Medievalia et Humanistica, No. 36: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Volume 36) (Medievalia et Humanistica Series, 36) 9781442208124, 9781442208131, 1442208120

Table of contents :
Contents
Editorial Note
Articles for Future Volumes
Preface
The Ultimate Transgression of the Courtly World:
One Mind, One Heart, One Purse:
Solving Dorigen’s Trilemma:
What Were the Ladies in the City of Ladies Reading?
Review Articles
England and Iberia
English Regional Identity
Alternative Christianities, Part I
Alternative Christianities, Part II
Review Notices
Amadis of Gaul
Christine Caldwell Ames
Patricia Badir
Koenraad Brosens
John A. Burrow
Martin Carver, Catherine Hills, and Jonathan Scheschkewitz
Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon
Leah DeVun
Sten Ebbesen
Susan Einbinder
Ferdinand Feldbrugge
Hillel Gamoran
James Gardner
John M. Hill
V. A. Kolve
Paul Meyvaert
Ulrich Müller, Ingrid Bennewitz, and Franz Viktor Spechtler
David S. Peterson
R. N. Swanson
Vasileios Syros
Maria Vassilaki
István Zombori
Books Received

Citation preview

Medievalia et Hu manistica

M e d i e v a l i a e t H um a n istica Editor Paul Maurice Clogan University of North Texas B O O K REVIE W EDIT ORS Alcuin Blamires Goldsmiths, University of London

Robert Boenig Texas A&M University

Albrecht Classen University of Arizona

Jacques Dalarun Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes

Reinhold Glei Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Yasmin Haskell University of Western Australia

Marcia Kupfer The Ohio State University

David Lines University of Warwick

Richard Marsden University of Nottingham

Adriano Prosperi Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa Francesco Stella Università di Siena EDIT O RIAL B O A RD

David Bevington University of Chicago

Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski University of Pittsburgh

Daniel Bornstein Washington University, St. Louis

Christopher S. Celenza Johns Hopkins University

Marvin L. Colker University of Virginia

Peter Dembowski University of Chicago

Peter Dronke University of Cambridge

Charles Witke University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Jan M. Ziolkowski Harvard University

Medievalia et Humanistica Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture New Series: Number 36

Reviews Edited by Paul Maurice Clogan

R OW M AN & LITTLE F IELD P UBLIS H E R S , INC .

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by The Medieval and Renaissance Society, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available The Library of Congress has catalogued this serial publication as follows: Medievalia et humanistica, fasc. 1–jan. 1943–; New ser. No 1– 1970– Totowa, N.J. [etc.] Rowman & Littlefield [etc.] no. 29 cm Annual, 1943– “Studies in medieval and renaissance culture.” Vols. for 1970–1972 issued by the Medieval and neo-Latin society; 1973– by the Medieval and Renaissance Society. Key title: Medievalia et humanistica, ISSN 0076-6127. ISBN: 978-1-4422-0812-4 eISBN: 978-1-4422-0813-1 Library of Congress (8108) Printed in the United States of America

` ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Editorial Note

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Manuscript Submission Guidelines

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Articles for Future Volumes

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Preface

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The Ultimate Transgression of the Courtly World: Peasants on the Courtly Stage and Their Grotesque Quests for Sexual Pleasures Albrecht Classen, University of Arizona

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One Mind, One Heart, One Purse: Integrating Friendship Traditions and the Case of Troilus and Criseyde John Garrison, University of California, Davis

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Solving Dorigen’s Trilemma: Oath and Law in the Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales John Bugbee, University of Texas at Austin

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What Were the Ladies in the City of Ladies Reading? The Libraries of Christine de Pizan’s Contemporaries Karen Green, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

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review articles England and Iberia Maria Bullón-Fernández, ed., England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century: Cultural, Literary and Political Exchanges (José Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla, University of Almeria)

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English Regional Identity Robert W. Barrett Jr., Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656 (Uwe Klawitter, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

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Alternative Christianities Daniel E. Bornstein, ed., Medieval Christianity: A People’s History of Christianity, vol. 4 (Eva von Contzen, Ruhr-Universität Bochum) Dale Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence (Christoph Pieper, Leiden University)

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review notices Amadis of Gaul, vols. 1 and 2 (Craig M. Nakashian)

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Ames, Christine Caldwell, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Robert E. Lerner)

129

Badir, Patricia, The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700 (Jacob Riyeff)

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Brosens, Koenrraad, ed., European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago (Kate Dimitrova)

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Burrow, John A., The Poetry of Praise (Eva von Contzen)

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Carver, Martin, Catherine Hills, and Jonathan Scheschkewitz, Wasperton: A Roman, British and Anglo-Saxon Community in Central England (Robert Boenig)

141

Clarke, Peter, and Tony Claydon, eds., The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul (Raymond J. Cormier)

144

Devun, Leah, Prophecy, Alchemy and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages (Laura Ackerman Smoller)

146

Ebbesen, Sten, Topics in Latin Philosophy from the 12th–14th Centuries (Michael Renemann)

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Einbinder, Susan, No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France (Anthony Bale)

153

Feldbrugge, Ferdinand, Law in Medieval Russia (George G. Weindhardt)

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Gamoran, Hillel, Jewish Law in Transition: How Economic Forces Overcame the Prohibition against Lending on Interest (Julius Kirshner)

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Gardner, James, Marco Girolamo Vida: Christiad (Wolfgang Polleichtner)

160

Hill, John M., The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf: Arrivals and Departures (E. L. Risden)

164

Kolve, V. A. Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II (Robert Boenig)

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Meyvaert, Paul, The Art of Words: Bede and Theodulf (Richard Marsden)

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Müller, Ulrich, Ingrid Bennewitz, and Franz Viktor Spechtler, eds., Neidhart-Lieder: Texte und Melodien sämtlicher Handschriften und Drucke (Albrecht Classen)

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Peterson, David S., ed., Florence and Beyond: Cultures, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy; Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy, with Daniel E. Bornstein, (Nicoletta Marcelli)

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Swanson, R. N., Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Romanus Cessario)

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Syros, Vasileios, Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua: Eine Untersuchung zur ersten Diktion des Defensor pacis (Martin Ossikovski)

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Vassilaki, Maria, The Painter Angelos and Icon-Painting in Venetian Crete (Annemarie Weyl Carr)

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Zombori, István, ed., Közép-Európa harca a török ellen a 16 század elso" felében [The Central Europeans’ struggle with the Turks during the first half of the sixteenth century] (†Z. J. Kosztolnyik)

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Books Received

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Editorial Note

Since 1970, this new series has sought to promote significant scholarship, criticism, and reviews within the fields of medieval and Renaissance studies. It has published articles drawn from a variety of disciplines, and it has given attention to new directions in humanistic scholarship and to significant topics of general interest. This series has been particularly concerned with the exchange between specializations, and scholars of diverse approaches have complemented each other’s efforts on questions of common interest. Medievalia et Humanistica is sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America. Publication in the series is open to contributions from all sources, and the editorial board welcomes scholarly, critical, or interdisciplinary articles of significant interest on relevant material. Contributors are urged to communicate in a clear and concise style the larger implications and the material of their research, with documentation held to a minimum. Text, maps, illustrations, diagrams, and musical examples are published when they are essential to the argument of the article. In preparing and submitting manuscripts for consideration, potential contributors are advised to follow carefully the instructions given on pages x–xi. Articles in English may be submitted to any of the editors. Books for review and inquiries concerning Fasciculi I–XVII in the original series should be addressed to the Editor, Medievalia et Humanistica, P.O. Box 28428, Austin, Texas 78755–8428. Inquiries concerning subscriptions should be addressed to the publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, Maryland 20706

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Manuscript Submission Guidelines Preparing Your Word File •  Double-space your file, except for extracts (lengthy quotes), which should be single-spaced with a line space above and below. •  Use only one space between sentences. Use tabs, not letter-spaces, to indent text. •  Type note callouts as superior numbers, then type out the notes themselves at the end of your document. Avoid the Notes feature of Word. Style Matters •  Spell out numbers up to one hundred—both cardinals and ordinals (e.g., twentieth century). •  Use American punctuation and spelling: commas and periods go inside closing quotation marks. •  Lowercase biblical, medieval. Capitalize Bible, Middle Ages, West, Western. •  Style for literary works includes Book of Acts, Genesis (book of the Bible), Genesis A (poem), Gospel of Matthew. •  Short quotations: Put small quotations with translations in running text into parentheses: “Ipsa autem nocte vidit mulier . . .” (“That very night his wife saw . . .”). •  Long quotations: For longer quotations with translations, set them off as extracts with the translation in brackets below. If the original text is poetry with half-lines, use only one tab between each half-line. Although the text will look uneven in your Word file, the tab will make the lines align exactly when typeset: Cynewulf describes her as she sits on a throne while the Jews crowd around her: þær on þrymme bád casere mæg, golde gehyrsted.

þrungon þa on þreate in cynestole geatolic guðcwen

[They crowded where the Caesar’s kinswoman was waiting / in majesty upon a throne, / a magnificent battle-queenclad in gold] (329–331) Sample Notes Journal Article: 1.  Melinda Shepard, “The Church in Eleventh-Century Europe,” Medieval Studies 15, no. 1 (1993), 211–226. Book: 2. Shepard, p. 223. Shepard notes other similarities as well. See also R. A. Potter, Church and Medieval State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 301.

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Articles may be submitted to any of the editors, but it would be advisable to submit them to the nearest or most appropriate editor for consideration. A prospective author is encouraged to contact his or her editor at the earliest opportunity to receive any necessary advice. The length of the article depends on the material, but brief articles or notes normally are not considered. The entire manuscript should be typed, double-spaced, on standard 8 1/2-by-11 bond paper, with ample margins; documentation should be held to a minimum. The submission must also include a final copy of the manuscript in Microsoft Word, 3 1/2-inch formatted diskette or CD-R. Endnotes, prepared according to The Chicago Manual of Style, fifteenth edition (University of Chicago Press), should be double-spaced and numbered consecutively, and they should appear at the end of the article. All quotations and references should be in finished form. Electronic submissions should be accompanied by two hard copies. Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts, but a cover letter with the author’s name and address should be included with each manuscript. The addresses of the American editors can be determined by their academic affiliations. The addresses of the editors outside the United States and their respective areas of interest are as follows: Alcuin Blamires, Professor of English and comparative literature, Chaucer, fourteenth-century literature, and medieval women writers, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths College, University of London, Lewisham Way, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW UK Jacques Dalarun, 3 rue du général Delestraint, 75016 Paris, France Reinhold Glei, Professor für Klassische Philologie, Seminar für Klassische Philologie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, D-44780 Bochum, Germany Yasmin Haskell, Professor of Latin Humanism, School of Humanities (M205), University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia David Lines, Professor of Italian, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK xi

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Richard Marsden, Professor of English, School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK Adriano Prosperi, Professor of History of the Reformation and CounterReformation, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy Francesco Stella, Dipartmento di Teoria e Documentazione delle Tradizione Culturali, Università di Siena, viale Luigi Cittadini 33, I.52100, Arezzo, Italia

Preface

Because so many scholarly books are published by national and international presses annually, many are not reviewed or receive only brief mention or summary listing. Some of these books are the work of young or beginning scholars who engaged in extensive research and travel whose voices need to be heard and evaluated. For this reason, the editorial board decided to increase the number of reviews and review articles in this year’s volume, number 36 of Medievalia et Humanistica, to twenty-four reviews and three review articles of recent scholarly publications. In addition, this volume features four original articles on sundry aspects of medieval and Renaissance studies. Albrecht Classen’s article, “The Ultimate Transgression of the Courtly World: Peasants on the Courtly Stage and Their Quest for Sexual Pleasures,” presents a very suggestive and stimulating analysis of German texts and melodies, in particular the work of Neidhart-Lieder, revealing the disruption brought on by social crisis in the relationship between peasantry and aristocracy. John Garrison’s essay, “One Mind, One Heart, One Purse: Integrating Friendship Traditions and the Case of Troilus and Criseyde,” which studies the idea that the friendship between Troilus and Pandarus can be analyzed in terms of medieval friendship treatises, is engaging and potentially important. Garrison’s suggestion that Chaucer might have been familiar with medieval friendship treatises like Aelred’s is indeed interesting. John Bugbee’s critical analysis, “Solving Dorigen’s Trilemma: Oath and Law in the Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales,” contributes a solution to Dorigen’s vexing trilemma. Karen Green’s essay, “What Were the Ladies in the City of Ladies Reading? The Libraries of Christine de Pizan’s Contemporaries,” forges ahead since the mid-twentieth-century work on the libraries of medieval women by exploiting the results of this research to provide a fascinating study that contributes a clearer and more accurate picture of Christine’s intellectual development and that of her contemporaries. Moreover, the editorial board and book-review editors have been developed and expanded to accommodate the range and number of

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submissions: ten members of both are now from the United States, and ten members are international, making Medievalia et Humanistica a truly international publication. As always, I am grateful to the editorial board and book-review editors for their expert advice and to the staff of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., for their helpful assistance in the production of the annual volume. P. M. C.

The Ultimate Transgression of the Courtly World: Peasants on the Courtly Stage and Their Grotesque Quests for Sexual Pleasures; The Poetry by the Thirteenth-Century Austrian-Bavarian Neidhart Albrecht Classen

One of the most beautiful and impressively illustrated manuscripts of the entire Middle Ages is the so-called Manesse manuscript (ca. 1310– 1330), today housed in the University library of Heidelberg (Germany), containing a large number of full-page miniatures depicting the individual poets whose works are included therein (all from approximately 1170 to roughly 1230). In most cases these poets are presented in an idealistic manner, elegantly dressed, displaying perfect courtly behavior, talking to a lady, playing music, holding a scroll or a sword, sitting on a rock and reflecting on life, dancing with women, or posturing as knights in polite society. Sometimes a poet is shown in tender embrace with his lady, at other times handing over a love letter to a messenger, or perhaps pierced through the heart by an arrow of love. There are, to be sure, a few alternative pictorial motifs, such as Sir Reinmar of Brennenberg whose murder by a gang of sword wielding characters is here seen (no. 61). In most cases, however, and quite fittingly, the illustrators chose typical courtly scenes with a plethora of significant motifs characteristic of the aristocratic world, idealizing, glossing over all potential conflicts, glorifying the courtly existence, especially courtly love. We couldn’t call any of these images realistic; rather, they often portray a Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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characteristic, idyllic scene from one of the poems or depict the narrator singing, wooing, or thinking.1 But some illustrations might be shocking, such as figure no. 111, of Sir Dietmar der Setzer, where two knights are pitted against one another in a deadly joust.2 Overall, though, the general tone and cultural context reflect happiness: delight in the arts, enjoyment of the ladies’ company, and the pursuit of love in a highly aestheticizing manner; see, for instance, the last figure for the Chancellor (no. 137), situated between musicians, obliquely looking at his audience, all three of them dressed in stunning gowns and pleasantly seated on a bench in a Gothic space.3 Some aspects of the illustrations, however, are rather curious: the Austrian-Bavarian poet Neidhart (fl. ca. 1220–1240) is surrounded by a group of peasants attacking him from both sides, grimacing angrily at him, grabbing his shoulders, elbows, and side, making threatening gestures, and waving huge swords, which are attributes of the knightly class inappropriately assumed by the peasants. Although the poet still seems to smile, he has lifted his right arm as if he were about to curse at the peasants, stretching out his right hand in explicit opposition to what these peasants seem to suggest to him. In his work the artist certainly made greatest efforts to project an image that would appeal to the aristocratic patron commissioning the manuscript, but the peasants’ hostile energy and Neidhart’s defensive posture betray the considerable trouble and tensions at play here. Although Neidhart enjoyed tremendous popularity throughout the late Middle Ages, and although his nom de plume (Neidhart von Reuental, or Neidhart of the Sorrowful Dale) quickly translated into a term for a specific literary genre where the noble protagonist constantly finds himself in conflict with a group of peasant lads,4 scholars outside of the field of medieval German studies have not been exposed to him adequately, and even within specialized Neidhart research we are missing good explanations for the thematic orientation directed at two major innovative aspects characterizing the poet’s oeuvre: the transgression of the social constraints making up feudal society with its clearly demarcated estates, and the transgression of sexual norms within courtly discourse.5 Neidhart was the first medieval poet to create the two unique types of (love) songs within the courtly world, his Winter and Summer Songs. The latter normally recounted his successful conquest of the country girls, while the former lamented his frustration with the rambunctious village lads whose money and greater resources regularly win the village girls’ attention, besting the miserable nobleman who is poor and unlucky in love.6



