celtic’ in the otherworldly sense that Ehrhart suggests, being more concerned with the erotic possibilities of translatio, so it seems more likely that SBT’s ‘Celticism’ derives less from Troie specifically than from a sense of romance concepts more widely.51 In Sir Orfeo, for example, Herodis falls asleep under a tree and dreams of her kidnap by the fairy king (lines 69–76), and in Sir Launfal the titular knight meets his mysterious and beautiful fairy lady when he rests in the heat of the day under a tree in a forest (lines 220–28).52 The idea of distance between the ‘real’ world of the narrative and that of ‘fairy’, indicated in SBT by the mist, is also seen in Sir Orfeo when the eponymous character sees ‘the king o fairy with his rout’ come to hunt in the forest ‘with dim cri and bloweing’ (lines 283, 285) so that ‘no never he nist whider they bicome’ (line 288). This admittedly brief comparison with other romances makes it clear that in SBT these features act as broader generic markers that create an identifiable romance atmosphere. The supernatural features in SBT thus seem more aligned with 48 For a recent discussion of supernatural phenomena and Celticism, see Aisling Byrne,

Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially chapter 3, ‘Supernatural Authorities’, and Victoria Flood’s chapter 3 in this volume. 49 SBT, ed. Barnicle, p. xlvi. 50 Ehrhart, Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris, pp. 54–55. 51 The Judgement of Paris episode in Troie is briefer than it is in SBT, occupying around 60 lines (lines 3860–921, in Troie, ed. Constans, i). Paris’ sleep is due to midday heat rather than a mysterious mist, and the goddesses play a minimal part, as their conflict and speeches are reported to Paris via Mercury rather than in their own voices (even indirectly). The effect is to make the episode much more matter of fact, without any of the supernatural elements characteristic of romance more widely and of SBT in particular at this point, although the heat is perhaps suggestive: see Robert Allen Rouse, ‘“Some Like it Hot”: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat’, in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 71–81. 52 Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal, both in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995).

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Venetia Bridges earlier fourteenth-century romances than with Troie, suggesting that once again the poet of the Troy poem is using motifs inspired by contemporary habits of romance composition as part of his poetic palate. This introduction of an otherworldly and mysterious atmosphere is potentially at odds with the matter-of-fact, condensed, and mercantile ethos of SBT more generally. It is particularly noticeable in light of Paris’ relentless interest in profit in the same passage quoted above, meaning that this passage seems to be experiencing tension between this quotidian interest and a conceptually opposed supernaturalism. Despite this tension, however, the two kinds of translatio are driven by the same literary-cultural phenomenon, which can be seen in their impact upon the narrative. In both cases, the effect is to move the Judgement of Paris passage away from its classical origins and towards contemporary sensibilities, situating SBT primarily in the contemporary medieval world rather than in the historical past. ‘Re-classicising’? Learning in Harley 525 In both the Prologue and the Judgement of Paris episode as it stands in the three earlier witnesses, it seems that there is indeed an ignorance of history and classical details, but any such ignorance is part of a wider stylistic and conceptual translatio that seeks to rework the Troy narrative in contemporary terms. Once again, to describe this as a lack of ‘learning’ is accurate only with reference to classical knowledge; in the context of romance translatio, this approach displays significant generic awareness. However, Harley 525 may demonstrate a different approach to learning. Copied noticeably later than the other three witnesses, the Harley manuscript’s text has been edited to produce a different version of the narrative, although it is still fundamentally the same work. Both McDonald and Bradbury, as mentioned earlier, interpret SBT in Harley 525 as a text aimed at a more ‘literary’ audience, adding greater sophistication to the poem.53 This more literary nature and greater sophistication may be related to SBT’s relationship to learning, whether this ‘learning’ is characterised in terms of classical knowledge or as a keen awareness of the possibilities of romance translatio.54 So Harley 525’s SBT may shed light both on changing ideas about romance translatio in the fifteenth century and also on the text’s interaction with intellectual culture more widely. 53 McDonald, ‘The Seege of Troye’, p. 196, citing Pearsall, ‘Development of Middle Eng-

lish Romance’, p. 193, and Bradbury, ‘Poetics of Middle English Romance’, p. 47.

54 The allusive and intertextual nature of ‘popular’ romances such as Emaré and The

Squire of Low Degree situates them as ‘learned’ in this sense of generic awareness, for example. See Megan G. Leitch, ‘Middle English Romance: The Motifs and the Critics’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolultion of Middle English Romance, A Tribute to Helen Cooper, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 1–24.

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Trojan Trash? The Judgement of Paris episode is intriguing from this perspective. It is shorter, and all the references to romance motifs – mist, sleep, elven ladies – have been removed, so that it begins with ‘Thre goddess an apull fonde’ (line 400) and their disagreement; Paris is then appealed to as a judge because of his reputation as the ‘trewest man’ to live (line 425), not simply because of proximity, as in the earlier version. In addition, the male-named goddesses of the earlier text have been reduced from four to three, and given their usual female names. These changes indicate that the scene has been ‘re-classicised’ to some extent by being brought back in line with the expected plot motifs; Harley 525’s version might therefore be seen as a more accurate and hence more ‘learned’ one, and thus perceived as more sophisticated. However, the editorial work done on the episode, whether or not it is a sign of increased classical knowledge, has had other important effects, of which one is structural confusion. There are only two goddesses’ speeches, not three, and the first one, ascribed to Juno, is potentially that of Pallas.55 Line 430 states ‘Juno she went onto Parysse’, but after the goddess finishes speaking we are told ‘Pallas þe way from him has taken’ (line 439); in addition, the gift offered by ‘Juno’ here is wisdom (line 436), which seems more appropriate to Pallas, although Juno is in fairness described earlier as ‘lady of wysenesse’ (line 401). Barnicle extends this narrative confusion into a stylistic criticism, damning the passage for its ‘bald, almost anecdotal fashion, which has nothing of the dramatic vitality and emphatic repetition of the L E A version’, and also claiming that ‘the poetry is irregular and unmusical, stumping along on infirm feet’.56 The attempt to bring the Judgement of Paris scene in line with classical versions in terms of accuracy has led, even if indirectly, to editorially induced structural confusion and perhaps ‘unmusical’ poetic style; to some extent, the adaptor has lost control of the narrative by altering its translatio. In addition to this narrative confusion, the idea that the Harley Judgement of Paris is a more ‘learned’ adaptation in terms of being intellectually and historically aware is troubled by Juno’s and Venus’ anachronistic references to ‘Mahound’: ‘Dame Juno seyd, “Be Mahound, nay”’ and Venus tells Paris, ‘Mahound the save’.57 These references are a common feature in Middle English romances, especially those involving Saracen–Christian conflicts such as Otuel a Knight and The King of Tars.58 They are therefore all the more 55 This incongruity is also noted by Ehrhart, Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris, p. 56.

The Harley text is in SBT, ed. Barnicle, Appendix A, pp. 175–76. In fairness, there is also confusion between the speakers in Egerton, where Venus is named as ‘þe þridde lady’ in place of ‘Jubiter’, as well as being the fourth speaker (SBT, ed. Barnicle, Egerton 579, 589, 606). 56 SBT, ed. Barnicle, p. xlvii. 57 SBT, ed. Barnicle, Appendix A, lines 417 and 442. 58 Both the sultan in The King of Tars and Otuel in Otuel a Knight swear by ‘Mahoun’ (The King of Tars, ed. J. Perryman, Middle English Texts, 12 (Heidleberg: Winter, 1980),

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Venetia Bridges striking in this apparently ‘re-classicised’ context, particularly as Pallas by contrast swears ‘be Jubiter and Appolyn’, using the historically appropriate classical pantheon.59 This feature, small though it is, contradicts the idea that a re-classicising translatio is consistently taking place in the Harley version, since it introduces a glaring non-classical anachronism into the narrative, an anachronism that also gestures generically towards romance. This last point about romance is perhaps supported indirectly by the Harley version’s embrace of the familiar ahistorical approach to the narrative, exemplified here by Paris’ description as ‘þe trewest man’ and ‘þe trewest knyght’ (lines 425, 443): again, this emphasis on timeless chivalric concerns aligns the passage with romance habits, particularly in English works.60 Harley 525’s Judgement of Paris version, then, appears to display a greater sense of ‘learning’ in the classical and historical sense, but this is not clear cut. On one hand, the episode seems to reduce its romance atmosphere by removing the supernatural motifs, but on the other hand it might be said to add to this atmosphere by including a reference to ‘Mahound’. Perhaps the latter invocation is intended primarily to mark up the religious difference between the pagan goddesses and the narrative’s Christian audience without regard for the anachronism, but its impact remains the same: it is characteristic of romance translatio and its frequently lesser concern for a historical rather than a more thematically timeless approach. Despite Harley 525’s later date and ‘correct’ classical knowledge, it seems that the text here does not diverge significantly from the translatio seen in the other three witnesses in this episode, which suggests that its fifteenth-century cultural context has not affected the text’s transmission in any immediately apparent way. Like the other witnesses, then, albeit in a more complex and potentially contradictory fashion, the Harley text demonstrates its ‘learned’ awareness of romance translatio. Conclusion This study of SBT’s relationship with ‘learning’ in its sources, Prologue, and two versions of the Judgement of Paris episode has shown repeatedly that its translatio is governed by a wide-ranging awareness of the stylistic conventions of romance as a genre: in this sense, it is a ‘learned’ performance. Bradbury’s and McDonald’s studies contextualise this romance awareness helpfully from the perspectives of oral-literate transmission and mercantile ethos, but what this analysis has highlighted is the extent of such an awareness line 102; Otuel a Knight, in The Roland and Otuel Romances and the Anglo-Norman Otinel, ed. Elizabeth Melick, Susanna Greer Fein, and David Raybin (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), line 232). 59 SBT, ed. Barnicle, Appendix A, line 410. 60 See Saunders, ‘Love and Loyalty’.

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Trojan Trash? and the thorough-going nature of the transformation that has occurred in the movement of the narrative from Latin and French into English.61 Pearsall and Benson are right to point out that the poem is not ‘learned’ in the traditional sense of displaying classically accurate knowledge, but this judgement overlooks the insight provided by a closer study of SBT’s sources, since the textual presence and selective poetic use of Dares, the Roman de Troie, the Excidium Troiae, and the Compendium demonstrates classical ‘learning’ in a different sense.62 They highlight that classical ‘learning’ is present behind the text, rather like a palimpsest, but it is concealed by the act of translatio into a new language and genre, whose stylistic conventions require an approach different from the simple reproduction of antique facts. SBT is a text whose close relationship with romance habits and fashions does not create a binary of ‘learned classicism’ versus ‘unlearned romance’, as implied by the approaches of Pearsall and Benson, but, rather, engages with classical material closely and deeply in order to perform the most appropriate translatio studii for a romance work. This undoing of the binary between ‘learned’ and ‘unlearned’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘popular’, is highlighted clearly by SBT’s material context: by the later Middle Ages, all the information needed to gain wide-ranging knowledge, from historical narratives like Troy to accounts of English heroes such as Bevis and erotic fantasises like Floris and Blancheflour, can be found in Middle English narratives that consciously adhere to recognisable romance conventions and styles. In terms of both material and translatio studii, romance itself has become a ‘learned’ matter.

61 Bradbury, ‘Poetics of Middle English Romance’; McDonald, ‘The Seege of Troye’. 62 Pearsall, ‘The Development of Middle English Romance’; Benson, History of Troy.

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9 Poaching Romance: Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives CORY JAMES RUSHTON

B

y current critical understanding of the aesthetic difference between high and popular romance, authors like Thomas Chestre (fourteenth century) and the anonymous authors of The Greene Knight (c. 1500), Torrent of Portyngale (c. 1400) and Sir Gowther (mid to late fifteenth century) can only fail to impress. Chestre’s work has seemed unfocused and amateurish, while the Greene Knight appears to academic audiences as a bad misunderstanding of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But if we use a different critical lens – that of fan fiction – we might reorient our approach to what motivates people to write and tell stories in the late Middle Ages. Modern fan fiction theory is a useful way of illuminating how medieval popular romance works because it helps to move us past modern notions of both textual authority and writing for profit, although it is also necessary not to collapse all distinctions between medieval literature and modern fan texts. Using Henry Jenkins’ theory of ‘textual poaching’, authors like Chestre look rather more like ‘readers who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests’.1 Chestre’s work, Torrent, and the Greene Knight engage with new social interests or produce fan-friendlier versions of difficult or ambiguous narratives; Sir Gowther links romance to apocalyptic eschatology through the figure of Merlin. All four participate in a popular view of history as something organised around and by chivalry and chivalric identity. I will argue that to some extent this will not be a new apparatus, but a shifting of focus, partly concerning authorial intention and partly concerning perceived aesthetic effect. Fan fiction, then, offers a new way to interpret the radical translation into the vernacular – of earlier aristocratic ethos, of eschatological prediction – represented by late Middle English romance, where the focus becomes the entertaining of both one’s self and one’s audience. Textual poaching 1 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poaching, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2013).

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Cory James Rushton imagines a diegetic field – a body of story – as a game preserve, bordered and guarded. The fan fiction writer defies authority in order to translate material across those borders. Jenkins’ other term for fan fiction practitioners is, after all, ‘nomads’. Fan fiction is different from adaptation, although they share significant features. The idea of textual poaching has been expanded and questioned. Juli J. Parrish argues that fan fiction writers ‘reimagine the preserve itself’, the landscape in which the poaching takes place transformed by their activity.2 As Anna Wilson has said, ‘To define fan fiction only by its transformative relationship to other texts runs the risk of missing the fan in fan fiction – the loving reader to whom fan fiction seeks to give pleasure.’3 That pleasure can be found in fixing perceived problems or ironing out inconsistencies, creating expanded character backgrounds, or including one’s own self in the fictional world. For my purposes, a fan of Star Wars in 1990 and an enthusiast for Arthurian Britain in 1390 face the same question: am I to be a passive observer of this material, or will I immerse myself in it, engage with it, poach it, fix it? There are still rules, as Sheenagh Pugh points out: ‘Canon is a framework to write against. It contains inherent restrictions, though sequels, prequels, missing scenes and AUS [alternate universes] can get around most of them. Anyway restrictions, as all writers know, are not necessarily a disadvantage; they can help to focus writing.’ The only ‘unforgivable sin in any fanfic universe is getting facts wrong, departing from canon not deliberately but accidentally by giving someone an accent, appearance or opinions that the canon plainly states didn’t belong to him’.4 For example, ‘You cannot very easily tell your audience that Odysseus is a tall blond man with a speech impediment, but you can give him an unexpected streak of compassion, as Sophocles did in his Ajax.’5 This is reader reception in an active mode, active world builders in their own right, as Natalia Samutina has observed.6 Before the similarities, a key difference. Fan fiction, properly speaking, can emerge only within a strong copyright culture. Fan fiction can be read as poaching because it involves someone without authority – a writer with no legal right to the material – stepping into the preserve to use what is inside for their own ends. Without copyright law, anyone can make use of any materials

2 Juli J. Parrish, ‘Inventing a Universe: Reading and Writing Internet Fan Fiction’ (un-

published doctoral thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2007), pp. 67–68.

3 Anna Wilson, ‘The Role of Affect in Fan Fiction’, Transformative Works and Cultures,

21 (2016) , 1.2 [accessed 27 October 2018].

4 Sheenagh Pugh, The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context (Bridgend,

Wales: Seren, 2005), p. 40.

5 Pugh, The Democratic Genre, p. 69. 6 Natalie Samutina, ‘Fan Fiction as World-Building: Transformative Reception in Cross-

over Writing’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 30.4 (2016), 433–50.

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Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives they want, as Chaucer, Chestre, and Shakespeare all did.7 So, in that sense, as Angela L. Florschuetz explains, ‘If the term is understood to include a legal component, then fan fiction could not have existed before the development of authorial copyright, so the first fan fiction could, for example, be some of the rewrites of Jane Austen by her readers.’8 But, in another sense, we still have a preserve, although we call it a canon: Chaucer and Marie De France are in it, Chestre is not. The difference, as Barlow suggests, has been perceived aesthetic quality: Chestre is an interloper because he misreads – misuses – Marie’s high-culture object.9 Fan fiction theory might help us to explain why this is, not only to understand what Chestre is actually trying to do (what motivates him) but also why critics have been reluctant to take him and others seriously. It is good to be reminded that ‘canon’ is not just a term applied to the Great Books tradition; it is the word modern popular culture uses to distinguish between authorised texts (such as the Star Trek films and TV shows) and unauthorised texts using those characters and settings. Fan fiction studies’ adoption of the term ‘poaching’ has resonances for a medievalist audience, given the ubiquity of poaching laws in the Middle Ages. Poaching law governed who had legal access to natural resources, best known in the context of the medieval forest. The rights to deer, to take one prominent example, often lay with a single family or with the crown. To borrow this term as a metaphor for textual play is to make a claim that works better for modern fan fiction than it does for any medieval antecedents, because it assumes both ownership and exclusivity: no two people can have the same deer, and something of value illegitimately passes from one owner to another in the act of poaching. Someone gains at someone else’s loss. This transfers to copyright as loss of value rather than physical loss (stealing a DVD is different than downloading an illegally recorded film): this value first takes the form of lost 7 Pugh’s influential book has problematised this position: ‘Many, I am sure, would quar-

rel with defining Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or Scott’s Ivanhoe as fan fiction, merely because they use material from a common myth-kitty … But what of respected writers who do use as their taking-off point the creations of other, named, writers? What of Jean Rhys’s alternative take on Jane Eyre from the viewpoint of the first Mrs. Rochester, Wide Sargasso Sea? Or the published “sequels” to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and du Maurier’s Rebecca?’ She also cites the example of George Fraser MacDonald’s Flashman series, starring a minor character from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and provides a very short discussion of Maid Marian, a character not present in early Robin Hood stories, and who not only fills a perceived need (love interest) but also grows into a more central, stronger place in the Robin Hood tradition: ‘Marian once wasn’t canon; now she is accepted as such …’: Pugh, The Democratic Genre, p. 11. 8 Angela L. Florschuetz, ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Canonicity, and Audience Participation’, Transformative Works and Cultures, 30 (2019) [accessed 30 October 2019] (para. 3 of 32). 9 Gania Barlow, ‘Sir Launfal’s Creative Abuses’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 115.2 (2016), 167–85.

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Cory James Rushton revenue, but can also be a matter of intellectual or creative repute. Sexual stories about Harry Potter characters, for example, can be seen as damaging for the overall brand. So can the threat of an unauthorised writer producing content that seems superior to the official product. This does not quite work for pre-modern societies, where very little is authorised (outside of the Bible) and nothing is owned. Poaching is translation across boundaries and owners which results in someone’s loss. In a fundamental way, medieval ‘fan fiction’ is a translation that produces only gains. In her recent, challenging chapter on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK, discussed below), Angela L. Florschuetz makes use of Abigail Derecho’s useful term ‘archontic’. Derecho coined this word ‘to address works previously described as derivative or appropriative, particularly works that draw upon intertextuality and an order in which some texts precede and create a basis for the existence but do not, as those terms imply, require a sense of hierarchy between them’.10 In that sense, the archontic is the opposite of canonisation, the latter described by Ahuvia Kahane as less a set list of texts than ‘a socially embedded practice of containment of surplus’, in that the archontic is ‘literature that draws and builds upon previously existing textual worlds and that allows for unlimited expansions to the textual conglomeration or archive’.11 In other words, surplus. Glenn W. Most describes canonisation as a process which ‘aims, not at the annihilation of the texts it designates as non-canonical, but only at positioning them lower on a scale of priority, at rendering their use less urgent’.12 For Most, writing after the expansion of literacy means an ever greater surplus of books, not all of which an individual can read; the canon is born as a means of prioritising the texts that must be read from those that can be ignored. Archontic fan fiction seeks to re-level this playing field, motivated primarily by pleasure (even if rewriting a canonical text looks like a negative judgement on the original, it is still pleasurable to fix what’s seen as a problem). Wilson puts it best: ‘The affective quality of fan fiction – and its implications – could potentially be overlooked or erased through scholarship that identifies it too readily with classical literature, which has – correctly or not – so long been associated with western high culture and the literary canon of Great Books on which the university rests.’13 Fan fiction 10 Florschuetz, ‘Sir Gawain’, 11. The term comes from Abigail Derecho, ‘Archontic Lit-

erature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction’, in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), pp. 61–78. 11 Ahuvia Kahane, ‘Fan Fiction, Early Greece, and the Historicity of Canon’, in Transformative Works and Cultures, 21 (2016) https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2016.0681, 1.3 [accessed 18 April 2016]; Florschuetz, ‘Sir Gawain’, 11. 12 Glenn W. Most, ‘Canon Fathers: Literacy, Mortality, Power’, Arion 1 (3rd series), 35–60 (p. 44). 13 Wilson, ‘Role of Affect’, 2.10.

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Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives studies can still resist being absorbed into the university’s hierarchies; medieval romance studies adopted a hierarchy of texts long before the field expanded, which has limited our ability to see the ways in which playfulness and joy might motivate attempts to expand the archive.14 Playfulness might need to be reclaimed, and perhaps it is not surprising that late Middle English romances – translating and adapting both from other languages and from earlier Middle English works, in texts that have often seemed silly or underbaked – produce the sort of hybrid texts that might benefit from a fan fiction lens. There are many kinds of fan fiction, reflecting the many different uses fans have for their beloved material. Fan fiction arose in the context of Star Trek, following the cancellation of the original series, and terminology associated with Trek fan fiction is still in use. Fanzines circulated widely at sci fi conventions, keeping the series alive and eventually building the momentum necessary for the franchise’s revival with the original films and The Next Generation. Some fan fiction shares the idea of the prosthetic with adaptation, a rhetorical move often called an episode tag in fan fiction studies. Coming out of disability theory, prosthesis is used to explain how perceived flaws or absences in a primary text can generate new texts: like artificial limbs, they replace something or fix something.15 Sequels and prequels, done right, are generated when questions are left unanswered or intriguing characters left unexplored (perhaps the best example is Perceforest, a sprawling fourteenth-century romance telling the adventures of some ancestors of prominent Round Table knights, led by two men left behind after Alexander the Great visits Britain). Adaptations change texts to eliminate things now seen as socially or politically inadequate, including increasing the presence of women and minorities. Another form of fan fiction is the cross-over, in which franchises merge. This has happened semi-officially at times: Captain Picard has faced the X-Men, and both Batman and Superman have fought the Predator, in canon-adjacent texts. But, with fan fiction, such mergings are not the result of complicated copyright/legal agreements between franchise holders: they are potentially unlimited. And they have historical precedent: to take one medieval example, Huon of Bordeaux, in which Julius Caesar and Morgan le Fay have had a love affair, is a cross-over between the Matters of Antiquity and of Britain. Perceforest, mentioned above and mixing Alexander (Antiquity) with Britain, is another example. As Wilson puts it, ‘both fan fiction and these premodern genres use sophisticated allusion and intertextuality to create new meanings, and both assume a knowledgeable audience with a shared understanding of 14 While much work has been done to recuperate these works for university study, that

work has tended to try finding reasons to take the romances more seriously, to raise up neglected or undervalued texts rather than to see what they might really be trying to do. 15 See David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

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Cory James Rushton their source’.16 The desire to see favourite characters meet, fight, love, and work together is a very old one. Greek myth cannot be fully understood otherwise; the voyage of the Argonauts is a cross-over in which Hercules appears and soon departs, his presence important primarily for itself. Even history can provide gaps which seem like missed opportunities: ‘from Schiller onwards, writers have been unwilling to accept that history was so poor a judge of drama as never to have arranged a meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots’.17 This discussion does not exhaust the possible types of fan fiction, but does point to how writers – fans – have long participated in various traditions by expanding the archives to modify elements of them and to bring them into contact with other matters. To take a fully archontic case first, I turn to the Arthurian tradition, where textual authority is nebulous and fluid: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Marie de France, and Chrétien, then Malory for the English language, can all claim to be central (at times) to how Arthur’s court is understood. But none of them has final authority, and there is no ruling body to enforce anything (although university syllabi over decades might be said to play some role in making some texts central while ignoring others).18 The anonymous The Greene Knight, found in the Percy Folio, has long been taken for a weak, derivative version of the now-canonical Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one which eliminates the role of Morgan, simplifies the contest, and gives Gawain (and the Arthurian court) an unambiguous happy ending.19 As with Chestre, the poetry is not as impressive, and for twentieth-century readers the loss of an ambiguous ending felt like a serious flaw (even as the elimination of Morgan looks tidier to modern eyes, as she seems to appear out of nowhere). What interests me is how the anonymous adapter seems close to fan fiction in the prosthetic sense: Gawain wins the loyalty of the Green Knight, who reveals the whole thing was a prankish audition for the Round Table. When he joins the Table, the Green Knight falls in line with many of Gawain’s opponents in Middle English romances. The later poet does not think they are matching the performance of the earlier, because that is not their motivation: it is to make this Gawain poem fit with those others. This common tradition of Gawain is indeed exactly what the earlier poet is interrogating (among other things), but 16 Wilson, ‘Role of Affect’, 1.1. See also Pugh, The Democratic Genre, p. 32: ‘So what

effect does working to a canon have on writing? Perhaps the most obviously important is that fanfic writers not only have their own knowledge of the canon but can assume a similar knowledge on the part of their readership.’ 17 Pugh, The Democratic Genre, p. 69. 18 The debate over which romances deserve academic attention is a long one. 19 The Grene Knight, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1995). Cory James Rushton, ‘Modern and Academic Reception of the Popular Romance’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), pp. 174–78.

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Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives the later poet is not interested – the SGGK Gawain is not their Gawain, the one they find in most other Middle English poems.20 This is not simply a matter of the popular being low-brow as opposed to greater sophistication being highbrow, but the connected idea that characters find a middle in which they have generally agreed-upon personalities and stories. Deviations from that middle – from the imagined norm – are translated back into line. Complicating this is Florschuetz’s recent reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight itself as a ‘self-referential depiction of an Arthurian romance fan community, whose members not only critique the existing Arthurian texts but go further – inserting themselves within the corpus both as characters and creators’.21 She refers to both Bertilak and the Lady, whose readings of the court and of Gawain himself are set against expectations raised by earlier texts. For Florschuetz, SGGK is also archontic in that it seeks to add to the total Arthurian archive. In one sense, this neatly sidesteps the question of aesthetics altogether, the perceived high literary value of SGGK being no barrier to its participation in fan fiction. In another sense, it risks collapsing intertextuality into fan fiction entirely, for if SGGK is fan fiction then so are Chrétien de Troyes and his earlier imitators. Ad Putter has argued for the former’s deliberate placement of the adventures he writes within the framework of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, where they occur during the periods in which Arthur’s kingdom is at peace (a strategy reflected in one manuscript of the Historia).22 Chrétien is literally filling in gaps, in a way designed to augment and explain the glory of Arthur’s court and the nature or strength of the Round Table. Later still, one of Chrétien’s anonymous imitators, in Le Chevalier à l’Epée, praises Chrétien in order to criticise him for failing to take Gawain seriously by giving him an adventure of his own: One may not reasonably reproach Chrétien de Troyes, in my opinion, who could tell stories of King Arthur and his court and his retinue, which was praised and honoured so much: he recounts the deeds of others but never took any account of Gawain. He was too fine a man to forget. For this reason, I am pleased to be the first to recount an adventure which happened to the Good Knight.23

20 There is a term for ‘a story wrong-footed by a later canon development’ requiring a

fanfic fix: such a story is ‘sometimes said to be “jossed”, from the name of Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose unexpected plot twists and penchant for filling in gaps were particularly likely to make this happen’. Pugh, The Democratic Genre, p. 55. Whether the author of The Grene Knight would consider Gawain to have been ‘jossed’ by his portrait in SGGK is a matter of speculation. 21 Florschuetz, ‘Sir Gawain’, 5. 22 Ad Putter, ‘Finding Time for Romance: Mediaeval Arthurian Literary History’, Medium Ævum, 63.1 (1994), 1–16. 23 ‘The Knight with the Sword’, in Three Arthurian Poems: Poems from Medieval France, ed. and trans. Ross G. Arthur (London: Everyman, 1996), p. 87.

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Cory James Rushton This potentially back-handed praise can be seen as participation in an ongoing game of archival addition and rivalry, and as such is both archontic and an episode tag meant to correct an omission: ‘too fine a man’ has been neglected (even if this claim is not quite true). The strength of Florschuetz’s argument is that she privileges the pleasure to be found in playing with Gawain, whose ‘status is collectively created and archontic’ (both within SGGK and in the tradition as a whole), ‘constantly subject to reassessment and revision by his audience/critics’.24 Like The Grene Knight, SGGK carves out its own new space: ‘Not only does this romance refuse to perform to specifications; it does so aggressively.’25 Neither text needs to be privileged over the other if they are imagined as archontic, additions to the archive for their own sake. Like all games, adding to the archive can be competitive and joyful at the same time. The Arthurian legend calls out for participation: new or revisited knights, proliferation of relatives (sisters and nephews perhaps especially), geographic expansion. That brings us to the case of Thomas Chestre. His composition of Sir Launfal is attested in that poem, but he is also associated with Lybeaus Desconus, a story about Gawain’s lost son.26 Chestre is a particularly good candidate for this treatment for reasons Gania Barlow has given in the context of his reception: ‘Scholars have long accused Thomas Chestre’s Middle English lay, Sir Launfal, of deviating from the high aesthetic and formal standards of the earlier French lay tradition, and in particular from its source, Marie de France’s Lanval. And scholars have demonstrated that the first audiences of Chestre’s lay would have recognized its divergences from generic traditions.’27 Indeed, Barlow’s article is called ‘Sir Launfal’s Creative Abuses’. The scholarly community has been moving towards a consensus that this late Middle English romance is wrestling with both its inheritance of earlier materials and new cultural and material conditions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that it is thus at least somewhat better than we thought. As Barlow argues, Chestre, and others, are doing something that is not simply mutilating earlier, better texts: adaptation as wrecking crew. They have their own purposes and motivations independent of the anxiety of influence. Chestre has been taken, as has John Lydgate (c. 1370–c. 1451), as being anxious about the legacy of Chaucer, in the Bloomian sense: Chestre does, after all, name Launfal’s violent and invisible squire ‘Geoffrey’.28 But Chestre may not think that is what he is doing, as he shows less interest in Chaucer than he does in the British past, particularly the Arthurian, writing these two Arthurian poems and possibly also the Southern Octavian, set in Rome. Given that interest, Chestre 24 Florschuetz, ‘Sir Gawain’, 29. 25 Florschuetz, ‘Sir Gawain’, 10. 26 Lybeaus Desconus, ed. Maldwyn Mills, EETS o.s. 261 (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1969).