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Though study of Neidhart has been carried out from many perspectives, it has also been rather problematic because the editing of his texts remains incredibly challenging, if not altogether questionable.7 We cannot really answer satisfactorily what songs are authentically by Neidhart and what songs ought to be attributed to imitators and successors.8 The Neidhart songs were popular well into the late Middle Ages, last printed in 1566, but not even the individual melodies accompanying the texts allow us to distinguish clearly between original and imitation.9 Many times the manuscripts and then early modern prints contain varying stanzas, differing texts, and changing arrangements of the stanzas, and it might even be altogether impossible to ever determine with any desirable specificity and scholarly evidence who composed what under the name of Neidhart. This realization has led an entire team of Germanists at the University of Salzburg to abandon all traditional effort to identify any one true oeuvre by this poet in favor of editing all and every poetic text possibly associated with Neidhart in parallel to one another. After all, and I would certainly concur with this assessment, the various medieval audiences, whether they were reading or listening to Neidhart’s texts, had no means to ascertain, or interest in determining, this question for themselves. The recent publication of all of the Neidhart lieder represents perhaps the best of what German medieval philology could make of this conundrum.10 Leaving all these highly thorny philological issues aside, the theme of transgression in Neidhart’s songs clearly stands out and profoundly challenges our assessment of thirteenth-century courtly culture. The mores were often criticized by a number of authors who seriously questioned the traditional claim that the aristocracy’s high ethical standards and moral values justified their position of power.11 By the time Neidhart came into favor somewhat irreverent and provocative poems had already been composed by the first troubadour, Guillaume le Neuf, and then later by the many contributors to the Carmina Burana (in Latin and Middle High German); but Neidhart certainly was the first to critically discuss the social conflicts and troubles in courtly love. Strangely, his indirect criticism of courtly society, represented by the knight from Reuental, almost seems to have been well received by the representatives of this very class12 and by later poets who often referred to Neidhart with admiration.13 Neidhart reflected on a profound transformation unsettling his own social class and indirectly, or obliquely, referred to an alarming challenge the rich peasantry posed to the landed gentry’s economic status, as the social inferiors increasingly dressed in the same types of clothing and girded themselves

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with the same weapons as their social superiors, calling into question feudalism’s very underlying principles.14 Poetry such as Neidhart’s work mirrored early signs of the impending paradigm shift affecting all of late-medieval society. Undoubtedly, both the peasantry and the urban classes had made tremendous gains in influence and power since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and late-medieval literature intensively dealt with the resulting social tensions.15 I address this phenomenon by looking at a couple of narratives detailing sexual transgression and where the poetic protagonist openly admits, much to his chagrin, that he is losing the economic and social competition, probing in each instance to what extent these allusions represent the status of the nobility at large. Subsequently I discuss the curious relationship between the dubious knight from Reuental and the local villagers who compete with him for the favor of the peasant women. As hilarious and entertaining as Neidhart’s Summer Songs are, they demonstrate in multiple fashion the considerable destabilization of the world of the aristocratic courts, even though the poet cast his worries and concerns mostly in facetiousness.16 Scholars such as Tomas Tomasek have already examined some of the comic features in Neidhart’s oeuvre, arguing that the listeners’ ensuing laughter strategically erects a firewall against the foolish-looking and threateningly acting peasants.17 I think, however, that we have to take a good step further and identify the comedy in Neidhart’s songs as an expression of deep-seated fear. For, initially, all of his narratives appear—rather deceptively—beautiful and pastoral, such as in “Schowet an den walt” (R 50).18 The singer announces to his audience that the warm weather has transformed the forest, allowing it to put on a veritable show of leaves and flowers. At the same time, he appeals to the young women to come out and to ready themselves for the spring dance, wearing the “rosenchrenczel” (I, 8; “wreath of roses”). Everyone is delighted with the arrival of summer (II, 1), birds and people alike, the former singing, the latter playing ball (II). Joy and entertainment abound, and youth has finally defeated the old (III). But stanza 4 suddenly names a young woman, Jeuteline, who has captured the poet’s interest (5). But the dance takes place under a linden or lime tree (V, 8–10), the classical trope of medieval love poetry, perhaps best known in Walther von der Vogelweide’s famous song, “Under der linden.”19 Up to this point, the listener expects Neidhart to continue in the traditional discourse of courtly love poetry, but the following stanzas take us abruptly in a different direction entirely: we hear from the young woman’s old mother, “des chindes æide” (V, 1), who declares that she



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still feels young at heart, despite her gray hair, and intends to go with her daughter to meet the knight at the linden tree, in hopes of enjoying a sexual interlude herself. To disguise her advanced age, she plans to braid her hair and cover it with a veil. But her daughter, fearing that her mother will make a fool of herself in violating the norms of her age, has locked that important piece of clothing away (VI)—her mother’s desire to participate in the erotic games, in the dance, and in the wooing of the knight’s (sexual?) favors would be nothing but a bad dream and should be completely suppressed. The song then concludes with curious comments about the fight between these two women and with references to the daughter’s subsequent unspecified behavior with the knight from Reuental. The poet does not allow us to understand prima facie what really happened here, but we are told that at the dance the daughter stole two red shoes from the knight and in return gave him a wreath (VII). We might as well read these allusions through a sexual lens, whether shoes carried such a meaning at that time or not. Primarily, the poem sets up an erotically charged situation in which these two women compete for the knight’s favor, and it ends with oblique remarks that only underscore that specific favors were exchanged. There is hardly anything left of traditional courtly values; all the usual wooing has been abandoned in this pastoral setting in favor of a direct, almost crass hunt for sexual pleasure. The narrative was probably intended to confirm the assumptions that courtly audiences already made about the peasant class at large.20 Worse still is the peasant class’s portrayal in “Nu ist der chule winder gar zergangen” (R 51), in which the poet employs the crucial term “ougenweide” (II, 1; “joy for the eyes”) to describe the global happiness that fills people’s hearts when spring weather arrives, connecting it with the roses that are blooming again (II, 2) and the meadow covered in a refreshing early morning dew (II, 3–4). Similarly, the forest has turned green once more (III, 1–3), inviting two young women to don wreaths in preparation for an erotic encounter with the knight Reuental. But this time the old mother overhears their plans and tries to intervene, threatening to take away her daughter’s pretty dresses, urging her to hide her hair under a veil, as if she were already married (IV). The daughter, however, does not heed her mother’s authority and coldly reminds her that she herself spun every thread for the fabric of the dress, which makes ridiculous her threats to confiscate it in hopes of preventing her daughter’s fun with that knight (V). But the mother disregards her daughter’s protestations and locks the dress in a chest; her daughter then forces the chest open, destroying the lock. The old

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woman is so shocked that she does not know what to say (VI, 5), and her daughter simply runs away to the knight from Reuental, to whom she throws a yellow-colored ball (VII, 4–5), most likely an erotic symbol, though no real parallels to the allusion in other medieval texts confirm this interpretation. Yet just when we expect that the happy dalliance would conclude with the dance, we are taken completely by surprise: in the last stanza, the mother grabs a stick and savagely beats her daughter, warning her against even dreaming about the knight, cursing her to prevent her running away and the devil getting ahold of her (VIII, 4–5). Mother and daughter mirror larger social and sexual conflicts within late-medieval society, and Neidhart intriguingly reflects on and intertwines these themes into many of his songs. As Ann Marie Rasmussen has already observed, “These mothers are completely pragmatic about the rewards of sexual conformity (marriage to a man who owns livestock and fields) and the consequences of sexual rebellion (a bastard child).”21 But the poet’s ironic tone still signals his contempt for the peasant class—although he also betrays a hint of fear, as we will discuss later. The transgression, to be sure, signals most clearly that traditional values are at risk, if not already lost, since Neidhart never thematizes any courtly setting. Open sexual desire, lack of modesty and self-control, physical violence, mockery of the peasant class, and the poet’s own self-aggrandizement characterize this poem and many of his remaining verses. To confirm this, let us look at several other examples among Neidhart’s Summer Songs. In “Losa, wie die vogel alle donent” (R 53), we first come across delightful nature images—typical in the poetry of the genre—including choirs of thrushes, nightingales, and other birds (V). As usual, the poet describes the beautifully decked linden tree, where the dance takes place; but this time only village girls participate (I, 4–6). Since the roses are blooming again, the female speaker announces that she will fashion them into a wreath for her head (II). All these images create a poetic tableau that parallels the miniatures in the Manesse manuscript and elsewhere. But the story’s tone soon sours, because these young women belong to the peasant class and do not understand much, if anything, of courtly culture, although they intend to dance “mit einem hobschen ritter” (II, 6; “with an attractive knight”). We hear of this decision directly from the mouth of the female speaker, who addresses her girlfriend, encouraging her to join in the dance in the meadow, ostensibly relegating this song to a representative of the medieval genre of women’s songs.22 However, instead of a response from her friend, the girl’s mother interjects, warning her



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against the hubris of believing that she could ever attract a nobleman, directing her notice instead to the attentions of a young farmer, which would be much more appropriate to her station (III). At this point the textual version of R 53 seems to have gone astray, and we might be better off following the other versions in ms. C, stanzas 100–108, C 29, or ms. f 13; but for consistency’s sake let us instead trace the song as it appears in R 53 and banish to the background the stanzas’ disarray. At first the young woman continues to adulate the brilliance of nature in spring and express her delight in the nightingale’s song and the growth of new leaves on the trees (IV–VI). Only in stanza VII, which probably should have appeared elsewhere in the poem, does the daughter finally respond to her mother’s criticism, rejecting her insistence that she keep to her own social class and accept the peasant as her lover. The girl insists instead that only a nobleman would do: “ia trow ich einem stolczen ritter wol gehersen. / Zwiu sol ein gebower mir ze man / der enchan / mich nah minem [willen] niht getrouten” (VII, 2–5; “I trust that I should belong to a wonderful knight; what good would do me a peasant as a husband who cannot date me according to my wishes?”). Once more, the mother enjoins her daughter to abstain, to not fall victim to ignorance, even stupidity, and to not abandon her mother—that is, her own social class: “din muet dich allez von mir treit” (VIII, 6; “your mind drives you completely away from me”).23 Finally, the daughter ends the discussion, urging her mother to stop lamenting (“pagen,” IX, 1); she is prepared to wager her happiness on the knight from Reuental, to whom she had always openly made known her desires. She defies maternal authority and resolutely proclaims that everyone should observe that she will turn toward the castle of her lover (IX, 4–6). This then concludes the version of R 53. But C 105 continues: the mother warns her daughter that she can no longer protect her and insists that the daughter’s behavior will damage her reputation and honor. In C 108 the mother doesn’t merely scold but grabs a stick and beats her daughter badly, chasing her out of the house and away to Reuental, cutting off all ties with her.24 And in c 29, the mother goes so far as to imply that her daughter is already pregnant because she heard her making a lot of noise together with a man underneath the linden tree (X, 2); moreover, she urges her daughter to don a modest veil since the knight has dallied with her to such an extent that the consequences— probably a swelling tummy—are evident (X, 4–6). Everything is amiss: the nature setting and the interactions between man and woman are askew, all because of the stark conflict between

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the social classes. We are certainly invited to laugh at this foolish young woman who runs away from her mother to be with the knight from Reuental, which results, depending on the manuscript version, in her pregnancy or at least a severe clash with her mother who begs her to accept the peasant’s suit instead. Certainly the birds, the flowers, and the trees all announce a traditional locus amoenus.25 However, in this rural idyll the male poet Neidhart has the foolish women race to meet the noble knight with whom they would have an affair. The mother desperately tries to prevent their folly, but—at least in c 29—she fails. In the rural world parental authority has broken down: the mother’s traditional role has been wrested away by the aristocratic lover, waiting in the background though unlike the mother there is no evidence that the knight is making wedding plans. Spring, by contrast, has intoxicated the young women with an unbridled lust, disobedience, and disrespect. The mother emphasizes that for her daughter to join the knightly lover in a meadow dance outside the village would be grossly immodest and signals a lack of self-restraint; moreover, it would violently disrupt the social order for peasant women to mingle with noble dance partners “di dir niht ze mazzen suln sin” (III, 3; “who are not appropriate for you”). As the research by both Ursula Schulz and Hans-Joachim Behr, for instance, has already illustrated, the poet Neidhart created deft stereotypes and predicated his songs on outspoken satire, so we ought to be extremely careful in our assessment of the allegedly realistic background of his songs about the peasant women and their desire to dance with the knight from Reuental on the glorious spring day.26 Nevertheless, presenting this and many similar songs to his noble audience,27 Neidhart transgressed traditional expectations, imagined new areas of operation for the knightly adventurers—ridiculing implicitly, however, their potential sexual goals, laughing at the same time at the foolish peasant women, and presenting, altogether, a world turned topsy-turvy. These spring songs are particularly transgressive in their heavy reliance on traditional elements, images, and specifically courtly language applied to the world of peasant women who want to experience erotic encounters with the falsely idealized Reuental figure. At times the subtlety and skill with which Neidhart composes his songs obscures the satire and even endangers the audience’s understanding of his intended tone. In a way, Neidhart’s poems were still modeled after traditional examples of courtly love songs: the male lover pines away for his lady but is consistently deprived of any happiness, which ennobles him.28 In “Nu ist vil gar zergangen” (R 54) we encounter just such a tale: a cheerful mood dominates the entire poem, for winter



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has passed into spring, although the narrator still emphasizes how much pain burdens his heart: “Ich mach leider niht geiehen, / daz mir min tougen senediu sorge swinde. / Diu ist min ingesinde” (II, 6–8; “Unfortunately I cannot say that my secret, painful pining has been reduced. It is a household item”). The next stanza switches to a dialogue between two young women, one of whom laments an unrequited love (III). Specifically, the man for whom she longs has given her the cold shoulder: “mir ist ein man / vremde” (IV, 5–6; “a man does not recognize me”). Her friend supports her and urges her to keep it all a secret and not expose her true feelings (V, 7). Only stanza VI reveals the name of the beloved, who is none other than the knight from Reuental, the singer himself, or at least a projection on the stage of courtly love. Again, however, the young woman does not explicitly identify him as the object of her desire; instead she refers to him as the one whose singing she had heard (VI, 5) and then begs God to protect him on her behalf (VI, 7–8). Finally, in stanza VII the female speaker betrays her deep melancholy: she feels homeless and lonely. While the swallow knows how to build a house for itself out of clay, she cannot find a home there. Next she complains about summer’s brevity, pleading with God to provide her with a house covered by a roof near a creek called Lengebache (VII, 7–8).29 This may suggest a rural setting, since swallows are normally found in villages—building their nests in the eaves of farm houses—and since she refers only to a valley with a creek—where a castle would be out of the question. Nevertheless, irony still permeates this poem because it plays so exceedingly well with the traditional topoi: it makes us believe that two courtly ladies are exchanging ideas and revealing their deepest feelings, when in reality we overhear two country women yearning for the love of a knight—that is, the poet himself, who positions himself quite delicately in the background both as the object of their affections and someone who does not care about those village girls. Despite the soft criticism contained in this song, there is no doubt that Neidhart ridiculed both the world of the peasants—particularly of the women who regard themselves as appropriate matches for the knightly singer—and also the world of the aristocrats. Since he projects himself, or rather the knight from Reuental, as the idealized object of erotic desire by the village girls, aristocratic culture is also exposed as materialistic, sex driven, and pathetic in its hypocritical pretenses of maintaining high courtly values and standards.30 Perhaps we’re supposed to feel pity for the lonely, possibly homeless, female voice, but her lament remains rather mysterious because it does not make real sense. Why would she not have housing? Why would she

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not build a place for herself as the swallow does all the time? The answer might rest in the third and final line of R 54, where she complaints about the quick passing of summer, the only time when she might have a chance to reach out to the knight and win him as her beloved (VII, 6). Considering that we must assume that Neidhart presented his poem to a courtly audience, hence to the rich and wealthy of his time, such a cry for cover under a roof would have evoked brutal laughter, especially after the entire poem had been cast in such soft, fragile, and tender terms. The woman’s wailing does not make sense, she is nothing but a simple country girl, and all her dreams of living in a castle come to naught. In other words, the audience is suddenly invited to break out in laughter because even here, perhaps more subtly than elsewhere, but certainly equally powerfully, transgression is also at work. If we turn to “Uns wil ein sumer chomen” (R 56), the thematic orientation—with its satirical, perhaps even sarcastic, elements—gains even more traction, strengthening the “noble” poet’s ridicule of the peasant women who all fall for the miserable knight from Reuental figure in every one of these songs. This time the nature background is practically not present, except for fleeting references to the spring weather that has made dancing outdoors possible. The female voice immediately announces that she has heard the Reuental singer perform his songs, which make her heart race excessively: “als ez welle toben” (I, 4; “as if it wants to rage”). Her passion for this man is so strong that she cannot control herself, and hence she pronounces that she will hold his hand during the next dance at any cost. Of course, here as well we encounter the standard linden tree where all the erotic action takes place, and which could also symbolize not only the beauty of fulfilled love—as in Walther von der Vogelweide’s famous song (see above)—but also the site where sexual violation, rape, commonly takes place—such as in the Latin-German poem “Ich was ein chint so wolgetan” in the contemporary Carmina Burana (no. 185).31 As the first stanza indicates, this woman’s propriety knows no bounds, and she makes herself readily available to male desire, which the knightly guest in the area of the village takes fully to his advantage. He only needs to perform a few songs before the village girls are following him like the rats trailing the Pied Piper of Hamelin: “ich springe an siner hende zu der linden” (I, 7; “I will dance [jump] holding his hand next to the linden tree”). Much more explicitly than in the previous songs, the headstrong girl’s conflict with her mother takes center stage, since the old woman obviously knows only too well what will become of her daughter, warning her that she might be easily seduced and abused. She goes on to



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admonish her daughter to be moderate and control herself (II, 2). And she buttresses her warning with a reference to one of her daughter’s female friends who immediately became pregnant after she had spent time with this noble intruder: waistu wi geschah diner gespilen Ieuten vert, alsam ir æide iach? der wuhs von sinem ræien uof ir wæmpel, und gewan ein chint, daz hiez si Lempel. also lert er si den gimpelgempel. (II, 3–7)

[Do you know what happened / to your girlfriend Jüten, as her mother told me? / From this dance it happened that her tummy grew / and she gained a child, which she called Lempel. / In this way he taught her the “gimpelgempel.”] We need not be told in detail what happened at the dance to understand the consequences perfectly: he slept with and impregnated the young woman. The child received a typical peasant name, Lempel, which conveniently rhymes on the onomatopoetic phrase gimpelgempel, which is untranslatable but certainly refers to sexual dalliance. Despite her mother’s clear warning about the knight’s unmistakable sexual motives, the young woman disregards her mother’s advice, because she is already completely enamored and cannot see how this knightly singer has already manipulated her so completely, trapping her and disabling her free will. As the girl retorts to her mother, the knight from Reuental sent her a wreath of roses (III, 2), which she has already placed on her head (III, 3). He also brought her a pair of red shoes from France (or at least from the other side of the Rhine, as she says) (III, 4–5), of which she is foolishly proud, so intent is she on carrying out his wishes and disregarding anything that her mother might tell her: “ia volg ich iwer ræt harte chleine” (III, 7; “I do not listen at all to your advice”). Her rebellious attitude adds another layer of transgression to this song, this time addressing both the aristocratic audience, who might fear the disobedience of their own daughters, and also a potential rural audience, who are the subject of the song, though it is extremely unlikely that Neidhart would have ever actually addressed the lower class as explicitly. The Manesse manuscript also contains the didactic exchange between mother and daughter by the otherwise unknown Winsbeckin, but there the dialogue leads to a constructive discussion of the dangers lurking in the world for young women, and it concludes with a basic agreement between the two women.32 Neidhart, on the other hand, presents a highly

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contentious young woman who only trusts her new lover to whom she has pledged herself: “des hat er miniu sicherheit” (IV, 4; “he has my guarantee”). She cannot understand, nor does she want to, why her honor would be at stake (IV, 5), so she announces that she would leave home and hearth without having any plans ever to return because she trusts this lover completely: “er muoz mich sine geile sprunge leren” (IV, 7; “he must teach me his boisterous jumps”). The peasant girl’s audacity immediately remind us of Helmbrecht’s sister Gotelind, whose sad tale is told in Wernher the Gardener’s didactic narrative Helmbrecht, composed only a few decades later (ca. 1270–1280). The story is of a young woman who decides to sneak away from her peasant home with her robber-knight brother after his second return to their village; they then publicly forsake their parents because they aspire to a better, wealthier, even nobler, life. However, both are quickly apprehended by the authorities and cruelly punished. Helmbrecht loses both eyes, his right hand, and his left foot, and Gotelind is stripped naked and fettered to a fence to be publicly humiliated (1631–36). The narrator does not know what else happens to her, but the cruel punishment already detailed serves as sufficient warning, which the daughter in Neidhart’s poem certainly should have heeded, as Claudia Brinker von der Heide illustrates in her article.33 Finally, in the last stanza, the mother gives up trying to change her daughter’s mind and instead prophesies that the marriage will quickly fail, and her daughter will be stuck with several children in the crib and a husband prone to violence: “er beginnet dich slahen stozzen roufen, / muzzen zwo wiegen bi dir loufen” (V, 6–7; “He will begin to beat you, push you, and pull your hair, and there will be two mangers in front of you”). The obscure reference to the Reuental knight’s “trairos” (V, 5), which will only betray her, might be a specific dance34 but signals in general that such a knight and such erotically charged dancing cannot end well for the girl. The song clearly invited the audience to laugh at this foolish young woman who so easily becomes the noble singer’s sexual prey. While the song seemingly criticizes only representatives of the peasant class, it’s not a stretch for us to suppose that Neidhart was quietly addressing all young women, of every circumstance, warning them to follow their mothers’ advice and guard their honor for fear of ending up victims of domestic violence and abuse.35 Nevertheless, the comic elements still dominate the song for a number of reasons: The poem begins, as usual, with the generic praise of summer’s arrival, during which the young woman will join other female



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friends at the dance and join hands with this curious knight figure. We know, of course, what follows from that, and the mother’s warning isn’t so much necessary except to invite the audience to laugh at the acrimonious exchange between both women, where the older woman first loses when her daughter simply rejects her, belittles her, and then runs off with her attractive knight. But we are allowed a second smile when the mother predicts the crude and brutal behavior of her daughter’s future husband. We might wonder whether the old woman has herself experienced the suffering she is warning her daughter against. At any rate, the true comedy rests in the drastic contrast between the thinly veiled dream of erotic and sexual desires that drive the young woman, and the most probable consequences that smack like a reality check: an abusive husband and two babies that demand the woman’s full attention. Although the introductory framework of this song still evokes the traditional courtly elements, the subsequent dialogue and the mother’s warning expose them all as lies, except that the daughter does not have the capacity to grasp what is really going on in her life because she is totally obsessed with erotic desire and hence finds herself in no position to think rationally. No other poet before Neidhart had explicitly discussed all that was implied by the lovely wooing, the dance on the meadow under the linden tree, the communal singing, and the courtly festivities. The idea that a nobleman would ever actually wed a peasant girl was meant to be extremely jarring and bitingly hilarious. Most importantly, Neidhart not only ridicules the peasant class but also exposes the hypocrisy of courtly love poetry altogether, leaving it to the critical mother to tell the rest of the story that no one else ever seems interested in. In a way, the knightly figure also becomes the object of the poet’s satire since he simply seduces the young woman and victimizes her, even though she might not understand what is truly happening to her. Moreover, the mother proves to be entirely helpless, although she seems to foresee correctly what is in store for her poor daughter. And the daughter, most of all, rejects all parental authority outright and simply runs away because she only wants to be with her lover out of overwhelming erotic desire. Nothing is right in this troubled world, and Neidhart addresses the egregious transgressions that deeply affect and scar his time. Neidhart’s Summer Songs aren’t the only tales of transgression. In the Winter Songs the noble singer’s predicament is quite different, much more threatening and dangerous, because in these tales the village men come forward and begin to threaten their noble competitor, promising to best him in competition for the women’s favors. Whereas the Songs

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of Summer sang the praises of nature’s return and the subsequent joy spring and summer brought, here winter is a devastation, devoid of joy, where the singer laments the loss of all happiness because all flowers and leaves have disappeared.36 Cold winds, snow, and frost destroy all natural beauty, leading the singer to lament, “eis und anehanch / hat der vogelin sanch / gar gestillet in den welden, da sie muzzzen swigen allen disen winder lanch” (R 1, II, 13–15; “Ice and everything that comes along with it have muted the birds’ song in the forests. There they must be silent throughout the whole long winter”). But just as in Summer Songs, the nature tropes of Winter Songs are mere background for the actual issue at stake. Whereas in the former the growth of leaves and flowers illustrates a happy experience of love, in the latter all joy is gone because the young women suddenly find the country lads much more attractive than they do the knight from Reuental. First of all, the peasants prevent Neidhart from singing his usual songs (IV), and then they even chase him away from the women altogether: “diesen sumer habent si mich verdrungen, er unt sin gelofte Herebrant” (IV, 15; “this summer [i.e., by summer’s end] they have pushed me aside, he and his buddy Herebrant”). Helplessly, the noble singer watches the village men whisper into the woman’s ears while they dance with her (V, 6), which causes him great grief, as there is nothing he can do to stop them (V, 11). All his good luck has disappeared by winter, and he is a victim of misfortune, especially in matters of love (V, 12–15). Never before, he emphasizes, has his life been more miserable (VI, 1–2), because a peasant rival has outdone him and caused him great harm. This grievance finds its most vocal expression in the narrator’s final comment—that the peasant Engelmar has stolen his lady Vriderounen’s mirror (VI, 12), which is tantamount to the most grievous transgression the poet can imagine. Finally, the injured knight swears to do just as his opponent has—steal the mirror—in revenge (VI, 15), indicating that the mirror is symbolically significant—in all likelihood representing sexuality, perhaps even the woman’s virginity.37 Robbing her mirror, then, means raping her, which might be the village lads’ general approach to seducing the women, as implied in the conclusion of the following song, “Sumer, diner suzzen weter muzzen wir uns anen” (R 2). The singer bitterly resents the peasants’ luxurious and certainly improper clothing, which contradicts all sartorial law and custom of the late Middle Ages, where dress demarcates class. After this complaint, we hear a female peasant call out in distress (VI, 6).38 Whatever might be going on within the peasant domiciles, the knight from Reuental is at a great disadvantage and observes the girls’ sexual



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abuse at the hand of the peasant men. Over and over again the narrator bitterly laments how the men dress most arrogantly and pretend to be social equals with him—that is, a courtier. Most painfully, the narrator realizes that because they possess these material attributes the village men assume they also have the right to flirt with the girls and shut him out of the erotic competition. In a later poem, “Nu ist der liebe sumer hin gescheiden” (R 7), the peasants’ violence is described even more explicitly—the infamous mirror is destroyed during a wild fight between the men (only in ms. c 117, XVII, 9–10). The narrator mentions that many of the men are badly wounded and that one of the lads is even slain by the others; but really it is the destruction of the mirror that truly hurts the poet because, we can safely say, it represents traditional courtly values and ideals.39 But we could go even one step further in our interpretation, following Stefan Zeyen’s lead, who suggests that Neidhart here alludes to the sexual act itself, the mirror standing in for the vagina, and the club with which the mirror is broken symbolizing the penis.40 However we interpret the meaning of mirror, Neidhart certainly underscores how transgression mars society at large: courtly love has grossly morphed into a brutish game of sexual conquest, and the peasants have riotously banded together to undermine the traditionally superior role of the aristocracy. This assessment finds its most poignant expression in a later complaint, that men at large are no longer trustworthy partners in the game of love and can no more serve as “der weib spiegelglas” (R 10, III, 5; “women’s mirror glass”) because they have become weak and effeminate (“geswachen,” III, 6) and have abandoned the quest for honor (“die man sint niht in eren,” IV, 3; “the men have fallen out of honor”). Reflecting on how life has changed over the past thirty years, one of the women speakers sighs, saying, “ia ist iz hiwer boser danne vert, / daz leben mir beginnet swaren” (N I, 5–6; “things stand worse than before; life is getting hard for me”). Worse, even, in “Wir chlagen daz der winder” (R 13) the narrator has nothing positive to say anymore about his lady who has lost all honor and can no longer be saved from social disgrace unless God himself were to intervene on her behalf: Miner vrowen ere, diu ist an allen liden lam unde strouchet sere. si ist gevallen daz siz uberwinden nimmer mach. si leit in einer lachen, daz si niemen ane got ræine chan gemachen. sie gewinnet nimmer mere rehten suzzen smack. (III, 1–6)

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[My lady’s honor / is lacking in every limb and stumbles badly. / She fell so deeply that she can never recover it. / She is lying in such a puddle / that no one except for the pure God can make her clean again. / She will never again regain a good, sweet smell.] On the other hand, in the same song (R 13) the peasants represent a serious threat to the nobility, as in the last two stanzas the poet sighs in relief that finally all those young men have been drafted as soldiers into the army of the duke of Austria. Instead of being the first at the dance in the village—where the knight from Reuental wants to dominate as a lover, which in and of itself is a transgressive act—they have now put on iron armor and prepare themselves for warfare (IV, 5–7). Finally, then, the way is cleared the way for the curious narrator; he is now the only man available to all of the young women, who of course now can no longer be harassed by the peasant men (IV, 8–9). Curiously, however, the song continues, at least in ms. C with stanza 17: Neidhart suddenly reveals the name of the one woman he had wooed the entire time, though foolishly—“Werltsuesse” (VIII, 4; “Sweetness of This World”). But he now begs God to liberate him of her (VIII, 5) and to protect the other ladies, obviously the really noble women at court who display true honor and are far removed from the world of crude physical pleasures. The C version concludes with a few verses about birds that are kept as pets because their singing is so beautiful. If they are well fed during the summer and winter, they are grateful (IX, 10). Other birds, however, that are unreliable and do not sing with a pleasing voice, do not deserve such respect and good treatment. In other words, Neidhart continues to discuss women at large, contrasting the courtly lady with the peasant woman, clearly dismissing the latter as insufficiently honorable— even though he thought them sufficiently worthy to command a starring role in his literary songs! Neidhart, then, does not think that courtly values are completely lost, but he believes that transgression lurks everywhere, in the form of the loud, sex-crazed village girls and the upstart peasant men who try to oust the nobility and assume their trappings for themselves. By the same token, in other Winter Songs the noble knight from Reuental finds himself at a great disadvantage to the country lads, as in the poem “Owe, lieber sumer, diner suzze bernden wunne” (R 18). Courtly joy, the key value in the high Middle Ages,41 has suddenly been lost (II, 1) and now seems an alien component in this world (among the nobles) (II, 2–4); even so, Neidhart thinks he knows how to retrieve this joy and, hence, regain the ethical standards he held of old if he turns to his lord, Duke Frederick of Austria (II, 5–8). Nevertheless, the



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outrageous peasants still pose a grave threat to the poet, poaching on the aristocrats’ status and dressing inappropriately as if they were of superior class. And so Neidhart urges his audience to take action and rip off the cap of the peasant who dared transgress all normative standards and, thus, appear as worthy as the nobles, wearing long, curly hair (VII).42 In ms. c 113 the poet continues with his lamentations, offering more details of a social order turned on its ear and explicitly appeals to the members of the court to be resolute and defend their status against the arrogant people from the country: “das will ich mit gsanck nu den hoffleuten klagen” (XII, 4; “I want to complain about this to the courtiers through my song”). Neidhart represents the nobility of his time while also playing the gigolo with the peasant women, and so his sarcastic tone could not be clearer. Though many of his Summer Songs invite laughter, they also lay the foundation for the contrastive Winter Songs, where his pretense of being such an erotically attractive character is suddenly exposed and collapses. As intriguing as Neidhart’s oeuvre may be—innovative in many respects, irreverent, satirical, and even grotesque at times, considering his comments about sexual violence committed against one of the peasant women (loss of the mirror)—and as much as he consistently warns of the dangers resulting from the bold transgressions that occur everywhere, he ultimately has no solution to offer his audience, only poetic satire, and thus writes himself as a Don Quixote avant la lettre. In “Allez daz den sumer her mit vreuden was” (R 20), for instance, the joys of summer are all lost, and the singer has to live live with the consequences—his children from his beloved or wife (III, 2)—a theme virtually unsung in all of medieval courtly love poetry. But the singer blames everything on the material temptations of this world and berates himself for having committed too many sins, having turned away from God, and having ignored his own soul. Drawing from the traditional memento mori motif, the narrator insists that his wife or beloved can no longer force him to provide her with his service (III, 4–5), that he needs to take care of his own soul (III, 5–6), and that he must stop performing courtly songs. Turning away from all courtly love, he mockingly encourages his lady to accept the service of thousands of other men (IV, 2), whereas he himself would submit to God alone (IV, 3). In short, Neidhart says good-bye to courtly singing, a necessity he blames on the disrespectful peasants (V–VII). To conclude, Neidhart proves to be an extraordinary and fascinating voice reflecting deep and painful social disruptions in the early thirteenth century. He addressed the fundamental conflict by singing

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stories of free love between the dubious knight from Reuental and the various village women in the Summer Songs and then by lamenting his feud with the peasant lovers—in possession of superior material conditions and resources—who easily outshine him during the winter months. But the poet does not really address the lower social classes. Rather, Neidhart engages with the members of the noble class, specifically with the court, warning them about the seductiveness of the village women and the overt aggression of the peasant lads. Nevertheless, he cannot uphold the noble class as an ideal against which the peasants would have to measure themselves, because there is not much in the nobility to admire. Neidhart would certainly prefer, as a close reading of a wide range of his poems clearly indicates, to adulate and idolatrize the nobility, his specific audience. However, the courtly world is already in shambles, as these poems signal quite clearly. Sex dominates and makes a mockery of courtly love in its traditional context. The young men from the village face no difficulties in imitating, if not outdoing, their aristocratic competitors, so their transgression is most effective. Neidhart has no other choice but to lament the obvious transgression as a result of many different social and economic factors that are not mentioned here. Certainly in the Summer Songs he still sings of courtly love coming to good fruition and satisfaction, but if we listen closely, despite the peasant women’s eagerness and lack of concern for their own honor or virginity, the poems do not contain any reference to true and mutual happiness and erotic fulfillment. On the contrary, we might call Neidhart a pessimist and sarcastic critic: all of his poetic images of courtly love are completely travestied and ridiculed; they are situated in the countryside where the knight from Reuental either enjoys excessive success in sexual terms or is rudely pushed aside and marginalized by the pompous young village lads. One farcical universe here collides with another operating completely on the false, theatrical assumption that the material claims by the peasant class could be rejected easily. Although Neidhart continued to call his opponents “tumbe getelinge” (R 21, VI, 2; “dumb peasants”), he could not deny his own defeat in face of their erotic triumphs both in their villages and at the dance in the meadow. Both in the Summer and Winter Songs, the knight from Reuental has no real chance to achieve his personal goals and is ultimately an object of derision, even though the old mother explicitly tells her daughter in one song that the “wurzen in dem munde” (R 22, VII, 2; “the root in his mouth”) is nothing but his genitals—a hilarious transfer of his masculine body parts, or a transfer of the kiss (tongue) to the coitus (penis). Of course, as the old woman



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immediately realizes, he has impregnated her daughter: “du bist niht magt, dich rurent mannes minne” (VII, 4; “you are no longer a virgin; a man’s love has touched you”). In the aggressive Winter Songs the knight quickly understands how minute his chances really are and that his social class has mostly lost its traditional influence over economic resource. As the poet signals, ultimately, neither sexual prowess nor chivalric performance can any longer guarantee social dominance, and the more Neidhart and his successors make their audiences laugh, the more we recognize a sense of defeat.