27 Barlow, ‘Creative Abuses’, 167. 28 Launfal, line 327.

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Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives seems just as likely to have named the squire after Geoffrey of Monmouth, a sly reference to the most prominent originator of the Arthurian legend and the Trojan myth as it was known to the Middle Ages, the figure who has attracted prosthetic tags since Chrétien himself. As Timothy O’Brien has argued, Chestre’s Launfal is ‘readerly’, held together less by narrative causality than by an interest in tale-telling: everyone makes up stories in this version of the tale, relentlessly attempting to shape the final narrative just as Florschuetz claims the characters in SGGK do.29 Chestre also participates in a widespread and lively contemporary interrogation of the lay tradition (in which Sir Gowther is also sometimes included). Chestre’s interest in the past and in the problem of storytelling might well be his era’s, if not his own, and not simply borrowed from Chaucer. This will sound like a claim that Chestre is indeed trying to compete with Chaucer as a producer of literature. It is true that Launfal, in particular, seems deeply interested in matters of money and justice, in ways that Marie’s original is not but Chaucer sometimes is.30 But what really seems to interest Chestre is immersion in the past, an immersion in which he wants to bring his texts in line with others, and further to understand the world of these texts in ways that look familiar to his own world. More than anything, he wants to add to the archive. That, however, has not interested, nor has it seemed worthy to, generations of literary scholars. Chaucer throws himself up against the greats; he creates unreliable narrators and complex meta-narratives based on elaborate frame stories. Chaucer has become authorised. Meanwhile, Chestre carries on, trying to expand the preserve. Pugh notes that ‘There is certainly an element of being an insider in fanfic reading which can enhance the experience.’31 That certainly seems to be the case for Chestre, who is writing for readers like himself, insiders. Chaucer wants to stamp himself on things, but Chestre wants to add to the total tapestry, the Arthurian archives. So he creates two new nephews for Arthur, because he knows Arthur has many, many nephews but does not want high-profile knights like Gawain to perform such a mundane task; Mordred would be right out, of course.32 He names the queen, and links her to Arthur’s great early enemy, Ryons, here the king of Ireland where he is normally king of the Isles.33 Does he know the Welsh had a tradition of multiple Guineveres, so he feels free to essentially make a new one, one who can be punished by Tryamour? In Lybeaus Desconus, he implies that Lybeaus – unlike Malory’s 29 Timothy D. O’Brien, ‘The “Readerly” Sir Launfal’, Parergon, 8.1 (1990), 33–45. 30 Rushton, ‘Reception’, pp. 173–74. 31 Pugh, The Democratic Genre, p. 35. 32 Here named ‘Syr Huwe and Syr Jon’ (82, 136). A. J. Bliss argued that these were likely

corruptions of Gawain and Ywain, respectively, two well-attested Arthurian knights; but this has not been widely adopted. A. J. Bliss, ‘The Hero’s Name in the Middle English Versions of Lanval’, Medium Ævum, 27 (1958), 80–85 (p. 86). 33 Launfal, line 40.

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Cory James Rushton Gareth, a later analogue – sleeps with all three women in his story: guide, enchantress, future wife. He is, after all, Gawain’s son.34 A more complicated example is found in the late Middle English tailrhyme romance Sir Gowther, which lightly attaches itself to the Arthurian archive on the way to a fan fiction-like work which expands on Christian eschatology concerning the Apocalypse.35 Sir Gowther posits the idea of multiple Anti-Christs, not as the seven heads of the Dragon in prophecy familiar from someone like Joachim of Fiore, but as a series of potentially limitless attempts to disrupt the work of God in the world which paradoxically point to the existence of free will and something like the rise of the individual. This could be more dangerous work than writing a romance about Gawain’s son, or expanding a tale about a minor knight; this is translating a biblical element into the romance preserve, and one from the Bible’s final book which contains an injunction to add nothing to its apocalyptic narrative. The cultural authority poached here is weightier. It may be enough that Sir Gowther takes place between the writing of Revelation and the future events depicted within it. But it is still a romance that plays in a preserve guarded by harsher sanctions than any Disney could bring to bear today. This is not to say that speculation about the nature and purpose of the Anti-Christ was ever impossible, or indeed not sometimes playful (although it may just look that way to us, just as playful romances have sometimes seemed unworthy of our attention). Anyone who knows their Anti-Christs will see the objection. The Anti-Christ story appears in three forms. The first is the single Anti-Christ who will operate in the Last Days, the dominant form which found its way into modern pop culture in films like The Omen trilogy (1976–81) and Rapture-Palooza (2013). The second is a more complex historical scheme in which there are several Anti-Christs, represented by the seven horns of the Dragon in Revelation: according to Joachim of Fiore, these historical Anti-Christs include Herod, Nero, Mohammed, and Saladin. The identities of these Anti-Christs were sometimes unknown (they parallel the saints in this way), but each Anti-Christ foreshadowed and pointed to the last and Final Enemy. Scholars argued over whether he was a man possessed by the Devil or a man fathered by the Devil. But there was a third way of interpreting Anti-Christ, associated with Augustine, Origen, and others. In this scheme, Anti-Christ is anyone who denies Christ through words or deeds, even if that denial was internal.36 It was matter of personal conscience, but the idea could 34 Cory James Rushton, ‘The Lady’s Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Litera-

ture’, in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 27–37. 35 ‘Sir Gowther’, in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1995). 36 A thorough examination of this character’s history is Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of Human Fascination with Evil (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

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Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives be extrapolated further: just as the church should be understood as the corporate body of Christ, so Anti-Christ could be imagined as the corrupted and perverse corporate body of those who denied Christ. This tradition continues, albeit in a time and place where such inventive reimaginings are less fraught. This may be a good moment to recall that debate over applying fan fiction theory to medieval literature has concerned the adjective, ‘fan’, but could apply just as well to the noun, ‘fiction’. The current controversy over the history of fictionality itself, kick-started by Catherine Gallagher’s ‘The Rise of Fictionality’, has been picked up by Julie Orlemanski, among others.37 In Peter Haidu’s words, ‘In the context of a world constituted as God’s trace, fiction is not the addition brought before our eyes to enrich our lives by an imaginative genius in imitation of a Deus sive Natura, it is a subtraction of a richness that existed before the arrival of écriture’ because ‘Fiction is man’s disruption of language from its divided ordained intentionality … inherently parodic.’38 To insist on writing an account of a failed, alternate Anti-Christ is to engage in something very similar to fan fiction, which is in turn sometimes close to parody: to talk back, to ask questions of a tradition you encounter. In this case, one ‘gap’ that might have prompted Sir Gowther is opened by Merlin: if there is one demonic attempt at creating an Anti-Christ before the Final Days, were there others? The result can only be fiction, fan or otherwise, because this particular preserve – eschatological doctrine – has boundaries which extend beyond content. With that caveat, the ‘Anti-Christ shelf’ in the archive starts to look invitingly empty.39 In a relatively obscure horror film, Devil’s Due (2014), a honeymooning couple are tricked by a taxi driver into attending a night club in a dangerous part of the Dominican Republic.40 The woman becomes pregnant despite being on birth control, and it soon becomes clear that the child will be the Anti-Christ. Or, rather, an Anti-Christ, for the film ends with the mother dead and the baby taken away by cultists, only to be followed by a final scene in which another honeymooning couple in Paris are tricked by the same taxi driver. The film begins with a quote from 1 John 2:18: ‘Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even 37 Catherine Gallagher, ‘The Rise of Fictionality’, in The Novel: Vol. 1, ed. Franco Moretti

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 336–63; Julie Orlemanski, ‘Who Has Fiction? Modernity, Fictionality, and the Middle Ages’, New Literary History, 50.2 (2019), 145–70. 38 Peter Haidu, ‘Repetition: Modern Reflections on Medieval Aesthetics’, Modern Language Notes, 92.5 (1977), 875–87 (p. 885). 39 That the late twentieth century saw a proliferation of narratives set in and around the Final Days and the rule of Anti-Christ, most notably the Evangelical novel series that began with Left Behind (1995), testifies to the way in which Revelation opens up an imagined future timeline that can then itself be further exploited to produce more story. 40 Devil’s Due, dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (20th Century Fox, 2014).

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Cory James Rushton now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.’ Most of the quote fades away, leaving only the phrase ‘now there are many antichrists’. Devil’s Due combines two of these strands: the idea of multiple Anti-Christs who attack the church with the idea of demonic parentage; but Sir Gowther got there first. In Sir Gowther, the eponymous protagonist is not only said to be the son of a devil but of a very specific devil. His demonic father is also the father of Merlin, making Gowther the famous prophet’s ‘halfe brodur’ (line 98).41 While recent literary criticism has explored the role of the demonic in Gowther’s story –both through an emphasis on spiritual and educational redemption and through the ‘science’ of demonology – there has been no sustained attention to the obvious intertextual question, fan fiction in the form of a cross-over.42 If the Merlin of Robert de Boron’s Merlin is the culmination of a plot to produce the Anti-Christ, what does that make Gowther? None of these seems to entirely fit what happens with Gowther: is he just an ‘ordinary’ half-devil, whose daddy had another more famous son? Is he symbolic of those inner Anti-Christs that lurk in all our hearts? Gowther throws that into contention not because he is the son of a devil – there seem to be quite a few of those, even after the Flood – but because Gowther is so explicitly linked to one devil, a father who ‘bigat Merlyng and mo’ (line 10). Merlin here links Gowther to the wider Arthurian tradition in which the Round Table and Arthur’s kingdom play a role in providential history, most notably through the quest of the Holy Grail. The place of that Arthurian history is then both extended in that Merlin’s ‘family’ continues to pay a role, and contextualised in a way that extends history rather than collapses it: a long chivalric temporal chain in which flawed knights nonetheless work God’s will in the world. Gowther ends his life as Holy Roman Emperor, chronologically long after Arthur, and his explicit defence of ‘holy kyrke’ (line 719) helps to hold off rather than bring about the end of the world. At the same time, the link works both ways, and the second direction is explored more thoroughly: to translate the story of Anti-Christ into romance is to impose chivalric reasoning on the latter. That long temporal chain starts to look like an eternal chivalry constantly working to thwart the end of the world, as knights discover how their particular set of skills can be used to battle the forces of evil both within and without. 41 Gowther’s shared parentage with Merlin is discussed in Sir Gowther, lines 10, 97–99. 42 See Andrea Hopkins, The Sinful Knights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);

Alcuin Blamires, ‘The Twin Demons of Aristocratic Society in Sir Gowther’, in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England: Essays in Popular Romance, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 45–62; Neil Cartlidge, ‘Sons of Devils’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), pp. 219–36.

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Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives Andrea Hopkins pointed to Anti-Christ, and to Merlin, as possible analogue, using the Middle English translation of Robert de Boron’s Merlin, called Arthour and Merlin and found in Auchinleck.43 The problem is that de Boron and his followers depict a failed Anti-Christ, presumably to be followed by a more successful final version at the end of historical time. Alarmed at Christ’s Harrowing of Hell, a council of devils decide to replicate the Messiah. They choose a maiden, isolating her by killing or destroying her parents and siblings. Fleeing to the company of a hermit named Blaise, the girl is impregnated when she forgets to cross herself before bed one night. Her child, Merlin, has a rough appearance, described in some sources as covered with hair and in others as rough in hide. The devil council’s plans go awry when the child is baptised. All of this may seem to take us far from Gowther, although Hopkins points out that the poem goes out of its way to mention Merlin where other poems do not, and does so twice. She notes that the poem refers to the idea of the incubus, and does so on the model of Thomas Aquinas: demons have no ‘kynde’ of their own necessary to making children according to the poem itself (lines 15–17), and so must collect semen from men as succubi and deliver it to women as incubi.44 Because the resulting offspring have human parents, says Aquinas, they can be saved (as Gowther is, even if Merlin is not); this may also explain how Gowther can inherit his earthly father’s lands. This does set up a powerfully suggestive situation in which the Devil’s brood can be used to demonstrate Christ’s potential to save anyone. Sir Gowther is a story of chivalric penance and redemption. Gowther is inclined by his demonic heritage to a life of violence, often directed at the church; but that violence is both excessive and exuberantly expressed. He famously bites the nipples from his mother when she tries to breast-feed him, and he makes a weapon nobody else can carry before he is fifteen (for every year’s worth other children grow, he grows six or seven years’ worth).45 In other words, the local lord’s son has to make his own weapon like a blacksmith, because nobody else can lift it in order to make it, drawing out an inference from a narrative commonplace (the weapon nobody can lift has to have been made by somebody, just as in modern pop culture the Death Star’s bathrooms must be somewhere). As Jeffrey Cohen notes, ‘Giants are almost always described as the sons of fiends’, as in the delightfully weird late medieval Torrent of Portyngale.46 It is worth noting that the giant described in Torrent as having been ‘get of the dewell of hell, / As his moder on slepe 43 Hopkins, Sinful Knights, pp. 167–69. 44 See further, Hopkins, Sinful Knights, pp. 166–67. 45 Sir Gowther, lines 127–30, 139–44, 145–46. 46 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 123.

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Cory James Rushton lay’ is only one of about a billion giants Torrent fights, not all of which are described in these terms.47 It is commonplace now to point to the long English tradition which posited a race of gods and giants resulting from the union of the Sons of God and the Daughters of Man in Genesis 6:4: Now giants were upon the earth in those days, for after the sons of God went in to the daughters of men, and they brought forth children, these are the mighty men of old, men of renown.48

The idea will be familiar to anyone who knows Beowulf or, to a lesser extent, Geoffrey of Monmouth. This explanatory biblical verse, in the hands of romance writers, becomes a villain-generating machine in which the spiritual meaning is largely eclipsed unless brought back for a specific thematic purpose (here in Sir Gowther, to illustrate something about sin and redemption). Gowther’s redemption comes about first by learning the truth of his parentage. His mother, unable to conceive, prayed to God and Mary for a child, foolishly suggesting that she did not care how. Her prayer is, of course, answered by a fiend who initially looks like her husband.49 When he reveals himself as a ‘feltured fende’ post-coitus, shaggy in appearance, she returns to her husband, claiming to have had an angelic vision that she will get pregnant if they try that night.50 The deception works, at least until Gowther is fifteen. One reading of the poem can be found in my own work, where Gowther is an example of a fantastic kind of miscegenation, an inappropriate mingling of races (here, human and angelic).51 The very revelation of his true father’s identity is enough to make Gowther ‘sodenly’ pray for mercy.52 His road will be harder than that, and it begins with a trip to Rome. On this level, the poem is concerned with salvation theory: since Gowther is partially human, not only can he be saved, but his salvation is all the more remarkable because he is not fully human. The penance Gowther receives from the pope is to stay mute and to eat nothing that has not been through the mouth of a hound; even his redemptive arc is excessive and potentially funny. As Cohen says, ‘To become a man, Gowther is going to have to become a dog.’53 Anna Chen’s reading first notes 47 Torrent of Portyngale, ed. E. Adam (London, 1887), lines 921–26. 48 The Vulgate Bible: Douay-Rheims Translation, ed. Swift Edgar and Angela M. Kinney

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

49 Sir Gowther, lines 60–69. 50 Sir Gowther, lines 71, 85–90. 51 Cory James Rushton, ‘Where the Falling Ape meets the Rising Ape’, Year’s Work in

Medievalism, 20–21 (2005/2006), 69–88.

52 Sir Gowther, lines 235–43. 53 Cohen, Of Giants, p. 128; more recent important readings of Gowther’s penance in-

clude Emily Rebekah Huber, ‘Redeeming the Dog: Sir Gowther’, Chaucer Review, 50 (2015), pp. 284–314; and Samantha Zacher, ‘Sir Gowther’s Canine Penance: Forms of Animal Asceticism from Cynic Philosophy to Medieval Romance’, Chaucer Review, 52 (2017), 426–55.

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Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives that one of the two versions of Gowther appears in Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.3.1, now considered an educational manuscript intended for children. Chen’s argument is alimentary, all about development and eating: ‘Gowther simultaneously eats his way out of one model of childhood and back into the other.’54 This, at some level, works with Cohen’s now-standard reading of giants as figures of excessive consumption. In a text like Torrent, the trope of excess in both size and appetite can seem pro forma and even lazy: demonic giants are what they are, and they must either remain villains or seek onerous redemption. Read through fan theory, Torrent and Gowther reads like exuberant if violent archontic expansions of the archive, a playful proliferation of giants in number and kind. Chaucer’s giant, named Olyphaunt or Elephant, has been taken as pure parody; but parody also plays, and here it may be playing in exactly the same way as Torrent and Gowther do (or, indeed, Monty Python’s Knights Who Say Ni). Far from being clumsy or derivative, these texts might know exactly how silly – how fun – giants are. None of this should detract from the many excellent, sustained readings offered in recent times – no matter the motivations, all authors work with the cultural materials they have at hand. Alcuin Blamires has suggested that Gowther’s readers have not always paid close enough attention to his status as a knight, an aristocrat rather than a surrogate for all souls (an Everyman).55 In addition to the penitential reading, Blamires finds (especially in the second manuscript, Royal) that the poem depicts a young man, heir to an estate, who is ‘brutally self-willed’, and ‘deliberately associated with an expression of sheer willfulness and caprice that makes him the total antithesis of all feudal responsibility and courtly mesure’.56 I want to follow this suggestion, and in turn suggest something that this romance does when it follows in Robert de Boron’s footsteps regarding Anti-Christ. At a bare minimum, Sir Gowther (and to a lesser extent Torrent and others) borrows the idea of demonic parentage, allies it with the idea of multiple Anti-Christs, and finds therein a useful trope for the generation – indeed, proliferation – of villains. Gowther wants to do something more significant, in that it borrows the same basic trope and follows it back to a very specific earlier version. In doing so, the poet makes Gowther not just an Anti-Christ, persecutor of the church, but a second failed demonic experiment. What Gowther posits is a salvation history that reveals demons to be inefficient central planners, continually failing to bring about a divine prophecy that they 54 Anna Chen, ‘Consuming Childhood: Sir Gowther and National Library Scotland MS

Advocates 19.3.1’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 111 (2012), 360–83 (p. 361). 55 Alcuin Blamires, ‘The Twin Demons of Aristocratic Society in Sir Gowther’, in Pulp Fictions of Medieval England, ed. Nicola McDonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 45–62 (p. 46). 56 Blamires, ‘The Twin Demons’, pp. 52–55.

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Cory James Rushton are themselves at the heart of. Make as many Anti-Christs as you want, the poem says: until the time of the Final Enemy is actually at hand, no amount of devilish planning will result in anything other than the greater glory of God. In conclusion, the trope of the potential Anti-Christ is not just a villain-generating idea; it is a narrative-generating machine, one that has seemed specific to romance but is increasingly familiar from fan fiction. What Merlin and Gowther both do is that they become individuals: prophesied to perform certain roles in the penultimate moments of divine future history, instead they are saved and find unique paths of their own. Merlin is a prophet; Gowther is a Saracen-fighter who learns to be human through engagement with the animal. If romance is, in one of its most basic and common modes, concerned with how young men learn to navigate their world and society, then romance has found in the story of Anti-Christ one more way to suggest the growth of individuals: Yvain has a lion, Lancelot loves Guinevere, Gowther is a devil’s son. Further, the reference to Merlin links Gowther to Arthurian legend, which through Morgan le Fay and other figures is already linked to the other great Matters. Romance, even in its most individual manifestations, often seeks to ensure that each individual knight is seen as part of a greater universal chivalric (and indeed salvational) history. In other words, it carves out a space for an ideology and a figure – the knight – to participate directly in the slow winding-up of history itself. Gowther’s intertextual relationship with Merlin, then, is more than an allusion. It testifies to the voraciousness of romance, which always seems to seek new ways to tell old stories, latching on to even apparently unsuitable material in its relentless quest to generate narrative. Gowther is, potentially, a more dangerous text than the others studied here, given that it translates eschatological and biblical materials into a playful romance mode. It may be that this playfulness is exactly the thing that defangs its potential for trouble: Gowther is an Anti-Christ translated into a romance, one in which he can then be saved (in part) by chivalric action. Gowther adds to the preserve just as the other Arthurian poems do, while claiming no authority for itself beyond being a kind of chivalric thought experiment. Translation – whether across generic borders or across languages – produces gains unaccompanied by losses. This is never clearer than in Chestre, whose sole interest appears to be telling a story that expands the scope of the Arthurian story without necessarily eclipsing anything that came before. The Grene Knight can be seen as an exception, in that it does seem to ‘correct’ a flaw in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this case, the informal authority of the Middle English Gawain canon trumps the uncharacteristic ambiguities of the Gawain-poet’s singular text. But it still does not delete the earlier poem. Fan fiction theory invites us not to change our entire approach, but rather to occasionally shift our focus. In this chapter, while my argument is rooted in texts which have only recently risen in academic estimation, I am 188

Fan Fiction Theory and Shared Medieval Narratives less interested in aesthetic distinctions than I am in how fan fiction dares us to think about authorial intention and motivation. In turn, thinking without worth/value as a primary interest or organisational feature might allow us to better see how and why romance proliferated as expansively as it did (and how the academic canon of studied works has undergone a similar proliferation in the past few decades). It asks us to remember that humans are storytellers by nature, and the motivations are not always fame, fortune, or rivalry.

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10 Between Epic and Romance: The Matter of England and the Chansons de Geste1 AISLING BYRNE

T

his chapter examines the ways in which two neglected works in the Middle English tradition, Horn Childe and John Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke, engage with conventions that might be more readily associated with medieval epic than with romance. Both of these works have been categorised as romances and belong to what modern scholars have designated the ‘Matter of England’; as such, they have significant investment in historical events and offer some parallels to the ‘Matter of France’. The latter body of narratives, of course, forms the main subject matter of the French vernacular epic mode, the chansons de geste. Horn Childe and Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke are both part of wider insular traditions that appear to go back to original works in Anglo-Norman. In each case, those Anglo-Norman works have affiliations with the chansons de geste, which have been acknowledged by a number of scholars. However, far less attention has been paid to the impact of epic elements on adaptations in Middle English. It seems to me that Horn Childe and Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke not only carry over epic conventions and values already embedded in their respective narrative traditions but actually heighten such elements and add further ones of their own invention. These two texts engage with the interface between romance and epic in active and, at certain moments, innovative ways. Previous discussions of Horn Childe and Gy de Warwyke tend to place these works in dialogue with chronicle writing, rather than with epic. Matthew Holford’s extensive analysis of Horn Childe concludes that in this work the ‘imperatives of historical writing are combined to an unusual degree with the conventions of romance’.2 Gy de Warwyke’s most recent editor, Pamela 1 I am very grateful to Dr Jessica J. Lockhart (Toronto) and to the editors of the present

volume for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter and for a number of valuable insights that have been incorporated into the final text. 2 Matthew Holford, ‘History and Politics in Horn Child and Maiden Rimnild’, The Review of English Studies, 57 (2006), 149–68 (p. 158).

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Aisling Byrne Varvolden, adds a further category to the mix, observing that the text ‘mingles characteristics of the genres of history, romance, and saint’s life’.3 This tendency to turn to ‘history’ (or, less frequently, hagiography) as the most obvious generic alterative to ‘romance’ reflects a more widespread convention in discussion of insular romance. The term ‘epic’ is rarely employed as a conceptual category in discussions of Middle English works.4 There seem to be two primary reasons for this. Firstly, ‘epic’ is, if possible, an even vaguer designation than ‘romance’. Secondly, the epic mode is very firmly associated with the pre-Conquest literary landscape. Indeed, Maldwyn Mills makes this point in his edition of Horn Childe, noting, in passing, the poet’s ‘recreation of an earlier (heroic) literary style’ (my emphasis).5 We tend to see epic and romance in a teleological relationship, the one early, the other late, the first superseded by the second. Conceptual vagueness and its association with early medieval writing are good reasons to be wary of the term ‘epic’, but both might be questioned. In French, the epic – the chanson de geste – is certainly much simpler to define, since it is consistently associated with a distinctive poetic form, the assonanced or rhymed laisse. This sort of connection between epic matter and literary form is by no means so evident in English.6 Nonetheless, while there is no clear linguistic or formal marker for ‘epic’ in Middle English, the epic mode, in the form of the chansons de geste, was well known in England. A good number of manuscripts of the chansons de geste were either written in England or circulated there. Library inventories, wills, and references in other works provide further evidence of how well known a number of these works were – when Chaucer mentions Ganelon in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, he must have expected some of his audience to recognise the reference.7 Scholars of Anglo-Norman have made greater use of the category of epic or chanson 3 Pamela Farvolden (ed.), Lydgate’s Fabula Duorum Mercatorum and Guy of Warwyk

(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), p. 87.

4 Paul Strohm shows that terms like ‘geste’ can designate a very wide range of works in

English: ‘Storie, Spelle, Geste, Romaunce, Tragedie: Generic Distinctions in the Middle English Troy Narratives’, Speculum, 46, (1971), 348–59. 5 Maldywn Mills, ed., Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, Middle English Texts 20 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1988), p. 9. 6 It has been suggested that tail rhyme might represent an English alternative to the laisse form and that it might mark out similarly epic and pious matter: William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 441; Rhiannon Purdie, Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 102–5. Alliterative verse may also have been associated with works of ‘national’ and ‘historical’ significance; see further, Rosalind Field, ‘The Anglo-Norman Background to Alliterative Romance’, in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David A. Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), pp. 54–69. 7 For an overview of the long-term influence of the chansons de geste in England, see Melissa Furrow in ‘Chanson de Geste as Romance in England’, in The Exploitations of

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Between Epic and Romance de geste in recent decades, particularly with reference to texts where there is pronounced interplay between romance and history. For instance, Marianne Ailes has highlighted how many Anglo-Norman texts which are usually classed as romances employ forms and conventions more typically associated with chansons de geste.8 While such Anglo-Norman narratives are predominantly composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they are copied and translated into the later Middle Ages, circulating alongside manuscripts of Continental chansons de geste. Scholarship on Anglo-Norman works which use epic conventions has tended to stop short of suggesting that insular works are ‘pure’ chansons de geste but, rather, that they represent hybrid works, drawing to various degrees on the epic and romance modes. In this respect the interplay of epic and romance in England was not likely to have been all that dissimilar to that in France. Scholars of continental French, like Sarah Kay, have emphasised the chronological simultaneity of chanson de geste and romance in France – the chansons de geste continue to be copied and composed throughout the ‘age of romance’.9 Such scholars typically see the relationship of French romance and chanson de geste as dialogic, with each mode drawing on the motifs, values, and structures of the other. Perhaps something similar is afoot in certain corners of the English-language tradition too? The suggestion has been made by a number of scholars, though not pursued at length. Derek Pearsall notes that a number of texts in the Auchinleck manuscript could be seen as ‘vigourously professional adaptations of French poems of the chanson de geste type’.10 Siobhain Bly Calkin and Melissa Furrow have suggested that epic and romance are in consistent dialogue in Middle English, with a wide range Medieval Romance, ed. Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević, and Judith Weiss (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 57–72 (pp. 67–69). 8 See, for instance, ‘Fierenbras: Anglo-Norman Developments of the Chanson de Geste’, Olifant, 25 (2006), 97–109, and ‘What’s in a Name? Anglo-Norman Romances or Chansons de Geste?’, in Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 61–75. See also Marianne Ailes and Phillipa Hardman, ‘The Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone as a Chanson de Geste’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, ed. Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjevic (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 9–24; Judith Weiss, ‘Insular Beginnings: Anglo-Norman Romance’, in A Companion to Romance from Classical to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 26–44 (pp. 30–34); Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 123. The apparent taste for the chansons de geste in England after the Norman Conquest is noted by Rosalind Field in ‘Romance in England 1066–1400’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 152–76 (p. 155). 9 Sarah Kay, The Chansons de Geste in the Age of Romance: Political Fictions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 10 Derek Pearsall, ‘The Development of Middle English Romance’, Mediaeval Studies, 27 (1965), 91–116 (p. 97).

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Aisling Byrne of texts typically termed ‘romances’ by modern scholars exhibiting qualities associated with the chansons de geste.11 John Finlayson engages with this idea in more detail. He suggests that certain Middle English texts, like Richard Coer de Lyon and the Alliterative Morte Arthure, may have closer generic affiliations to the chanson de geste than is generally thought.12 The Auchinleck version of Of Arthour and of Merlin has also been associated with the chansons de geste.13 Horn Childe and Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke represent particularly interesting case studies, because they both depict invasions of England by foreign enemies. In previous discussions, notably Finlayson’s work, epic conventions have been identified in Middle English works which depict protagonist-kings embarking on foreign wars (Richard Coer de Lyon) and imperial conquests (the Alliterative Morte). Defensive actions are, of course, a frequent subject in chansons de geste, where the battle lines are usually drawn between Christendom and the Islamic world. Although Charlemagne’s early feats of conquest were well known, chansons de geste more frequently depict the emperor and his vassals as defenders of Christendom’s borders than as conquerors. A focus on defensive action may reflect the sort of vernacular epic narratives that were circulating in the insular world: chansons de geste of the Charlemagne cycle seem to have been particularly well known in England. For instance, Aspremont, which depicts a Muslim invasion of Italy, survives in particularly high numbers of insular manuscripts, and Middle English translations of chansons de geste are typically works from the Charlemagne cycle.14 In many respects, the motif of invasion is at odds with the horizon of expectation of romance.15 The 11 Siobhain Bly Calkin, Saracens and the Making of English Identity: The Auchinleck

Manuscript (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 20–22; Furrow, ‘Chanson de Geste as Romance in England’. 12 See, for instance, John Finlayson, ‘Rhetorical Descriptio of Place in the Alliterative Morte Arthure’, Modern Philology, 61 (1963), 1–11; ‘Arthur and the Giant of St. Michael’s Mount’, Medium Ævum, 33 (1964), 112–20; ‘Definitions of Middle English Romance’, The Chaucer Review, 15 (1980), 44–62; ‘Richard, Coer de Lyon: Romance, History or Something in Between?’, Studies in Philology, 87 (1990), 156–80. For a critique of Finlayson’s association of the Alliterative Morte with chanson de geste, see David A. Lawton, ‘The Unity of Middle English Alliterative Poetry’, Speculum, 58 (1983), 72–94. More recently, K. S. Whetter has highlighted the Alliterative Morte’s affinity with epic, broadly conceived: ‘Genre as Context in the Alliterative Morte Arthure’, Arthuriana, 20 (2010), 45–65. 13 For instance, introducing her French translation of the work, Anne Berthelot observes that it is ‘une sorte de version moderne des chansons de geste’. Histoire d’Arthur et de Merlin: Roman moyen-anglais du XIVe siècle (Grenoble: UGA Éditions, 2013), p. 11. 14 See further, Marianne Ailes and Philippa Hardman, The Legend of Charlemagne in Medieval England: The Matter of France in Middle English and Anglo-Norman Literature (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017). 15 The characteristics of romance are articulated influentially in Eric Auerbach, ‘The Knight Sets Forth’, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,

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Between Epic and Romance larger geopolitical conflicts it exemplifies are not usually placed to the fore in romance. Invasion typically implicates the group, rather than the individual – it involves collective, often feudal, experience and pitched battles undertaken by massed armies. Invasion implicates rulers, as well as individual knights, in the action. The pursuit of private fulfilment and ethical self-validation that we associate with romance is of rather less centrality in such circumstances. Invasion also cuts against the conventional spatial dynamics of romance. The movement of a protagonist through a series of diverse settings is the structuring principle of many romances. The knights of romance set out from the court in pursuit of a goal or stumble upon adventures when they are travelling away from home. Scenarios where a protagonist defends their own territory against invasion present a reversal of the usual spatial dynamics of romance: knights in this circumstance are static and their antagonists are mobile. Depicting invasion in a medieval romance, therefore, has generic implications. Texts like Horn Childe and Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke are often categorised as romance, but they fit uneasily within that tradition. While they certainly have much in common with romance narratives, it seems to me that both texts are in more sustained dialogue with what we might term ‘epic’ values and structures. Horn Childe Horn Childe has a number of features that make it a rather unconventional romance. While stopping sort of considering it a ‘classic chanson de geste’, Finlayson considers it a ‘heroic work’ and highlights how peripheral are courtly matters and magical elements in this text, compared to other versions of this story.16 In some respects, of course, Horn Childe develops epic elements already present in the Horn tradition. Generic mixing is a feature of the Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn by Thomas, a work which seems to date from the second half of the twelfth century and is written in the monorhymed alexandrine laisses characteristic of the chansons de geste.17 Dean and Boul-

trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday, 1953), pp. 107–24. A more recent and more extensive account is Helen Cooper’s in The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 16 Finlayson, ‘Richard, Coer de Lyon’, p. 162. See also, Maldywn Mills (ed.), Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, Middle English Texts 20 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1988), p. 47. 17 Thomas, The Romance of Horn, ed. Mildred K. Pope, rev. T. B. W. Reid, 2 vols, ANTS, 9–10, 12–13 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955–64). Translated by Judith Weiss in The Birth of Romance: An Anthology (London: Everyman, 1992), pp. 1–120. For discussion of the text’s context, see Judith Weiss, ‘Thomas and the Earl: Literary and Historical Contexts for the Romance of Horn’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 1–13.

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Aisling Byrne ton describe it as a ‘romance with epic resonances’.18 The text is one of the Anglo-Norman works which Ailes believes have particularly close affinities with the chansons de geste. She observes that the work has been consciously denied the label despite the way its prologue invites us to read the text as a chanson de geste; its use and exploitation of the laisse, the principal generic marker of the chanson de geste; and the mix of rhétorique scolaire and the more popular rhetoric that is part of the discourse of chanson de geste.19

Its content also blends characteristics of romance with those of epic: for all its fascination with courtly life, the text also maintains its focus on geopolitical conflicts and gives a good deal of space to large-scale battles. Horn’s adversaries in this work are typically described as ‘Saracens’, and whether they are intended to be specifically Muslim or generically non-Christian, the term casts the hero’s struggles in terms of the sort of ‘national’ and religious conflicts associated with the Matter of France.20 The work survives in three substantial manuscript copies and in two fragments written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Horn Childe is one of two significant Middle English translations that were made of the work, the other being the earlier and longer King Horn.21 Both poems are considerably shorter than the Anglo-Norman text and differ from that work in both content and emphasis. Their precise relationship to the Anglo-Norman poem is not clear. The editor of Horn Childe, Maldwyn Mills, posits that they may be derived from a variant version of the Anglo-Norman Horn that has not come down to us.22 King Horn seems to date from the final quarter of the thirteenth century, though earlier dates have also been suggested.23 It is 1,544 lines in length and survives in three manuscripts. Horn Childe is easily the most neglected text of the Horn tradition. Written in tail-rhyme, at 1,136 lines it is shorter than King Horn and survives in a unique copy in the Auchinleck manuscript. The text itself is unlikely to have been written more than a few decades earlier than the likely date of the Auchinleck codex, which is usually dated to the 1330s.24 The Auchinleck copy has suffered some losses, including the folios at the conclusion of the 18 Ruth Dean and Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts

and Manuscripts, ANTS o.p.s 3 (London: ANTS, 1999), pp. 88.

19 Marianne Ailes, ‘What’s in a Name?’, p. 69. 20 See further, Diane Speed, ‘The Saracens of King Horn’, Speculum, 65 (1990), 564–95. 21 Two later works, the French romance Ponthus et Sidoine and the ballad Hind Horn, also

ultimately derive from the Horn narrative.

22 See Mills, ed., Horn Childe, pp. 44–51. 23 On the question of the poem’s date, see Rosamund Allen, ‘Date and Provenance of

King Horn: Some Interim Reassessments’, in Medieval English Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988), pp. 99–126. 24 Mills, ed., Horn Childe, p. 11.

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Between Epic and Romance poem. However, the complete text is unlikely to have been much longer than what survives, since most of the main events of the story have already taken place when the surviving copy terminates. Despite its brevity, it is, in many respects, closer to the Anglo-Norman text than to King Horn. The action of Horn Childe can be summarised briefly. Horn’s father, Hatheolf, king of Northumberland, faces successive invasions by Danish and Irish armies. He repels the first set of invaders, but he is finally killed in battle with the Irish. On hearing of the king’s death, the earl of Northumberland seizes Hatheolf’s territories. The young Horn is evacuated with his companions to the south of England. There, the boy is raised in the court of King Houlac and eventually captures the heart of Houlac’s daughter, Rimnild. However, two of Horn’s companions falsely claim that Horn has slept with Rimnild and her father banishes him from the kingdom. The maiden vows to wait seven years for her lover’s return and gives him a magical ring. Horn travels to Wales under an assumed name and gains a reputation for valour at the court of the Welsh king. He eventually travels to Ireland, where he participates in a war against the same Irish king who killed his father. He receives lands in Ireland, but returns to England, anxious to reunite with Rimnild before the seven years elapse. He arrives just as Rimnild is about to be married and infiltrates the court dressed as a beggar. At the feast, Rimnild serves him and he drops her ring into the cup, causing her to recognise him. Horn distinguishes himself at the wedding tournament and marries Rimnild. He then travels to Northumberland to reclaim his father’s territories. Two articles by Matthew Holford offer the most extensive discussion of this text.25 Holford highlights a number of distinctive qualities of the poem which mark it out from other works in the Horn tradition and the conventions of romance in general. These include ‘the extent of [its] interest in the defence of the realm’, its ‘collective ethos’, and its cultivation of ‘an impression of realism and historicity through the use of topographical detail’. 26 Holford suggests that some of the text’s features may reflect early fourteenth-century challenges to English power within the British Isles, in particular, the Bruce Wars.27 In Holford’s reading, then, Horn Childe offers a dialogue between romance and chronicle. However, the nature and extent of some of this text’s deviations from romance norms suggests movement in a different direction: that of epic. The opening of Horn Childe offers a good example of the text’s investment in epic values and conventions. Its emphasis is on heroism in collective endeavour, rather than personal aventure. It presents Horn’s father, Hatheolf, 25 Holford, ‘History and Politics’, and ‘A Local Source for Horn Childe and Maiden

Rimnild’, Medium Ævum, 74 (2005), 34–40.

26 Holford, ‘History and Politics’, pp. 167, 166, 153. 27 Holford, ‘History and Politics’, pp. 167–68.

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Aisling Byrne as an exemplary hero-king. In the Anglo-Norman romance, the life of Horn’s father (there named ‘Aalof’) has already concluded by the point at which the text opens. The poet makes reference to a separate work recounting the story of Horn’s father, with which he assumes his audience is familiar (‘Seignurs, oi avez les vers de parchemin / Cum li bers Aaluf est venuz a sa fin’; ‘You will have heard, my lords, from the verses in the parchment, how the noble Aaluf came to his end’, lines 1–2). However, no such text has survived in Anglo-Norman. In King Horn, Horn’s father appears in the story itself, but he is swiftly despatched and the poem gives only a brief account of his death. By contrast, the poet of Horn Childe devotes a significant portion of the work to Hatheolf’s life, character, and deeds; indeed, nearly a quarter of the surviving lines of the poem focus on Hatheolf, not Horn. The account of Hatheolf’s exploits extends well beyond what would be necessary to set the story of Horn himself in motion. The poet may well have derived this structure, with its emphasis on Hatheolf as a hero in his own right, from the Horn tradition. However, the Romance of Horn does not offer enough detail regarding the content of that lost poem to allow any comparison between it and Horn Childe. The Middle English poet could have had access to some version of the story of Horn’s father, but he also may have been responding to, and expanding on, the allusions in the Romance, without any reference to an original Anglo-Norman work. In other versions of the story, Horn’s father, through pride (in the Romance of Horn) or ill-preparedness (in King Horn), is killed before he can mount any sort of military defence against an invasion of his territories. Narrative economy requires nothing more than this – at least, that is, if introducing the story of Horn’s own life is the poet’s primary aim. However, in Horn Childe Hatheolf faces not one but two successive invasions. Only the second of these has any direct bearing on the story of Horn. On the first occasion Hatheolf defeats a host of Danes on Alerton Moor. The poet describes their defeat and the social and economic restoration of the area in its aftermath. Throughout, the emphasis is on Hatheolf’s qualities as a ruler: he redistributes the armour and ships of the Danes to his soldiers and to locals who have suffered losses in the conflict; he makes gifts of land and also builds churches where prayers can be said for the dead. The poet focuses on Hatheolf’s relationship to his kingdom and on the fortunes of the group, rather than merely on individual exploits. In contrast to the Romance and to King Horn, courtly pursuits are not described at length; for instance, the feast celebrating his victory is alluded to briefly, rather than described. The Danes never reappear in the poem and the purpose of this part of the narrative seems to be to celebrate Hatheolf, rather than to build the foundations of his son’s story. The second invasion takes place nine months after the first and is led by three Irish kings who lay waste to Westmoreland. The battle is preceded by an extended description of the feudal levy as Hatheolf calls on men across the region to come to repel the invaders: 198

Between Epic and Romance ‘Bid hem þat þai com to me Al þat hold her lond fre, Help now at þis nede. Better manly to be slayn Þan long to liue in sorwe & pain Oȝain outlondis þede.’ þai busked hem wel hastily To com to þe kinges cri Wiþin elleuen niȝt Þat eueriche strete & eueri sty Glised þer þai riden by Of her brinis briȝt. (lines 163–74)

The ensuing battle is vast, with a body count in the tens of thousands. Hatheolf kills two of the kings himself, is unhorsed by the third, but continues to fight. Such is his ferocity that the Irish still cannot kill him and resort to stoning him: Gret diol it was to se Of hende Haþeolf þat was so fre: Stones to him þai cast; Þai brak him boþe legge & kne (Gret diol it was to se) He kneled attelast. (lines 217–22)

The surviving Irish king then strikes him through the heart. Hatheolf clings so firmly to his sword that his enemies must cut off his arm to claim the weapon (lines 225–26). Although Hatheolf is killed, the Irish have taken such losses that they still retreat nonetheless. The ensuing political vacuum and power struggle provides the catalyst for Horn himself to flee the region. Hatheolf’s valour is expressed on the larger geopolitical stage, rather than through the sort of individual aventure associated with knights of romance. Outside of the battlefield, he is a model of a feudal lord, carefully orchestrating the collective defence of his kingdom, cementing bonds of loyalty through gift-giving and gathering armies in defence of his territory. This section of the poem has been characterised by its editor as a Vorgeschichte, but, in truth, it could also easily stand alone as a short heroic poem about King Hatheolf.28 We are given a vivid picture of his character and his rule as well as a suitably extended description of his tragic end. At first glance, we shift quite rapidly from epic or ‘heroic’ mode to romance conventions once the poet picks up Horn’s own story. The account of the exiled Horn’s adventures and love affair are very much the conventional matter of romance; however, Horn Childe reworks this part of the story in ways that are also 28 Mills, ed., Horn Childe, p. 60.

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Aisling Byrne quite distinctive. Some of these are small details. The text’s uncourtly tone is reflected in an approach to violence that is rather cruder than in other versions of the story; for instance, Houlac beats Rimnild until her face is bloody when he mistakenly believes she has slept with Horn (lines 498–99, 520–21), and Horn breaks the shoulder of the porter who denies him entrance to Rimnild’s wedding feast (line 959). However, there are certain features of the remainder of Horn Childe that also pick up the values of the text’s opening. The text takes much less interest in courtly behaviour and ceremony than the two earlier versions of the story.29 Comparison with the Anglo-Norman version’s treatment of the scenes set in Ireland is indicative. In the Romance of Horn, the Irish interlude is recounted in eighty-one laisses (lines 106–87) of varying lengths. The martial episode – an invasion – occupies only thirty of these laisses (lines 140–70) and is preceded by a lengthy account of the love of Lenbruc, the Irish princess, for Horn, and descriptions of courtly pastimes, such as games and hawking. The episode concludes with Horn refusing Lenbruc’s love. In Horn Childe the structure and emphasis are very different. Horn’s heroic deeds in Ireland are recounted almost immediately upon his arrival in the country. The poet does not describe any courtly pursuits and the princess appears only after Horn has seen battle. Her love for Horn is recounted briefly, with none of the affective detail offered in the Romance. As Mills recognised, the scenes set in Ireland are ‘almost wholly heroic in tendency’, rather than courtly, in this version of the narrative.30 So, although the events in Ireland are broadly similar in both the Romance and Horn Childe, the ordering of the incidents and space given to heroic rather than courtly affairs reflects the differing emphasis of these two poets. Holford has drawn attention to two other ways in which Horn Childe diverges from romance conventions: the text’s approach to territorial acquisition and its structuring of the romance with Rimnild. He associates these features with the work’s historical affiliations, but they might just as readily be associated with epic conventions. Firstly, Holford observes that the hero in Horn Childe seems to gain power and lands for himself, not for his friends and kin, in the course of his adventures in other lands.31 This is of course not the conventional approach of the romance hero who may win territory but typically refuses or redistributes the conquest offered.32 Horn’s Irish and British lands offer him the sort of feudal power wielded by his father at the start of the poem, but on an imperial scale. We are told that earls and barons in Ireland would all respond to this summons (lines 814–16) and that when he travels north to regain his father’s lands he can summon support from ‘est and weste’ 29 Mills, ed., Horn Childe, p. 47. 30 Mills, ed., Horn Childe, p. 51. 31 Holford, ‘History and Politics’, pp. 155–56. 32 Holford, ‘History and Politics’, pp. 155–56.

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Between Epic and Romance (line 1122). Secondly, the poet of Horn Childe restructures the text’s conclusion, emphasising the martial and de-emphasising the romantic. In King Horn, Horn marries before he sets out to regain his patrimony; however, he promises to delay the consummation of his marriage until after he has regained his father’s lands, positioning the fulfilment of the love relationship as the culmination of the narrative.33 In Horn Childe, the marriage with Rimnild takes place before Horn regains his lands and we are also informed, quite briskly, that the marriage was consummated on the wedding night (lines 1108–12). These two distinctive aspects of Horn Childe’s conclusion distance the work from romance conventions and, in so doing, parallel the effect of the extended account of Hatheolf with which the poem opens. The end of the text is lost, but it seems clear that the final episode is also a martial one, with Horn setting out for Northumbria to regain his patrimony. The structure of Horn Childe is, therefore, quite distinctive within the Horn tradition: there are substantial opening and closing episodes that are concerned more with largescale conflict and collective endeavour than with the conventional matter of romance. Martial achievement has the first and final word, rather than more personal values. And, rather than the epic story of Horn’s father giving way to the knightly aventures of his son, the son’s story culminates in the same mode as his father’s. Romance here is a detour, rather than a destination. John Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke The epic affiliations of early works in the Guy of Warwick tradition are less immediately obvious than those of the Romance of Horn. While the use of laisses makes comparisons between the Romance and chansons de geste unavoidable, the earliest Anglo-Norman versions of Gui de Warewic are in the more generic couplet form. Indeed, the tale’s hero and many of the episodes in this story are more conventional of romance. Guy is the son of the earl of Warwick’s steward, rather than, as in the Horn narratives, a royal heir. In the first half of the romance he travels the world in pursuit of very personal goals: to prove his knightly prowess and win the hand of the earl’s daughter, Felice. However, the work takes a rather unconventional turn after his marriage, which in many other works might have served as the culmination and conclusion of the narrative. Struck with compunction for the vainglorious deeds of his earlier life, Guy leaves his wife and takes on the life of a poor pilgrim. The chivalric and affective values of the first half of the story are replaced by pious and ascetic ones. Guy continues to perform feats of heroism across Europe, but he does so without revealing his identity and therefore with no concern for renown. Where the story of Horn begins with invasion, narratives of the Guy of Warwick tradition conclude with it. Guy’s final act of martial valour 33 Holford, ‘History and Politics’, p. 154.

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Aisling Byrne is a response to a Danish invasion of England. At the urging of King Athelstan, he fights the giant Colbrond in single combat and, in defeating the giant, causes the Danes to retreat. He retires to a hermit’s cell and is reunited with his wife only on his deathbed. The interplay of piety and combat in the second half of the romance has prompted comparisons with episodes in the chansons de geste. The story of Guy has been characterised as ‘une sorte de roman épique’.34 William Calin goes further still and considers it ‘a thirteenth century chanson de geste in all but narrative form’.35 Guy’s final retreat to a hermitage has been compared to Le Moniage Guillaume and Girart de Roussillon, while single combat with non-Christian giants recalls works like Fierabras.36 The epic affiliations of the text are most evident in the final account of the Danish invasion. Here the stakes are national, rather than personal, with Guy acting as champion for the king and his people. Given the rather distinctive qualities of the culminating events of the story, it is perhaps unsurprising to see a range of writers detach them from the rest of the work. This was, for instance, the part of Guy’s story that appeared most frequently in chronicles. It fleshed out the account of Athelstan’s reign in works by Pierre de Langtoft and his English translator, Robert Mannying, in the Short Metrical Chronicle, and in Henry Knighton’s chronicle.37 As one might expect, Guy’s adventures abroad are not related in these works; in fact, the emphasis in recounting the episode is often on Athelstan, rather than on Guy. Once the fight with Colbrond is over, Guy drops out of the text as abruptly as he entered it. The more personal dimensions of his story are the matter of romance, not of history. An exception to chroniclers’ tendency to depict Guy as a deus ex machina, who exits the ‘national’ scene as abruptly as he enters it, is the curious account attributed to one Gerald of Cornwall.38 This short work now survives as part of the account of the reign of Athelstan in the Liber Monasterii de Hyda and at the end of a copy of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon. The account of Guy is identified as the eleventh chapter in a larger history of the West Saxons which seems to no longer survive:

34 Jean-Charles Payen, ‘Notice sur Gui de Warewic’, in Grundriss der romanischen Lit-

eraturen des Mittelalters, Volume IV: Le roman jusqu’à la fin du XIIIe siècle, ed. Jean Frappier and R. R. Grimm (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1978), pp. 478–79. 35 William Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 87. 36 On the narrative’s relationship to chansons de geste, see Judith Weiss, ‘Gui de Warewic at Home and Abroad: A Hero for Europe’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 1–11 (p. 2). 37 For an overview of chronicle treatments, see Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 66–76. 38 The work is edited and translated as an appendix to Farvolden, ed., Lydgate’s Fabula.

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Between Epic and Romance Jstud extractum est ex scriptis Girardi Cornubiensis in libro de gestis regum Westsaxonum in capitulo XI et eciam habetur Wynton in tabula pendente iuxta maius altare ecclesie cathedralis sancti Stephani. (This extract is from the writings of Gerard of Cornwall, in the book about the deeds of the kings of Wessex, in the eleventh chapter, and it is also preserved on a tablet in Winchester hanging by the high altar of the cathedral church of St. Stephan).39

The tablet listed here is also lost, but it may have been one of a number of artefacts celebrating Guy of Warwick in Winchester cathedral, close to the location of his legendary duel with the giant. Not only was Guy’s story absorbed into written history but it formed part of a very material record in physical proximity to the site of his deeds. Associating Guy’s exploits with the cathedral also highlights the religious dimension of Guy’s story. In contrast to other chronicle accounts of Guy, Gerald maintains his focus on Guy after the Danes flee homeward. He recounts Guy’s self-revelation to Athelstan, his disguised interactions with his wife, and his retreat to and death in a hermitage. John Lydgate’s account of Guy and Colbrand, as he repeatedly reminds his reader, is based on Gerald of Cornwall’s work. It is one of two English versions of the legend which make the fight with Colbrond the centrepiece of their action.40 The other is the ballad, Guy and Colbrond, that now survives in the Percy Folio and likely dates from late in the fifteenth century. Lydgate’s poem was probably composed in the 1420s, and a rubric found in two surviving manuscripts identifies its patron as Margaret, eldest daughter of Richard Beauchamp, the thirteenth earl of Warwick. It may have been commissioned on the occasion of her marriage to John Talbot, the first earl of Shrewsbury, around 1425. Interest in Guy’s story was particularly intense in the fifteenth century, partly fanned by the earls of Warwick who sought to make political capital from the deeds of their supposed ancestor.41 Like Horn Childe, Lydgate’s text is perhaps the most neglected in its narrative tradition and has received limited attention from critics.42

39 Farvolden, ed., Lydgate’s Fabula. I have lightly adapted this translation. 40 Farvolden, ed., Lydgate’s Fabula. 41 Emma Mason, ‘Legends of the Beauchamps’ Ancestors: The Use of Baronial Prop-

aganda in Medieval England’, Journal of Medieval History, 10 (1984), 25–40 and Yin Liu, ‘Richard Beauchamp and the Uses of Romance’, Medium Ævum, 74 (2005), 271–87. 42 A notable exception is A. S. G. Edwards’s study ‘The Speculum Guy de Warwick and Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick: The Non-Romance Middle English Tradition’, in Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), pp. 81–93.

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Aisling Byrne For the most part, Lydgate follows Gerald’s work carefully. His main contribution is in expansion, converting about 1,300 words of Latin prose into around 4,300 words of English verse. In so doing, Lydgate has not changed the content of his source, but he does alter the form and shape of Gerald’s work significantly and in ways that have generic implications. Lydgate extends the story primarily by means of amplification. In line with a shift from terse chronicle to narrative poetry, his work features extended descriptions of places, events, and people, and considerably more direct speech. Rhetorical exclamatio is frequent, as are allusions to biblical and historical events. The most radical expansion is to the story’s opening. Where Gerald introduces the invasion and the offer made by the Danes to Athelstan in two sentences, Lydgate reaches the same point in the narrative in 128 lines. Although the work ultimately focuses on Guy, it opens with very broad geopolitical horizons. Lydgate describes two Danish kings sweeping through the country and closing in on Winchester, where the central events of the poem will take place – they destroy churches, colleges, and castles, and even kill pregnant women. The account offered is particularly vivid: On hih hilles ther fyres gaf suych lyght, Fortune of werre in suych disjoynt tho stood, The peple robbed and spoiled of ther good, For verray dreed of colour ded and pale, Whan the stremys ran doun of red blood, Lyk a gret ryver fro mounteyne to the vale. (lines 27–32)

Lydgate draws on a range of historical precedents in his account: he compares events to the fall of Jericho in the Old Testament and to the destruction of Jerusalem, Nineveh, Rome, Carthage, and Troy. One can dismiss this as padding, but the degree of the expansion here has a significant impact on the tenor of the poem and on its structure. Lydgate places far more emphasis on recounting the invasion than does any other version of Guy’s life, whether chronicle or romance. The expansion is such that it decentres the account of the fight with Colbrond. Whereas this event occurs more or less midway through Gerald’s work, in Lydgate we reach it only in the final third of the poem. Significantly, Lydgate’s reshaping of his chronicle source tends not to reassert the story’s romance affiliations. Rather, his interventions amplify themes of kingship, communality, piety, and violence. Like Horn Childe, Lydgate’s text opens by focusing on a ruler, not on a knight, and it sustains that focus for a considerable time. It is Athelstan, not Guy, who takes on the role of protagonist in the first half of the poem. The events are framed as a challenge for a ruler and his people, not as an opportunity for aventure undertaken by an individual knight. Comparison with the Percy Folio Guy and Colbrond is instructive here. Although that work also focuses on the final events of Guy’s career – the fight with the giant, his retirement to the 204

Between Epic and Romance hermitage and his death – it presents itself as a story of ‘keene knights’ (line 5) and celebrates Guy’s reputation for chivalry from the very first line.43 The invasion of the Danes is not introduced until we are nearly forty lines into the poem, and Athelstan’s plight is related with considerable economy. By contrast, the space Lydgate gives to Athelstan’s part in the story produces a very distinctive version of the poem and one which emphasises the larger geopolitical significance of events. Of course, Athelstan cuts a rather different figure to Hatheolf. Lydgate relates how he assembles lords and advisors at Winchester in an attempt to find a champion to face the Danish giant, but he is not depicted as a martial hero. Instead, his piety is emphasised and is the means by which aid finally comes. It is noteworthy that Guy himself is not even mentioned until line 168 of Lydgate’s poem and does not actually appear on the scene until nearly halfway through the work. Unlike the Percy Folio Guy and Colbrond, Lydgate does not focus on his knightly hero from the very start; but, unlike many chronicle accounts, he maintains his focus on Guy after his role in ‘national’ events has ended. Lydgate’s text also carries over one of the more anomalous aspects of his source: Gerald’s emphasis on Guy’s return to a life of devotion, and his death. This aspect of the text opens further distance between this iteration of the Guy story and chronicle accounts. It is followed by an extended description of his burial and of how the people flocked to see the body of Guy. Although Guy’s deathbed reunion with his wife is conveyed with the same emotion as we see in the romance tradition, the text also dwells on more pragmatic concerns. We are treated to a lengthy account of how Felice ensures that their son’s succession to the earldom of Warwick is legally shored up before she too dies. This emphasis on lineage must owe something to the fact that this poem had Warwick patronage, but it also reflects the work’s interest in values that are relatively marginal in conventional romances. Like the poet of Horn Childe, Lydgate is also at pains to ground his work in real historical locations. Many of these references are carried over from Gerald of Cornwall’s account. Guy comes ashore at Portsmouth and enters Winchester through the north gate (line 329). The battle with Colbrond takes place at a location near Hyde Benedictine abbey, known as both ‘Hyde Meadow’ and ‘Denmarch’ – the latter name was in use until the modern period. Lydgate notes that Colbrond’s axe, which Guy used to kill him, was taken to Winchester cathedral and could still be viewed at the time of the poem’s composition. This sort of explicit connection between legendary heroes and local landmarks is also a feature of Horn Childe, where, as Holford has demonstrated, the poet connects Hatheolf’s defeat of the Danes to a well-known burial site at the mouth of the Tees – a detail recorded in no other version of the 43 John W. Hales and Frederick J. Furnival, eds, Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads

and Romances, 3 vols (London: Trübner, 1867–68), II, pp. 527–49.