Notes   1. For an online version of the digitized manuscript, see http://diglit.ub.uniheidelberg.de/diglit/cpg848/ (accessed April 3, 2010). Wikipedia.de offers a surprisingly well-written article, along with updated research, at http:// de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse (accessed April 3, 2010).   2. Ingo F. Walther, ed. and explained by, with Gisela Siebert, Codex Manesse: Die Miniaturen der Großen Heidelberger Liederhandschrift (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1989; 6th ed. 2001); see the critical comments by Gisela Kornrumpf on this famous manuscript, Vom Codex Manesse zur Kolmarer Liederhandschrift: Aspekte der Überlieferung, Formtraditionen, Texte, Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2008), 133.   3. Josef Fleckenstein, ed., Das ritterliche Turnier im Mittelalter: Beiträge zu einer vergleichenden Formen- und Verhaltensgeschichte des Rittertums (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986); Thomas Zotz, Das Turnier als Gesellschafts-Spiel: Adelige Lebensformen und höfische Kultur im Mittelalter (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2002).   4. See, for instance, John Margetts, ed., Neidhartspiele, Wiener Neudrucke, 7 (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1982), 259–76.   5. Marion E. Gibbs and Sidney M. Johnson (Medieval German Literature: A Companion [New York and London: Garland, 1997], 279) refer to Neidhart in two sentences and then ignore him entirely. The contributors to German Literature of the High Middle Ages (Will Hasty, ed., The Camden House History of German Literature, 3 [Rochester, N.Y., and Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2006]) mention Neidhart a number of times, but they only pay lip service to him. In fact, he only makes a cameo appearance in this otherwise excellent literary history. When we turn to older studies, such as J. G. Robertson’s History of German Literature (6th ed., ed. Dorothy Reich [1902; Elmsford, N.Y.: London House & Maxwell, 1970]), Neidhart gains considerably more attention, but the information offered is no longer valid and represents a naive positivist approach.   6. For a useful introduction to Neidhart in English, see William E. Jackson, “Neidhart von Reuental,” in German Writers and Works of the High Middle Ages: 1170–1280, ed. James Hardin and Will Hasty, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 13 (Detroit; Washington, D.C.; and London: Gale Research, 1994), 88–91. For a biographical-historical introduction, see Eckehard Simon,

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Neidhart von Reuental, Twayne’s World Authors Series, 364 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975); for a very solid discussion of Neidhart research with a focus on the manuscripts, the historical figure, his songs in their musical and textual manifestations, see Günther Schweikle, Neidhart, Sammlung Metzler, 253 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990).   7. Traditionally we have relied on the edition Die Lieder Neidharts, Edmund Wiessner, ed., Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 44 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1955; 4th ed. continued by Hanns Fischer, and revised by Paul Sappler, 1984). See also Die Lieder Neidharts: Der Textbestand der Pergament-Handschriften und die Melodien, edition der Melodien von Horst Brunner (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975). Whereas Wiessner et al. still embraced the traditional concept of the Lachmannian stemmatology, Beyschlag went already one important step further to rely faithfully on the manuscript versions. But he constantly switches between the individual manuscripts in order to create the most “authentic” text version. See Siegfried Beyschlag, ed., Die Lieder Neidharts: Der Textbestand der Pergament-Handschriften und die Melodien (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975).   8. For a broader discussion of this topic, see Thomas Bein, “Zum ‘Autor’ im mittelalterlichen Literaturbetrieb und im Diskurs der germanistischen Mediävistik,” in Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs, ed. Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999), 303–20. See also the contributions to Autorentypen (Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger, eds., Fortuna vitrea, 6 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991).   9. Helmut Lomnitzer, “Zur wechselseitigen Erhellung von Text- und Melodiekritik mittelalterlicher deutscher Lyrik,” in Probleme mittelalterlicher Überlieferung und Textkritik: Oxforder Colloquium 1966, ed. Peter F. Ganz and Werner Schröder, Institute of Germanic Studies, Publications, 11 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1968), 118–44. 10. Ulrich Müller, Ingrid Bennewitz, and Franz Viktor Spechtler, eds., NeidhartLieder: Texte und Melodien sämtlicher Handschriften und Drucke, 3 vols., Salzburger Neidhart-edition, 1–3 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007); see my review in this volume. 11. See my studies: “Mauritius von Craûn and Otto von Freising’s The Two Cities: 12th- and 13th-Century Scepticism about Historical Progress and the Metaphor of the Ship,” German Quarterly 79, 1 (2006): 28–49; “Die sich selbst verschlingende Gewalt: Grundsätzliche Gedanken zu einem globalmenschlichen Phänomen mit mediävistischen Perspektiven auf Wernhers des Gaertenære Helmbrecht und Heinrich Wittenwilers Ring,” Futhark: Revista de investigación y cultura 1 (2006): 11–39; “Gewaltverbrechen als Thema des spätarturischen Romans. Sozialkritisches in Wirnts von Grafenberg Wigalois,” Etudes Germaniques 62, 2 (2007): 429–55; “Heinrich der Teichner: Commentator and Critic of the Worlds of the Court,” Orbis Litterarum 63, 3 (2008): 237–61; and “Money, Power, Poverty, and Social Criticism in the Work of Heinrich der Teichner,” Studi medievali (forthcoming). 12. In Neidharts Sommerlieder: Überlieferungsvarianz und Autoridentität (Münchener Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters, 132 [Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2007], 17), Jessica Warning rightly emphasizes that the twenty-five manuscripts [from the thirteenth to the late fifteenth century] and the two sixteenth-century prints defy all efforts to categorize the poet and his oeuvre in a simple fashion.



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13. Günther Schweikle, ed., Dichter über Dichter in mittelhochdeutscher Literatur, Deutsche Texte, 12 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1970), 4, 33, 39, 80, 89, 91, 102. See also Jörn Bockmann, Translatio Neidhardi: Untersuchungen zur Konstitution der Figurenidentität in der Neidhart-Tradition, Mikrokosmos, 61 (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, et al.: Peter Lang, 2001). 14. Schweikle, Neidhart, 80–85; Ulrike Lehmann-Langholz, Kleiderkritik in mittelalterlicher Dichtung: Der Arme Heinrich, Heinrich ‘von Melk’, Neidhart, Wernher der Gartenaere und ein Ausblick auf die Stellungnahmen spätmittelalterlicher Dichter, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe I: Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, 885 (Frankfurt am Main, Bern, and New York: Peter Lang, 1985), 155–74. For a broad discussion of peasants, see Werner Rösener, Peasants in the Middle Ages, trans. and with foreword and glossary by Alexander Stützer (1985; Cambridge: Polity, 1992). 15. Werner Rösener, “Leben auf dem Lande und bäuerlicher Alltag: Aspekte der Veränderung bäuerlicher Lebensverhältnisse im Hochmittelalter,” in Alltagsleben im Mittelalter, Schriften zur staufischen Geschichte und Kunst, 24 (Göppingen: Gesellschaft für staufische Geschichte e.V., 2005), 59–84. For the new role of urban life, see the contributions to Albrecht Classen, ed., Urban Space in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern culture, 4 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009). 16. We haven’t room here to investigate the wide-reaching issue of economic changes affecting all of thirteenth-century Europe and must content ourselves with taking note of Neidhart’s rather unsettling statements throughout his oeuvre. For some global perspectives, see Frances and Joseph Gies, Life in a Medieval Village (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); Werner Rösener, Agrarwirtschaft, Agrarverfassung und ländliche Gesellschaft im Mittelalter, Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, 13 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992); Michael Mitterauer, “Die Landwirtschaft und der ‘Aufstieg Europas,’” Historische Anthropologie 8 (2000): 423–31. 17. “Komik im Minnesang: Möglichkeiten einer Bestandsaufnahme,” in Komische Gegenwelten: Lachen und Literatur in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Werner Röcke and Helga Neumann (Paderborn, Munich, et al.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1999), 13–28; here 23–24. 18. According to the new edition from which I am quoting here, it only makes sense to cite the specific stanza, or song, in a specific manuscript. R here refers to the Riedegger Handschrift (late thirteenth century), today housed in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, mgf 1062 (vol. 3, X). 19. Walther von der Vogelweide, Leich, Lieder, Sangsprüche, 14, völlig neubearbeitete Auflage der Ausgabe Karl Lachmanns mit Beiträgen von Thomas Bein und Horst Brunner, ed. Christoph Cormeau (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), no. 16 (L. 39,11). For a discussion of how the trope of the linden tree could be translated into its very opposite meaning, see Hubert Heinen, “Walther’s ‘Under der linden,’ Its Function, Its Subtext, and Its Maltreated Maiden,” in Medieval German Literature: Proceedings from the 23rd International Congress on Medieval Studies Kalamazoo, MI, May 5–8, 1988, ed. Albrecht Classen, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 507 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1989), 51–73. 20. See, for instance, the contributions to European Peasants and Their Markets: Essays in Agrarian Economic History (William Nelson Parker and E. L. Jones,

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eds. [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975]); and to Landlords, Peasants, and Politics in Medieval England (T. H. Aston, ed. [Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987]); see also Piero Camporesi, Bauern, Priester, Possenreisser: Volkskultur und Kultur der Eliten im Mittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, trans. Karl F. Hauber (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Campus Verlag, 1997); Paul H. Freedman, The Images of the Medieval Peasant, Figurae (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 21. Mothers and Daughters in Medieval German Literature (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 171. 22. See the excellent bilingual edition of a good selection of such women’s songs in Ingrid Kasten’s Frauenlieder des Mittelalters (Übersetzt und herausgegeben von Ingrid Kasten [Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990]). Kasten includes some Neidhart songs as well, but not R 53. See also the valuable contributions to Medieval Woman’s Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches (Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen, eds., The Middle Ages Series [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002]). Surprisingly, although Rasmussen is a Germanist, the texts by Neidhart are not even mentioned here. For a discussion of authentic women’s songs in the German Middle Ages, see Albrecht Classen, Late-Medieval German Women’s Poetry: Secular and Religious Songs, trans. with introduction, notes, and interpretive essay, Library of Medieval Women (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 2004). 23. To avoid mistakes in the reproduction of this text in the printed version, I am writing out all German phonetically in lieu of using diacritics. 24. In the more or less contemporary didactic verse narrative Helmbrecht by Wernher the Gardener (ca. 1230–1240), the young protagonist deliberately rejects his social background and family and becomes a robberknight. He even eventually attacks and robs from among his own social group because he is not strong enough to pillage among the nobility or the urban class. Wernher, however, clearly signals at the end that such a transgression results in the most severe punishment at the hand of the authorities; the robber-knight is lynched by the peasants. See the contributions to Wernher der Gärtner: ‘Helmbrecht,’ Die Beiträge des HelmbrechtSymposions in Burghausen 2001 (Theodor Nolte and Tobias Schneider, eds., [Stuttgart: S. Hirzel, 2001]); see also Günter Lange, Zeitkritik im “Helmbrecht” von Wernher dem Gärtner: Und ihre sozialgeschichtlichen Hintergründe (Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag Hohengehren, 2009). For a critical edition, see Wernher der Gartenære, Helmbrecht, ed. Friedrich Panzer and Kurt Ruh, 10th ed. by Hans-Joachim Ziegeler, Altdeutsche Textbibliothek, 11 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993). 25. The classical study of this topos still proves to be Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen, series, XXXVI (1948; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 195–202. 26. Ursula Schulze, “Zur Frage des Realitätsbezuges bei Neidhart,” in Österreichische Literatur zur Zeit der Babenberger: Vorträge der Lilienfelder Tagung 1976, ed. Alfred Ebenbauer, Fritz Peter Knapp, and Ingrid Strasser, Wiener Arbeiten zur germanistischen Altertumskunde und Philologie, 10 (Vienna: Halosar, 1977), 197–217 (referring mostly to Neidhart’s crusade song and to the reference of his castle); Hans-Joachim Behr, “ICH GEVRIESCH BÎ MÎNEN JÂREN NIE GEBÛREN ALSÔ GEILE. . . : Neidharts ‘Dörper’Feindlichkeit und das Problem sozialen Aufstiegs im Rahmen des Territorialisierungsprozesses in Bayern und Österreich,” in Neidhart von Reuental:



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Aspekte einer Neubewertung, ed. Helmut Birkhan, Philologica Germanica, 5 (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1983), 1–16. 27. Schweikle, Neidhart, 63. 28. In The Ennobling Power of Love in the Medieval German Lyric (University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages, 106 [Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986]), Stephen J. Kaplowitt argues convincingly that this general assumption about medieval courtly love would not find full confirmation when the entire corpus of Minnesang is carefully examined. Nevertheless, pining away for the beloved—lamenting the distance from the lady—is the common theme in courtly love poetry. This finds even more expression in courtly romances; see C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility, The Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 29. Beyschlag, ed. and trans., Die Lieder Neidharts, 765, identifies Lengebach as a village and a creek in Upper Austria. 30. Warning, Neidharts Sommerlieder, 215–23. 31. Benedikt Konrad Vollmann, ed., Carmina Burana: Texte und Übersetzungen; mit den Miniaturen aus der Handschrift und einem Aufsatz von Peter und Dorothee Diemer, Bibliothek des Mittelalters, 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 588–92; for a solid commentary, see ibid. 1207–1209. For an introduction to this famous corpus of songs, see Albrecht Classen, “Carmina Burana,” in Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature, ed. Jay Ruud (New York: Facts On File, 2006), 114–15. See also Classen, “The Carmina Burana: A Mirror of Latin and Vernacular Literary Traditions from a Cultural-Historical Perspective; Transgression Is the Name of the Game,” Neophilologus 94, 3 (July 2010): 477–97; http://www.springerlink.com/openurl.asp?genre =article&id=doi:10.1007/s11061-009-9188-2). 32. The most recent study on this dialogue poem was published by Olga V. Trolhimenko, “On the Dignity of Women: The ‘Ethical Reading’ of Winsbeckin in mgf 474, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 107, 4 (2008): 490–505; she did not yet register Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literature: New Approaches to German and European Women Writers and to Violence against Women in Premodern Times, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 1 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), 159–86. See also the contributions to Juanita Feros Ruys, ed., What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and EarlyModern Periods, Disputatio, 15 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), though with no reference to the Winsbeckin. 33. Claudia Brinker von der Heide, “Literarische Spielregeln der Kleinfamilie: Untersuchungen zum ‘Armen Heinrich’ und zum ‘Helmbrecht,’” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 32, 1 (2000): 45–63. See also the excellent analysis by William E. Jackson, “Das Märe von Helmbrecht als Familiengeschichte,” Euphorion 84, 1 (1990): 45–58. 34. Beyschlag, Die Lieder Neidharts, 736. 35. The theme of domestic violence was raised in medieval literature more often than we might think; see Classen, Power of a Woman’s Voice, 187–230. 36. Albrecht Classen, “Winter as a Phenomenon in Medieval Literature: A Transgression of the Traditional Chronotopos?” Mediaevistik (forthcoming). 37. Edith Wenzel, “The Never-Ending Neidhart-Story: Vriderûn and Her Mirror,” in Texts, Methodologies, and Interpretations in Medieval German Literature

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(Kalamazoo Papers 1992–1995), ed. Sibylle Jefferis, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 670 (Göppingen: Kümmerle, 1999), 41–58. 38. Joachim Bumke, Höfische Kultur: Literatur und Gesellschaft im hohen Mittelalter (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), vol. 1, 172–77; Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline Beamish (1995; New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1997). For Neidhart’s sartorial criticism, see Lehmann-Langholz, Kleiderkritik, 183–89. For a much broader overview regarding the cultural-historical significance of clothing, see Gabriele Raudszus, Die Zeichensprache der Kleidung: Untersuchungen zur Symbolik des Gewandes in der deutschen Epik des Mittelalters, Ordo, Studien zur Literatur und Gesellschaft des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit, 1 (Hildesheim, Zürich, and New York: Georg Olms, 1985). 39. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, Histoire du miroir (Paris: Imago, 1994); Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and the English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (1982; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); for the specific use of the mirror in Neidhart’s oeuvre, see Dorothee Lindemann, Studien zur Neidhart-Tradition: Untersuchungen zu den Liedern c 2, 8 und 15/16 der Berliner Handschrift c (Edition und Kommentar), zum Spiegelraubmotiv und zu den Fürst-Friedrich-Liedern (Herne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Kunst, 2004). 40. Stefan Zeyen, . . . daz tet der liebe dorn: Erotische Metaphorik in der deutschsprachigen Lyrik des 12.-14. Jahrhunderts, Item Mediävistische Studien, 5 (Essen: Item, 1996), 154–55. 41. Siegfried Christoph, “The Language and Culture of Joy,” in Words of Love and Love of Words in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Albrecht Classen, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 347 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007), 319–33. 42. The parallels to Helmbrecht in Wernher the Gardener’s eponymous narratives are unmistakable.

One Mind, One Heart, One Purse: Integrating Friendship Traditions and the Case of Troilus and Criseyde J o h n G a rr i s o n

Troilus’s offer to obtain any woman for Pandarus in book 3 of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1380–1387) might seem to devalue the two men’s friendship, especially given the medieval poem’s classical setting.1 Writers in antiquity emphasized that lack of self-interest ranked among the most crucial markers for virtuous friendship. Indeed, the mutuality in the young knight’s offer to reciprocate Pandarus’s delivery of Criseyde suggests an operation of base brokerage where the trafficking of women bolsters male power.2 Rather than calling into question any claim the friendship may have to virtue, however, the dynamics of exchange and mutual obligation in this interchange dramatize the qualities that mark Troilus and Pandarus as each other’s “fulle frend.” Chaucer’s pair of friends offers an apt case study through which to illuminate a medieval pattern of thought that integrated various textual and visual traditions of representing male friendships in order to idealize profitable friendships. After examining Aelred of Rievaulx’s views in De Spirituali Amicitia (ca. 1147–1157), this chapter will consider another important twelfth-century text on friendship, Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis (ca. 1100–1125). Medieval depictions of idealized friendship in texts such as De Spirituali Amicitia and Disciplina Clericalis, as well as others described in this chapter, show a well-developed medieval tradition of combining the remarkably pure friendship depicted in Cicero with an embrace of the potential for mutual gain offered by ideal friendships. These medieval texts readily take up the language of material exchange and, in doing so, reflect and perhaps even foster the increasing opportunities for economic advancement in the later Middle Ages. The object of this chapter is to render visible that tradition and then illustrate how Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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it makes possible a new reading of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. This historicized reading suggests that Troilus and Pandarus’s friendship should not be considered as operating within one of two wholly separate spheres of virtue and vice. Rather, the moral ambiguity inherent the text’s commingling of diverse friendship traditions and its overt emphasis on mutual gain makes room to idealize the two men’s relationship on its own terms.

Making the Spiritual Material: Aelred’s De Spirituali Amicitia When describing the pleasures of friendship experienced during his youth, Aelred of Rievaulx uses the Latin term gratia, a word that shares the same root with the English word agreement.3 This link speaks to the connection between the rewards of idealized friendship extolled by classical and medieval writers and the likeness in qualities that allows one to recognize such a friend. Indeed, the agreement to provide mutual pleasure might be included in the mutual obligation that characterizes ideal friendship for Aelred and other medieval writers considering such relationships. Gratia, in the classical period, denoted a kind of social generosity that made no overt claim to obligation but implicitly expected future reciprocity. In a Christian context, the term could refer to the grace of God and carry connotations of something freely given and unobligated. Aelred’s De Spirituali Amicitia, which attempts to Christianize Cicero’s formulation of ideal friendship in De Amicitia (44 b.c.), returns many times to Cicero’s assertion that true friends share “agreement on both human and divine affairs, combined with good will and mutual esteem” (prologue, 1).4 This phrase, which Aelred interprets to presage the critical role of a relationship with the Christian God in strengthening the bond between true friends, emphasizes the practical and emotional components of the bonds of likeness that characterize ideal friendship. “Spiritual friendship” involves shared daily habits, as well as shared personal characteristics and beliefs. Aelred’s treatise enjoyed considerable popularity in England and France during the Middle Ages and was recopied many times during the generations that followed his death.5 Cicero’s emphasis creates a conceptual difficulty for Aelred, because Aelred is a Christian. Rather than limiting true friendship to “three or four pairs of friends, as the pagans do,” Aelred seeks a broader definition of ideal friendship that would encompass “a thousand pairs



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of friends” (1.30). By positing a shared, personal relationship with God as the central component of ideal friendship, rather than a collaboration of mythical proportions between a pair such as Orestes and Pylades, Aelred extends Cicero’s definition to include pairs of men who simply share a similarity of “emotions . . . , character, goals, and habits” (1.37). Aelred envisions that cultivating an ideal friendship will involve seeking those with whom one has general agreement and engaging in shared spiritual activity. While Aelred criticizes the exclusivity of Cicero’s formulation, he reveals later in the text (structured as a dialogue) that he has only enjoyed this form of friendship with two fellow monks, both of whom appear to have died. Even Aelred, who is presumably an expert in identifying an appropriate partner and cultivating a spiritual friendship with him, possesses no living friend who meets the criteria set out in his treatise. Thus, friendship operates within an economy of scarcity, where either only a few individuals possess ideal qualities or individuals possess a limited amount of love or emotional charity to share with others. Still, Aelred emphasizes acquiring such a friend as an important factor in achieving happiness, and in doing so he clearly echoes his classical predecessor. Cicero links friendship to both happiness and virtue, suggesting they can be fostered only between good men: “Friendship was given by nature as a helper in virtue, not an accomplice in crime, so that, because virtue cannot reach the greatest heights in solitude, it should reach them when joined and allied with another. If there are any between whom this alliance exists or has existed or will exist in the future, we must believe that theirs is the best and happiest companionship on the road to the highest good” (83–84). Echoing sentiments found in Aristotle, Cicero sees friendship leading to several superlative states, including “the highest good.” Specifically, he sees virtue as a quality that can only be obtained through companionship and notes that this companionship should only engage in activities considered good or virtuous.6 Aelred and Cicero both advocate pairing into self-selected friends, but this notion may have run counter to the organizational fraternity that marked the medieval monastic community. Mark Williams speculates that Aelred’s retention of Ciceronian exclusivity in De Spirituali Amicitia (despite the monk’s claims to argue otherwise) may explain the decline in the text’s popularity in the late thirteenth century.7 The production of new Christian discourses on the nature of true friendship, a production that peaked in the twelfth century, seems to have diminished in the late medieval period.8 Aquinas and others shifted their focus toward the individual’s loving relationship with her

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or his own self and with God, a connection for which friendship was no longer an apt model. However, I argue that Aelred and others writing before the thirteenth century had an enduring influence on depictions of practical social relations that evolved throughout the later Middle Ages and into the early modern period when discourses on friendship gained renewed popularity with the rise of humanism. The evidence of successive recopying of Aelred’s and Alfonsi’s tests, as well as the number of extant copies of them, suggests a sustained interest on the part of new readers in didactic treatises on friendship, despite the apparent absence of new writers on the subject. Indeed, depictions of close friendships in the works of later secular authors such as Chaucer imply that interest abided in the subject of friendship and that their depictions were influenced by earlier writers. The implications of Aelred’s De Spirituali Amicitia for later models of ideal friendship lie in its frequent commingling of emotional, practical, and financial benefits of friendship, a mixture similarly articulated in Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis and embodied in codified agreements between medieval sworn brothers.

Profiting from Integration and the Integer Amicus Petrus Alfonsi, a Spanish Jew who converted to Christianity, describes the model of the “half-friend” and the “full friend” in the first two tales of his Disciplina Clericalis, which like Aelred’s text circulated widely during the medieval period.9 Alfonsi’s tales reflect an effort to Christianize the ancient friendship model but also to draw upon Arab proverbs. In doing so, the tales indicate the author’s link to the Islamic tradition of “sincere friends,” a group of scholars who actively synthesized many traditions and sources of knowledge.10 Alfonsi’s choice of two merchants to embody ideal friends also acknowledges Arab culture’s highly developed mercantile class in the early Middle Ages. These two tales describe the difference between the dimidius amicus (half-friend), whom the narrator has himself possessed, and the integer amicus (full friend), who is so rare that the narrator has only heard of a single pair.11 In Alfonsi’s first tale, the half-friend stands out from other acquaintances by his willingness to help a man conceal the corpse of someone whom the man has killed. Despite the misleading nature of the term half-friend, Alfonsi uses this term to describe someone laudable. Less-esteemed friends in the tale pass judgment on the perpetrator: “Sicut fecisti malum, patere satisfactionem” (“as you have committed evil, you must suffer punishment”). While this less-valued group gives a more traditionally Christian



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response, the half-friend makes no such moral judgment about the actions of his friend: “Hic est vere amicus qui te adiuvat, cum saeculum tibi deficit” (“The true friend is the one who helps you when the world deserts you”). This initial description of the half-friend suggests that esteemed friends lend aid regardless of both the world’s perception of the friend and the morality of his actions. Alfonsi’s valorization of the half-friend diverges from Cicero’s declaration that friendship “is a bad and unacceptable excuse for any sort of wrongdoing, but particularly if a man says that he has acted against the interests of the state for the sake of his friend” (40). In Alfonsi’s tale, loyalty to a friend supersedes moral obligations to society and to the law.12 Alfonsi describes the rare and paradigmatic full friends in a tale of two merchants, one of whom becomes horribly ill due to lovesickness. The ill friend reveals that he pines for the woman that his friend plans to marry and that “Ex hac est mihi mors et in hac est mihi vita!” (“This longing for her constitutes a matter of life or death”). The merchant gives to his lovesick friend his betrothed, her dowry, and other money he planned to give her when they married. Much later, the married merchant, no longer lovesick, confesses to a murder he did not commit in order to exonerate his wrongly accused friend. After both men have been exonerated, the married merchant gives his now-destitute friend half of all that he owns. The narrator concludes that a man could “vix poterit talis reperiri amicus” (“scarcely find again such a friend”) as the full friends depicted in the tale. Although Alfonsi directly quotes from Cicero’s De Amicitia,13 the tale of the two merchants clearly departs from, or at least adds complicating nuances to, two of Cicero’s central tenets: that ideal friendships are marked by behavior generally agreed to be virtuous and that they cannot exist for practical benefit. Alfonsi’s effort is more ambitious than Aelred’s. He not only combines classical and Christian ethics but also integrates Arab culture into his model for ideal friendship by casting one merchant as Egyptian and the other as from Baghdad. As a Jew who converted to Christianity but lived among Muslims, Alfonsi could well have been combining elements from all these traditions. Indeed, the term full friend implies a formulation that integrates, by way of selective inclusion and exclusion, many different forms of friendship. The Disciplina Clericalis was often bundled with sermons and preaching manuals in the thirteenth century in manuscripts that served as compendia of useful material for preachers.14 Various versions of Alfonsi’s tales appear extensively throughout extant sermons and legal and didactic texts from the twelfth through the early fourteenth centuries. In

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one example, an anonymous author sees Alfonsi’s tale of the full friend as allegorical, interpreting the merchant from Baghdad as Christ, the Egyptian as man, and the exchanged woman as the soul.15 The use of these tales for sermons may have ignited the notion of full friend as a term to describe positively those engaged in economically charged, mutually beneficial friendships. While Christian didactic treatises regarding friendship declined in popularity among new writers toward the end of the thirteenth century, the influence of such treatises may have infused the language of everyday relations and, as this paper will later argue, of secular literary texts.

Considering Aelred alongside Alfonsi Both Aelred and Alfonsi depict close friendship as a productive partnership that has financial and emotional implications. Although Aelred served as an abbot at the time of writing De Spirituali Amicitia and constructs his dialogue as one between monks, discussion of financial obligation recurs throughout his description of ideal friends.16 This not only suggests that his textual depiction of ideal friendship could apply to relationships beyond the monastery but also underscores the fact that monasteries themselves did not exist separately from the economic sphere. While joining a monastery required a vow of poverty, the monasteries themselves operated as powerful economic organizations in the medieval period, and the Cistercian order, to which Aelred belonged, was a particularly entrepreneurial group. They were well known for reclaiming wasteland and clearing forest in order to expand the scope of their income-generating operations.17 Some historians have gone so far as to position the Cistercians as driving economic and technological innovation in the twelfth century, interpreting Cistercian statutes as embodying a deliberately economic plan.18 The rapid growth and spread of the Cistercian network may have owed much to strategies based on forming friendships grounded in likeness. The traditional view imagines the Cistercian order growing by building new monasteries, yet Constance Berman has shown how the order expanded in large part by converting existing houses that shared customs, such as sharing manual labor among all members and regulating management of lay brothers, extolled by the Cistercians.19 Aelred’s depiction of friendship between monks as a matter of likeness and mutual benefit may extrapolate not only to secular relationships between individuals but also to alliances between monastic organizations.



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Aelred himself was focused on expanding the Cistercian network and was a highly personable abbot, described as the “Bernard of the North” after the charismatic abbot of Clairvaux and builder of the Cistercian order.20 Aelred avoided political intrigue and focused on building the Rievaulx abbey’s estates by very successfully soliciting donations from wealthy benefactors.21 The Life of Ailred—a biography written by Walter Daniel (probably the “Daniel” who participated in the dialogue depicted in De Spirituali Amicitia)—describes the abbey lands as doubling in size under the abbot’s leadership.22 Abbots and other senior members of the monastery were likely to have been no strangers to the secular world of money and property. While many monks came from peasant families, some men from aristocratic backgrounds (like Bernard himself) might have been attracted to the Cistercian order, and the former possession of wealth may explain why some abbots strove to make a name for themselves through extravagant building and expansion.23 Discourses of idealized friendship proved useful when these men solicited patrons for the monasteries. For example, the term amicus dei, a friend of God, typically was reserved for saints and angels. However, patrons could secure a closer relationship to God and gain the status of amicus dei through substantial financial support of the monastery. Aethelwine, a tenth-century nobleman and patron to the monastery of Ramsey in East Anglia, as well as Richard I of Normandy in his role as the tenth-century patron of the Saint Taurin monastery in Évreux, both earned access to this elite form of friendship.24 De Spirituali Amicitia invokes money in several places in order to define better the terms by which an ideal friendship should operate. While Aelred places friendship above money in value, he draws upon the language of material wealth to provide a lexicon through which he can communicate the value of friendship: “without friends, riches could afford no delight to the greedy man” (1.59). Aelred’s formulation does not simply argue that money alone grants no real happiness. Rather, it opens itself to the possible interpretation that money can only be enjoyed in the company of friends. Aelred quotes Cicero as noting that friends are “rich even when they are needy,” and the abbot subsequently adds that “to the poor [friendship] is like a family fortune” (2.14). By arguing that friendship can be valued on the same terms as money, Aelred explicitly positions the emotional rewards of friendship as a substitute for material riches. However, the notion that it can make the poor rich or operate as an inheritance implicitly suggests that friendship offers a means to improve one’s financial position or to protect oneself against financial hardship. Toward the end of De Spirituali Amicitia, the author

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makes this promise explicit, stating that friendship brings about a state of equality where “the wealthy become poor and the poor abound in wealth and so each partner shares his state with his friend” (3.91). While this language recalls earlier formulations where money simply acts as a metaphor for the affective rewards of friendship, Aelred here actually does refer to financial wealth. He cites the Ciceronian formulation of friends sharing “one mind and one heart” and adds that friends should share “one purse” (3.100). For Aelred, the spiritual fusing of two friends—Cicero says “the essence of friendship being that two minds become as one” (De Amicitia 1.25)—can be dramatized by combining material wealth. Indeed, the external action that proves the spiritual merger between the two friends involves following Aelred’s edict to “spend your money on behalf of your friend” (3.100). In a monastic context, readers might act on this only in terms of money’s metaphorical role and engage in more emotional generosity by showing more patience, listening more carefully, or being more affectionate. In friendships outside the monastery, however, money offered a tangible, measurable means to demonstrate one’s devotion to a friend. Once the mercantile language leaves the controlling context of theology—whether involving two parties outside the monastery or a monk’s interaction with someone in the secular world—it readily applies to more material forms of exchange and benefit. By arguing that ideal friendship manifests itself through the granting of one’s money to one’s friend, De Spirituali Amicitia mirrors the logic that undergirds Disciplina Clericalis: ideal friendship far surpasses money in value, but it can only be recognized when friends share their money. Reinforcing the notion that his discussion of money and friendship should not be taken solely as figurative, Aelred rejects what he describes as a commonly held assertion that one should spurn money for the sake of the friend (2.30). He further argues that the true friend “regards the advantage of [the friend] as his own” (3.101). Within the context of De Spirituali Amicitia, this phrase simultaneously suggests that a friendship should be based in selflessness and that a friendship offers a strategic asset to one who might need assistance, financial or otherwise. Aelred stresses that “similarity of character, goals, and habits in life makes for a bond of friendship among good people,” echoing his earlier assertion that friendship succeeds by “mental agreeableness” (2.20–23). For Aelred, friends join together due to not only shared personality traits (“character”) but also to shared everyday activities that might include one’s profession (“habits”) and desired future outcomes (“goals”). Aelred thus provides a link between the ways in which the friends have



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similar qualities and the mutual obligation that forms an unwritten agreement between them. Aelred describes the obligations of friendship that exist under a set of “laws” based in “nature” and advocates that the terms that bind friendship should be codified in societal law. He warns that “sworn bonds of fellowship” can exist between “the worst of people” and uses this as evidence for the need to regulate friendship bonds by law (1.59–61). Here Aelred echoes Cicero’s desire: “let us enact this law that we should not ask disgraceful things nor do them if asked” (40).25 Aelred may also explicitly reject elements of chivalric friendship traditions, which involved sworn brotherhood between knights. These agreements may have been too focused on shared material gain or too unregulated, because they took the form of a contract between two individuals. Aelred demands a law, which would interpolate a shared standard regulated by a third-party, whether this would be God or a secular enforcement of God’s will is not clear.