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Aisling Byrne work.44 Lydgate also shares a certain narrowing of geographical vision with Horn Childe. In focusing on the final events in Guy of Warwick’s life, the poem limits the geographical scope of its action to England. The adventures which took Guy across the Continent are referenced very briefly. The Percy Folio Guy and Colbrond also shares this more focused geographical vision. That Lydgate’s Gy sheds almost all the ‘romance’ elements we associate with the narrative should not come as a surprise in a story as sceptical of the claims of worldly chivalry and of the ethics of romance as that of Guy of Warwick. In Lydgate’s poem, the other events of Guy’s life go unmentioned and these final episodes become the matter of the entire story. Whether bringing out the chanson de geste affiliations of the Guy narrative was Lydgate’s intention or not is open to question, but it is worth noting that there is evidence for such an association in the family milieu for which Lydgate was writing. In 1425 Lydgate’s patron, Margaret, married John Talbot, first earl of Shrewsbury. Talbot, of course, was responsible for the Talbot Shrewsbury Book, presented to Margaret of Anjou and featuring a French prose redaction of the story of Guy of Warwick, Guy de Warrewik et Heraud d’Ardenne. In this manuscript, Guy of Warwick keeps company with advice for princes and chronicle material, but also with no fewer than six verse or prose redactions of chansons de geste: Simon de Pouille, Aspremont, Fierabras, Chanson d’Ogier, Les Quatre fils Aymon, and Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne. The prose Guy is also grouped with these works codicologically, appearing between the Quatre fils Aymon and the Chevalier au Cygne.45 Conclusion It may well be no coincidence that both Horn Childe and John Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke are considered the ugly ducklings of their respective narrative traditions. Neither Horn Childe nor Lydgate’s Gy quite ‘works’ as romance, but that may be, in part, because they are heavily influenced by another generic mode – epic. Both texts ultimately derive from Anglo-Norman works with affiliations to the chansons de geste. However, in engaging with the epic mode, these Middle English authors do not merely carry over values and conventions that were already embedded in the Horn and Guy traditions. Rather, at various points they highlight, expand on, and add to those conventions. Both writers reframe the story they tell significantly. The lengthy account of Hatheolf’s defence of his territories in the first part of Horn Childe is very much in epic 44 Holford, ‘History and Politics’, p. 163. 45 On this manuscript, see further Andrew Taylor, ‘The French Self-Presentation of an

English Mastiff: John Talbot’s Book of Chivalry’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Carolyn Collette, Maryanne Kowaleski, Linne Mooney, Ad Putter, and David Trotter (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 444–56.

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Between Epic and Romance mode. Lydgate is one of a number of writers to focus on Guy of Warwick’s final battle and pass over his earlier adventures, but the Danish invasion is much more fully and dramatically developed in his poem than in other works. In situating their works firmly in known settings and in emphasising geopolitical conflict, violence, the dilemmas of rulers, and communal action in their opening episodes, these authors establish horizons of expectation which are very different from those of romance. Both Horn Childe and John Lydgate’s Gy de Warwyke are associated with contexts where wider engagement with the epic mode is evident. Horn Childe first appears in the Auchinleck manuscript, which also features the earliest Middle English translations of the Matter of France and English works like Richard Coer de Lyon and Of Arthour and of Merlin that have been associated with the chansons de geste.46 It seems likely that Lydgate’s patrons associated Guy’s story with a number of the chansons de geste in the Talbot-Shrewsbury book. Attending to the epic affiliations of such works is more than simply a labelling exercise. It highlights certain thematic emphases within each work and the significance of neglected passages, such as the extended account of Hatheolf in Horn Childe and the lengthy description Lydgate offers of the Danish invasion. It also highlights a paradox that we see again and again in Middle English writing: that in attempting to articulate an authentically insular vision of the past and of present identity, writers often turned to French literary templates. In fact, in using French literary models to articulate Englishness and depict resistance to foreign invasion, one type of ‘translatio’ (translatio studii) seems to be used to comment upon another (translatio imperii).47

46 The Matter of France texts, Roland and Vernagu and Otuel a Knight, are derived from

the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle and the chanson de geste, Otinel, respectively.

47 I owe this observation to Dr Megan G. Leitch (Cardiff).

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11 Geographies of Loss: Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine JAN SHAW

T

he English prose romance Melusine (c. 1500) is, in many respects, a close translation of Jean d’Arras’s 1393 French work. And yet, the late Middle English text (hereafter Melusine) inevitably reflects its differing context of production.1 D’Arras’s text (hereafter D’Arras) was produced during the Hundred Years’ War, when the fortress of Lusignan was under threat. It has long been agreed that one of d’Arras’s goals in writing the romance was to secure Jean de Berry’s hold over the fortress, and that one of his key strategies was to script the rise of the House of Lusignan, but also its fall, thereby making way for his illustrious patron.2 In the romance, the eponymous heroine establishes the family seat by building the fortress of Lusignan, and then expands its holdings into the surrounding Poitevin countryside. In the next generation, four Lusignan sons marry heiresses of distant lands – Cyprus and Cilician Armenia in the eastern Mediterranean, and Luxembourg and Bohemia in continental Europe – thereby creating an imaginary geopolitical expanse of a unified and defended Christendom that reconfigures the shape and distribution of power in Europe and secures the stronghold of Lusignan as its core. While political alliances were commonly effected through high-level marriages in this period, 1 Citations are from A. K. Donald, ed., Melusine. Compiled (1392–1394 A. D.) by Jean

d’Arras, Englisht about 1500, EETS es 68 (London: Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895). Citations of the 1393 French version are from Louis Stouff, ed., Jean d’Arras, Mélusine, ou la noble histoire de Lusignan: Roman du XIVe siècle (1932; Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1974). A poetic version of the romance was produced within ten years of d’Arras’s text by Couldrette, but this text is not considered here because it reduces the detail of the marriage tales considerably and excises Florie’s participation altogether. 2 First postulated by Laurence Harf-Lancner, ‘Littérature et Politique: Jean de Berry, Leon de Lusignan et le Roman de Melusine’, in Histoire et littérature au Moyen Age: actes du colloque de Centre d’études médiévales de l’Université de Picardie, Amiens, 1985, ed. Danielle Buschinger (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1991), pp. 161–71. Jean de Berry was not, of course, a Lusignan, although a fictional connection is made in the romance when a cadet branch of the Lusignans is established in Luxembourg, whence de Berry’s mother hailed.

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Jan Shaw the romance foregrounds the participants’ negotiation of intimate relationships as key to the success of empire. D’Arras privileges Cilician Armenia in this endeavour, narrating the seamless rise of the Lusignan house in the tale of Florie and Guyon, and its ultimate demise in the Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue. Melusine, however, undercuts this assurance, making focused changes to the interpersonal relationships in these episodes that weaken claims to empire. Melusine was produced approximately one hundred years after D’Arras, amid the political instability and financial exhaustion that resulted from long years of war, including the Wars of the Roses and their bitter domestic rivalries. Literature of the period reflects these conditions in increased tropes of treason and betrayal.3 Within such a context, extending the fractures in family relations takes on a new significance. This chapter argues that these changes rupture the foundation of empire, extending the blame for its fall from one man, traditionally read as the last reigning Lusignan king of Cilician Armenia, onto a whole lineage. Unlike D’Arras, with its precise internal dating and description of the conditions under which it was produced, the geographical, temporal, and authorial context of production of Melusine is not known.4 Approaching the concept of place differently, however, leads to interpretive possibilities. Doreen Massey argues that any one place has a multitude of stories flowing through it. Indeed, the specificity of location is found in the unique collection of ‘stories-so-far’ that come together in that place (at that time).5 If place is understood in this way, then a trajectory or story is inseparable from its position in relation to these other trajectories. Massey also notes that these stories and their relations are articulated ‘within the wider power-geometries of space’.6 In other words, a story does not exist in isolation; nor is it simply housed within broader cultural contexts. Rather, it is a becoming that is in jostling juxtaposition with other stories, and this negotiation might or might not change its own narrative flow, depending on the geometries of power that pertain in that place. Of course, one of the stories that came into the place of production of Melusine was its source, D’Arras, but this was most likely not the only text in that place 3 Megan G. Leitch, Romancing Treason: The Literature of the Wars of the Roses (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2015).

4 For discussion on the context of production of the near-contemporaneously printed

edition by Wynken de Worde, see Tania M. Colwell, ‘The Middle English Melusine: Evidence for an Early Edition of the Prose Romance in the Bodleian Library’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 17 (2014), 254–82; Carol M. Meale, ‘Caxton, de Worde, and the Publication of Romance in Late Medieval England’, The Library, 14.4 (1992), 283–98. For a comprehensive discussion of the manuscripts of the romance, in both prose and poetic versions, see Lydia Zeldenrust, The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020). 5 Doreen Massey, For Space (Los Angeles: Sage, 2005), p. 12. 6 Massey, For Space, p. 130.

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Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine and it would almost certainly not have been the only story. In Massey’s view, the other stories that came together in this place would have had an irresistible influence on the translation, as would the power geometries at work there. Indeed, Michelle Warren proposes that, in the medieval context, the relationships between sources and translations were ‘flexible and varied’, and that translations might even ‘invite investigations into their relations to texts that are not, in fact, their sources’.7 This chapter approaches Melusine as a reading of D’Arras in the place of translation, as a reification of the meaning produced by D’Arras in conversation with other stories in that place at that time. This chapter, therefore, focuses on what Lawrence Venuti calls the ‘remainder’, that element of the translation that is understandable only in the local context.8 Melusine is interesting because, while it is close to D’Arras in many respects, the Armenian material changes just enough to suggest a shift in understanding in this new context. This discussion takes into account both D’Arras and other stories that were not necessarily sources of Melusine but were circulating in the English context and were pertinent to the romance’s narrative. Through these convoluted paths the differences between the French and English Cilician Armenian episodes of the prose romance, differences which have been historically ignored, can be read with a new significance. It is useful, therefore, to begin with a discussion of this story context, before moving on to analyse how this context informs a reading of the changes in the tale of Florie and Guyon and the Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue, changes that effect a destabilisation of the romance’s claims to empire in the East. Stories-So-Far in the Place of the English Translation The first recorded owner of the single extant Melusine manuscript is John Lumley, first baron Lumley (1533–1609), according to the catalogue of his library, dated 1609.9 There is, therefore, at least a one hundred years’ gap between the time of the English translation, which has been dated around 1500, and its first recorded provenance.10 Lumley’s family connections, however, reveal some tantalising associations. Lumley, a bibliophile and collector, married Jane Fitzalan, also an accomplished scholar and translator. The well-educated Jane was a direct lineal descendant, through her father, of 7 Michelle R. Warren, ‘Translation’, in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), pp. 51–67 (pp. 51–52).

8 Lawrence Venuti, Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice (London:

Routledge, 2013), pp. 13–16.

9 Sears Jayne and Francis Johnson, The Lumley Library: The Catalogue of 1609 (Lon-

don: British Museum, 1956), p. 132 (Item 1036).

10 Robert Nolan, ‘An Introduction to the English Version of Mélusine: A Medieval Prose

Romance’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, New York University, 1970), pp. 18–19.

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Jan Shaw Jacquetta of Luxembourg.11 According to the catalogue of the Cotton library (1696), Jacquetta owned a manuscript copy of D’Arras bound within a volume now known as London, British Library, Cotton MS Otho D II.12 If these catalogues present a true record, then we have a direct connection between the Cotton Manuscript and Melusine. It is tempting, therefore, to hypothesise that the translation was made in Jacquetta’s family, perhaps with full knowledge of the Cotton manuscript. I am not making the case that this manuscript was a source text for Melusine.13 My point is, rather, that this manuscript – with its many stories that were explicitly not sources – was known to and perhaps even in the family at the time of translation. If so, then the Cotton manuscript instantiates a unique collection of stories that inform the context of production of the English translation. The Cotton manuscript is curious as a literary context for D’Arras. The manuscript is a compendium of writings from the first half of the fourteenth century, including a series of first-hand accounts of travels to the east (Ricaldo de Montecroce, Odoric de Pordenone and Guillaume de Bondeselle), copies of letters between the ‘Great Khan of Cathay’ and Pope Benedict XII, and a report by Jean de Core on his official visit to the Khanate in China requested by Pope John XXII.14 It also includes a copy of the Armenian prince Hetoum’s La Fleur des histoires de la terre d’Orient, a geographical and politico-cultural survey of the lands and peoples from Cilician Armenia to Karakorum in the Mongol heartland based on travels in the thirteenth

11 Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, ‘Lumley [née Fitzalan], Jane, Lady Lumley (1537–1578)’,

in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [accessed 20 March 2020]. 12 The catalogue claims that Jacquetta’s signature was on the last folio of Cotton MS Otho D II. Thomas Smith, Catalogus Bibliothecae Cottonianae (Oxford, 1696), pp. 74–75. Unfortunately, the manuscript was damaged by fire in 1731 and the last folio was destroyed. Before that destruction, however, Sir Robert Bruce Cotton (1571–1631) added a contents list on fol. 1r of the manuscript, which is still extant. Item seven, ‘The history of the noble fortress of Lusignan’, includes a reference to Jacquetta. See British Library Manuscripts [accessed 5 January 2020]. 13 Scholarly consensus has long rested on Steinschaber’s editio princeps, printed in Geneva in 1478, as the source for Melusine. The link to Charles Brunet’s Paris edition of 1854 was first identified by Donald (Melusine, p. 368, n. 3) and has been traced back to Steinschaber’s edition by Nolan, Introduction, pp. 19–20. 14 For a description of the manuscript and its contents see British Library Manuscripts [accessed 7 December 2020]. By the time of this correspondence (c. 1320–40) the Mongol empire had divided into four, but the title ‘Great Khan’ was nominally retained by the leader of the Yuan dynasty. Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West 1221–1410, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 131.

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Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine century.15 The easterly facing orientation of these texts is unmistakable. The collection was originally compiled and translated into French by Jean d’Ypres in 1361 and survives in six manuscript copies, of which the Cotton manuscript is one. The Cotton manuscript, however, is unique in that a copy of D’Arras was later appended to it.16 This (perhaps innocent) act frames D’Arras with texts that, Charity Cannon Willard posits, were ‘intended to convey a realistic idea of conditions in the Middle and Far East’.17 This means that one of the earliest copies, if not the earliest copy, of D’Arras to make its way to England was embedded within a manuscript context of realistic travel narratives within which Cilician Armenia featured significantly.18 The English context of reading D’Arras must have been influenced by this unique textual association. In Massey’s terms, the compilation of these texts into one volume forms a radical contemporaneity of simultaneous stories-so-far. This means that every time the volume is opened these texts challenge each other, interfering with any attempt to isolate a reading of one text without at least acknowledging the existence of all the others. The chance encounter that brought D’Arras into this pre-existing collection brings into sharp relief the political impetus of Jean de Berry’s project. For example, Hetoum’s depiction of an easterly facing Cilician Armenia, actively engaged in diplomatic and military alliances with the Mongols, directly contradicts d’Arras’s construction of a hermetically sealed Christian West that effortlessly absorbs Cilicia into its universe of western uniformity. While Hetoum’s claims are often exaggerated, most notably his assertion that the Armenians dictated the terms of their treaty with the Mongols,19 this text, and indeed Hetoum himself in producing it, evidence an enterprising people, sophisticated in their diplomatic practices, ambitious in their efforts to take a leading role in negotiations between the Mongol East and 15 Glenn Burger, ed., Hetoum, A Lytell Cronycle: Richard Pynson’s Translation (c. 1520)

of La Fleur des histoires de la terre d’Orient (c. 1307) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), pp. x–xiii. 16 Charity Cannon Willard, ‘The Duke of Berry’s Multiple Copies of the Fleur des Histoires D’Orient’, in From Linguistics to Literature: Romance Studies offered to Francis M. Rogers, ed. Bernard H. Bichakjian (John Benjamins Publishing Co.: Amsterdam, 1981), pp. 281–92. Willard also argues that the Cotton manuscript passed through Jean de Berry’s library. 17 Willard, ‘Multiple Copies’, p. 285. 18 The other manuscript copy of d’Arras’s Mélusine known to be in England by 1535 and possibly earlier is London, British Library, Harley MS 4418. For a description of the manuscript and its contents see British Library Manuscripts [accessed 7 December 2020]. 19 Hetoum itemises seven requests made to the Great Khan Mongke, all of which, he writes, were granted. Burger, A Lytell Cronycle, pp. 37–38. This is almost certainly untrue. Alexandr Osipian, ‘Armenian Involvement in the Latin-Mongol Crusade: Uses of the Magi and Prester John in constable Smbat’s Letter and Hayton of Corycus’s Flos historiarum terre orientis, 1248–1307’, Medieval Encounters, 20 (2014), 66–100 (pp. 93–95).

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Jan Shaw the Christian West, and generally engaged in a worldview that far exceeded their geographical limits as a tiny eastern Mediterranean Christian nation.20 Hetoum (c. 1240–1310) was an influential Armenian prince and lord of Corycus. His text, produced in French at the papal court of Poitiers in 1307 and then translated into Latin for presentation to the pope later the same year, was one of the more geographically reliable works of travellers’ tales in the late medieval period.21 It was also one of the most important texts about Cilician Armenia from the late Middle Ages and was widely circulated throughout Europe.22 By the time of the translation of D’Arras into English, Hetoum’s chronicle was already circulating in England in multiple copies.23 The Cotton manuscript brings these texts into immediate juxtaposition. Most importantly, this suggests that Hetoum’s chronicle was part of the here-and-now of the translation activity, counterbalancing the appropriations and elisions of the depiction of Cilician Armenia in D’Arras. Massey makes the point that place is a coming together of ‘contemporaneous multiple becomings’ (emphasis mine).24 In other words, each trajectory is forever in process. If the specificity of place is defined by the unique set of distinct but coexistent trajectories that come together in that place (in a contemporaneous plurality from which each trajectory leaves forever changed), then it must also be considered that each of those trajectories has its own unique history of flows and interactions that it draws along in its journey towards that place. Hetoum’s La Fleur des histoires taps into a rich history of stories, both political and literary, and thereby necessarily draws along with it a certain confluence of stories that are part of that history. Hetoum’s chronicle then becomes one of the stories in the stream – it becomes a part of those flows – and in this way, it also contributes to the rearticulation of those past stories in its own future trajectories. Reading Hetoum’s 20 While ultimately unsuccessful, these ambitions are well documented. Angus Stewart,

‘The Armenian Kingdom and the Mongol-Frankish Encounter’, in Cultural Encounters during the Crusades, ed. Kurt Villads Jensen, Kirsi Salonen, and Helle Vogt (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2013), pp. 270–77. See also Osipian, ‘Armenian Involvement’, pp. 95–98. 21 Hetoum, A Lytell Cronycle, pp. x–xiii. 22 This text was translated into numerous languages and widely circulated. For a full list see C. Kohler, Recueil des historiens des croisades: Documents arméniens, 2 vols (Paris: L’Academie, 1906), II, p. 112. 23 London, British Library, Royal MS 12 D xi, dated 1337–38, as well as a copy of Hetoum’s chronicle, includes letters from Edward I of England to the King of Armenia. Other manuscripts include British Library, Royal MS 13 C xii, dated early fifteenth century, in Latin; British Library, Royal MS 14 C iv, fourteenth century, in Latin; British Library, Cotton MS Otho D v, fifteenth century, in French; British Library, Royal MS 18 B xxvi, 1518–20, in English. Five copies of Richard Pynson’s printed edition in English (c. 1520) also survive. Burger, A Lytell Cronycle, pp. x–xiii. 24 Massey, For Space, p. 120.

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Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine chronicle alongside D’Arras is intriguing, because Hetoum’s chronicle taps into entirely different histories to those presented in the romance, and indeed into stories that extend far beyond those offered in the Cotton manuscript. One story stream on which Hetoum’s text draws, and to which it contributes, is the identity narrative of Cilician Armenians, as especially gifted in effecting Christian conversion. As early as 1248, Smbat, the Constable of Cilician Armenia, while on his way to the Mongol court in Karakorum, reported that Christianity was widespread and that many in the Mongol court had converted.25 In between this moment and the production of Hetoum’s chronicle almost sixty years later, tales of secret conversion or wished-for conversion of the Mongol Khans had become common.26 The spread of Mongol rule and their policy of tolerance and even-handed treatment of different religions had resulted in an improvement in conditions for many eastern Christians, but the level of Christian presence and the rate of conversion were often wildly overstated.27 Further, while the marriage of Christian women to Mongol princes was well known, the influence of devout Christian wives on their non-Christian husbands, especially within polygamous marriages, could not match western expectations.28 Nevertheless, Mongol availability for conversion was a narrative assiduously cultivated by the Cilician Armenians, including Hetoum, and in these narratives Armenian women were often the agents of conversion. By the second half of the thirteenth century, these narratives had taken on a life of their own, with the converting Armenian princess a developing trope. One telling example is the 1268 marriage of the Ilkhan Abaqa to an Orthodox Catholic, Maria Palaeologina, daughter of Byzantine emperor Michael VIII.29 After the second council of Lyon in 1274 Abaqa was rumoured to have converted, and by 1280 the agent of his conversion had become the daughter of either Prester John or the king of Armenia.30 This theme of apparent Armenian influence, particularly over Ilkhanate religious observance,31 was further de25 Osipian, ‘Armenian Involvement’, pp. 81–85. See also Stewart, ‘The Armenian King-

dom’; Jacques Paviot, ‘England and the Mongols (c. 1260–1330)’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, 10 (2000), 305–18; and Jackson, The Mongols. 26 Lillian Herlands Hornstein, ‘The Historical Background of The King of Tars’, Speculum, 16 (1941), 404–14 (p. 407). 27 Jackson, The Mongols, p. 100. See also Thomas T. Allsen, Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Möngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands, 1251–1259 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). 28 James D. Ryan, ‘Christian Wives of Mongol Khans: Tartar Queens and Missionary Expectations in Asia’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3.8 (1998), 411–21 (p. 416). 29 He also had other Christian wives. Ryan, ‘Christian Wives’, p. 416. 30 Sylvia Schein, ‘Gesta Dei per Mongolos 1300. The Genesis of a Non-event’, English Historical Review, 94 (1979), 805–19. 31 The Persian Ilkhanate was one of the four khanates into which the Mongol empire split after the death of Möngke Khan in 1260. See Jackson, The Mongols, pp. 203–34.

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Jan Shaw veloped in the extraordinary elation that resulted from the short-lived success of the combined Mongol and Armenian campaign in Syria of 1299–1300.32 Stories circulated that mass was sung by the Ilkhan Ghazan and the king of Armenia together in the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. In one chronicle Ghazan is transformed into a member of the Christian royal family of Armenia; in others, he marries a Christian Armenian princess.33 His miraculous conversion by the daughter of an Armenian king was a tale widely circulated. Letters reported the miracle of a monstrous child who was rendered completely normal through baptism, thereby causing Ghazan’s immediate conversion.34 The level of circulation of these tidings was such that Ghazan’s conversion was reported in an official letter from Pope Boniface VIII to Edward I of England.35 Fast on the heels of these reports was Hetoum’s La Fleur des histoires. Hetoum describes how, as part of a peace treaty negotiated by his uncle, King Hetoum I, when he visited the Great Khan Möngke in 1253–56, the khan accepted baptism, as did his court.36 The timing of this claim (1307), and its delivery to the highest ecclesiastical level, supported the contemporaneously circulating narrative that the Armenians had a touch of the miraculous about them. In the popular imagination Armenia was entering legendary status. In England alone, no less than three contemporary Anglo-Latin chronicles report the story of the Armenian princess, complete with monstrous babe, miraculous transformation, and inevitable conversion.37 The King of Tars repeats this story, 32 After the battle of Homs in late December 1299, the combined Mongol and Armenian

forces entered Damascus, but by February 1300 only a small force remained and the Mamluks quickly reoccupied the region. Jackson, The Mongols, p. 170. Schein, ‘Gesta Dei per Mongolos’, p. 810. See also Paviot, ‘England and the Mongols’. 33 Although Ghazan had seven wives, not one was a Christian. Hornstein, ‘Historical Background’, p. 411. Ghazan was a Muslim, who in the first two years of his reign forwent the Mongol policy of religious tolerance and was surprisingly harsh to his Christian subjects. Jackson, The Mongols, p. 177. See also Schein, ‘Gesta Dei per Mongolos’ 34 Jackson, The Mongols, p. 172. See also Schein, ‘Gesta Dei per Mongolos’, p. 817. 35 Schein, ‘Gesta Dei per Mongolos’, p. 806. 36 Burger, A Lytell Cronycle, p. 37. While the visit is historical, historians generally agree that the conversions are fictional. Nevertheless, some of the seven conditions listed by Hetoum reflect historical behaviour. See Jackson, The Mongols, p. 100. 37 In the English chronicles it is the brother of the king of the Tartars rather than the king himself who marries the Armenian princess and is converted by the miracle. Thomae Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley (London: 1863), Rolls Series, XXXVIII, Part I, 77, 113, dated 1299 and 1307, respectively. Flores Historiarum, ed. H. R. Luard (London: 1890), Rolls Series, XCV, Part 3, 107, 301, both entries dated 1299. W. Rishanger, Chronica et Annales, ed. H. T. Riley (London: 1865), Rolls Series, XXCIII, Part 2, 189, also dated 1299. In the fourth analogue the protagonists are the king of Norway and the daughter of the king of Scotland; Chronicon de Lanercost, ed. J. Stevenson, for the Maitland Club (London, 1839), p. 104. See Hornstein, ‘Historical Background’, p. 404. See also Laura A. Hibbard, Mediaeval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances (New York: Burt Franklin, 1963), pp. 45–48.

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Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine albeit without identifying the princess as Armenian; but, of the twelve analogues identified by Lillian Herlands Hornstein, in eight the mother of the heroine is an Armenian princess.38 This suggests that the King of Tars, proffering a heroine who is an able Christian converter in a cross-cultural marriage, has embedded within it an understanding and acceptance of the Armenian capacity for conversion. The continual swirling of stories that present Armenians, and particularly Armenian women, as unusually successful in effecting conversion was, therefore, not only the result of industrious Armenian information management; it was an identity collectively and enthusiastically granted to them by western Christians, including popes and kings, and it had certainly reached England. The thread of stories that grants Armenians unusual powers of conversion presents a radically different view of the world to the one based on the easy division of inside/outside Christendom, such as that presented in D’Arras. Hetoum’s chronicle and the stories with which it is entangled evidence the artificiality of borders, especially the imagined geography of Christendom, and instead point to a reality of permeability and intercultural exchange. They also foreground the diplomatic and religious agency of women. Against these stories, the idea of a Lusignan empire reaching north to Bohemia and east to Cilician Armenia (in a proxy for Christendom) seems particularly discordant. Yet, if we take Massey’s view, D’Arras is just one of many in a swirling plurality of stories. D’Arras might take Armenian stories away, but, in the context of the Cotton manuscript, Hetoum’s chronicle and the stories it draws forth give other stories back. Even though these stories are often fanciful, and narratives of conversion are necessarily shot through with religious imperialism, they achieve an articulation of identity for Cilician Armenians that is their own. D’Arras did not exist in isolation. In England, it circulated in a literary context that included multiple copies of Hetoum’s chronicle, among many other texts. The coming together of these disparate stories in the Cotton manuscript – stories of travels to the farthest east then known, of trade and riches, of polygamy, intermarriage and religious plurality, of mass conversion of the Mongol court at Karakorum at the hands of a Cilician Armenian king, and D’Arras – occurs in what Massey would describe as an unpredictable ‘throwntogetherness’ that may be multiple but is not necessarily coherent. In the Cotton manuscript, this jostling creates a unique context for reading D’Arras in England. For Massey, such a meeting ‘demands negotiation’.39 The push and pull of this interaction is the ‘eventness’ of place from which the English prose Melusine springs. 38 Hornstein, ‘Historical Background’, pp. 404–05. The King of Tars is not the only lit-

erary work produced in England that refers to Armenia. For more details see Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Carolyn P. Collette and Vincent J. DiMarco, ‘The Matter of Armenia in the Age of Chaucer’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 23 (2001), 317–58. 39 Massey, For Space, p. 141.

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Jan Shaw Florie and Guyon in England The argument thus far proposes that the English translator is working within a context that recognises the permeability of borders and the importance of intimate relationships to diplomatic negotiation and cross-cultural exchange, with a heightened sense of the capacity of Cilician Armenian women in this field of endeavour. In both D’Arras and Melusine, while chivalric ambition paves the way for the expansion of empire, it is the intimate relationships, indeed intimate negotiations, that secure empire building.40 The Lusignan dynasty is founded upon Melusine and Raymondin’s secret pact, negotiated prior to their marriage. Melusine’s extraordinary building programme, which begins with Lusignan and extends beyond into surrounding Poitou, is dependent upon this secret, as is their future prosperity. This focus on marital intimacy continues into the next generation, when four Lusignan sons go out into the world in search of honour, rescue defenceless heiresses, and procure rule through marriage. Ongoing reference to the participation of these ladies in the narrative, the production of children, and the arrangement of their future marriages, makes explicit the connection between the success of intimate relationships and the future prosperity of the dynasty. In all four of the marriage tales, Lusignan takeover is not presented as simply an agreement between lords and barons that is effected through marital contract. All of these maidens are thinking, feeling, and speaking subjects, and three of them resist or critique proceedings in some significant way.41 The Cilician Armenian princess, Florie, is the only maiden to offer no critique or resistance that needs to be overcome. Instead, in both texts, Florie represents a shift from critical to affective engagement. Florie and Guyon are the only couple to meet prior to any hint of marriage. They spend a whole evening of festivities together, engaged closely in gracious conversation (‘s’entredirent moult de gracieuses paroles’), laying the groundwork for a future intimacy.42 When Guyon is unexpectedly called away, the text notes that, if he had the time (‘eust eu loisir’), he would have expressed his innermost thoughts to her.43 In D’Arras, on Guyon’s return to Cruly, Florie admits that she is barely well (‘il ne me puet estre gueres 40 Scholarship that touches on these episodes of the romance tends to focus on the exploits of

the Lusignan sons. See Emmanuèle Baumgartner, ‘Fiction and History: The Cypriot Episode in Jean d’Arras’s Mélusine’, in Mélusine of Lusignan: Founding Fiction in Late Medieval France, ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 185–200; Daisy Delogu, ‘Jean d’Arras Makes History: Political Legitimacy and the Roman de Mélusine’, Dalhousie French Studies, 80 (2007), 15–28. 41 Stouff, D’Arras, pp. 119–22, 188–89, and 162. For a detailed discussion of the English version, which closely reproduces these three episodes, see Jan Shaw, Space, Gender and Memory in Middle English Romance: Architectures of Wonder in the Middle English Melusine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 185–201. 42 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 127. 43 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 127.

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Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine bien’), due to her father’s recent death, demonstrating an already growing intimacy.44 While Melusine follows D’Arras’s version of the other three marriage tales closely, it changes the tale of Florie and Guyon. In this version, Florie and Guyon’s relationship is interrupted before marital intimacy can be established. On Guyon’s return to marry and accept the crown, Florie does not reappear and there is no resumption of the ‘honeste & gracyous talkying’ that occurred in their first and only meeting.45 Unlike in D’Arras, Florie is cut from the English text and neither seen nor heard from again. Her marriage is referred to in one line in the past tense: ‘There was guyon wedded with Florye’.46 The references to Guyon, however, continue: he crowns himself king, is feted by the local barons, dispenses gifts, and is loved by all the people.47 In D’Arras, the lack of critical comment by Florie and the shift to potential intimacy effects the smoothest and most seamless integration of a small kingdom into the Lusignan world. In the story-stream context of the English translation, the agency of Cilician Armenian women is celebrated, and their capacity to forge diplomatic and cultural ties is realised through their intimate relationships. Agency and intimacy are thereby inextricably linked. Reading d’Arras’s Florie in this context is problematic, especially when his wider romance is full of agentive women. To grant Florie no critical agency is, therefore, already to undermine her capacity for affective connection and lasting intimacy. This suggests that, while the tale of Florie and Guyon in D’Arras offers the smoothest integration of any kingdom into the Lusignan empire because Florie offers no critique, when read in the English story context it is that very lack of critique that harbours the seeds of failure. This failure is then scripted explicitly into the English text. Also worthy of consideration is the common narrative imperative that impels the action in this section of the romance: the horror of cross-cultural marriage from which the heiresses must be rescued. In a story context within which borders are permeable (even those of Christendom), where diplomacy can be achieved through marriage, and cross-cultural marriages are common, the expansion of empire based on the rescue of maidens from such marriages is harder to justify. Within this context, rather than presenting a solid foundation for empire, intimate relationships might be read as the thinnest of veils that mask opportunistic and appropriative marriages. Melusine takes this further. The disappearance of Florie from the narrative, and Guyon’s uninterrupted upward trajectory, suggest what is really at stake in these narratives: Lusignan ambition and the expansion of empire. 44 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 144. 45 Donald, Melusine, p. 163, lines 13–14. The elision is here: Donald, Melusine, p. 180,

line 31.

46 Donald, Melusine, p. 181, line 1. 47 Donald, Melusine, p. 181, lines 1–4.

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Jan Shaw Geometries of Power: the Lusignans in the English Imagination In contrast to the general favour enjoyed by Cilician Armenians, the English power-geometries were weighted against the Lusignan dynasty and therefore any story that might celebrate their achievements. Such forces must have troubled the reception of D’Arras in England to some degree and therefore influenced the interpretation of that narrative as it is scripted in the translation. Distrust of the Lusignans in England goes back at least to the mid-thirteenth century, when the Lusignan half-siblings of Henry III came to England and enjoyed royal approval and great privilege. Royal patronage was redirected towards them, including rich marriages and even direct income payments from the exchequer.48 Resentment festered in the English barony, ultimately resulting in the expulsion of the leading Lusignans from England after less than two decades.49 In the late fourteenth century, tensions arose between the English crown and the barons over a Lusignan once again. This time, it was the exiled King Leon of Cilician Armenia, who arrived in England in 1385. The last of the short-lived Lusignan dynasty, he had surrendered what remained of the country to the Mamluks ten years earlier. Living in France as a guest of Charles VI, Leon persuaded the French king to appoint him as a peace negotiator. He travelled to England, where Richard II gave him a warm and lavish welcome, much to the chagrin of the English barons, who did not trust him.50 Their views are echoed in numerous contemporary chronicles, which note that Leon was an unscrupulous fortune hunter, content to live in luxury in France while his country suffered under oppressive foreign rule.51 Even his adopted people did not trust him.52 Indeed, historians have noted that the Lusignan dynasty in Cilicia never secured local legitimacy.53 It seems that they could not shake 48 Michael Prestwich, Plantagenet England 1225–1360 (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2005), pp. 95–96.

49 Prestwich, Plantagenet England, pp. 101–3. 50 Andrew Sharf, ‘An Armenian King at the Court of Richard II’, in Bar-Ilan Studies in

History: Volume I, ed. Pinchas Artzi (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1978), pp. 115–28 (pp. 121–22). 51 Collette and DiMarco cite the Westminster Chronicle as particularly detailed in the description of Leon’s visit. ‘The Matter of Armenia’, pp. 336–37. The view that Leon is an opportunist is expressed in numerous contemporary chronicles. There is a particularly strong outburst in Chronicon Angliae, reproduced in Collette and DiMarco, ‘The Matter of Armenia’, p. 338. 52 Sharf, ‘An Armenian King’, p. 120. 53 Simon Payaslian, The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 99–100. See also T. S. R. Boase, ed., The Cilician Kingdom of Armenia (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978); Sirarpie der Nersessian, ‘The Kingdom of Cilician Armenia’, in The History of the Crusades, Volume II: The Later Crusades, 1189–1311, ed. Robert Lee Wolff and Harry W. Hazard (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Jacob G. Ghazarian, The Armenian Kingdom in Cilicia During the Crusades: The Integration of Cilician Armenians with the Latins 1080–1393 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000).

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Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine their identity as Lusignans. The English barons accused Leon of representing French interests in the peace negotiations, and his family name had the added misfortune of foregrounding his connection with a French territory over which battles continued to be fought during the Hundred Years’ War, a war whose peace he was supposedly impartially negotiating. This disputed territory included the fortress of Lusignan itself, although D’Arras was not yet written. The barons succeeded in persuading Richard to refuse safe conduct to Leon for a second visit to England in 1386.54 The English barony, therefore, had a history of holding the reputation of the Lusignans in low esteem, suggesting that the context of the translation may well have been predisposed to a negative reading in relation to the Lusignans, while maintaining a positive view in favour of the miracle-working Cilician Armenians. It is not surprising, therefore, that a translation produced within this context might be suspicious of the rescue that Guyon of Lusignan brings to Florie and the Cilician Armenian people. Moreover, if the relationship between Guyon and Florie is central to narrating the Lusignan imperial project, then this suspicion casts doubt over the legitimacy of the whole enterprise. The Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue: Narrating the End of Empire Arriving in a new place means joining up with and somehow linking into the collection of interwoven stories of which that place is made.55 Moving D’Arras to England changed its meaning because it was inserted into a whole new stream of stories. This shift is nowhere more striking than in the Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue. Appended to the end of the romance and set at an unidentified future time, the Epilogue narrates the meeting between Melusine’s sister, Melior, who keeps the custom of the Sparrowhawk at her castle in Armenia, and a descendant of Guyon. If a successfully negotiated marriage is key to the expansion of the Lusignan empire, with the participation of the lady in an actively granted consent, then the Epilogue, with its complete breakdown of interpersonal relations, becomes the turning point that leads inexorably to the downfall of empire.56 Shifting this narrative to the English story context puts it into contact with unflattering stories about the Lusignans and power geometries that have no interest in preserving their name. Considering the differing treatments of this episode in D’Arras and Melusine, it is evident that reading D’Arras in the English story context draws out a lingering prejudice against the Lusignans. 54 Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, II, p. 151. 55 Massey, For Space, p. 119. 56 First noted by Harf-Lancner in ‘Littérature et Politique’, this has been most recently

discussed in E. Jane Burns, ‘Magical Politics from Poitou to Armenia: Mélusine, Jean de Berry, and the Eastern Mediterranean’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 43 (2013), 275–301.

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Jan Shaw The story tells of a young Cilician Armenian king, a Lusignan descended from Guyon, who hears of the legend of the Sparrowhawk Castle. The custom of the castle is that any knight successful in watching the sparrowhawk for three days and nights without sleep may ask the lady of the castle for any gift other than herself. Upon hearing the legend, the king expresses his determination to succeed in the test, but also to take the lady of the castle as his boon: ‘Le roy … dist que pour certain il yroit et ne demanderoit que le corps d’elle’; ‘This king … said he wold go thither / and that of the lady he shuld nothing take but herself.’57 In both versions, therefore, the king fully intends to act in bad faith.58 When he arrives at the castle, the terms of the custom are carefully explained by the gatekeeper, and he is warned of dire consequences if he asks for the lady as his prize. When the king succeeds in the challenge, the lady appears, acknowledges his success and, appropriate to the terms of the custom, offers him a gift. An argument ensues, in which he repeatedly asks for her as his gift, and each time she angrily rebuffs him. Frustrated and cross, the lady warns him that unless he desists, evil misadventure will befall him and his heirs and successors, even though they share no blame. He persists. The lady proclaims his doom, that he and his descendants will suffer misadventure, decline, and exile for nine generations.59 In response, he tries to take her by force. She vanishes and he is beaten and thrown out of the castle. His line subsequently goes into decline. The Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue is clearly not about successful intimate relationships. Rather, it considers the negotiation of interpersonal relations between a man and a woman when intimacy is forbidden. In both texts, the king clearly fails in this, but Melusine changes the discursive strategies of both the king and Melior, which shifts the power balance and changes the characterisation of each. After their initial exchange, in which he makes his claim and she refuses him, D’Arras continues: Et le roy lui respond: Tenez moy la promesse de l’aventure de ce chastel, car j’ay bien fait mon devoir. Par foy, dist la dame, je n’y debat pas. Or demandez chose raisonnable, et vous l’aurez, car moy ne povez vous avoir. (The king responded, ‘Fulfil the promise of the adventure of this castle, for I have completed the requirement.’ ‘Indeed,’ said the lady, ‘I don’t dispute that. Now ask for something reasonable and you will have it, but me you may not have.’)60 57 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 302; Donald, Melusine, p. 362, lines 30–34. 58 E. Jane Burns argues that the downfall of the lineage is due to Melior’s familial relation-

ship with the king, rather than his behaviour to her. Her argument, however, appears to take no account of the premeditated breach of the custom of the castle, nor the attempt to take Melior at any cost. ‘Magical Politics’, p. 281. 59 Donald, Melusine, p. 367, lines 9–12; Stouff, D’Arras, p. 305. 60 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 305; my translation.

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Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine The king’s statement is in two parts. The first is a demand, and the second offers a reason for that demand: a claim of appropriate performance. The lady responds only to the second part and with a statement that is conciliatory in tone and purpose; she then deflects him by requiring him to make another choice, reminding him that he cannot have her. She makes no comment about his attempt to break the custom of the castle. The king’s language, however, continues to be direct and forceful; he will not be deflected. He simply repeats his demands: ‘touteffoiz ne vueil je autre don […] Touteffoiz ne vueil je autre chose que le corps de vous’ (‘nevertheless, I want no other gift […] Nevertheless, I want nothing other than your person’).61 He is also brutally honest, not veiling his true purpose: ‘car pour autre chose ne suiz je cy venuz’ (‘for I have come here for nothing else’).62 Melusine differs: Thenne said the king to the lady, ‘Wel I haue, to myn aduys, endeuoired me. Wherfor, noble lady, be you fauourable to me and haue regard to the custome of this castel.’ ‘By my faith’ ansuerd the lady, ‘as touching thaduenture & custome of this Castel, I wyl that it be obserued & kept / but aske of me yeft raysounable / and no doubte of but thou shalt haue it.’63

As in D’Arras, the king’s statement is in two parts, but the order here is reversed and his claim is softened: he does not assert that he has completed requirements, but that he has worked hard (‘endeuoired’), and even this he couches as his opinion, not a statement of fact (‘to myn aduys’). His demand is reduced to a request that the noble lady be kind to him and take into account the custom of the castle. As in D’Arras, the lady takes issue with the second part of his statement, but here that refers to the custom of the castle. She makes explicit the requirement to observe the custom: ‘I wyl that it be obserued & kept’. The reversal of order is used again in her next statement, bringing consequences to the fore: ‘euyl myscheaunce shall fall on the, yf thou soon chaungest not thy purpos’.64 The indirect language (‘thy purpos’) changes her refusal into an abstraction, emphasising the king’s wrong-headedness rather than simply refusing him once again. It also deflects the argument away from her body. The king seems impelled to respond to Melior’s warning, using courtly language that, for all its praise, shifts the blame onto her desirability: ‘It is for nought, For my herte is ruysshed of your beaute, and only fedde with your sight’. Only then does he segue back to her body: ‘And therefore your body wyl I haue’.65 The lady chooses her response carefully. Rather than 61 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 305. 62 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 305 63 Donald, Melusine, p. 366, lines 8–15. 64 Donald, Melusine, p. 366, lines 18–20. See Stouff, D’Arras, p. 305. 65 Donald, Melusine, p. 366, lines 22–24.

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Jan Shaw declaring that he will lose her, as she does in D’Arras, in Melusine she focuses on him losing the sight of her, thereby cutting off the source of his supposedly uncontrollable desire, and also, once again, avoiding any reference to her body.66 It is evident, then, that in Melusine the lady more actively and conclusively steers the argument. Both of these exchanges are recontextualised when the king attempts to take Melior by force. In D’Arras, the king’s attempted rape is consistent with his earlier behaviour. He is clear about what he wants and does not deviate from this in word or deed. He does not engage with Melior’s conditions; he focuses on performance, winning, and entitlement. At the same time, he does not misrepresent his position to her. Indeed, the text hints that his character is not wholly negative; from the start he is characterised as a lion, which presages determination, persistence, and courage.67 In Melusine, on the other hand, there is no mention of the lion,68 and the character of the king has slipped. He begins as ‘yong and fayre, lecherous and folowyng his wyll’, but then he meets the lady and behaves with deference and a courtly demeanour.69 When this tactic is unsuccessful, he reverts to type, attempting to take Melior by force. These shifting positions betray the king not only as predatory (as is the king in D’Arras) but also as dishonest and manipulative. In both cases, the episode clearly signals that the ideal of an extended Lusignan empire built upon carefully negotiated intimate relationships is already corroding from within. Melusine goes further. In the translation the particular characteristics betrayed by the king are consistent with the long-term prejudices harboured in the English context against the Lusignans: he is falsely ingratiating, seeking his own gratification, and careless of the consequences of his actions on those he should protect. This negative representation of the king in Melusine extends yet further. As noted, in D’Arras, the king is characterised as a lion. This links him to the last reigning king of Armenia, Leon.70 The episode closes with another contemporaneous reference, that the kings of Armenia and Cyprus still bear the name and the arms of Lusignan and continue to cry out its name.71 Homing in thus on a contemporaneous historical moment seems to secure the gesture as one pointing to Leon. This effectively quarantines the personal failings of the king in the romance to one historical man, the same man who visited England in 1385. In Melusine, on the other hand, all historical markers are removed. There

66 Donald, Melusine, p. 366, lines 31–32. 67 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 302. 68 The elision is here: Donald, Melusine, p. 362, line 20. 69 Donald, Melusine, p. 362, line 20. 70 Stouff, D’Arras, p. 302. Harf-Lancner associates Leon with the Armenian king’s de-

scendant, but the reference to the lion suggests otherwise. ‘Littérature et Politique’.

71 While Leon had lost Cilician Armenia to the Egyptian Mamluks, at the time the romance

appeared he still claimed the title of king and hoped to be restored. Stouff, D’Arras, p. 307.

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Cilician Armenia and the Prose Romance of Melusine is no mention of the lion,72 nor any reference to the current kings of Armenia or Cyprus.73 Given that one hundred years or so have passed since the production of d’Arras’s text, this deletion of historical specificity might simply be the removal of detail whose significance has been lost to time, or it might be a deliberate elision of the reference to Leon. Either way, the offending king is no longer linked to any historical person, thereby suggesting that the dishonour he accrues infects any or all of his lineage. In other words, Melusine translates a single failed Lusignan king into an untrustworthy line, which is consistent with the prevailing story context that distrusts Lusignans as devious and opportunistic. To cast blame across the whole lineage has implications that go right back to the founder of that line, Guyon. The dishonest behaviour of the king in the Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue could be one interpretation of Guyon’s behaviour earlier in the text, when, after his short courtship of Florie and securing the offer of kingship, he leaps ashore and crowns himself king. Indeed, if the romance builds empire through a series of successful intimate relationships, then the disconnection between these two Lusignan kings of Cilician Armenia and the women with whom they should be engaging could be read as a fundamental flaw of the lineage. This means that Guyon’s failure to reconnect with Florie, at the very beginning of the Lusignan dynasty in Cilician Armenia, holds within it a sign of the lineage’s downfall, putting in doubt the legitimacy of the whole enterprise of Lusignan expansion in the East. In D’Arras, on the other hand, the king in the Epilogue is singular, and no connection can be made between him and the behaviour of Guyon, who warmly reconnects with Florie. In both texts the Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue signals the end of empire, but in different ways. In D’Arras, the Cilician Armenian line is privileged. Joining the Lusignan world in the smoothest assimilation, in the tale of Florie and Guyon, it prospers long into the future and falls only through the misdirected determination of one man in the Epilogue. In Melusine, the negative representation of the Lusignan king in the Epilogue not only bleeds into the other members of the lineage. The negative reflection back onto Guyon reinforces the failure already embedded in Florie’s characterisation. In this way, therefore, the Lusignan lineage in Cilician Armenia is undermined twice over from its very beginning. Geographies of Loss: Reading d’Arras’s Romance in England D’Arras’s project to narrate the rise of the House of Lusignan to a pan-European empire rests on a gesture of reverse translatio imperii, establishing cadet branches of the lineage in eastern lands and thereby legitimising the fortress of Lusignan as the western core of empire. In d’Arras’s telling, the 72 The elision is here: Donald, Melusine, p. 362, line 20. 73 The elision is here: Donald, Melusine, p. 368, line 24.

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Jan Shaw most easterly acquisition, that of Cilician Armenia, is also the most seamless. The loss of this secure footing on the borders of the Holy Land, in the Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue, signals the fall of empire. In D’Arras, that fall is the unfortunate consequence of the flaws of one man. Therefore, while the consequences are necessarily substantial, the loss of the dignity of that House is minimised. Reading this romance in England places the narrative within a different story context that subjects it to different pressures, and it changes under these ebbs and flows. Melusine evidences these changes. Here the failure of empire accrues iteratively, beginning in the tale of Florie and Guyon, where Florie’s lack of critical engagement in D’Arras turns into a failure of intimacy in Melusine, which results in her being written out of the text, raising further questions about Lusignan ambition. Already, the romance is shifting from being a story of empire building and an unfortunate fall, to the story of an empire whose fall is embedded within the overreach of its most easterly, hubristic extent. The Sparrowhawk Castle Epilogue in Melusine picks up the thread of these divided trajectories. This time, it is not the lady who is written out, but the Lusignan king who is conclusively thrown out and his descendants, in their loss of rule, written out of history. This analysis suggests that, while the English prose Melusine has traditionally been viewed as a close translation of d’Arras’s romance, if read within the wider flow of stories that were available to an English audience, and within the different power geometries that were operating in that time and place, then the changes made by the translator have a renewed significance. While the meanings made here of the gaps and changes gain their substance only within the particular flow of stories found in the translation’s receiving context, some of these stories have past trajectories that reach far beyond the local. The English prose Melusine can, therefore, be imagined as looking back, obliquely, past d’Arras’s text as its main source, at some of those stories. In these ways, therefore, the English translation opens up a space for other stories to be told, a space that allows those stories to speak for themselves.

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12 ‘All this will not comfort me’: Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree LAURA ASHE The Squire of Low Degree is a romance preserved only in sixteenth-century print. Probably written around 1500, it survives complete in a 1560 printing by William Copland;1 two fragments of an earlier edition by Wynkyn de Worde, from around 1520, appear under the alternative title Undo your door.2 Besides this evidence of multiple editions, references to the tale crop up with some frequency over the next decades, indicating a notable degree of popularity and memorability. Finally, and importantly for present purposes, a much shorter version of the tale (170 lines to the complete version’s 1,132) appears in the Percy Folio, a famous collection of medieval and later verse compiled in the 1640s.3 As a self-conscious participant in the romance tradition – the Squire who is the work’s hero wishes that he were ‘so bolde in chyvalry / As Syr Gawayne, or Syr Guy’ (lines 79–80)4 – the text has been regarded as something of a parody, even a pastiche, of the genre.5 On the surface it is a highly conventional exercise – a squire loves a princess; he is betrayed by a jealous steward; he is sent into exile to prove himself with deeds of chivalry for seven years and, on his triumphant return, is rewarded with marriage to his lady. But, as Nicola McDonald pointed out in a 2012 article, such a summary misses the

1 STC 23112. 2 STC 23111.5. 3 Joseph Donatelli, ‘The Percy Folio Manuscript: A Seventeenth-Century Context for

Medieval Poetry’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 4 (1993), 114–33.

4 The Squire of Low Degree, ed. Erik Kooper, in Sentimental and Humorous Romances

(Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2005).

5 See, e.g., Kevin Kiernan, ‘“Undo Your Door” and the Order of Chivalry’, Studies in

Philology, 70 (1973), 345–66; Bryan Rivers, ‘The Focus of Satire in The Squire of Low Degree’, English Studies in Canada, 7 (1981), 379–87; Glenn Wright, ‘“Other wyse then must we do”: Parody and Popular Narrative in The Squyr of Lowe Degre’, Comitatus, 27 (1996), 14–41.

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Laura Ashe most memorable and disturbing aspect of the text.6 The pivotal episode in the narrative is the Squire’s attempt to say farewell to his lady the night before his departure: he comes to the door of her chamber and begs to be let in. She refuses, citing her chastity and devoted love. He is set upon by the treacherous steward with more than thirty men, and in the melée the steward is killed. His fellows disguise the steward’s body as that of the Squire, disfiguring his face, and leave the corpse outside the door, while hustling the Squire off to prison. The princess rises naked from her bed to open the door; believing the corpse to be her lover, she embalms it and keeps it in her chamber, praying for him, kissing and clasping the remains, for seven ensuing years of mourning. The king meanwhile advances the conventional plot by sending the Squire off on his chivalric quest. Only when the corpse has finally disintegrated into dust does the king come to his daughter with the news that her lover is alive, well, and has returned with his chivalric duty fulfilled; the princess’s confusion and horror are dismissed, and they are happily married. McDonald regards the change of title between de Worde’s and Copland’s editions, from Undo your door to The Squire of Low Degree, as a sign of sixteenth-century discomfort with the princess’s misdirected necrophilia, the most transgressive and interpretation-resistant part of the text – a discomfort echoed, she argues, in the readings of modern critics, who have also sought to diminish or discount the implications of ‘a narrative wholly preoccupied with desires that are out of order’.7 I want to argue something different. I think the work’s representation and management of desire is indeed a great part of its purpose; and I suggest that the way this romance establishes and then channels its dangerous desires makes most sense if we put it into conversation with the ballad. The relationship between the medieval romance and the lyrical-narrative ballad, two genres which share themes, materials, and often whole plots, is indissolubly tangled.8 In terms of extant written material, the ballad is overwhelmingly an early modern, even an eighteenth-century, phenomenon; the romance, in contrast, survives from the twelfth century onward. As such, the standard assumption has been a relationship of one-way influence between the two genres: that composers of ballads used romances as part of their source material. But there is no shortage of references, throughout the Middle Ages, 6 Nicola McDonald, ‘Desire Out of Order and Undo Your Door’, Studies in the Age of

Chaucer, 34 (2012), 247–75.

7 McDonald, ‘Desire Out of Order’, p. 252. 8 See Holger Nygard, ‘Popular Ballad and Medieval Romance’, in Folklore Interna-

tional: Essays in Traditional Literature, Belief, and Custom in Honor of Wayland Debs Hand, ed. Donald Knight Wilgus (Hatboro, PA: Folklore Associates, 1967), pp. 161–73; Thomas J. Garbáty, ‘Rhyme, Romance, Ballad, Burlesque, and the Confluence of Form’, in Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984), pp. 283–301.

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Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree to songs that sound like ballads – songs that tell complex tragic tales, of adultery or suspicion, of the visitation of ghosts, of scenes of recognition and misrecognition; songs about knights, outlaws, and adventures; songs about lovers with happy – or more often with desperate – endings. Definition is a problem here, with the (one or two) extant early texts that have been claimed as ballads often being assigned some alternative generic label.9 Scholarly opinion is partly defined by scholarly practice: those who work on the ballad tend to write in the context of its emergence as a literary phenomenon, on the entirely reasonable grounds that then there is something to write about;10 some medievalists have contrarily sought to insist that the variety of evidence for a lost tradition is too abundant to be ignored.11 Against this background, the existence of a directly related, greatly abbreviated version of The Squire of Low Degree in the Percy Folio has been described as a clear example of a romance ‘in the process of turning into a ballad’.12 I suggest, contrarily, that the romance was originally composed of raw materials drawn from both genres, stitched together in fascinating ways; it is with the short, overtly ballad-style version in the Percy Folio that these elements, and their interrelation, become clarified. I am not necessarily seeking to dispute the chronological priority of the Copland text over the Percy Folio version; rather, I am not convinced that it matters. I suggest that the barely controlled strangeness of The Squire of Low Degree can be understood and explained as the product of the poet’s cavalier deployment of tragic ballad materials inside the shell of a conventional romance. The effect is sharply revealing of narrative patterns and compulsions, and, I think, self-consciously so. Slavish intertextuality is the essential framework of the tale, whose fundamental conventionality can be symbolised for us by the woodcut cover illustration used in both sixteenth-century editions: a depiction of two lovers 9 The key example is the ‘Judas Ballad’, in the late thirteenth-century Trinity College,

Cambridge MS B.14.39: see Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, ‘Judas: The First English Ballad?’, Medium Ævum, 62 (1993), 20–34. 10 See, e.g. David C. Fowler, A Literary History of the Popular Ballad (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968); David Atkinson, The Ballad and its Pasts: Literary Histories and the Play of Memory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018). 11 See Peter Dronke, ‘Learned Lyric and Popular Ballad in the Early Middle Ages’, Studi Medievali, ser. 3, 17 (1976), 1–40; Richard Firth Green, ‘The Ballad and the Middle Ages’, in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 163–84; and Firth Green, ‘Did Chaucer Know the Ballad of Glen Kindy?’, Neophilologus, 92 (2008), 351–58. 12 Gillian Rogers, ‘The Percy Folio Manuscript Revisited’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 39–64 (p. 59); Fowler, Literary History, pp. 134–36; a detailed analysis (though drawing on some out-of-date scholarship) is offered in S. G. St Clair-Kendall, ‘Narrative Form and Mediaeval Continuity in the Percy Folio Manuscript: A Study of Selected Poems’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 1988; rev. 2007), pp. 315–33.

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Laura Ashe in a garden, with labels over their heads for their names, it was first used by de Worde for his 1517 edition of Troilus,13 and he and Copland each used it at least three times in different works.14 In the case of The Squire of Low Degree the labels above the lovers are simply left blank, resulting in an unintentional caption competition. This is not in itself a meaningful observation – sixteenth-century printers reused materials as all manufacturers do – but it does serve as a reminder of the conventions of the romance: that it does not matter who the characters are; that indeed, there aren’t any characters, just roles, ready to be played out in their set positions. In this highly self-reflexive, intertextual world, authors and printers can conjure up entire hinterlands of meaning with startling economy; even more noticeably, especially in later romance, they can move from one stock episode to another with almost comical rapidity. In this case we begin with ‘a squyer of lowe degré / That loved the kings doughter of Hungré’ (lines 1–2), and immediately we know to expect a tale in which the low-status, noble but impecunious lover proves his courtliness to admirers in the hall, establishes his knightly prowess on the battlefield, and earns the princess’s hand in marriage – no doubt with some perfidious traitors’ attempts to block the liaison, and perhaps – given the exotic location – some kind of supernatural intervention. Once we are informed of the Squire’s sufferings, seven years of undeclared love pass in a line, and then nearly forty lines are used to describe the bird-filled beauty of the garden into which he goes one day so that he can lament his love in an appropriate setting, demonstrating his innate courtliness. His cries of frankly financial woe – if only ‘I were ryche of golde and fe / That I might wedde that lady fre, / Of golde good, or some treasure, / That I myght wedde that lady floure!’ (lines 69–72) – are culturally fleshed out with a list of romance heroes he wishes to emulate – Lybius, Gawain, Guy – though a flat note is struck, purposefully or otherwise, when he wishes he had the prowess of ‘the gyaunte Syr Colbrande’ (line 82), the monstrous enemy defeated by Guy of Warwick in the defence of England. On the part either of the poet or of the Squire, we are being reminded that all famous names are to some extent interchangeable. In his love-lament in the garden, beneath the lady’s window, the Squire is staking his claim to the whole romance framework of values, in which reward is promised by entirely predictable patterns. And of course, the lady hears him: Anone that lady, fayre and fre, Undyd a pynne of yveré, And wyd the windowes she open set, The sunne shone in at her closet. In that arber fayre and gaye 13 STC 5095. 14 Siân Echard, Printing the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

2008), pp. 71, 239 n. 44.