Benefitting from Swearing Brotherhood Medieval sworn brotherhoods represent another ideal of friendship that intertwines spiritual intimacy and material wealth between parties. These partnerships, involving shared vows and sometimes solemnized by written contract, signaled an exclusivity of intimacy and obligation between two men. In many communities that lacked a feudal lord, these formal unions played an important role in regulating social and economic obligations, especially within the context of an expanding culture of exchange that relied on credit. Thus, friendship had a value that could be quantified in a brotherhood agreement and through day-to-day practices of advancing in the credit-driven marketplace. Alan Bray’s work has importantly expanded the terms by which sworn brotherhood has typically been understood, showing that these alliances carried familial connotations and involved deep levels of emotional intimacy. In this respect, he opposes scholarly interpretations that depict these formalized friendship unions as strictly motivated by shared financial self-interest.26 Kenneth McFarlane, for example, posits a more traditional view that sworn brotherhood operated to mitigate financial risk during warfare and facilitate sharing monetary gains. McFarlane’s analysis mainly focuses on the nature of this allegiance as a “business partnership.”27 However, the contract sealing the sworn brotherhood between Nicholas Molyneux and Jehan Wynter in 1421 that serves as the primary object for McFarlane’s study directly conflates affective reward

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with financial gain. Before listing a series of very specific financial obligations that bind these two sworn “frères darmes” (“brothers-in-arms”), the contract names at the outset that its objective is “premierement pour acroistre et augmenter lamour et fraternite” (“primarily to increase the love and fraternity [between the two men]”).28 The contract—citing the strength of the parties’ emotional bond, detailing specific terms of financial obligation, and signed in a church—grounds the agreement in terms of economic, affective, and religious obligation. Just as Aelred’s ideal of the spiritual friendship necessitates a unification of the parties’ minds, hearts, and purses, the sworn brotherhood does not and cannot disaggregate the contribution of the emotional from the financial. Such a blend guarantees the two parties will be “loyal lun a autre sans aucune dissimulacion ou fraude” (“loyal to one another without deception or fraud”).29 By ignoring the intertwining economic and affective aspects of sworn brotherhood, Bray and McFarlane both overlook an opportunity to examine how these components might either conflict with or support each other in medieval male friendship, whether articulated in terms of Aelred’s monastic outlook or Alfonsi’s mercantile point of view.

Monks, Merchants, and Sworn Brothers When Chaucer depicts sworn brotherhood in “The Shipman’s Tale” (ca. 1380–1400), he takes the opportunity to counterpose the differing attitudes toward friendship between a monk and a merchant, the latter of whom “riche was, for which men helde hym wys” (7.2).30 Wealth produces a reputation for wisdom, presumably a kind of secular knowledge different from what one would develop through monastic training. The merchant and the monk claim each other “as for cosynage,” underscoring the connotations of familial bonds associated with sworn brotherhood (7.36). Regarding this alliance, the merchant was as glad therof as fowel of day, For to his herte it was a greet plesaunce. Thus been they knyt with eterne alliaunce, And ech of hem gan oother for t’assure Of bretherhede whil that hir lyf may dure. (7.38–42)

The alliance between the two men is marked by its permanence and its ability to produce pleasure. While the tenor of the Canterbury Tales— and the literary form (fabliau) upon which this tale is based—involves mocking societal mores, the merchant’s belief in the partnership as a highly positive one seems sincere.31 It is his belief in the reliability of



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sworn brotherhood that sets up the merchant to be duped. When the merchant’s wife asks the monk for one hundred franks to pay her debts, he borrows the money from the merchant and convinces the wife that “for thise hundred frankes he sholde al nyght / Have hire in his armes bolt upright” (7.315–16). The tale draws its cuckolding plot from the fabliau tradition and incorporates Chaucer’s familiar portrayal of clergy as particularly libidinous.32 At the same time, the tale’s dynamics suggest that the monk is more savvy about money and women than the merchant.33 The monk leverages his friend’s trust to gain intimate access to the house and private time with the wife in order to accomplish the ruse central to the tale. As Helen Fulton aptly notes, the monk must break his oath with his sworn brother in order to access the merchant’s money.34 Of the two men, the merchant ultimately seems the more naïve because of his reluctance to ask for repayment of the loan and the primacy of his interest in his friend’s welfare at the end of the tale (7.337–41). However, the very fact that the merchant believes the wife when she says that the monk paid to be a houseguest betrays his own lack of selfless sharing that would mark an ideal sworn brotherhood. If they were an idealized pair of friends that—to use Aelred’s formulation—shared one purse, there would be neither repayment nor such an imbalance in each man’s valuing of affection and material wealth. From the evidence of this tale, and in fact all of the Canterbury Tales that depict sworn brothers, one could come to believe that Chaucer does not consider sworn brotherhood to be a laudable or viable form of union.35 The monk dismisses the strength of such an alliance when he seduces the wife: “He [the merchant] is na moore cosyn unto me / Than is this leef that hangeth on the tree” (7.149–50). The sworn brotherhood’s claims to kinship operate simply as an obfuscation that enables the seduction of the wife and the dishonest acquisition of money. Indeed, the wife starts the conflict, out of her own financial and sexual dissatisfaction, suggesting that successful merchants must manage equally their money and their affections. While the monk tells the merchant’s wife that he loves her above all women, he supports the claim with “this swere I yow on my professioun” (7.155). The line mocks the monk’s vow of chastity, just as the tale itself mocks all vows, whether marital, monastic, or brotherly. The tale suggests that Chaucer may not have viewed sworn brotherhood as the highest form of friendship. Chaucer himself might have had reason to be concerned about sworn brotherhood as an institution. The Westminster Chronicle describes the 1391 deaths of William Neville and John Clanvowe, two noblemen Chaucer knew well enough for them to act as witnesses for a document

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releasing the poet from liabilities in an ambiguous 1380 rape charge.36 Neville is described as dying of “inconsolable sorrow” in Constantinople two days after the passing of his sworn brother Clanvowe, “quem non minus quam se ipsum diligebat” (“whom he loved no less than himself”).37 The vocabulary used here underscores the valuation at work in describing the devotion between Clanvowe and Neville. Their individual contribution to the friendship can be measured both in quantity (whether it is less than or more than the other’s) and in quality (the extent to which it represents parity or likeness). The use of the verb diligo emphasizes that the men’s love is based in mutual esteem, and the phrasing used to describe Clanvowe and Neville’s bond mirrors the logic of likeness inherent in Cicero’s formulation of the ideal friend as “another self” (80). For Cicero, attaining this second self involves loving the true friend by “the same principle” as loving oneself (80).38 The reciprocity between the two noblemen is emblematized by Neville’s insistence on dying in the same village where Clanvowe died and the depiction of joined hands that would eventually adorn their shared tomb. Indeed, the Chronicle’s description of Neville refusing to take food after the death of his friend symbolizes the conflation of material and emotional sustenance operating in such a partnership. Neville neither returns to England to enjoy any financial gain the two men may have agreed to share, nor does he show any interest in nourishment at all in a world without Clanvowe.

Full Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde The depth of devotion of one such friend resonates in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, where the friendship between Pandarus and Troilus carries the same mortal effect as that between Neville and Clanvowe. Pandarus warns Criseyde that Troilus’s lovesickness for her threatens Troilus’s life and endangers Pandarus as well. Pandarus tells his niece, “if ye late hym deyen, I wol sterve [die]” (2.323). While Pandarus might be willing to exaggerate or dissemble to secure Criseyde for Troilus, the threat of a man dying of grief after the death of a dear friend might not have been simple hyperbole for Chaucer. As in the case of the merchants in Alfonsi’s tale of the full friend, Pandarus responds to the danger of his friend’s death from lovesickness by delivering the desired woman. Though not explicitly a sworn brotherhood, Pandarus and Troilus’s relationship stands out as deeper than other Trojan friendships depicted in Chaucer’s poem. The friendship exists on a par with, if it doesn’t exceed, the closeness of the heterosexual union between Troilus



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and Criseyde.39 Pandarus clearly holds his friend in high regard, giving the relationship particularity beyond the more general bonds of a tightknit homosocial network. Their first depicted encounter occurs when Pandarus enters Troilus’s bedroom without either knocking or being announced (1.547–49). Chaucer’s source text describes Pandarus here as someone to whom all doors in Troy are open: “Pandaro . . . a cui non si tenea / Uscio giammai” (“Pandaro, whom doors never stopped”).40 Chaucer omits this distinction, thereby suggesting that Pandarus’s access to his friend’s house might be specific to their mutual trust or intimacy.41 When Pandarus seeks to arrange an opportunity for Troilus to meet Criseyde in private, “to Deiphebus wente he [Pandarus] tho, / which hadde his lord and great frend ben ay; / Save Troilus, no man he loved so” (2.1402–1404). This formulation stresses that love exists between various men in Troy, but the love between the two principal male characters in the poem stands out as rare and infrequent. In book 3, for example, after embracing each other, the two men swear lifelong commitment. Troilus promises Pandarus, “I wol the serve, / Right as thi sclave, whider so thow wende, / for evere more, unto my lyve’s ende” (3.390–92). From these vows, one can read their relationship as representing the enduring and permanent qualities that characterize true friendship in Aelred’s formulation. Here and elsewhere within the poem, Pandarus uses the informal thee, underscoring the two men’s closeness and intimacy. The use of this term of address shows that their friendship may mitigate their social inequality to allow for parity between them. The fact that Pandarus is not Troilus’s social equal might seem to constitute an inappropriate power differential between them. In the medieval period, however, the relationship between a member of the royal family and his favorite might have been celebrated as noble. One critic asserts that, during the Middle Ages, “charismatic” or “ennobling” love constituted a form of courtly devotion “never, or hardly ever, separable from ambition or material rewards.” C. Stephen Jaeger asserts that expressions of courtly love directly linked to official promotion or access to other new income were “not just self-serving flattery or empty good manners” but rather real expressions of  “love creat[ing] a scale of worth” that tended to disappear early in the early modern period.42 Jaeger’s claims have significant relevance to Troilus and Criseyde, as they suggest that self-interested love may have been an accepted and even championed component of the highest forms of friendship. The same-sex alliance depicted in Chaucer’s poem noticeably involves mutual profit, as Troilus will have access to pleasure and Pandarus retains his position close to the royal family, even bringing another member of his family

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into the royal circle. Pandarus’s reward does not immediately take the form of a material gain, though such closeness to the royal court constitutes the future promise of this. The power differential between the two men is also mitigated by the fact that they share the status of Trojan nobles under siege, and as Leah Rieber Freiwald has observed, Pandarus may even be among the “yonge knights” that accompany Troilus early in the poem.43 Despite being a prince, Troilus may relate to his fellow nobles and knights in a manner similar to how Malory’s Arthur relates to the members of the Round Table: primus inter pares.44 While Troilus and Pandarus dwell in a classical setting, their relationship does not embody an unadulterated ideal of friendship as depicted by classical writers. Such a reading complicates John Hill’s interpretation that the opening interaction between Pandarus and Troilus instantiates Chaucer’s effort to create a world that “marries Ciceronian friendship to the role of assistant in love.”45 As noted earlier, Cicero asserts that the friendship should assist in virtuous acts, rather than in crime. While not necessarily involved in criminal activities, Troilus and Pandarus engage in morally ambiguous behavior toward Criseyde that includes, at a minimum, dishonesty. That Troilus has sex with Criseyde confirms that his desire for her can be satisfied carnally, which distinguishes it from more virtuous forms of love. However, the two men evaluate the virtue of their friendship not on moral or ethical considerations but rather on their sheer loyalty to each other. Their friendship also operates at odds with key elements of Aristotle’s formulation of ideal friendship, which critiques friendships that generate benefit, pleasure, or profit because they may lead to morally ambiguous action.46 Though Pandarus and Troilus’s friendship stands out as the most significant and highly celebrated in Chaucer’s poem, its virtue finds expression in Pandarus’s ability to deliver his niece in order to counter Troilus’s woe, an action that involves aspects of utility as well as pleasure.47 While Chaucer may have been familiar with classical texts describing friendship, these texts would not have been accessible to most of his readers. Ciceronian and Aristotelian ideals would find much more widespread distribution and acceptance in the early modern period, due to a heightened interest in antiquity associated with the rise of humanism; more widespread literacy in Latin and Greek; new translations of classical texts into the English vernacular; and the increasing availability of these texts enabled by the development of printing. Medieval texts such as Chaucer’s probably tapped into other models of idealized friendship, such as those depicted in De Spirituali Amicitia and Disciplina Clericalis, that would be recognizable to their readers.



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Freiwald argues that the transition from Troilus simply addressing Pandarus as frend at their first depicted encounter to using the phrase deere frend several hundred lines later signifies a deepening of the relationship only made possible by the two men “join[ing] forces” in the project to woo Criseyde for Troilus.48 This view, however, underestimates the emotional content inherent in the two men’s earliest depicted encounter, as well as other ways in which the poem alludes to existing layers of intimacy that are only rendered visible, rather than engendered, by the wooing of Criseyde. However, the project of attaining Criseyde does construct the framework for displaying and proving friendship within the narrative. The connection between the two men at the level of mind and heart can only be demonstrated through the practice of exchange. When Pandarus consoles his lovesick friend, he adds that “if evere love or trouthe / Hath ben, or is, bitwixen the and me,” then Troilus should communicate the nature of his sorrow to his friend (1.584–85). Thus, Troilus’s subsequent decision to confide in Pandarus confirms a pattern of loyalty and emotional connection between the two men. Indeed, the use of the term trouthe underscores the broader significance of Troilus’s willingness to share his plight. The word trouthe functions as an alternative spelling for treuth, a word that carries the primary connotations of fidelity, allegiance, and even genuine friendship.49 The two men share a form of committed relationship, and the notion that they have stayed and will stay together through “trewe and fals report” and “wrong and right” echoes the pairs of opposites expressed in medieval (and presentday) wedding vows (1.593–94).50 Given that the term trouthe can also connote the ideals of honesty and honor, the two men’s willingness to share in each other’s lives so emphatically testifies to their virtue. Pandarus asserts that “for to trusten some wight is a preve / Of trouth”(1.690–91). It is the willingness to trust each other and share each other’s pain even if it leads to death that proves the men’s virtue and endears them to each other, not the joint seduction of Criseyde. While certainly the delivery of his niece constitutes a key point in Pandarus’s proof of his dedication to Troilus, this commitment to sharing begins before Troilus’s revelation that the beloved is his friend’s niece. By the time Troilus uses the term deere frend, the two men have already expressed a deep, committed dedication to each other. While the poem’s project overtly involves the wooing of Criseyde, part of the narrative tension also revolves around the extent to which the existing friendship between the two men can be sustained and remain virtuous throughout their endeavors. Unlike Chaucerian texts such as “The Shipman’s Tale” that depict sworn brotherhood as disingenuous agreements to be ridiculed, Troilus

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and Criseyde presents Pandarus’s concern for “his frend in swich distresse and care” as genuine (1.550).51 Viscerally responding to Troilus’s lovesick torment, Pandarus “neigh malt for wo and routh” (1.582). The word malt, from melten, could connote to melt or to fuse. The first connotation suggests that his friend’s distress overwhelms Pandarus and renders him emotionally permeable. The second connotation complements the first, as it suggests that Pandarus’s empathy allows him to connect or bond with Troilus on an intimate level: Pandarus will become one with his friend. This notion of fusion between the friends operates at the core of Pandarus’s offer of help, as he promises to “parten with the al thi peyne” (1.589). Pandarus will share Troilus’s burden, importantly using the term parten, a verb meaning to divide in two. The idea of the pain’s division operates in tandem with the fusion implied by Pandarus’s molten state. Troilus’s suffering will be divided between two selves or bodies, a profound degree of sharing partially enabled by Pandarus’s permeability to his friend’s desires. In this way, the two men’s experience dramatizes the notion articulated by both Aelred and Cicero that true friends share a single heart and mind between two bodies.52 In book 1, Troilus addresses Pandarus as his “fulle friend,” and the narrator later uses the same designation to describe Troilus’s relationship to Pandarus (1.610, 1.1059).53 Chaucer’s replacement of the phrase care amico (“dear friend”) in the Boccaccio source text here underscores the intentionality of this particular designation (1.8). The use of this phrase suggests that Pandarus meets particular criteria with which to evaluate friendship articulated by Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis. Chaucer likely knew Alfonsi’s text or at least its formulation of ideal friendship.54 The descriptions of the half-friend as willing to conceal the body of a murder victim and the full friend as confessing to a murder he did not commit suggest that the ideal friend lends aid regardless of both the world’s perception of the friend and the moral right or wrong of his actions. Such a degree of dedication anticipates the sentiments of Pandarus’s pledge to love Troilus “for trewe and fals report, / In wrong and right” (1.593–94).The bonds between Troilus and Pandarus remarkably parallel the dynamics in Alfonsi’s tale. Troilus becomes horribly ill due to lovesickness. Just as Alfonsi’s full friend gladly gives up his bride to be, Pandarus willingly delivers his niece to fulfill Troilus’s lust. While Pandarus insists that Troilus take care with Criseyde’s honor, he displays little concern for Criseyde’s fate upon the later decision to trade her with the Greeks, suggesting that he favors Troilus’s happiness above Criseyde’s (4.393–427). Like that between Chaucer’s pair, the two merchants’ friendship clearly exists for mutual benefit and is judged on ethical criteria defined between the pair of men. 55