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Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree She sawe where that squyre lay. The lady sayd to hym anone: ‘Syr, why makest thou that mone? And whi thou mournest night and day Now tell me, squyre, I thee pray.’ … The squyer set hym on hys kne, And sayde: ‘Lady, it is for thee: I have thee loved this seven yere, And bought thy love, lady, full dere…’ (lines 99–118)

The undoing of the ivory ‘pin’, the lock on the window casement, will resonate in retrospect with the urgent request to undo her door: though when the lady opens the window over her garden, all that can enter is the sun and birdsong; the door to her bower is another matter.15 The Squire next adds Christian convention to those of courtly love declaration, promising to undertake a lifelong barefoot pilgrimage if she should turn him down. Illogically, in one example of the text’s willingness flatly to present absolute paradox, he concludes his speech by asking that ‘For Hym that dyed on Good Frydaye’ she ‘Let [him] not in daunger dwell, / For His love that harowed Hell’ (lines 146–48). This is a shameless conflation of the material perils of being a pilgrim with luf-daunger, the agony of the rejected lover, which alarmingly ignores the spiritual value of devotion, or suggests that devotion’s true end is sexual consummation. The lady nonetheless happily agrees that Heaven would indeed be better served by their mutual love than by his pious self-sacrifice. However, he must win her love in the proper manner. To that end she describes his full itinerary for the next seven years, and the armour and clothing he should wear – reassuring him that she will foot the bill, promising him a thousand pounds. With this speech many critics have suggested that we must imagine a bourgeois audience being given a rapid coaching in courtly aspiration, and it certainly resembles the aspirational product-placement found in modern popular novels and films. But it is at this point that the steward spies on them, and determines to betray them to the king. It is worth noting that the narrative does not require this addition, the trope of the envious or treacherous servant. It passes unnoticed as a point of convention, but in fact there was no need for it. So far the narrative has precisely followed that of Guy of Warwick, cited by the Squire himself: a comparatively low-born man asks love of a princess, and is set the requirement of leaving to prove his worth on foreign battlefields.16 The crisis precipitated by the serv15 On this window, surveillance, and the penetration of privacy, see A. C. Spearing, The

Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love-Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 9, esp. pp. 178–80. 16 See Gui de Warewic, ed. Alfred Ewert, 2 vols (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Edouard Champion, 1933), lines 621–98, trans. Judith Weiss, in Boeve de Haumtone and Gui de Warewic: Two Anglo-Norman Romances (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and

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Laura Ashe ant, in contrast, is usual to a different narrative structure: where the lover’s prowess and status are already recognised by the whole court, and so the narrative would move smoothly to a happy conclusion without this necessary obstacle: examples include the Romance of Horn and King Horn story, or the Amis and Amilun legend of the two friends. And in fact, The Squire of Low Degree decides to have it both ways, for as the happy lover serves as usual in the hall, unaware of his impending betrayal, he suddenly exudes a ubiquitous magnetism which captures the heart of the king. He served the hall to and fro. Eche man hym loved in honesté, Hye and lowe in theyr degré. So dyd the kyng full sodenly, And he wyst not wherfore nor why. The kynge behelde the squyer wele, And all his rayment every dele. He thought he was the semylyest man That ever in the worlde he sawe or than. Thus sate the kyng and eate ryght nought, But on his squyer was all his thought. (lines 328–38)

This erotically charged regard has been described as a dangerous moment of sexual threat and hermeneutic obscurity,17 but I suggest that it is unconventional only in its directness and lack of nuance. Nakedly depicting the king’s desire for this perfect servant, itself a wish-fulfilment fantasy for an audience composed of far more squires than kings, this passage deconstructs the romance trope of winning the love of the princess, to reveal what lies behind it. As any reader of early sixteenth-century lyric knows, aspirant love is literary code for the real-world ambition of winning the favour of the king, and gaining all the wealth and status that follows. This nexus had inhabited the romance from its inception, and this particular romance does no more than bring it to the surface. Why do romance heroes fall in love with the princess? Because she is beautiful. Why is she beautiful? Because she is the female heir to a king. The goal is the patronage, and the marriage: the wealth, land, and ultimately the inheritance she brings; the bond proposed to be formed by the marriage is one between suitor and father-in-law. So much is apparent with the king’s unexpectedly positive reaction to the steward’s attempted revelation, in which he sets out with comically inappropriate equanimity – for a king – the romance ideal of a courtly and chivalric meritocracy: Renaissance Studies, 2008), pp. 103–4; cf. the Auchinleck MS Guy of Warwick in couplets, lines 511–22 [accessed 2 February 2019]. 17 McDonald, ‘Desire Out of Order’, pp. 258–59.

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Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree But yf he myght that lady wynne In wedlocke to welde, withouten synne, And yf she assent him tyll, The squyer is worthy to have none yll, For I have sene that many a page Have become men by mariage. Than it is semely that squyer To have my doughter by this manere, And eche man in his degré Become a lorde of ryaltyé, By fortune and by other grace, By herytage and by purchace. (lines 369–80)

So The Squire of Low Degree sets out its particular claim to ideological distinction: it applauds class mobility, at least on a financial level, and within a certain range of status (we cannot forget the Squire’s ‘gentle birth’). This must be rooted in the work’s very belatedness as a chivalric romance, its composition in a period of shifting and febrile categories of nobility and gentry.18 Far from the extreme social and economic elitism of the early courtly romances, which work to exclude all but the greatest aristocracy,19 this romance offers a programme of personal improvement: our courtly hero wins the favour of financial backing through his model behaviour, and with that support he can go on to win the ultimate prize. That the lady’s instructions are wholly intertextual and impractical, and her personal wealth wildly implausible, is the privilege of the romance: and in any case, her desires are shortly to be rendered immaterial; first they will be directed to an inanimate and misidentified object, and then they will crumble to nothing.

18 See Myra J. Seaman, ‘The Waning of Middle English Chivalric Romance in “The

Squyr of Lowe Degre”’, Fifteenth-Century Studies, 29 (2004), 174–99 (esp. pp. 186–87); Seth Lerer, Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 66–67; Harriet E. Hudson, ‘Construction of Class, Family, and Gender in some Middle English Popular Romances’, in Class and Gender in Early English Literature: Intersections, ed. Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 76–94. On the shifting landscape of this period see, e.g., Pamela Nightingale, ‘Knights and Merchants: Trade, Politics and the Gentry in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present, 169 (2000), 36–62; Simon J. Payling, ‘Social Mobility, Demographic Change, and Landed Society in Late Medieval England’, Economic History Review, 45 (1992), 51–73. For an overview of social and class structures in the later Middle Ages see Peter Coss, ‘An Age of Deference’, and Philippa C. Maddern, ‘Social Mobility’, in A Social History of England, 1200– 1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. M. Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 31–73, 113–33. 19 See Laura Ashe, The Oxford English Literary History vol. 1: 1000–1350. Conquest and Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 198–203.

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Laura Ashe In the approach to this crisis which is no crisis, rather like the betrayal which has no effect, the Squire – who at this point is faced with no enemies, and believes himself to be alone outside the princess’s chamber – nonetheless insists upon the life-threatening urgency of his situation: Whan that he came her chambre to, Anone he sayde: ‘Your dore undo! Undo,’ he sayde, ‘nowe, fayre lady! I am beset with many a spy. Lady as whyte as whales bone, There are thyrty agaynst me one. Undo thy dore, my worthy wyfe, I am besette with many a knyfe. Undo your dore, my lady swete, I am beset with enemyes great; And, lady, but ye wyll aryse, I shall be dead with myne enemyes. Undo thy dore, my frely floure, For ye are myne, and I am your.’ (lines 533–46)

Here I think the narrative glitch – that even though he shortly will be attacked, at this point he is apparently lying to her – is partly explained by the force of the image, of the knight begging admittance outside his lady’s locked door. As we will see, this is a recurrent scene in the ballad, and it almost always has tragic consequences. Danger is certainly in the air. Entrance to the lady’s chamber is synonymous with sex, as the king had earlier made clear in his commands to the steward: ‘So he come not her chambre within, / No bate on hym loke thou begyn; / Though that he kysse that lady fre, / And take his leave ryght curteysly’ (lines 431–4), he insists: ‘But yf he wyl her chamber breke’ (line 437) that is another matter.20 The princess is accordingly proper and stern in her response: That lady with those wordes awoke, A mantell of golde to her she toke; She sayde: ‘Go away, thou wicked wyght, Thou shalt not come here this nyght; For I wyll not my dore undo For no man that cometh therto. There is but one in Christenté That ever made that forwarde with me … Wende forth, squyer, on your waye, 20 For a nuanced reading of this relation see Megan G. Leitch, ‘Enter the Bedroom: Man-

aging Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance’, in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 39–53.

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Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree For here ye gette none other praye. For I ne wote what ye should be, That thus besecheth love of me.’ (lines 549–66)

When he then identifies himself, however, she delightedly promises him more money and loyalty, again describing at length the adventures he must undertake. Only she reserves her virginity for marriage – ‘kepe I shall my maydenhede ryght’ (line 575) – and since this conversation takes place through the door, which is never opened, we understand (if it was ever in doubt) what the chamber is substituting for, and what the king meant when he established precisely the same rules now enumerated by his daughter. The battle which ensues outside her door is briefly described; the steward left dead and disfigured on the floor, the Squire is taken ‘hole and sounde’ before the king: As soone as the kynge him spyed with eye, He sayd, ‘Welcome, sonne, sykerly! Thou hast cast thee my sonne to be: This seven yere I shall let thee.’ (lines 665–68)

This, again, is an astonishingly transparent meta-commentary on the romance genre: the purpose of the Squire’s love is to become the king’s son and heir, and it is the king who is arbiter of this possibility, not only pragmatically but emotionally. Meanwhile, the romance narrative requires some obstacle, in the king’s word some ‘let’ by which to generate the plot, and that too is to be under his control. There was, again, no need for this plot development: the princess had already directed the Squire to go and prove himself for seven years (and since the king declares his approval of the match, the story could in fact end with a marriage at this point, after the suitable diversion of the steward’s betrayal and defeat). Instead, now the narrative driver is the king’s love for his ‘sonne’, and the king’s power simply to impose a brake on proceedings. But this time lapse is purposeful: it serves to complete the process which I think is central to this romance, of removing agency from the princess and relocating it with the king. Meanwhile (quite literally: ‘Leve we here of this squyer wight, / And speake we of that lady bryght’: lines 669–70), the princess mourns over the ruined body of the steward: And in her armes she toke hym there, Into the chamber she dyd hym bere. His bowels soone she dyd out drawe, And buryed them in Goddes lawe. She sered that body with specery, With vyrgin waxe and commendry; And closed hym in a maser tre, 235

Laura Ashe And set on hym lockes thre. She put him in a marble stone, With quaynt gynnes many one, And set hym at hir beddes head, And every day she kyst that dead. (lines 683–94)

The imagery is patently allusive to her own cold virginity, locked up and sealed away from the living as she is trapped in stasis, unknowingly awaiting the moment when her father will return her lover to her. The narrative has been wrested from her, and she is left in limbo. Her grief manifests itself in the externalised, objectified cliché of the destruction of her beauty (‘Ye were whyte as whales bone, / Nowe are ye pale as any stone’: lines 711–12), and the king disingenuously begs to know the cause, asking not what grieves her, but only what kind of man has caused her grief; it is only in such relation that she exists. To this she refuses answer: ‘Gramercy, father, so mote I thryve, For I mourne for no man alyve. Ther is no man, by heven kyng, That shal knowe more of my mournynge.’ Her father knewe it every deale, But he kept it in counsele (lines 733–38)

– and the power imbalance here perpetuates this romance’s whole design, of eradicating the lady’s agency. When the king then embarks upon inordinately long descriptions of all the riches and leisure she might alternatively enjoy – for a tenth of the length of the whole poem – he seizes from her exactly the power she had previously exercised over the Squire, prescribing his chivalric identity; the king now describes what is entailed in her being a great lady. All she can respond with is stasis: ‘“Gramercy, father, so mote I the, / For all these thinges lyketh not me”’ (lines 853–54). Narrative agency is simply unavailable to her: she can (unthinkably) acquiesce in her father’s offering of wealth and comfort, thereby proving herself unworthy of her absent lover; or she can (inevitably) stay locked in her mourning. Meanwhile, unknown to her, the king releases the Squire, telling him to go on his chivalric exploits as planned, and with the king’s financial backing in place of the princess’s promised support. He is to return at an appointed time: ‘“Than shalt thou wedde my doughter dere, / And have my landes both farre and nere”’ (lines 879–80). We are told in rapid succession of the Squire’s ‘great chyvalry’ in Italy, Portugal, and Spain (lines 885–87), and his punctual return, ready for the king to draw the narrative to its conclusion. I suggest that all of this slightly skewed plot development, part clichéd, part unexpected, is a fascinatingly honest redirection of the romance. The text is pulled away from the apparently disruptive, potentially transgressive, heterosexual love impulse – a woman who can open her own door to whom she chooses – which 236

Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree purports to drive the plot. Instead the whole romance genre’s entirely conventional, homosocial foundations are exposed, and in this romance become the entire construction: now it is the king who gives the squire money, and sends him out with a chivalric itinerary, and a promise of reward at the end; it is the king who describes and promises, at vast length, all the courtly trappings of aristocratic romance life and luxury – and it is the king who eventually recounts the whole conspiracy to his bewildered daughter, after the sorry corpse of the steward has finally collapsed into bits with all her fervent kissing and handling:21 Unto that body she sayd tho: ‘Alas that we should parte in two!’ Twyse or thryse she kyssed that body, And fell in sownynge by and by. ‘Alas!’ than sayd that lady dere, I have thee kept this seven yere, And now ye be in powder small, I may no lenger holde you with all.’ (lines 925–32)

Her desire – that supposed driving force of the romance, which threatens disruption of social conventions – has effectively been turned to dust. The princess’s adoration of what she believes to be her lover’s body is evidently reminiscent of the macabre story in the Decameron, of Lisabetta’s keeping her dead lover’s head in a pot of basil, which she waters with her tears. Ultimately her brothers – who had killed her lover and hidden his body, in an attempt to hide the scandal of their relationship – take the pot away from her and flee the region. Lisabetta is not to be comforted, as the princess in Squire declares she is not: La giovane non restando di piagnere e pure il suo testo adimandando, piagnendo si morí; e cosí il suo disavventurato amore ebbe termine. Ma poi a certo tempo divenuta questa cosa manifesta a molti, fu alcuno che compuose quel la canzone la quale ancora oggi si canta.22 (The girl ceased not to weep and crave her pot, and, so weeping, died. Such was the end of her disastrous love; but not a few in course of time coming to know the truth of the affair, there was one that made the song that is still sung.)23

21 Cf. Diane Cady, The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Econ-

omy in Late Medieval England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 33–50: Cady’s argument, which I encountered only during final revisions to the present chapter, closely agrees with this reading. 22 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Vittorio Branca, 2 vols (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), Day IV, novel 5. 23 Trans. by J. M. Rigg, The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, 2 vols (London: Navarre Society, 1932), II, p. 299.

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Laura Ashe What matters here is not chiefly the theme shared by two literary texts, but Boccaccio’s reference to an old, popular song about it; he goes on to quote the first two lines, and the song survives in manuscript.24 The tale of the lady who loves a corpse is a widespread one in classical and medieval culture, as Peter Dronke has shown; the Decameron story is only the most famous and canonical of its various versions, many of which must be irretrievably lost, contained and transmitted only in song – and what we might call ballad. Furthermore (and important for what follows), often found in association with this trope is that of the lover at the door (or window), begging admittance; and the misrecognition scene, where the lover’s identity is not realised until too late.25 In the Decameron story the grieving lady does nothing but mourn her lover’s death, until her murderous brothers finally take his head away too, and she dies herself: it is a grotesque tragedy of patriarchal control over female disruptive desire. Here, in The Squire of Low Degree, the lady is held in similarly static suspension, her desire feeding on an inanimate object which is gradually consumed to dust, giving the king and Squire the necessary time to complete the romance plot. We can see that the lady’s agency is circumscribed and eradicated by this romance, even though her desires are in fact entirely in line with the romance’s idealised expectations. She is not trusted to be an independent agent – she had originally planned, as indeed happens, to wait seven years for the Squire to prove himself abroad, but instead of that being the product of her narrative design, it is appropriated by the king, while she is duped into safe, solitary containment, spending seven years adoring a corpse. Her helplessness is finally signified by her passionate but ineffectual decision to remove herself from the world of the romance – ‘Fy on this worldes vanyté! / Farewell golde pure and fyne …’ (lines 940–41). She declares that she will become an anchorite, a hermit walled up into a cell, dedicated to prayer. What sounds like a pious moment of self-determination is immediately discarded by the plot’s happy ending: under the king’s control the Squire returns, a champion of chivalry, and they are happily married. At this point – remembering the Decameron story’s declared origins in popular song – I want to explore this romance’s involvement with the ballad genre, by means of a comparison between the Squire, the abbreviated version contained in the Percy Folio, and another poem, also found in the Percy Folio. This is a medieval English ballad (also extant in Scottish versions) that I suggest should be regarded as an analogue to our romance:26

24 Dronke, ‘Learned Lyric and Popular Ballad’, p. 33. 25 Dronke, ‘Learned Lyric and Popular Ballad’, pp. 17–22, 31–33. 26 ‘Glasgerion’, Child ballad 67.

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Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree Glasgerion was a kings owne sonne, and a harper he was good, he harped in the kings Chamber where cappe & candle yoode, & soe did hee in the Queens chamber till ladies waxed wood; And then bespake the Kings daughter, & these words thus sayd shee, saide, ‘strike on, strike on, Glasgerrion, of thy striking doe not blinne, theres neuer a stroke comes ouer this harpe but it glads my hart within.’ ‘faire might you fall, Lady!’ quoth hee, ‘who taught you now to speake? I haue loued you, Lady, 7 yeere; my hart I durst neere breake.’ (lines 1–16)27

The lady immediately makes a pact with him: but, unfortunately, Glasgerion then tells his servant about the proposed meeting, ordering him to wake his lord at the appropriate time: ‘but come to my bower, my Glasgerryon, when all men are att rest; as I am a lady true of my promise, thou shalt bee a welcome guest.’ but whom then came Glasgerryon, a glad man, Lord, was hee, ‘and come thou hither, Iacke, my boy, Come hither vnto mee, ‘for the Kings daughter of Normandye, her loue is granted mee, & att her chamber must I bee beffore the cocke haue crowen.’ … but vpp then rose that Lither ladd, and did on hose & shoone, A coller he cast vpon his necke, hee seemed a gentleman.

27 ‘Glasgerion’, in Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript: Ballads and Romances, ed. John W.

Hales and Frederick J. Furnivall, 3 vols (London: N. Trübner, 1867–8), I, pp. 246–52.

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Laura Ashe & when he came to that Ladies chamber, he thrild vpon a pinn. the Lady was true of her promise, rose vp & lett him in. (lines 17–40)

An extremely unpleasant rape scene follows: he did not take the lady gay to boulster nor noe bedd, but downe vpon her chamber flore full soone he hath her layd. he did not kisse that Lady gay when he came nor when he youd; & sore mistrusted that Lady gay he was of some churles blood. but home then came that Lither ladd, & did of his hose & shoone, & cast that Coller from about his necke, – he was but a churles sonne: – ‘awaken,’ quoth hee, ‘my Master deere, ‘I hold it time to be gone …’ but vp then rose good Glasgerryon, & did on both hose and shoone, & cast a Coller about his necke, He was a Kinges sonne. (lines 41–62)

When Glasgerion comes to her door and begs entry, she lets him in, and then asks why he has returned. When she discovers how she has been deceived, she kills herself in horror: ‘then shee pulld forth a litle pen-kniffe / that hanged by her knee, / says, “there shall neuer noe churles blood / spring within my body”’ (lines 77–80). Glasgerion returns to his quarters, kills the servant, and kills himself: & he puld out his bright browne sword, & dryed it on his sleeue, & he smote off that lither ladds head, & asked noe man noe leaue. he sett the swords point till his brest, the pumill till a stone: thorrow that falseness of that lither ladd these 3 liues werne all gone! (lines 89–96)

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Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree This ballad is centred on the penetration of the lady’s chamber, which is to say, the penetration of her body. The deaths of the two lovers are the result of the evil cunning of the servant – against whom in other versions of the ballad the princess explicitly warns Glasgerion, just as the princess in the Squire explicitly warns him against the Steward. But this ending is also the result of two other mechanisms. First, grimly, it is the consequence of the lady’s desiring agency, her willingness to allow her lover into her chamber. Second, notably, it is about honour and status – the churl’s son and the king’s son, the princess who will not have her body defiled by bearing the child of a servant. At every point there is a direct comparison with the Squire of Low Degree: repeatedly the text deploys these same tropes and yet defuses them, evades their tragic consequences: now we have the chamber door which never opens to admit a lover, only a misidentified corpse; a treacherous servant whose desire to cause harm is rendered powerless; a protagonist explicitly identified as impoverished, as not a king’s son, who dons borrowed clothes, and yet – in The Squire – who thereby comes to be a king’s son. The much-abbreviated version of The Squire in the Percy Folio has close verbal and structural parallels with Glasgerion, its companion in the manuscript, and with ballads in general. The dialogue between the king and his daughter is significantly more effective for adopting the ballad genre’s characteristic repetition and refrain: ‘Daughter,’ hee sais, ‘to-morrow I will a hunting fare, And thou shalt ryde uppon thy chaire. And thou shalt stand in such a place And see thirty harts come all in a chase.’ ‘Father,’ shee sayes, ‘godamercye, But all this will not comfort mee.’ ‘Daughter,’ he sais, ‘thou shalt sitt att thy meate, And see the fishes in the floud leape.’ ‘Father,’ shee sais, ‘godamercy, But all this will not comfort mee.’ ‘Thy sheetes they shall be of the Lawne, Thy blanketts of the fine fustyan.’ ‘Father,’ shee sais, ‘godamercy, But all this will not comfort mee.’ ‘And to thy bed I will thee bring Many torches faire burninge.’ ‘Father,’ shee sais, ‘godamercy, But all this will not comfort mee.’ ‘If thou cannott sleepe, nor rest take, Thou shalt have minstrells with thee to wake.’ ‘Father,’ shee sais, ‘godamercy, But all this will not comfort mee.’ 241

Laura Ashe ‘Peper and cloves shall be burninge, That thou maist feele the sweet smellinge.’ ‘Father,’ shee sais, ‘godamercy, But all this will not comfort mee.’ (lines 127–52)28

Noticeably the exchange is different in content as well as form: here the king moves on from the descriptions of leisured wealth which fill a hundred lines of the long version, to hint instead at psychological trauma and a hidden tragedy. Ballads are characteristically so constructed, composed of dramatic – and often opaque – dialogue, and sudden action; typically, their suspenseful, questioning repetition is ended by eventual revelation, twists of expectation, and awful tragedy.29 As I observed earlier, beside and associated with the tale of the lady who adores her lover’s corpse, Dronke has traced the tropes of the man begging admittance at the door, and the misrecognition of a lover, to songs from early medieval Europe. They are a common feature in Scottish and English ballads preserved in writing from the seventeenth century onward: the dramatic scene of a man’s begging entrance to the lady’s chamber, her admitting him, his hiding in there, men hunting for him; sometimes the lady returns to the chamber only for him to kill her, whether intentionally or otherwise; sometimes she releases him and tells him it is safe to flee, only for him to be killed by his pursuers. The theme recurs, and it is always associated with tragedy.30 ‘Glasgerion’, then, is an example of something widespread. It is not clear whether the author of The Squire of Low Degree could have known the ballad ‘Glasgerion’ in anything like the form we have in the Percy Folio; but it is certainly possible.31 More importantly, it seems to me very likely that the romance poet knew, and drew upon, ballads and songs that are now unavailable to us. Piecing together the evidence, we can see that his themes, even at their most outlandish, were a part of oral medieval culture, and in some cases had been so for many centuries. The Squire of Low Degree playfully responds to some of the eeriest and most chilling themes of ancient songs and contemporary ballads; the death and embalmed corpse of the steward absorb the death-drive of the story, and we watch it fall into dust, to be swept away. ‘Undo your door’ is not a title for a romance; it is a ballad meme of threat, danger, and tragedy. But this romance 28 The Squier of Low Degree, Percy Folio, ed. Kooper, in Sentimental and Humorous

Romances.

29 See, for example, the devastating twists which are revealed in Child ballads 12 and 13,

‘Edward’ / ‘My Son David’, and ‘Lord Randall’.

30 Other examples include Child 88, ‘Young Johnstone’, and Child 73, ‘Lord Thomas and

Annet’, and their variants.

31 Richard Firth Green has used various medieval references to the character to argue

for great longevity to the ballad, also known as ‘Glascurion’ and ‘Glen Kindy’: ‘Did Chaucer know the ballad of Glen Kindy?’

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Romancing the Ballad in The Squire of Low Degree not only rewrites the tragic ballad of ‘Glasgerion’ with its happy ending: it directly attacks that ballad’s central concern, which is to launch vituperative condemnation of the evil churl’s conduct in destroying the princess and the son of a king. Nobility is the highest virtue in ‘Glasgerion’, and the protagonists die for it. In The Squire of Low Degree, as the newer title suggests, it is not nobility but its threatening opposite, upward mobility, which is made central and celebrated. But, in contrast, I would add that I think the misogyny implicit in the ballad has become explicit, and explicitly acted upon, in the romance. Where the ballad tacitly invoked the dangers of female sexual agency, the lady’s willingness to open the door, it nevertheless squarely lands the blame on the villainous servant. The romance instead removes female sexual agency entirely, and with it, female agency of all presently available kinds. In The Squire of Low Degree, in both its longer romance and its short ballad form, the conventions of romance are allowed to overwhelm all others: tragedy is forestalled. Female agency is rescued from disaster, but only at the cost of its complete eradication. Ambitious, young, upwardly mobile men are encouraged in their quest to win, not the lady, but all that she represents. If The Squire of Low Degree does not predate the manuscript and print survivors of its ballad analogues, I nevertheless think it cannot be disputed that it must post-date their lost relatives and ancestors. In the case of this romance, I think the ballad came first – and that the author had a great deal of fun adapting it. How much fun we have in reading it, and at what distance we might want to hold it, is another matter.

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13 Merchants in Shining Armour: Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility in Late Middle English Romance MEGAN G. LEITCH

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his chapter analyses how merchant characters intervene in romance narratives, and how their interventions offer ideological challenges that reflect on the changing production and reception of romances in late medieval England. In so doing, it addresses this volume’s concerns with translatio as movement of power (in the appropriation of romance and its tropes to offer a critique informed by changing social structures and class politics) and also as movement of texts (in terms of the writing of late romances and their readership and circulation). From the perspective of medieval authorities, merchants are generally viewed with some mistrust or hostility, and the same goes for merchants in romance. However, in some late Middle English romances, merchants come across rather more positively than is generally the case in the genre. Emaré, Sir Degaré, Octavian, and Valentine and Orson all feature merchants who seem to be motivated by altruism rather than by avarice. Yet the ideological challenges romance merchants pose are manifested when they help central characters, at least as much as when they hinder them. In these romances, it is when men of aristocratic status behave badly – and towards ladies in particular – that merchants step in to help or rescue the lady. I approach these cases in which merchants rescue princesses as examples of what I shall call a motif of merchants in shining armour, and expose the ways in which, through this motif, late Middle English romance is transformed or troubled by contact with new (or newly powerful) class-based ideological agendas. The final portion of this chapter assesses how the manuscript history of these four romances suggests that late Middle English romance evolved to be especially receptive to the class-centred critique these merchants offer. Emaré, Sir Degaré, Octavian, and Valentine and Orson were all either copied or composed between the mid-fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, and their popularity coincides with shifts in social power. During this period, more merchants were increasingly reading and owning romances and merchants 245

Megan G. Leitch were also increasingly intermingling with the knightly classes, and/or being knighted themselves. In this context, the rewriting of the romance trope of knights rescuing damsels in distress to instead feature merchants rescuing damsels in distress reads as a political transformation or translation of the expectations of the genre. These merchant-centred episodes suggest a critique, and perhaps also a recentring, of chivalry; their celebration of mercantile integrity (rather than avarice or cunning) rewrites the expectations of romance and renegotiates the politics of social mobility at a time when merchants had expanding opportunities to aspire to be, or to imagine themselves as, part of the knightly classes – but without losing their identity as merchants. Emaré and Sir Degaré, which have no known direct sources, differ in this from earlier French romances that more unambiguously celebrate the exploits of the aristocracy (and only the aristocracy), and the analogues to Emaré show that the latter’s positive portrayal of its merchant is unique among Constance narratives. Moreover, the English versions of Octavian are open to the merchant’s social integration or mobility in ways that their French source is not; and Valentine and Orson, as a romance featuring a thoroughly admirable merchant, is a selective translation from French in the early sixteenth century – a time when merchants had recently gained more social respectability, as well as power. In later medieval England, then, as the audience for romances specifically in English (as opposed to England’s other vernacular, French) expanded to embrace new social strata in the gentry and then also the bourgeoisie,1 the political translation undertaken by these four relatively understudied romances often capitalised upon the opportunities extended by linguistic translation, whether directly or otherwise. From the perspective of the aristocracy and of chivalric romance, the genre that has most been seen to reflect the status quo of aristocratic power,2 medieval merchants were traditionally treated with disdain that either did not account for, or sought to counter, their importance in society. As Roger Ladd observes, ‘merchants were a paradox in medieval society, and wielded power and influence far in advance of their social status’.3 Merchants, that is, were resented for their wealth and perceived greed as ‘powerful commoners 1 While later Middle English romance was read by a wider social spectrum, Carol Meale

cautions against the outdated view that audiences for Middle English romance were necessarily less sophisticated than the (earlier) audiences of Anglo-Norman romance: Carol M. Meale, ‘Gode men / Wiues maydnes and alle men: Romance and its Audiences’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 209–25 (esp. p. 211). 2 Stephen Knight, ‘The Social Function of the Middle English Romances’, in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History, ed. David Aers (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), pp. 99–122. 3 Roger A. Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 1.

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Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility in an age of aristocrats, international operators in an age of dangerous travel, [and] city-dwellers within a predominantly rural population’.4 Or, as a fourteenth-century sermon puts it somewhat more pejoratively, ‘God made the Clergy, Knights and Labourers, but the Devil made the Burghers and Usurers.’5 This utterance demonises merchants and money-lenders perhaps more literally than others, but late medieval anti-mercantile satire was widespread, assuming a familiar form in Chaucer’s depiction of the Canterbury Tales’ Merchant as a self-serving, profit-seeking, and potentially deceitful problem.6 In the portrait, Chaucer mocks the Merchant’s concern with ostentatious fashions and with ‘th’encrees of his wynnyng’, as profit – rather than the common good – is shown to be his highest priority.7 Chaucer was himself, of course, a member of a mercantile family who rose to serve in aristocratic courts; yet, at the end of the fourteenth century, Chaucer’s Merchant is a representative sore thumb in the increasingly obsolescent, yet still potent, tripartite model of the body politic as symbiotic and the social hierarchy as fixed. The aristocracy and gentry, with their prestige and their control of the means of production, both derived from the ownership of land, resented, feared, and disparaged the ‘new money’ which merchants derived from exchange of capital and which could give them power that outstripped their traditional place in society. Merchants also served as a focal point for wider cultural anxieties about religion and race in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.8 However, in the later Middle Ages, and especially from the fifteenth century onwards, the gentry increasingly intermarried with merchant families,9 with both sides profiting from the interchange – the former gaining wealth, and the latter gaining social status. 4 Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature, p. 1. 5 Sermon in London, British Library, Harley MS 268; ed. and trans. G. R. Owst, Liter6 7 8

9

ature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn 1966), pp. 352–61. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 99–103. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), ‘General Prologue’, line 275. For instance, in London during the reign of Richard II, Lombard merchants were conflated with Jews and Saracens and viewed as ‘secret spies’ and enemies of the English: see Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘Jews and Saracens in Chaucer’s England: A Review of the Evidence’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 27 (2005), 125–69. Some Middle English romances participate in this xenophobic view of merchants, as when Floris and Blanchefleur depicts merchants as oriental stereotypes, or when the Mandeville-author writes of the Sultan’s men disguising themselves as merchants in order to gather intelligence in European ports about their Christian enemies. Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 16–17.

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Megan G. Leitch While recent studies have considered merchant perspectives or ideologies in late medieval English literature, focusing on texts such as Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ and ‘Shipman’s Tale’, the Book of Margery Kempe, and William Caxton’s paratexts and manuals,10 less attention has been given to merchants in Middle English romance.11 This is despite the fact that, as has been observed by Carol Meale and others, in the later Middle Ages – and especially in the fifteenth century and on into the sixteenth – merchants were increasingly owning and reading romances,12 and merchants do indeed feature in the genre. Typical roles for romance merchants, however, are not especially complimentary – particularly in earlier romances – and include acting as somewhat malign meddlers or sources of information. In romances such as Floris and Blancheflour and the stanzaic Guy of Warwick, for instance (both translated into English c. 1300 from earlier French sources), aristocratic youths are sold to or abducted by merchants, who show no moral scruples about treating these scions as commodities to be transported and exchanged for profit, just as though they were any other type of goods. And in Sir Tristrem (thirteenth century) or Charlemagne romances such as the Sultan of Babylon (c. 1400), merchants’ alterity is emphasised by the way in which knights disguise themselves as merchants to escape detection or infiltrate enemy strongholds. The guise of a merchant is useful here because merchants are expected to move relatively freely, and because they are not seen as aggressors or as military threats; they are so different from knights that no one can see the chivalric reality hiding behind the mercantile veneer.13 Meanwhile, in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale or the couplet Guy of Warwick (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), merchants, as travellers, are bearers of tales – they offer information about events or people elsewhere that propels the action. And when the merchants in the couplet Guy of Warwick talk to Guy about Constantinople, they urge him to go there to help them, because they have been forced out of Constantinople and lost their trade: thus, in asking for a knight’s help, these merchants are, stereotypically, motivated by 10 Jonathan Hsy, Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature

(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013); Tracy Adams, ‘“Noble, wyse and grete lordes, gentilmen and marchauntes”: Caxton’s Prologues as Conduct Books for Merchants’, Parergon, 22.2 (2005), 53–76; and Helen Fulton, ‘Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 36.4 (2002), 311–28. 11 The merchant in Sir Amadace is an exception: see Michael Johnston, ‘Knights and Merchants Unite: Sir Amadace, the Grateful Dead, and the Moral Exemplum Tradition’, Neophilologus, 92.4 (2008), 735–44, and James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution: 1350–1547 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 266–70. 12 Carol M. Meale, ‘The Middle English Romance of Ipomedon: A Late Medieval “Mirror” for Princes and Merchants’, Reading Medieval Studies, 10 (1984), 136–91. 13 Romance merchants’ alterity is also sometimes racialised or religiously demarcated, as, for example, in Richard Coeur de Lyon and Mandeville’s Travels, where Saracen merchants feature, as discussed in note 8 above.

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Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility profit, by the desire for an advantageous exchange of capital. Michael Johnston points out that while ‘merchants figure as stock characters in a number of romances, particularly Sir Launfal […] and Octavian […], the consistent implication in those texts is that merchants and knights speak different “economic languages,” that the economy of capital exchange and the economy of aristocratic gift-giving are mutually exclusive’.14 For Johnston, the merchant in Sir Amadace is an anomaly, because the merchant helps the knight protagonist: the text’s ‘didacticism is couched within a cross-class affinity between knight and merchant, a remarkable feature’.15 Johnston convincingly argues that this is a positive view of a romance merchant, and of a knight–merchant relationship, that is unique in romance. However, on the other hand, this merchant is not actually portrayed positively until he is dead, when he returns as ‘the quite knyghte’ (line 445), or white knight, socially elevated and with his money-grubbing past whitewashed by his new appearance and title.16 In return for Amadace’s generosity in paying for the dead, indebted merchant’s burial without any expectation of a return, the white knight, as the merchant’s ghost, helps the protagonist to rebuild his fortunes; however, the white knight stipulates that: a forwart make I with the or that thu goe, That evyn to part betwene us toe The godus thu hase wonun and spedde. (lines 502–4)

Thus, Amadace, dependent on a loan and required to pay exactly what he owes, must, as James Simpson observes, ‘act like a merchant’, revealing ‘an intimate connection between knighthood and merchants’.17 Moreover, Amadace’s merchant is still motivated by profit, since he wants to keep half the winnings – up to the point of almost requiring Amadace to chop his wife in two. From this representative survey of merchants in Middle English romance, it is clear that the genre does not usually portray merchants as respected or admirable figures. As the example of Sir Amadace shows, the only good merchant is a dead merchant. This parallels the logic by which Slavoj Žižek posits that ‘the only good woman is a dead woman’: that is, the male gaze seeks to dismiss or contain potentially co-dependent desiring subjects by which male identity (or in this case, aristocratic, armigerous male identity) is threatened.18 With that generic view of merchants in mind, this chapter focuses on some late Middle English romances where merchants come across rather more positively. In the fourteenth- or 14 Johnston, ‘Knights and Merchants Unite’, p. 736. 15 Johnston, ‘Knights and Merchants Unite’, p. 736. 16 Sir Amadace, in Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace, ed. Edward E.

Foster (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2007).

17 Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, p. 269. 18 See Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, dir. Sophie Fiennes (UK: Mischief

Films and Amoeba Films, 2006).

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Megan G. Leitch fifteenth-century romances Emaré, Sir Degaré, Octavian, and Valentine and Orson, the representation of merchants – live merchants – departs from the genre’s conventional depictions of merchants as human traffickers, infiltrators, or informants. And whereas in Guy of Warwick we find merchants in distress, needing to be championed by a knight, in the romances addressed here, merchants instead are the rescuers, offering succour to wronged ladies and/or to their sons. If, as Johnston argues, the knight–merchant relationship in Sir Amadace is a striking anomaly in chivalric literature, the princess–merchant relationships that feature in texts such as Emaré and Valentine and Orson are similarly striking in their (more frequently developed) departures from the norm. The late fourteenth-century Emaré has no extant source, and, as a Constance narrative (although under a different name), it offers a conspicuous departure from its analogues to portray a merchant in a more benevolent role. Other Constance narratives do include merchants, but, unlike Emaré, not as a saviour figure. Merchants feature as tale-tellers in the versions of this narrative by Chaucer and Gower. In Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’, for example, the story opens with, and is instigated by, ‘Surryen marchantz’ who tell the sultan of Syria about Dame Custance in such a way that he wants to marry her.19 The tales these merchants carry with their cargo have ill-fortuned consequences for Constance, but they constitute a typical form of medieval information dissemination, as merchant travellers were able to bear stories as well as items for sale. Similarly, albeit on a different narrative level, Chaucer’s Man of Law also claims that he obtained the story of Constance from a merchant (and has thus managed to find at least one story that Chaucer has not yet told). As Jonathan Hsy argues, both Chaucer and Gower depart from their shared Anglo-Norman source, Les Chroniques of Nicholas Trevet, in a way that ‘transform[s] Constance’s story from a cleric’s narrative into a merchant’s tale’.20 However, in these analogues for Emaré, while merchants (inadvertently) endanger the princess, it is a noble senator who rescues her. The emperor of Rome sends a senator to avenge his daughter Constance; Chaucer’s senator discovers her in the boat in which she has been cast adrift from her marriage, and, although he does not know who she is, rescues her: This senatour […] mette the ship dryvynge, as seith the storie, In which Custance sit ful pitously. […] He bryngeth hire to Rome, and to his wyf He yaf hire, and hir yonge sone also; And with the senatour she ladde hir lyf.21 19 Chaucer, ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, II.153. 20 Hsy, Trading Tongues, p. 73. 21 Chaucer, ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, II.967–76. Gower’s rescuer is also a senator.

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Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility Here, the generosity and integrity to rescue and provide shelter for a princess reside in the senator, as a representative of the aristocracy. Nobility of spirit is found, as the ideology of the late medieval ruling classes would expect, in those of noble status. However, by contrast, in Emaré the protagonist is instead rescued by a merchant who takes her in when she is washed ashore at Rome: A marchaunte dwelled yn that cyté, A ryche mon of golde and fee, Jurdan was hys name. Every day wolde he Go to playe hym by the see, The eyer forto tane. […] Up he toke that fayre ladye And the yonge chylde her by, And hom he gan hem lede. When he come to hys byggynge, He welcomed fayr that lady yynge That was fayr and bryght; And badde hys wyf yn all thynge, Mete and drynke forto brynge To the lady ryght. (lines 685–714)22

This helpful, courteous merchant Jordan and his wife give Emaré and her son somewhere to live for seven years. The unusual choice to have the rescuer be a merchant in Emaré, as a departure from the analogues, seems to signal a criticism of aristocratic men. Emaré’s merchant is not only generous in his largesse (an action elsewhere the preserve of the aristocracy); he also safeguards Emaré. The support and protection that the merchant offers Emaré is in distinct contrast to the behaviour of her husband, the king of Wales, and her father, the emperor: those chivalric men who wronged her by casting her adrift, or who, not giving her a chance to speak in her own defence against the wrongful charges of which she was accused, failed to protect her from exile. Intriguingly, there is a similar critique in Sir Degaré and in Valentine and Orson: when, as in Emaré, men of aristocratic status behave badly – and towards ladies in particular – it is similarly merchants who step in to help or rescue the lady. Like Emaré, Sir Degaré is a fourteenth-century English romance with no known source, though some think it may be based on a lost Breton lay. In this story in which the protagonist is born of rape in the forest of adventure, the knight who becomes the protagonist’s father evidently behaves very problematically. Although the text emphasises at some length that this knight is both attractive and noble, ‘Of countenaunce right curteis’ (line 94), 22 Emaré, in The Middle English Breton Lays, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kal-

amazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995).

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Megan G. Leitch it also leaves no doubt about the fact that when he finds the princess alone in the forest, he forces her against her will, telling her: ‘Thou best mi lemman ar thou go, Wether the liketh wel or wo.’ Tho nothing ne coude do she But wep and criede and wolde fle; And he anon gan hire at holde, And dide his wille, what he wolde. He binam hire here maidenhod. (lines 107–13)23

Rather than protecting a princess as he ought, this knight assaults her. While the protagonist Degaré is fathered by this abusive representative of the chivalric classes, Degaré is raised by a merchant who becomes his foster father, and who is a positive influence. A hermit initially shelters the baby Degaré when his mother, fearing her own father’s wrath if he were to discover her pregnancy, is forced to abandon him, and: The heremite that was holi of lif Hadde a soster that was a wif; A riche marchaunt of that countré Hadde hire ispoused into that cité. To hire that schild he sente tho Bi his knave, and the silver also, And bad here take gode hede Hit to foster and to fede. (lines 259–66)

Here, a merchant’s wealth and civic milieu, and a merchant’s wife’s care, provide a nurturing environment for a chivalric scion; the pair raise Degaré to be a right-thinking and successful knight. Young Degaré believes the merchant is his real father: He wende wel that the gode man Had ben his fader that him wan, And the wif his moder also, And the hermite his unkel bo. (lines 279–82)

Although Degaré then learns of his real parentage when he reads a letter from his mother at the age of twenty, the text’s focus on how the ‘gode’ bourgeois couple look after Degaré suggests that nurture is at least as important as nature in producing a good knight, and foregrounds bourgeois virtue in contrast with the unethical behaviour of Degaré’s aristocratic father. In Octavian, a merchant similarly serves as a foster father, as discussed later – 23 Sir Degaré, in The Middle English Breton Lays.

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Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility and although, unlike in Emaré, in Degaré and Octavian the merchants do not give shelter to a wronged lady as well as to her son, nonetheless, they do still intervene generously, giving much-needed shelter after a lady has been wronged. Another strong link between a calumniated woman and a merchant saviour features in Valentine and Orson, translated by Henry Watson and printed by Wynkyn de Worde in the first decade of the sixteenth century.24 This romance is about the twin sons of the emperor of Constantinople, who are separated from their parents – and from each other – in infancy and grow into very different adults. Valentine is taken in as a fosterling by King Pepin of France, while Orson, as his name suggests, is raised by a bear. King Pepin is Valentine’s uncle, but neither of them is aware that they are related; Valentine seems to prove that he must be of high birth by the combination of his battlefield prowess and his gentle behaviour. But this romance does not reproduce the Fair Unknown meme of inevitable nobility straightforwardly, since Orson, although by birth indistinguishable from Valentine, shares only his brother’s abilities as a warrior, and is otherwise as savage ‘as a wylde beest’ until his brother manages to partially domesticate him.25 Valentine’s twin brother, then, effectively serves as a ‘control group’, demonstrating how little of Valentine’s virtue is in fact due to inheritance. While the narrative perhaps displays a certain desire to present Valentine’s virtue and nobility as innate, the example of Orson, who has received the same inputs as Valentine but has missed out on the civilising process,26 suggests that it is the influence of the French court, rather than Valentine’s blood, that underpins his virtue. Here, then, character is shown to be a product of nurture, rather than nature; aristocratic nature, when left to itself, produces the brutish Orson. Gentility, then, does not necessarily manifest itself where it should.27

24 Helen Cooper, ‘The Strange History of Valentine and Orson’, in Tradition and Trans-

formation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 153–68. 25 Henry Watson, Valentine and Orson, p. 67.28. The late fifteenth-century French source was printed in 1489. 26 That Middle English literature contributes to what Norbert Elias has termed ‘the civilising process’ has been demonstrated by Ad Putter, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. p. 7; see also Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols (1939; Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 27 This is a somewhat Chaucerian view (reminiscent, for instance, of the Loathly Lady’s speech in the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’) that is in fact often manifested in mid-to-late fifteenth-century English prose romances: see Megan G. Leitch, ‘“Of his ffader spak he no thing”: Family Resemblance and Anxiety of Influence in the Prose Romances’, in Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper, ed. Andrew King and Matthew Woodcock (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), pp. 55–72.

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Megan G. Leitch This deficiency seems particularly telling alongside this romance’s intriguing instance of gentility appearing where it is not expected. A distinctly non-aristocratic merchant assumes the role of chivalric defender in this romance, not once but twice. When a squire has difficulty fighting off the wicked archbishop who – dressed ‘in the habyte of a knyght’ – assaults the empress of Constantinople, ‘a notable marchaunt’ comes to the rescue.28 The merchant: had grete pyte on her/ and sayd to the Archebysshop. Syr leve your enterpryse/ and touche not the lady/ for and the Emperoure knewe of this dede/ he wolde make you deye an evyll dethe before all the worlde. Also soone as the Archebisshoppe under stode the marchaunt speke/ he lefte the batayll quyckly and began for to fle thorughe the wodde.29

It is speech rather than combat that overcomes the archbishop here. Equally significantly, it is the merchant’s intervention, rather than the aristocratic squire’s, that saves the empress. The way in which the narrator emphasises that the archbishop is dressed as a knight in this encounter sharpens the contrast between chivalric abuse of a lady and bourgeois integrity and deliverance. In addition to taking on what would traditionally be a knight’s rescuing role in the forest, the merchant further inhabits the chivalric role by undertaking a trial by battle to save the empress from the archbishop’s false accusation of adultery. During an arduous judicial combat, the merchant falls off his horse and is dragged along the ground by it: his foot gets caught in the stirrup, and ‘the marchaunt was so trailed through the fielde that his horse foundred and fell down. And when the horse was down the marchaunt rose up that was valiaunt and hardy.’30 As this demonstrates, the merchant is not exactly the most adept chevalier; however, despite this setback, he is eventually victorious. Clearly, his victory is due to the justice of his cause, and his bravery, rather than his ability as a warrior. He is no Lancelot; he does not possess superlative martial prowess that could complicate perceptions of a just outcome to a trial by combat. But what this merchant lacks in the physical skills associated with chivalry, he makes up for in terms of the virtues: his behaviour is shaped by a firm sense of right and wrong. Valentine and Orson’s merchant, then, is effectively the opposite of a Fair Unknown such as Perceval, who has all the skill and ability of a knight but needs to learn the values according to which he should apply his skills. In the fourteenth-century Middle English Perceval of Galles, when Perceval first encounters three of Arthur’s knights, he does not even know what knights are, and has to be disabused of the notion that they are deities: 28 Henry Watson, Valentine and Orson, ed. Arthur Dickson, EETS o.s. 204 (London: Ox-

ford University Press, 1937), pp. 26.13 and 30.9.

29 Valentine and Orson, p. 30.18–24. 30 Valentine and Orson, p. 49.18–21.

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Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility Than saide the fole one the filde, Was comen oute of the woddes wilde, To Gawayne that was meke and mylde And softe to ansuare, ‘I sall sla yow all three Bot ye smertly now telle mee Whatkyns thynges that ye bee, Sen ye no goddes are.’31

Here, in contrast to the merchant, Perceval has the ability to fight but not (yet) to perceive right and wrong – or much else, for that matter – correctly. The merchant in Valentine and Orson, on the other hand, knows his right and wrong, and is determined to put his life on the line for it, even if he is not a skilled fighter. In this section of Valentine and Orson it is not a knight but, rather, a merchant who has ethically motivated martial adventures, and who does so in the traditionally chivalric spaces of the forest of romance and the tournament grounds.32 This geographical encroachment – when a merchant inhabits spaces that are customarily occupied by knights and from which merchants were usually excluded – allegorises the increase in social mobility in the later Middle Ages, when the bourgeoisie cultivated new opportunities to move into the spaces and roles that were traditionally the preserve of the aristocracy. Moreover, and perhaps most pointedly, that it is not a knight but, rather, a merchant who risks his life for what is right, for the sake of a wronged lady, suggests that chivalric behaviour can be learned or acquired by those of lower status (rather than being an innate and exclusive quality of the upper classes), and also that martial ability may not be the most important part of chivalric behaviour. Valentine and Orson’s ‘notable marchaunt’, while rewarded with wealth and favour for his actions and knighted by the emperor before the trial by combat, continues to be called ‘the merchant’ throughout the further six pages of the EETS edition in which he takes centre stage.33 The narrator specifies that ‘Themperour made him knight & promised him cyties townes & castelles and great possessions’ (47.11–13), and his brother-in-law King Pepin of France adds that he will ‘rewarde the so highly that in all my courte thou shalt be the greatest’.34 The merchant (now also a knight) replies, ‘Syr sayde the marchaunt I thank you’, and then the trial by combat between the ‘Archebysshop’ and the ‘marchaunt’ occupies a full four pages of the EETS edition.35 Middle 31 Sir Perceval of Galles, in Sir Perceval of Galles and Ywain and Gawain, ed. Mary

Flowers Braswell (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), pp. 289–96.

32 Corinne Saunders, The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden

(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993).

33 Valentine and Orson, pp. 47–52. 34 Valentine and Orson, p. 48.1–2. 35 Valentine and Orson, p. 48.2; see pp. 48–52.

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Megan G. Leitch English romance often offers a reductive silencing of difference, as when, for instance, virtuous and valiant Saracen knights such as Thomas Malory’s Priamus and Palomydes become Christians and members of the Round Table: since they are good fighters, since they have the same virtues as Arthur’s knights, they are not allowed to remain ideologically different. While Malory inherited the basis for these incorporations from his sources, his text goes further: for instance, whereas in the Alliterative Morte Arthure Priamus is christened and fights on behalf of King Arthur, in Malory’s Morte Darthur Priamus is also explicitly made a knight of the Round Table, enshrining him within the core chivalric community in a way that seeks to efface his othered origins. Here, late English romance does not display an increasing latitude or comfort level with regard to difference, for some types of Other at least; by contrast, however, in its treatment of the merchant, Valentine and Orson allows chivalric virtue to belong to the middle classes (even when undertaking a specifically knightly duty, in a trial by combat) without retracting or fully assimilating it afterward. The distinctiveness of Valentine and Orson’s portrayal amongst romances is pointed up all the more by the partial parallel with the Middle English Octavian, which survives in two versions that differ in dialect, form, and some details, but that both date from the mid-fourteenth century. Like Valentine and Orson, Octavian features a calumniated queen and twin sons separated from their parents and each other at birth (and, in this case, both of them are raised by animals, at least initially). The son who becomes the principal protagonist in this romance, Florent, is later taken in by the merchant Clement: here again, as in Sir Degaré, a merchant serves as a foster father. Florent is another permutation of the Fair Unknown trope of inevitable nobility; Florent eschews his ostensible father’s trade, in parallel with a Fair Unknown such as Malory’s Sir Torre, who is raised by a peasant family but, unlike the family’s other sons, is unwilling to undertake agricultural labour, preferring martial endeavour. Florent, however, is portrayed as failing to be strategic in the ways that a merchant would, as he repeatedly buys the wrong thing and/or fails to drive a good bargain. The text acknowledges the advantages of Clement’s views on these choices, suggesting that Octavian is willing to include critique of chivalric approaches in a way that is similar to the critiques offered by Malory’s Sir Dinadan, who repeatedly exposes the arbitrary axioms of romance chivalry by, for instance, refusing to take part in unnecessary duels, preferring instead to preserve life and limb.36 The merchant Clement is rewarded for taking care 36 Although there are no merchants, and thus no merchant rescuers, in Malory’s Morte

Darthur, mercantile spaces and endeavour do save Guenevere when the queen is seeking to circumvent Mordred’s plan to marry her while Arthur is abroad. As Cory Rushton argues, when Guenevere escapes Mordred’s clutches by suggesting that she travel to London to shop for wedding necessities (‘to byghe all maner thynges that longed to the brydale’; Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur, ed. P. J. C. Field, 2 vols

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Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility of the emperor’s son in both versions of Octavian, but his treatment afterward does not match that of the merchant in Valentine and Orson. In the Southern Octavian (attributed to Thomas Chestre), Clement is ‘made knyȝt / For hys erdedes wys and wyȝt’ (lines 1807–8), but he is still treated with some mockery rather than unambiguous respect,37 while in the Northern Octavian he is further mocked for his bourgeois values and mercantile attachment to money when ‘At Clement loghe the knyghtes alle, / So did the kynges in the haulle’ (lines 1253–54).38 Despite these remaining class tensions, however, both Middle English versions of Octavian portray Clement more positively, and more able to integrate with the aristocracy, than their shared French source does, and the Southern version in particular has been seen as appealing to ‘the growing audience of merchants, lesser gentry, and other socially aspiring individuals in late medieval England’.39 Where the French version (surviving in one early fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman copy) end-stops the possibility of Clement’s social mobility by having Clement decline to be knighted on the grounds that the position would be too much of a conflict with his mercantile, materialistic interests, the Middle English versions show Clement either as happy to accept the reward of a knighthood, or rewarded in other ways that also confer enhanced social status, if still with some aspersions from those of more long-standing elite status.

(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), I, 915.15–16), ‘London’s mercantile reputation is exactly the thing which provides respite to the beleaguered queen’: Cory James Rushton, ‘Malory’s Idea of the City’, in Studies in the Role of Cities in Arthurian Literature and in the Value of Arthurian Literature for a Civic Identity: When Arthuriana Meets Civic Spheres, ed. Cora Dietl and Claudia Lauer (New York: Edwin Mellen, 2009), pp. 95–116 (pp. 113–14). 37 Octavian Imperator: Edited from MS BL Cotton Caligula A II, ed. Frances McSparran (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1979). 38 Octavian, in Four Middle English Romances, ed. Harriet Hudson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006). Octavian’s Clement, however – in direct contrast with the merchant in Valentine and Orson – is shown to be very good at riding a horse, when he steals the sultan’s mount. 39 On some differences in the portrayal of Clement between Chestre’s Southern version and the Northern versions see William Fahrenbach, ‘Rereading Clement in Thomas Chestre’s Octavian and in BL Cotton Caligula A.ii’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 26 (2010), 85–99 (esp. p. 86). Fahrenbach argues that Chestre’s version pursues a ‘social agenda’ of supporting social mobility for the aspiring middle classes that is stronger than, but still to some extent shared by, the Northern version. This is in contrast to an earlier argument, based on the Northern rather than the Southern version, that Octavian denigrates Clement in order to enhance aristocratic solidarity and police class boundaries: John Simons, ‘Northern Octavian and the Question of Class’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), pp. 105–11.

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Megan G. Leitch The later Valentine and Orson shows more ideological openness than Octavian in neither mocking its merchant nor entirely reclaiming him for the aristocracy, despite offering him a knighthood. Valentine and Orson shows more ideological openness than Sir Amadace, too, since in the latter the merchant is not cast in a positive light until he has a sort of apotheosis when he is transformed into a knight and returns as the grateful (and prophetically wise) dead. In Octavian, the merchant becomes a knight through a ceremony, a royal reward for his good behaviour, but it is elevation without respect; in Amadace, the merchant becomes a knight only after death. In Emaré, Sir Degaré, and Valentine and Orson, by contrast, good, generous merchants are – and remain – good, generous merchants, at least in name. It is worth acknowledging that from one perspective this may mean that they are not very good at actually being merchants, since their alignment with mercantile ideology or their ability to turn a profit is not necessarily demonstrated when the focus is on them contributing to the good of others, whether in a forest or in urban spaces. However, from a different perspective, in accepting social rewards these merchants remain interested in trade and exchange – just of different commodities. They are still moving (or stocking) goods, though those ‘goods’ are people; and the merchants’ reward or profit, their return for helping others through relocation, rescue and/or shelter – because they help aristocrats – is some of the social capital or enhanced status that aristocrats are uniquely able to bestow. It is still an economy of exchange, just with different currencies. Yet again, as when Valentine and Orson’s merchant remains a ‘merchaunt’ despite receiving a knighthood, the merchants-in-shining-armour motif shows a remarkably positive view of late medieval mercantile endeavour: these merchants do not share in the greed or other traits condemned by anti-mercantile estates satire, but nor do they cease to operate like merchants when they engage in mutually beneficial interchanges with some members of the upper classes, while illuminating the faults of other aristocrats.40 In their deviation from more conventional depictions of merchants in medieval romance, then, exactly what sort of criticism of knights and kings do these more positive portrayals of merchants offer? To address this question, it is useful to consider the ways in which these popular romance merchants parallel Arthurian dwarves. Connecting dwarves to merchants might seem a 40 Complementarily, Ceri Sullivan observes that a century later early modern merchants’

modus operandi is credit, arguing that in ‘contemporary literature surrounding the Elizabethan and Jacobean merchant’ ‘credit is the social production of a marketable self – the habitus of the merchant’, and contrasting credit with both ‘medieval avarice’ and ‘modern anomie’: Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), p. 1. While the late medieval and early Tudor romances discussed here precede the Elizabethan and Jacobean moment Sullivan addresses, they too seem poised in opposition to negative stereotypes of merchants’ motivations, and allow for the cultivation of a more positive bourgeois habitus.