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Placing Troilus and Criseyde within the tradition of Aelred’s De Spirituali Amicitia and Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis calls into question D. W. Robertson’s famous claim in A Preface to Chaucer that medieval writers would have been very familiar with Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of caritas and cupiditas and would have celebrated caritas exclusively.56 The depictions of profitable friendships in the works discussed in this chapter indicate that there was a strand in medieval thought that tended to idealize forms of friendship that blended selfless love and compassion (caritas) with carnal lust and desire for material gain (cupiditas). While Chaucer does not necessarily celebrate both equally, the idealized friendship in Troilus and Criseyde suggests that he does not view profit as incompatible with virtue.57 Troilus praises his friend’s efforts on his behalf as demonstrating Pandarus’s “gentilesse, / Compassioun, and felawship, and trist” (3.402–403). Chaucer’s moral ballad “Gentilesse” links this term that Troilus attributes to his friend directly with “dignitee” and “vertu” (lines 4–5). Chaucer, like other medieval writers described here, suggests that virtue finds its expression in material exchange between two devoted friends. Enriching the literary and historical context for these texts not only encourages a more morally nuanced reading of Troilus and Criseyde but also resuscitates a tradition of writing about friendship that embraced moral ambiguity. While the friendship formulations found in medieval texts lose the ethical simplicity of the Ciceronian model, where friendship is divorced from pleasure and benefit, they offered a more practicable model for a medieval audience. With the rapid expansion of economic activity that marked the transition to the late medieval period, writers turned to representations of idealized friendship as a powerful model for managing the distribution of wealth among trusted intimates and condoning the seizure of opportunities for personal gain.

Notes I am grateful to Margaret Ferguson, David Traill, and Claire Waters for their thoughtful suggestions regading this essay.   1. Book 3, lines 409–21. All references to Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), and are given parenthetically in the text of the chapter.   2. For a discussion of the ways in which the exchange of women cemented allegiance between men in the Middle Ages and in Chaucer’s poem, see David Aers, “Chaucer’s Criseyde: Woman in Society, Woman in Love,” in Critical Essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Thomas C. Stillinger (New York: G. K. Hall & Co.; London: Prentice Hall, 1998), 195–218; and Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 3–64.

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For a broader discussion of the use of women to manifest male power and reinforce patriarchy, see Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (New York and London: Routledge, 1994); Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Raina R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).   3. Agreement is derived (through French) from the root grat-. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship (De Spirituali Amicitia), trans. Mark F. Williams (Scranton: University of Scranton, Pennsylvania, 2002), prologue, para. 1. Future references to Spiritual Friendship are to this edition and designate the book and paragraph numbers, which reflect those of the standard edition: Aelredi Rievallensis Opera Omnia, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), vol. 1 Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis.   4. In 1.11, 1.29, and 1.46, Aelred invokes Cicero’s “Est enim amicitia nihil aliud nisi omnium divinarum humanarumque rerum cum benevolentia et caritate consensio.” Cicero, Laelius, On Friendship (Laelius de Amicitia) and the Dream of Scipio, trans. J. G. F. Powell (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips Ltd., 1990), sec. 20. Subsequent textual references are followed by section number noted parenthetically.   5. Williams, Spiritual Friendship, 21 and 107, n. 28. Hoste’s critical edition refers to thirteen manuscripts, though only three date from after the thirteenth century. No copies seem to have been made outside England and France.   6. Augustine, Confessions 6.16.26, similarly states that only through friendship can one achieve higher levels of happiness.   7. Williams, Spiritual Friendship, 91.   8. For a broader description of the range of discourses on the ideals of Christian friendship during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well as their subsequent decline, see Williams, Spiritual Friendship, 21; Reginald Hyatte, The Arts of Friendship: The Idealizing of Friendship in Medieval and Early Renaissance Literature (Lieden, New York, and Koln: Brill, 1994), 45–86; and Klaus Oschema, “Sacred or Profane? Reflections on Love and Friendship in the Middle Ages,” in Love, Friendship, and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter, and Miri Rubin (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 43–65.   9. Alfonsi’s text survives in seventy-six medieval manuscripts. During the Middle Ages, sections of the Disciplina Clericalis were translated into Italian, English, and Hebrew; the entire book was translated into French several times. The fact that the Disciplina Clericalis, with its depictions of mercantile and town life, circulated much more widely than De Spirituali Amicitia supports the hypothesis that these friendship discourses found particularly wide appeal due to their applicability to situations in the wider secular world. See John Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1993), 132. 10. For a discussion of the circle of “sincere friends,” see Eberhad Hermes’s introduction to Petrus Alfonsi, The Disciplina Clericalis, ed. Eberhard Hermes and trans. P. R. Quarrie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 3–4. 11. “Petri Alfonsi/Disciplina Clericalis, I: Lateinischer Text,” in Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicæ (38/4), ed. Alfons Hilka and Werner Söderhjelm (Helsingfors: [Suomen Tiedeseura], 1911). All translations are my own.



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12. E. M. Forster articulates such a sentiment nicely: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Acknowledging that this statement would scandalize the modern reader, he asserts that Dante would not have been shocked by this idea and cites the depiction of Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of hell for betraying their friend Julius Caesar. E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1951), 68–69. 13. Alfonsi returns to the frame narrative immediately after the tale of the full friend and recites several aphorisms on friendship from philosophers—including Cicero, Sirach, and one of Alfonsi’s primary Arab influences, alMubashshir. The aphorism attributed to Sirach appears in Chaucer’s “Tale of Melibee,” 7.1140–41. See Hermes, Disciplina, 180, n. 30–34. 14. Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi, 139. 15. Ibid., 147–48. 16. Key sections include 1.59, 2.10, 2.13, 2.14, 3.63, 3.70, 3.90, 3.91, 3.95, and 3.98. I look at specific passages in the analysis that follows. 17. Emilia Jamroziak, Rievaulx Abbey and Its Social Context, 1132 to 1300: Memory, Locality and Networks (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005), 11. See also David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England: A History of Its Development from the Times of St. Dunstan to the Fourth Lateran Council, 940–1216, 2nd ed. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 227–66, 346–62. 18. See Jamroziak, Rievaulx Abbey, 11–12; and see Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine (New York: Penguin, 1976). 19. Constance H. Berman, The Cistercian Evolution: The Invention of a Religious Order in Twelfth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 20. Knowles, Monastic Order in England, 40. 21. Jamroziak, Rievaulx Abbey, 175. 22. Walter Daniel, Life of Ailred, trans. F. M. Powicke (London: Nelson, 1950), 38. 23. This acquisition of land and nurturing of business operations drew criticism, however, and eventually constituted one of the justifications for Henry VIII’s dissolution of monasteries between 1536 and 1541. For a discussion of the role of monastic wealth and the reformation, see Marjo Kaartinen, Religious Life and English Culture in the Reformation (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 49–70. 24. See D. J. V. Fisher, “The Anti-monastic Reaction in the Reign of Edward the Martyr,” Cambridge Historical Journal 10, 3 (1952): 260, 267; and Samantha Kahn Herrick, Imagining the Sacred Past (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007), 171, f. 96. 25. The idea of a “friendship pact,” or foedus amicitiae, is not new in Aelred. These agreements, though not universally defined, appear in classical texts such as Catullus 109. On the complexity of considering friendship within the context of law, see Peter Goodrich, “Laws of Friendship,” Law and Literature 15, 1 (Spring, 2003): 23–52. 26. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 36–41. 27. Kenneth McFarlane, “A Business Partnership in War and Administration, 1421–1433,” English Historical Review 78 (1963), 290. 28. Quoted in McFarlane, Business Partnership, 309. All translations are my own. 29. Ibid. 30. Chaucer depicts several of his most intimate but vexed male pairs as sworn brothers, including the two knights in “The Knight’s Tale,” the merchant

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and the monk in “The Shipman’s Tale,” the court officials in “The Friar’s Tale,” and the revelers (whose brotherhood oath is mocked by the devil) in “The Pardoner’s Tale.” See Tison Pugh, “‘For to be Sworne Bretheren til They Deye’: Satirizing Queer Brotherhood in the Chaucerian Corpus,” The Chaucer Review 43, 3 (2009): 282–310; and see Bray, The Friend, 32–37. 31. For a strong defense of the merchant’s probity in his relations with the monk, see Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 349–65. For a discussion of ways in which Chaucer both draws from and critiques the preaching tradition, see Claire M. Waters, Angels and Heavenly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 15–67. 32. See Peter Nicholson, “The ‘Shipman’s Tale’ and the Fabliaux,” English Literary History 45, 4 (Winter, 1978): 583–96. 33. It is not hard to imagine that a monk could possess such worldly knowledge. Aelred, for example, did not enter the monastery until the age of twenty-five and could have had ample exposure to both sex and money. See Williams, Spiritual Friendship, 27, n. 2. 34. Helen Fulton, “Mercantile Ideology in Chaucer’s ‘Shipman’s Tale,’” The Chaucer Review 36, 4 (2002): 311–28. For discussion of the economic and spiritual aspects of debt, see also Robert Adams, “The Concept of Debt in ‘The Shipman’s Tale,’” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 6 (1984): 85–102. 35. Tison Pugh goes so far as to claim that in “Chaucer’s canon, when a man swears an oath of brotherhood to another man, the vow is soon repudiated, rejected, or otherwise rendered problematic. No exceptions to this rule appear.” Pugh’s assertion does not encompass Troilus and Pandarus’s friendship, because the two men do not swear brotherhood to each other and thus are omitted from Pugh’s study. See Pugh, “For to Be Sworn Bretheren,” 282. 36. For details on the partnership between and deaths of Neville and Clanvowe, see Bray, The Friend, 32–41; and see Timothy O’Brien, “Brother as Problem in the Troilus,” Philological Quarterly 82, 2 (2003): 128. 37. The Westminster Chronicle is believed to have been coauthored by two monks, though one seems to have taken over as the sole author at the end of 1383. See The Westminster Chronicle: 1381–1994, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), xiii–xiv and 480–81. 38. “Ipse enim se quisque diligit, non ut aliquam a se ipse mercedem exigat caritatis suae, sed quod per se sibi quisque carus est; quod nisi idem in amicitiam transferetur, verus amicus numquam reperietur; est enim is qui est tamquam alter idem.” 39. For an excellent discussion of understanding Troilus and Pandarus’s friendship to be in competition with the relationship between Troilus and Criseyde, see Richard E. Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Same Sex Desire in the 14th Century (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 46–51. 40. Book 4, sec. 95. All references to Boccaccio’s original text refer to Giovanni Boccaccio, The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1967). Translations are my own. 41. For a broader discussion of the (lack of) zones of privacy in Chaucer’s Troy, see Sarah Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 141–58.



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42. Jaeger describes what he terms ennobling love as disappearing at the close of the Middle Ages, while Alan Bray and Michel Rey suggest that sworn brotherhood decreased gradually in prevalence during the seventeenth century. See C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 4 and 146. See also Alan Bray and Michel Rey, “The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century,” in English Masculinities, 1600–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (London: Longman, 1999). 43. Leah Rieber Freiwald, “Swych Love of Frendes: Pandarus and Troilus,” Chaucer Review 6 (1971–1972), 125. 44. “First among equals.” See Thomas Malory, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory: In Three Volumes, ed. Eugène Vinaver (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947), 1320. 45. John Hill, “Aristocratic Friendship in Troilus and Criseyde: Pandarus, Courtly Love and Ciceronian Brotherhood in Troy,” in New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, ed. Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 171. Robert G. Cook makes an argument similar to Hill’s, equating the “medieval ideal of friendship” with that of antiquity. I suggest that Troilus and Pandarus’s friendship may incorporate some components of the classical model, but it also integrates other components of more recent models. See Robert G. Cook, “Chaucer’s Pandarus and the Medieval Ideal of Friendship,” Journal of English and German Philology 69 (1970): 407–24. Other studies of friendship in Troilus and Criseyde include Alan T. Gaylord, “Friendship in Chaucer’s Troilus,” Chaucer Review 3, 4 (1969): 239–64; and Tison Pugh, “Queer Pandarus? Silence and Sexual Ambiguity in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Philological Quarterly 80, 1 (Winter 2001): 17–36. Writing more broadly about depictions of medieval friendship, Klaus Oschema asserts that many depictions may echo classical ideals, but they also draw from contemporaneous medieval texts that present alternate ideals. This chapter builds on that assertion and considers how this may have played out across texts. See Oschema, “Sacred or Profane?” 43–65. 46. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), book 8, sec. 4. 47. The exchange of Criseyde also operates as a demonstration of both men’s power, recalling the etymology of the term to the Latin virtus that denoted not only virtue but also manliness and strength. 48. Freiwald, “Swych Love of Frendes,” 120–129. 49. Unless otherwise noted, all Middle English dictionary references are to the Middle English Dictionary Online (Ann Arbor: The Regents of the University of Michigan, 2001), at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med. 50. See Phillip L. Reynolds, “Marrying and Its Documentation in Pre-modern Europe: Consent, Celebration and Property,” in To Have and to Hold: Marrying and Its Documentation in Western Christendom, 400–1600, ed. Philip L. Reynolds and John Witte (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24. 51. Troilus and Criseyde is not as clearly indebted to the fabliau as “The Shipman’s Tale.” Rather, its generic markers point more directly to romance and to tragedy. Thus one would not expect an outright farce of social mores. For Chaucer, sworn brotherhood may have no place in such a serious tale. 52. Tison Pugh argues that Pandarus and Troilus do not undertake a vow of sworn brotherhood because “certainly, their friendship is not explicitly

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predicated on any likeness to each other.” I argue that this scene stresses a strong likeness not in terms of “physical appearance and age” (two critical characteristics for Pugh’s argument) but rather in terms of spiritual likeness. While I agree that the two men do not swear a brotherhood oath, I do believe they attest to profound agreement with each other. Troilus’s offer to “pander” for Pandarus late in the poem offers evidence their friendship operates under rules of mutual obligation dramatized at the level of equal exchange (3.409–21). Like Aelred’s ideal friends who demonstrate their friendship by sharing one purse, Pandarus and Troilus freely exchange women in a world seemingly devoid of monetary currency. See Pugh, 308, n. 33. 53. The phrase fulle frend appears once more in Troilus and Criseyde. While waiting for Criseyde to visit him at Deiphebus’s house, Troilus prays that he can “ben hire [Criseyde] fulle freend” (2.1148–54). Chaucer posits full friendship as something that, unlike sworn brotherhood, can be shared between a man and woman. The notion that a man and a woman might partake in forms of idealized friendship might be familiar to a medieval reader. The eleventh-century poem “Parce Continuis” describes the “insoluble bond” of friendship as epitomized not only by Nisus and Euryalus, Pirithous and Theseus, and Polynices and Tydeus, but also by Pyramus and Thisbe. The inclusion of a male/female pairing may challenge classical ideals that largely asserted that true friendship could only exist between two men. See David A. Traill, “Parce Continuis: A New Text and Interpretive Notes,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 21 (1986): 114–24. I have found only one other use of the phrase fulle friend in Chaucer: In “The Merchant’s Tale,” January ironically refers to Fortune as his fulle frend. 54. Several scholars have argued for a link between Chaucer and Alfonsi, though none have discussed his allusion to the ideal of the full friend. The evidence they point to ranges from the Canterbury Tales’ use of a frame narrative encompassing a series of tales to Chaucer citing Alfonsi by name five times in “The Tale of Melibee.” See Tolan, Petrus Alfonsi, 138; Katharine S. Gittes, “The Canterbury Tales and the Arabic Frame Tradition,” PMLA 98 (1983): 237–51; Dorothee Metlitzki, The Matter of Araby in Medieval England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 8; and Kathryn L. Lynch, Chaucer’s Cultural Geography (New York: Routledge, 2002), 163–72. For a dissenting view, see Charles A. Owen, Jr., “The Arabic Frame Tradition” (Letter to the Editor), PMLA 98, 5 (October 1983): 902–904. 55. Another popular medieval story, Amis and Amiloun, also celebrates the virtue of friends engaged in morally ambiguous action. This French romance was translated into Middle English and focuses on the abiding friendship of Amis and Amiloun (whose very names cast them as paradigms of friendship). Mirroring both the language and the logic of Pandarus and Troilus’s pledges to each other (“for trewe and fals report, / In wrong and right”), these two friends promise to stand by each other “In wele and wo, in wrong and right, / That thai schuld frely fond /To hold togider at everi nede, / In word, in werk, in wille, in dede” (lines 149–52) These characters, like Chaucer’s depicted friends, make a lifelong pledge to stand by each other regardless of wrong or right. The moral complexity of the tale emerges when Amis kills his two children and bathes Amiloun in their blood to cure him of leprosy. The fact that the children are miraculously brought back to life seems to signify divine approval for Amis’s unconditional loyalty to his



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friend and its supersession of all other ties. See “Amis and Amiloun” in Amis and Amiloun, Robert of Cisyle, and Sir Amadace, ed. Edward E. Foster (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). 56. D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 295. 57. Troilus sees Pandarus’s loyalty as the only virtue of importance. He does not believe Pandarus to be guilty of “bauderye” but rather sees him as a friend who helps for the sake of “compaignie,” a bond of fellowship characterized by shared interest (3.396–97). As Gretchen Mieszkowski recognizes, Pandarus complicates the “sharply bifurcated Western medieval tradition as a go-between for both love and lust.” See Gretchen Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 58–67.