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Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility bit of a stretch, but what I am interested in here are the class dimensions of both character types, and the ethical commentary that their interventions offer. Dwarves in Middle English Arthurian romances often help knights, but not in a straightforwardly obedient way. They are non-chivalric, or sometimes distinctly unchivalric, servants: for instance, the dwarf who helps Malory’s Gareth, but who, when abducted, has no qualms about revealing his master’s secret identity; or dwarves who offer warnings or prophetic revelations when knights are doing something wrong; or, on the other hand, dwarves who steal an enemy knight’s horse so that the dwarf’s master can win a combat more easily.41 Such dwarves are members of the third estate who are not bound to behave according to the laws or ideals of chivalry, but who nonetheless speak to those laws and ideals. They offer advice and warnings as well as assistance: ‘Sir,’ seyde the dwarff, ‘hit is nat youre worshyp to hurte hym, for he ys a man oute of his wytte; and doute ye nat he hath bene a man of grete worshyp, and for som hartely sorow that he hath takyn he ys fallyn madde. And mesemyth,’ seyde the dwarff, ‘that he resembelyth muche unto Sir Launcelot, for hym I sawe at the turnemente of Lonezep.’42

These dwarves, in their interventions, contribute to chivalric ethics – to the ethics that other characters, the knights rather than the dwarves, are expected to espouse. The romance merchants addressed here, as representatives of the emerging middle classes, seem to do something similar. But whereas Middle English dwarves tend to point out knights’ failures to live up to chivalric values, or use dodgy means to help their own knight, these romance merchants not only point up knights’ failures, they do so by espousing or enacting chivalric values themselves. And whereas dwarves often comment upon knights’ conduct towards other knights, these romance merchants, in their interventions, often comment upon aristocratic men’s conduct towards women, in particular. I suggest that the relative lateness of the romances addressed here – and especially of Valentine and Orson – contributes to their receptivity to this motif of merchants in shining armour. In their implication that the virtues associated with chivalry are more important than the skills, the merchant-centred episodes in Valentine and Orson envisage a recentring of chivalry. This celebration of mercantile integrity and chivalry (rather than avarice or cunning) seems especially relevant at a time when merchants were themselves increasingly reading romances, particularly as the advent of the printing press

41 See Megan G. Leitch, ‘The Servants of Chivalry? Dwarfs and Porters in Malory and the

Middle English Gawain Romances’, Arthuriana, 27.1 (2017), 3–27.

42 Malory, Le Morte Darthur, p. 645.7–12.

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Megan G. Leitch in England in the 1470s began to make copies more plentiful and affordable.43 Londoners’ wills from 1300 to 1450 frequently bequeath religious books and occasionally chivalric ones, but records from the later 1400s show that many copies of romances (such as Caxton’s prose romances) were held by London merchants.44 Moreover, aldermen, as wealthy and influential merchants, were knighted in greater numbers during the reigns of Edward IV (1461–83) and Henry VII (1485–1509) than they had been beforehand.45 In the context of these late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century hybrid identities for English merchants, it seems entirely appropriate that Valentine and Orson’s merchant remains a merchant even after he is knighted. The romance genre seeks to grapple with, and harness, the growing power of wealthy merchants by extending chivalric virtues and rewards to mercantile figures in the same way that Yorkist and Tudor kings offered knighthoods to aldermen. While Emaré, Degaré, and Octavian are fourteenth-century romances, they were copied in the mid to late fifteenth century, and therefore read alongside these developments – and likely read not only by the gentry, but also by members of the middle classes (merchants, clerks, and wealthy townspeople). Although Emaré is presumed to have been composed in the late fourteenth century on the basis of its north east Midlands or East Anglian dialect, the sole manuscript in which Emaré survives, London, British Library, Cotton MS Caligula A.II, dates from the mid to late fifteenth century (c. 1446–60). It thus circulated alongside a number of other Middle English romances, including Octavian, in a household book presumed to have been owned by a wealthy family – whether a gentry family or a bourgeois one. As has been noted, the compiler of Cotton Caligula A.II ‘emphasises mercantile life in his rendering of several romances’.46 That Emaré, as the Constance narrative of this manuscript, departs from analogues in order to depict a noble saviour merchant rather than a noble saviour senator, and that Emaré is copied here alongside the merchant foster father of Octavian and the urban spaces and mayorial household of Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, suggests the likelihood 43 Yu-Chiao Wang, ‘English Romance in Print from 1473 to 1535: Reception and the

History of the Book’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2008), p. 74. 44 Caroline Barron, ‘Chivalry, Pageantry and Merchant Culture in Medieval London’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002), pp. 219–41 (pp. 228–30). 45 Barron, ‘Chivalry, Pageantry and Merchant Culture’, pp. 223–24 and 240. 46 Denise C. White, ‘BL Cotton Caligula Aii, Manuscript Context, the Theme of Obedience, and a Diplomatic Transcription Edition’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Georgia State University, 2012), p. 19. See also John J. Thompson, ‘Looking behind the Book: MS Cotton Caligula A.ii, Part 1, and the Experience of its Texts’, in Romance Reading on The Book: Essays on Medieval Narrative Presented to Maldwyn Mills, ed. Jennifer Fellows, Rosalind Field, Gillian Rogers, and Judith Weiss (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), pp. 171–87.

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Chivalrous Interventions and Social Mobility of a bourgeois context for this miscellany. Cotton Caligula A.II contains the sole version of the Southern Octavian; the Northern Octavian survives in two manuscripts, Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38 and Lincoln Cathedral Library, MS 91 (the Lincoln Thornton manuscript), both of which are also mid to late fifteenth-century miscellanies containing a number of Middle English romances alongside devotional and instructional texts. Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38 (late fifteenth century) also includes, for example, Sir Degaré and the Erle of Tolous, which both showcase honourable, helpful merchants, and this manuscript is thought to offer ‘a good index to the […] literary tastes and preoccupations of the bourgeoisie in the late fifteenth century’.47 (The late fourteenth-century Erle of Tolous is another romance that features a wrongfully calumniated queen, and a merchant who helps the queen to obtain justice. While the merchant in the Erle of Toulous is not a combatant, he is an ethically motivated informant and a guide for the earl, who then champions and rescues the queen.) The Lincoln Thornton manuscript (c. 1430–40) similarly features the Erle of Tolous alongside Octavian and its other more well-known romances, such as the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Sir Perceval of Galles, and Sir Isumbras; the way in which this manuscript was compiled by Robert Thornton, as a member of the gentry, also speaks to the gentry readership of these merchant-friendly romances. Sir Degaré, meanwhile, features in five other manuscripts in addition to Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, notably in the fourteenth-century Auchinleck manuscript (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, Advocates MS 19.2.1), but also in other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts, and the seventeenth-century Percy Folio:48 some of these later manuscript copies of Sir Degaré are now fragmentary, but they speak to the avid recopying and reading of this text at the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. Of course, more English literary manuscripts survive from the fifteenth century than from the fourteenth; however, the copying of these romances in miscellanies in the mid to late fifteenth century shows the extent to which they were considered worthwhile reading material at the time.49 Their surviving 47 Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38, ed. Frances McSparran and P. R. Robinson

(London: Scolar Press, 1979), p. vii.

48 See Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, ‘Sir Degare: Introduction’, in The Middle English

Breton Lays, pp. 89–100 (p. 89).

49 Where no fourteenth-century copy survives, as is the case for Emaré and Octavian

(and Valentine and Orson), it is of course impossible to know what, if any, textual idiosyncrasies or scribal alterations may have shaped the extant versions’ representations of merchants. Similarly, where no direct sources survive, as is the case for Emaré and Degaré, we cannot know to what extent the Middle English romances depart from (or indeed originate in) any earlier versions. This chapter focuses on these romances’ known circulation in England in the later Middle Ages, and the contexts in which they were read; however, the example of Octavian, in which – as discussed above – the Middle English versions explore a merchant’s social mobility in ways their French source

261

Megan G. Leitch materiality also broadens understanding of the contemporary audiences to which the romance genre appealed, suggesting a shared bourgeois and gentry readership, alongside the symbiotic diegetic relationships between merchants and ladies, or merchants and future knights, that these romances contain. The print history of these romances similarly testifies to their popularity: with the exception of Emaré, the romances on which this chapter concentrates were all printed in the early sixteenth century. Wynkyn de Worde printed the Northern version of Octavian in 1506, and de Worde also printed Sir Degaré in the early sixteenth century (and William Copland printed it in the mid-sixteenth century), ensuring the continued circulation of these romances.50 Valentine and Orson, as the latest of the romances considered here to begin circulating in English, was based on a French source printed in 1489 (presumed to derive from a lost fourteenth-century French original), and printed by de Worde around the same time as Emaré and Sir Degaré. Thus, alongside the quality and history of the manuscripts in which the romances discussed here survive, and their positive portrayals of merchants, the many indications of middle-class readerships for these romances also include their print history, since the audience for de Worde’s printed romances (which were often less expensively produced than William Caxton’s earlier printed romances) generally included bourgeois households.51 Although conclusions about exactly who read these romances must remain suggestively speculative, what we can be sure of is that they were read widely at a time when merchants were increasingly given opportunities to aspire to be, or to imagine themselves as, part of the knightly classes – while still remaining merchants. In the development of this late motif of merchants helping princesses, medieval romance translates an awareness of social mobility into a critique of chivalric behaviour that both admonishes knights to be more virtuous and invites the bourgeoisie to share chivalric values.

had instead curtailed, is perhaps a suggestive model, as is Emaré’s departure from its analogues to feature a generous merchant instead of a senator. 50 Jordi Sánchez-Marti, ‘The Printed History of the Middle English Verse Romances’, Modern Philology, 107 (2009), 1–31. 51 Carol Meale, ‘Caxton, de Worde, and the Publication of Romance in Late Medieval England’, The Library, 6th series 14 (1992), 283–98. See also Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Squire of Low Degree and the Penumbra of Romance Narrative in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, A Tribute to Helen Cooper, ed. Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 229–40 (pp. 235–37).

262

Index of Manuscripts Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales Brogyntyn MS 2.1 (formerly Porkington 10)  36 Peniarth MS 1 (Black Book of Carmarthen)  25, 77 Peniarth MS 2 (Book of Taliesin)  76–77 Peniarth MSS 4–5 (White Book of Rhydderch)  68, 69 Peniarth MS 26  71 n 22 Peniarth MS 94  71 n 22 Cambridge University Library MS Ff.2.38  156 n 12, 261 Cambridge, Jesus College MS 111 (Red Book of Hergest)  35, 68, 69, 80 Copenhagen, Arnamagnæan Institute MS AM 666 b 4to  103 Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS 523  138 n 14 Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland Advocates MS 19.2.1 (Auchinleck)  185, 193, 196, 207, 261 Advocates MS 19.3.1  187 Lincoln, Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 91 (Lincoln Thornton)  156 n 12, 261 London, British Library Additional MS 27879 (Percy Folio)  132 n 42, 178, 203–06, 227, 229, 238, 241–42, 261

Cotton MS Caligula A.II  156 n 12, 260–61 Cotton MS Faustina B.vi  53 Cotton MS Otho D II  212 Cotton MS Otho D v  214 n 23 Cotton MS Vespasian A. VII  138 n 14 Egerton MS 2515  138 n 14 Egerton MS 2862  155–57, 159, 164–69 Harley MS 525  156–59, 165, 168–70 Harley MS 978  104–05 Harley MS 2252  150 Harley MS 2253  36 Harley MS 3362  60 Harley MS 4418  213 n 18 Royal MS 12 D xi  214 n 23 Royal MS 13 C xii  214 n 23 Royal MS 14 C iv  214 n 23 Royal MS 18 B xxvi  214 n 23 London, College of Arms Arundel MS 22  36, 156, 159, 164–65 London, Lincoln’s Inn Library MS 150  36, 155–59, 165, 167 Manchester, Chetham Library MS 8009  149 Oxford, Bodleian Library Bodley MS 851  126–27 Rawlinson MS B 149  53, 58 Rawlinson MS Miscellanea D. 913  138 n 14 Uppsala University Library De la Gardie MS 4–7  102–03, 108 n 36

263

General Index Abaqa, Khan  215 Ailes, Marianne  193, 196 Alcuin (Disputatio Pippini cum Albino Scholastico)  59 Aldhelm  58–59 Alexander  89, 162, 177 Alliterative Morte Arthure  194, 256, 261 Amadas et Ydoine 70 Amis and Amiloun  127 n 31, 155, 232 Arabic (language and literature)  20 Archibald, Elizabeth  52 Aristotle (Poetics)  49 Armenia  209–26 Arnold, Matthew  21, 25, 73 n 30 Arthur  25–26, 31, 33, 35, 38–42, 46, 53, 56–57, 61–63, 65, 89, 131 n 41, 155, 178–81, 184, 254 Arthour and Merline  36, 153–55, 185, 194, 207 Arthur and Gorlagon  53, 58, 91 Aspremont  194, 206 Auerbach, Erich  121, 194 n 15 Augustine of Hippo  92, 182 Austen, Jane  175 Avalon  65 ballad  14, 19, 203, 227–43 Barlow, Gania  175, 180 Barnicle, Mary Elizabeth  160, 167, 169 Benoît de Sainte-Maure (Roman de Troie)  159–60, 163, 166–67, 171 Benson, C. David  154, 159, 171 Beowulf  47 n 8, 186 Bevis of Hampton  1 n 3, 29, 37–38, 68, 155 Blamires, Alcuin  187

Bloch, R. Howard  145 Bly Calkin, Siobhain  193 Boccaccio, Giovanni (Decameron)  161, 237–38 Boeve de Haumtone, see Bevis of Hampton Bradbury, Nancy Mason  158–59, 168, 170 Breton (language)  14–15, 30, 105 Brittany  21, 30, 33, 101, 105, 109 Bromwich, Rachel  66, 73 Brooke, C. N. L.  119 Bullock-Davies, Constance  27 Byrne, Aisling  7 Byron Smith, Joshua  30, 133 Calin, William  202 Cannon Willard, Charity  213 Cartlidge, Neil  137, 145, 147 Caxton, William  248, 260, 262 Chanson de geste, see also epic  4 n 14, 8, 18, 191–207 Chanson de Roland  29 n 21 Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne 90, 206 Chanson d’Ogier  206 Charlemagne  29, 68, 194, 248 Charles VI (King of France)  220 Chaucer, Geoffrey  3, 4 n 13, 13, 16, 20, 34–35, 38, 66, 161, 175, 180–81, 247 Book of the Duchess 99 Knight’s Tale 11 Man of Law’s Tale  248, 250 Merchant’s Tale  79 n 50 Nun’s Priest’s Tale  192 Romance of the Rose 66 Shipman’s Tale  248 Tale of Sir Thopas 187 Wife of Bath’s Tale  253 n 27

265

General Index Chaytor, H. J.  150 Chen, Anna  186–87 Chestre, Thomas  18, 173–81, 188, 257 Lybeaus Desconus  36, 42–44, 155, 162, 180–82 Octavian  19, 180, 245–46, 249–250, 252–53, 256–58, 260–62 Sir Launfal  40, 43, 167, 180–81, 249 Chevalere Assigne 89 Chrétien de Troyes  12, 14, 27, 28–31, 68, 117 n 2, 178–81 Cligès  92, 94, 96, 137, 141, 162 Erec et Enide  28, 30, 112, 137, 142 Lancelot, Le chevalier de la charrette  11, 28–29, 141 Perceval (Conte del Graal)  27 n 13, 28, 132, 140, 144 Yvain, Le Chevalier au Lion  28, 30, 38, 130 Cicero De amicitia  123–24 Rhetorica ad Herennium 139–40 Classicism  153–71 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome  24, 185, 187 Compendium Historiae Troianae-Romanae  159–60 Cook, Robert  104, 107–08, 111, 114 Cooper, Helen, see also meme  9, 64, 147–48 Copeland, Rita  3 Copland, William  227–30, 262 Crane, Susan  143, 146, 149, 152 Crouch, David  26 Crusades  7, 21, 213–20 Dafydd ap Gwilym  16, 22 n 3, 66–68, 70–84 ‘Dan Y Bargod’  80 ‘Dewis Un o Bedair’  83–84 ‘Mis Mai’  77–78, 82 ‘Mis Mai a Mis Tachwedd’  79 ‘Y Breuddwyd’  67 n 8 ‘Y Ceiliog Bronfraith’  75

‘Y Cloc’  67 n 8 ‘Y Deildy’  74, 76–77, 78 ‘Y Dylluan’  80 ‘Y Niwl’  71–72, 82 n 58 ‘Y Niwl Hudolus’ (apocryphal)  71 ‘Y Pwll Mawn’  80, 82–83, 84 ‘Yr Haf’  76 Dalrymple, Roger  88 Dares  159, 163, 165, 171 Davenport, Tony  38 De Ortu Waluuanii Nepotis Arturi  15, 45, 52, 53–64 Derecho, Abigail  176 Diamond, Arlyn  88 Dictys  159 Donatus (Ars Maior)  50, 56 Dronke, Peter  238, 242 Eachtra Uilliam  16, 86, 91, 93–94, 96–99 Echard, Siân  30, 53–54, 56 Edward I (King of England)  15, 22, 34, 39, 85, 214 n 23, 216 Edward IV (King of England)  260 Edwards, Huw  67, 79 Eger and Grime  131–32 Ehrhart, Margaret J.  165, 167 Eley, Penny  147 emotive scripts  16 Emaré  19, 168 n 54, 245–46, 250–51, 253, 258, 260, 262 epic  14, 18, 64, 88, 191–207 Erex saga  112 Erle of Tolous  261 Evans, Ruth  3 Excidium Troiae  159–60, 162, 165, 171 Exeter Book Riddles  50, 59 fairies  16, 19, 65–66, 69–73, 82 n 57, 84, 131 n 41, 167 fan fiction  18, 173–89 Fierabras  202, 206 Finlayson, John  13, 194–95 Firth Green, Richard  65, 88 Fitzbaderon, Gilbert  137 Floris and Blancheflour  155–56, 171, 248

266

General Index Florschuetz, Angela L.  175–76, 179–81 Fulton, Helen  16, 51–52, 69, 73 Furrow, Melissa  193 Gaimar, Geffrei (Lestorie des engles)  32–33 Gallagher, Catherine  183 Galloway, Andrew  60 Gay, Lucy  142 Geoffrey of Monmouth  20, 24–25, 52, 178, 181, 186 Historia regum Britanniae  31, 33, 43, 53, 62, 155 n 6, 156 n 9, 179 Vita Merlini  76 n 40 Geoffrey of Vinsauf (Poetria nova)  139–40 Gerald of Wales  24, 26–27, 39, 41 n 51, 71 n 23 ‘Glasgerion’  19, 238–43 Goeres, Erin  104, 106, 107, 109 Gottfried von Strassburg  104 Gower, John  3, 250 Greene Knight, The  18, 173, 178–79, 188 Guillaume de Bondeselle  212 Guillaume de Lorris, see Roman de la Rose Guillaume de Palerne, see William of Palerne Guruns strengleikr  17, 101–116 Guto’r Glyn  36–38 Guy and Colbrond  203, 205–06 Guy de Warrewik et Heraud d’Ardenne  206 Guy of Warwick  230–31, 248, 250 Gwyn ap Nudd  72–73, 78, 80, 82, 84 Gy de Warwyke see Lydgate, John Haidu, Peter  183 Hákon IV (King of Norway)  12, 101–02, 105–06, 108–09 Hanning, Robert W.  142, 144, 147 Havelok 139 Henry II (King of England)  28–29, 53 n 32 Henry III (King of England)  220 Henry IV (King of England)  90

Henry VII (King of England)  260 Herlands Hornstein, Lillian  217 Hetoum of Korikos (La Fleur des histoires de la terre d’Orient)  212–17 Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri  53, 58 Historia Meriadoci Regis Cambrie  15, 45, 52, 53–64 Hoccleve, Thomas (Complaint of the Virgin)  89 Holden, A, J.  138, 145 Holford, Matthew  191, 197, 200, 205 Hopkins, Andrea  185 Horn Childe  18, 140, 191–92, 194–201, 203, 205–07 Hosington, Brenda  136, 149 Hsy, Jonathan  250 Hue de Roteland Ipomedon  17, 27, 92, 94, 135–52 Protheselaus  137, 149 Humphrey de Bohun  85, 87–90, 98–99 Huon of Bordeaux 177 hybridity (generic)  8, 9, 13–14, 18–19, 177, 193 hybridity (postcolonial)  6, 24 Hyrd, Richard (Instruction of Christian Women)  90 Iceland   1, 7, 8, 12, 65, 103, 114 Ifor Hael  68, 82 Immram Brain  52 Ingham, Patricia Clare  24 Iorwerth Goch  27 Ipomedon, see Hue de Roteland Ireland  1, 4 7, 8, 20, 33, 42 n 52, 63, 65, 106, 200 Irish (language and literature)  4, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 45, 46, 51–52, 59, 63, 64, 72 n 26, 78 n 45, 86–87, 91–94, 96–99 Isidore of Seville  76 Jacquetta of Luxembourg  212 James, M. R.  119 Jean d’Arras, see Mélusine Jean de Berry  209, 213

267

General Index Jean de Meun, see also Roman de la Rose 69 Jean d’Ypres  213 Jefferson, Judith  7 Joachim of Fiore  182 John (King of England)  26 Johnston, Michael  249–50 Kahane, Ahuvia  176 Katherine of Aragon  90 Kay, Sarah  193 King Horn  36, 196–98, 201, 232 King Alisaunder  36, 155, 162 King of Tars  169, 216–17 Kinoshita, Sharon  24 Knight, Stephen  83 Ladd, Roger  246 Lai de Haveloc  62 Leach, Henry Goddard  106 Le Bel Inconnu  36, 140 Legge, M. Dominica  136, 148 Leon IV/V (King of Armenia)  220–21, 224–25 Les Quatre fils Aymon  206 Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen  68 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd  22, 24, 34 Llywelyn ap Iorwerth  26 Llywelyn Bren  29, 68 Lumley, John  211 Lybeaus Desconus, see Chestre, Thomas Lydgate, John   38, 154 n 3, 180 Gy de Warwyke  18, 191–94, 201–07 Mabinogion  24, 69 ‘Breuddwyd Macsen Wledig’  33 ‘Breuddwyd Rhonabwy’  24 n 5 ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’  25–26, 43, 72 n 28 ‘Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys’  33 ‘Four Branches’  24, 69 ‘Branwen uerch Lyr’  45–49, 51–56, 62–64, 75 n 36 ‘Manawydan uab Llyr’  24 n 5 ‘Gereint uab Erbin’  28 ‘Owein, neu Chwedl Iarlles y Ffynnawn’  28, 38 ‘Peredur uab Efrawg’  28

magic naturalism, see also Fulton, Helen  16, 73 Magoun, Francis P.  104–05, 107–08 Malory, Thomas  92, 111 n 50, 178, 181, 256, 259 Mandeville’s Travels  248 n 13 Mannyng, Robert (Short Metrical Chronicle)  202 Map, Walter  17, 26, 28–30, 117–33 association with Queste del Saint Graal and Mort Artu  29 De Nugis curialium  17, 71 n 23, 117–33 ‘De Rasone et eius uxore’  129 ‘Dissuasio Valerii’  130 ‘Sadius and Galo’  117–33 Maria Palaeologina  215 Marie de France  5, 17, 25, 27, 32, 104, 105, 107, 175 Bisclavret 91 Eliduc 104 Lanval  131, 140, 180 Milun  32–33 Yonec  32–33 Massey, Doreen  210–11, 213–14, 217 Matthew of Vendôme (Ars Versificatoria)  139–40 Mayer, Nora  150 McCracken, Peggy  91 McDonald, Nicola  11, 157–61, 166, 168, 170, 227–28 Meale, Carol  11, 248 Meecham-Jones, Simon  38 Mehl, Dieter  150 Mélusine  1 n 3, 19, 209–226 meme, see also Cooper, Helen  9, 64, 242, 253 Merlin, see also Myrddin  25, 31, 43, 62 Mills, Maldwyn  192, 196, 200 Möngke, Khan  213 n 19, 215–16 Monty Python  187 Most, Glenn W.  176 mouvance, see Zumthor, Paul Murphy, Patrick  50, 56 Mynors, R. A. B.  119

268

General Index Myrddin, see also Merlin  25, 77

Roman d’Eneas  27, 92, 94, 137, 141 Roman de la Rose  16, 29, 65–84 Roman de Thèbes  27, 137 Roman de Troie  159–60, 166–67, 171 Romanticism (English)  21, 25

Nennius (Historia Brittonum)  43–44 Norse (language and literature)  4, 16, 17, 101–16 Norway  7, 33, 101–16 O’Brien, Timothy  181 Odoric de Pordenone  212 Origen  182 Orlemanski, Julie  183 Otuel a Knight  169, 207 n 46 Ovid  70, 76, 78, 160 Owain ab Urien  30 parody  8, 9, 13–14, 17–18, 135–52, 183, 187, 227 Paston family  13 Paul, St  50–51 Pearsall, Derek  154, 159, 171, 193 Perceforest 177 Perceval of Galles  254–55, 261 Piers Plowman 88 Pope Benedict XII  212 Pope Boniface VIII  216 Pope John XXII  212 Poppe, Erich  7, 68 postcolonial (critical approach)  6–7, 15, 24 Prester John  215 Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle  29 n 21, 207 n 46 Pugh, Sheenagh  174, 181 Purdie, Rhiannon  145, 149 Putter, Ad  7, 179 Reck, Regine  7 Rhys ap Gruffudd  27–28 Ricaldo de Montecroce  212 Richard II (King of England)  90, 220–21 Richard Coeur de Lion  154 n 3, 155, 194, 207, 248 n 13 Robert de Boron (Merlin)  184–85, 187 Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune 70 Romance of Horn  137, 143–44, 162, 195, 232

Samutina, Natalia  174 Saxo Grammaticus 108 Scotland  33, 65, 106–08 Secretum Philosophorum  60–62 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky  102, 109, 115 Seege or Batayle of Troye  18, 36, 153–71 Shakespeare, William  96, 175 Sif Ríkharðsdóttir  7 Simon de Pouille  206 Simpson, James  249 Sims-Williams, Patrick  47, 51–52, 56, 59–60, 63–64 Sir Amadace  249–50, 258 Sir Cleges 39–40 Sir Degaré  19, 155–56, 245–46, 250–52, 256, 261–62 Sir Eglamour  155 Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle 36 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  40–42, 46, 88, 155 n 6, 173, 176, 178–80, 188 Sir Gowther  18, 173, 181–88 Sir Isumbras  261 Sir Orfeo  43, 65 n 1, 140, 167 Sir Tristrem  248 Sørensen, Preben Meulengracht  114–15 Spearing, A. C.  139–40 Spensley, Ronald  142 Squire of Low Degree, The  9, 13, 19, 149, 227–43 Star Trek  175, 177 Star Wars 174 Statius 160 Strengleikar  17, 101–16 Sultan of Babylon  248 Symphosius  57–59 Taliesin  30, 76 n 40, 77

269

General Index Thomas of Britain (Tristan)  27, 102, 104, 137–39, 145 Torrent of Portyngale  18, 173, 185–87 Tournament of Tottenham  9, 17 translatio studii et imperii  3, 7, 12–13, 18, 153–54, 171, 207, 225, 245 Tristrams saga  102–03 Troy, see also Seege or Batayle of Troye  89, 153–71, 204 Tveitane, Mattias  104, 107–08, 111 Tylwyth Teg, see also Gwyn ap Nudd  71–72 Valentine and Orson  19, 245–46, 250, 251, 253–59, 262 Varvolden, Pamela  191–92 Venuti, Lawrence  6, 86, 211 Virgil (Aeneid)  92, 159 Vortigern  31, 43–44, 46, 62 Vulgate Cycle 31

Wace (Roman de Brut)  156 n 9 Wade, James  70 Wales  4, 7, 8, 15, 20, 21–44, 65, 67–69, 71–73, 83–84 Walker Bynum, Caroline  49 Warren, Michelle  2, 24, 211 Welsh (language and literature)  4, 6–8, 14–16, 21–44, 45–64, 65–84 Welsh March  21–44, 52, 135–52 William of Palerne, see also Eachtra Uilliam  16, 85–100 Wilson, Anna  174, 176, 177 Winnere and Wastoure 88 Woodville, Elizabeth  13 Wynkyn de Worde  86, 150, 227–28, 230, 253, 262 Y Seint Greal  35 n 39 Ywain and Gawain 39 Žižek, Slavoj  249 Zumthor, Paul  4–5

270

Volumes Already Published I:

The Orient in Chaucer and Medieval Romance, Carol F. Heffernan, 2003 II: Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, edited by Corinne Saunders, 2005 III: The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance, Robert Allen Rouse, 2005 IV: Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, edited by Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field, 2007 V: The Sea and Medieval English Literature, Sebastian I. Sobecki, 2008 VI: Boundaries in Medieval Romance, edited by Neil Cartlidge, 2008 VII: Naming and Namelessness in Medieval Romance, Jane Bliss, 2008 VIII: Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, edited by Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević, 2008 IX: Anglicising Romance: Tail-Rhyme and Genre in Medieval English Literature, Rhiannon Purdie, 2008 X: A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, edited by Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton, 2009 XI: Expectations of Romance: The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England, Melissa Furrow, 2009 XII: The Exploitations of Medieval Romance, edited by Laura Ashe, Ivana Djordjević, and Judith Weiss, 2010 XIII: Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, Corinne Saunders, 2010 XIV: Medieval Romance, Medieval Contexts, edited by Rhiannon Purdie and Michael Cichon, 2011 XV: Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance, Amy N. Vines, 2011 XVI: Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, edited by Neil Cartlidge, 2012 XVII: Performance and the Middle English Romance, Linda Marie Zaerr, 2012 XVIII: Medieval Romance and Material Culture, edited by Nicholas Perkins, 2015 XIX: Middle English Romance and the Craft of Memory, Jamie McKinstry, 2015 XX: Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France, Venetia Bridges, 2018 XXI: The Transmission of Medieval Romance: Metres, Manuscripts and Early Prints, edited by Ad Putter and Judith A. Jefferson, 2018

XXII:

Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance. A Tribute to Helen Cooper, edited by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch and Corinne Saunders, 2018 XXIII: The Mélusine Romance in Medieval Europe: Translation, Circulation, and Material Contexts, Lydia Zeldenrust, 2020