Solving Dorigen’s Trilemma: Oath and Law in the Franklin’s and Physician’s Tales John Bugbee

Introduction: Dorigen’s Understanding of Her Oath Recall hapless Dorigen’s reaction when young squier Aurelius, the wouldbe suitor whom she had long ago dismissed with a playful, if ill-considered, oath and then apparently forgotten, reappears, after an interval of two years to report that the impossible condition of the oath has been fulfilled and to request that she make good on the bargain. Dorigen is astoned (1339). She has not one word to say to Aurelius in response to his twenty-eight-line monologue; instead she limps home to begin a monologue of her own, this one a 102-line litany of chaste maidens and wives, many of whom who chose death rather than submission to various sexual violations and dishonors. At the end of the litany the tale gives us to know that Dorigen has gone on in this vein for “a day or tweye” and, lest we be unclear about what is at stake, adds that she was “purposynge evere that she wolde deye” (1457–58).1 The oddest thing about the situation is the stark limitation of choices in Dorigen’s mind. She sees her lot as tragic in a narrow sense: defined by a forced option between two awful alternatives. Hating the thought of fulfilling Aurelius’s adulterous wishes, she inclines (or at least thinks she does) toward what seems to her the only other possibility, the desperate solution chosen by many of her exempla. But the tale’s reader rather easily imagines that there are more than two avenues open; indeed, we are likely to be shocked that suicide is held up as an option at all, let alone as one of the only two options. An obvious third way apparently never crosses Dorigen’s mind: why not simply refuse Aurelius’s “suit”? That is, when he appears to try to collect “payment,” why not point out that the oath was made in jest and forcefully decline? Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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One reply, of course, would be that Chaucer does not write that story because it is not the story he is writing; he is following a source or sources whose main outlines he means to preserve and whose genre asks us to accept certain incredible happenings as mere background elements.2 But there is much more to be said. Comparison to Chaucer’s literary sources reveals idiosyncrasies in “The Franklin’s Tale” that bring the question of the proper understanding of oaths to the foreground— usually by pointing up flaws in Dorigen’s, and Arveragus’s, quite improper understanding. Thus the whole matter of oaths, far from being merely a bit of backstage machinery, appears to be a central part of what Chaucer wants his audience to consider. And this is equally true, mutatis mutandis, of the probable neighbor tale, that of the physician; viewing it with the same concern in mind, and by a method similarly attentive to its sources, will reveal that the occasionally remarked parallels between the tales are much more extensive and significant than is generally thought.3 Reading them together—through the interpretive lens of a powerfully general concept of “law” borrowed from philosophical writers—suggests something surprising about their author: a habit of mind that is subtly but passionately critical of the ethics of his major characters Dorigen, Arveragus, and Virginius and in particular of their way of interacting with this thing called “law.” The argument begins on ground already relatively well understood— namely the questions surrounding the particularities of swearing in “The Franklin’s Tale.” For example, modern readers are by now aware that if they feel skeptical about the validity of Dorigen’s rash oath, they are not alone: the fourteenth century had its own careful requirements for valid swearing. Dorigen’s oath to Aurelius would have been held invalid by a large majority of theologians and jurists on at least three grounds: that oaths that would bind the swearer to do evil (including violating previously existing oaths, like Dorigen’s wedding promises to Arveragus) have no force, that swearing an oath is not just a matter of pronouncing words but must be accompanied by a real intention, and that in any case oaths sworn rashly are not oaths. These three conditions, respectively called justice (justitia), truth (veritas), and judgment (judicium), make up a canonical list for many medieval commentators. They derive from theologians’ and jurists’ application of Jeremiah 4:2— where the Israelites are encouraged to swear in veritate, et in judicio, et in justitia—to latter-day legal and theological questions about swearing, and so have the weight of Scripture behind them.4 Dorigen’s oath to Aurelius is disqualified on all three grounds. The first and last are rather obvious, and the middle one is convincingly argued by several critics’



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observations about the particular content of the requirement Dorigen sets, the protasis of her conditional. Clearly, as she herself tells us later (1342–45), she meant the removal of the rocks to be an impossible condition, and therefore her “oath” to Aurelius really declares only her intention to remain firm as those rocks in her devotion to Arveragus.5 Such objections belong to what is by now a venerable tradition of revisionist evaluations of the heroes of “The Franklin’s Tale”—revisionist, that is, by comparison with George Kittredge’s enthusiastic endorsement of Dorigen and Arveragus as the noblest couple in the Tales, the representatives of the happy solution to a debate about marriage that had been under way through most of the preceding stories.6 Indeed, much of the critical literature on “The Franklin’s Tale” over the last hundred years consists of argument between the admirers and detractors of Dorigen and Arveragus. We need not plunge deeply into the dispute, but a brief résumé of the strongest arguments on the detractors’ side will be useful for what follows. Against the knightly Arveragus, they have lodged the suspicion that Chaucer may intend his two-year glory-hunting trip, which begins only a year after the wedding (lines 807–813) to register as otherwise than knightly. They have asked, more bitingly, how wise (787) and freendly (1467) is this knight who, in the course of the allegedly generous decision to share his wife’s body with an amorous squire, threatens to kill her if she tells anyone or even if she looks sad about it (1481–86). They have wondered to what extent Arveragus can be said to keep his initial oath to renounce maistrye and “folwe hir wyl in al” (749), given that at the crucial moment he unhesitatingly assumes the right to override Dorigen’s own inclination toward responding to her dilemma violently and that in doing so he meets no challenge from her.7 Against Dorigen the skeptics register a troubling tendency toward histrionics: as the tale itself somewhat sardonically puts it, for Arveragus’s absence “wepeth she and siketh, / As doon thise noble wyves whan hem liketh” (817–18). The flair for melodrama also extends in directions that were for Christian morality, at least, quite forbidden—namely to a willingness to swear by God in matters both serious and trivial. During her first dramatic encounter with Aurelius Dorigen takes God’s name to witness three times in the course of eighteen lines—rather curiously, for oaths made in pleye, especially given that her rather more serious wedding oaths contained no such invocation.8 Most spectacular are Dorigen’s two long compleynts—the one against the rocks that threaten her husband’s life (865–93) and the already noted litany that follows Aurelius’s attempt to collect payment. The suspicion that Chaucer is

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poking a certain amount of fun at both recitals arises not just from their unwieldy length but also from the material effect of the second one: not, despite what Dorigen says, a steeling of the tragically noble heart to suicide but a postponement of the deed until the absent husband can return and resolve things another way.9 Of these six reasons for suspicion, five are Chaucer’s inventions; neither of his likeliest sources features an absent Arveragus or one whose concern for honor leads him to threaten his wife, nor do any of Dorigen’s predecessors swoon and sike, bewail their lots so lengthily, or swear so blasphemously.10 Chaucer may not be deciding the case in advance against his leading couple, but he has certainly given would-be prosecutors much to work with. The investigation that follows of our proper matter, the tale’s treatment of oaths, will both strengthen and be strengthened by that more general suspicion.

Episode I: The Wedding Oaths, Swearing, and Law But yet no one, if he professes cautiously, promises further that he will transgress in nothing, that is that he will not sin. —Bernard of Clairvaux11

The trouble begins earlier than usually recognized, in the midst of the wedding oaths that the protagonists’ supporters often take as their finest moment.12 The ambiguity of the key term pacience in that discussion is a useful clue to the problem. Here are the lines leading up to its first appearance: For o thyng, sires, saufly dar I seye, That freendes everych oother moot obeye, If they wol longe holden compaignye. Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye. Whan maistrie comth, the God of Love anon Beteth his wynges, and farewel, he is gon! Love is a thyng as any spirit free. Womman, of kynde, desiren libertee, And nat to been constreyned as a thral; And so doon men, if I sooth seyen shal. Looke who that is moost pacient in love, He is at his avantage al above. (761–72)

So far this does not seem particularly complicated: a person who is pacient must be one who refuses to grab for mastery but rather shares power. It is not the most common modern meaning of the word (it is



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closer to the etymological associations with passion, in the sense of suffering, and with passive), but it seems to have been in frequent use in the fourteenth century.13 It fits perfectly with the standard positive understanding of this long passage on the oaths: the poem is commending the equality of status they wisely enjoin on Dorigen and Arveragus. Something changes, however, in the lines that follow: Pacience is an heigh vertu, certeyn, For it venquysseth, as thise clerkes seyn, Thynges that rigour sholde nevere atteyne. For every word men may nat chide or pleyne. Lerneth to suffre, or elles, so moot I goon, Ye shul it lerne, wher so ye wol or noon; For in this world, certein, ther no wight is That he ne dooth or seith somtyme amys. Ire, siknesse, or constellacioun, Wyn, wo, or chaungynge of complexioun Causeth ful ofte to doon amys or speken. On every wrong a man may nat be wreken. (773–84)

The pacience commended here shades over into something much closer to our modern meaning: forbearance, as against wrongdoers or annoyances. It is the virtue that allows one to get past injuries done to oneself without insisting on being wreken, on taking revenge. It certainly need not be opposed to the idea of sharing power, but the two are separable: it is possible to conceive of a vindictive egalitarian or an indulgent monarch. The shift is particularly notable because of the way the second meaning is applied: the poem recommends pacience, in lines 779–84, as a response to the inconstancy of human life. Given that we are always internally or externally tripped up in our best efforts—given that no one escapes doing amys—therefore the need of this forbearance. The image (a somewhat optimistic one) is of regularity and interruption: goodness of will, of intention, or even of action, as a general rule unfortunately punctuated by irregularities of circumstance that “cause” one to go astray. It is a type of image that recurs often in Chaucer’s tales of the franklin and the physician—so often, indeed, that it will be helpful to reserve a word to refer to it. Any regularity or rule—any nonmaterial reality that lays claim to guiding the behavior of material realities, be they human beings or inert objects—I will call a law, using italics when necessary to distinguish from the more usual (and narrower) meanings of the word. Thus laws studied by jurisprudence and enforced by the courts are laws, but so are the measurable physical regularities that we now call laws of nature; an intention to do good in all circumstances is also a law (though

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not yet a particularly thoughtful one); and conditional resolutions like Dorigen’s promise to sleep with Aurelius also qualify. Obviously classification with such a broad category will mask a great many particular differences, but abstractions, as well as particularizations, have their uses, and the fruit this one bears in the coming pages should qualify as a more than sufficient argument for its adoption.14 In the meanwhile there is more to learn about pacience in this passage. Chaucer opposes it, for example, not just to taking revenge but to rigour (775). What sort of rigor opposes moral forbearance? Must it not be some kind of moral rigor—that is, some expectation that humans will behave perfectly, without the amoral or immoral blips that succeeding lines detail? The reigning image here is again one of a law, a regularity, that we might (in some moral fantasy) wish would be perfectly fulfilled but that, in fact, never is. It follows that the patience counseled here is just the opposite: a rejection of that way of understanding law in favor of a more nuanced, and less perfectionist, set of expectations. Such a revised outlook would hold that the moral fantasy of a strict and absolute fulfillment of law, however desirable it might first sound, is a dangerous one and that maintaining it is not only fallacious but actively harmful.15 In the tale that follows, a tale largely about oaths—the making of oaths, the keeping of oaths, the interpretation of oaths, the releasing of oaths—it is hard not to apply these initial reflections on law in general to oaths in particular. “On every wrong a man may not be wreken” (784) doubtless applies to all the general wrongs that one person might do to another; but surely here it applies especially to wrongs against oaths. Indeed this is true of much of the last-quoted passage. “For every word men may not chide or pleyne”: readers mindful of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” will think of the barbed words exchanged in her marriages and hear here an old counselor’s advice about letting a few such darts go by unanswered in order to maintain a happy union. But in the context of a story about oaths, is not this line also a counsel against the legal literalism that would bind a swearer to every jot and tittle, “every word” of a previous promise? And most especially the warning that everyone “seith somtyme amys” means more here than it would elsewhere. Dorigen “says amiss” in a garden one day, in a very particular way that does not involve a barbed tongue but an incautious one. The advice implied in line 780 has less to do with forbearance of wrongs in general than with a forgiving understanding of what an oath is and how to handle it: one cannot hold the swearer bound to every word that crosses her or his lips. The painful irony, of course, is that in this tale the most effective binder of the most errant oath will be not the lusty squire who receives it but



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Dorigen herself, with the full support of her husband—just the people, in other words, whom one would expect to be least interested in understanding and enforcing the oath as an inescapable mechanical law.16 Their moral rigorism will be clearest when we turn to the tale’s end, but hints of it are already apparent here before the tale has properly begun. Consider a few final lines on the wedding oaths: After the tyme moste be temperaunce To every wight that kan on governaunce. And therfore hath this wise, worthy knyght, To lyve in ese, suffrance hire bihight, And she to him ful wisly gan to swere That nevere sholde ther be defaute in here. (785–90)

First of all, this recommendation of temperaunce, like the earlier passages, can be interpreted two ways: as a general plea for the forbearance necessary in all human relationships but also, more particularly, as a plea for a moderate, sensible, context-observant understanding of the oaths and other laws that make up the mechanism of our governaunce. Such laws must be understood, and sometimes meliorated, according to their context (“after the tyme”). Interpreters who subscribe to this sort of prudential thinking will be able to take some oaths quite seriously while discounting others—surely including those made off the cuff, in violation of an earlier and more serious oath, by persons who think the fulfillment of their conditions is impossible. Thus this counsel is no less critical than the preceding ones of the protagonists of the tale it introduces. Then, immediately after this one last reminder that lapsus linguae is the order of the day and that therefore patience and temperance are indispensable, the poem delivers the explicit consequence for the story of all its moral advice to date: Arveragus’s almost complete renunciation of maistrye earns him the appellations wise and worthy, and Dorigen, for her part, “ful wisly” swears “that nevere sholde ther be defaute in here.” What? After the understanding uncovered so far, this line should arrive with a considerable jolt. Something is seriously askew when, at the end of thirty strong lines on the inevitability of human failure, the poet can return to his first activity of praising our heroine—for swearing “ful wisly” that she will never default from the relevant law. There are, of course, two live senses of the word wisly in the fourteenth century, but each of them rather thoroughly fails to describe the situation at hand. The word’s primary meaning is certainly, with certainty, and that is exactly what the preceding thirty lines have told us is out of human reach, at least when the question is one of flawless adherence to a rule. Alternately—especially given the “wise, worthy knyght” two lines earlier

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and the praise of the marriage vows as “an humble, wys accord” two lines later—it is easy to hear in line 789 praise for Dorigen’s swearing as done “quite wisely”; but given the moral lessons just delivered, we cannot take that assessment seriously either. This second-order oath of Dorigen’s, in fact, rather precisely violates the counsel of Bernard of Clairvaux that I have taken as an epigraph: it promises never to break a preceding promise. How wise, or certain, could it be? Thus we have, in precisely the passage often read as a high encomium on the leading couple’s wedding oaths, a gentle but insistent attack on their understanding of all swearing and of law in general. If it is at first hard to perceive, that may be credited to the subtlety with which Chaucer mounts the attack, allowing us to subscribe, up to a certain point, to the mindset of his protagonists. We can get a clearer idea of that mindset and its troubles by leaping now to the other end of the tale, where oaths held with rigour are having their inevitable effect.

Episode II: Dorigen’s Compleynt Though sometimes pilloried as doing little for the tale besides making the audience impatient with Dorigen,17 her second compleynt does in fact have content to offer. First, the very oddity of the already-noted fact that Dorigen recognizes only two of her three options helps us understand the role of law and rigorism in the tale, as we shall soon see. Second, critical reactions to the scene can themselves be instructive, in that they often show a certain elision of Dorigen’s skewed perspective. Here, for example, is R. F. Green: “If we are in any doubt as to whether the private law of trouthe or the public law of ecclesiastical marriage is the more potent shaping force behind the plot of ‘The Franklin’s Tale,’ we might ask ourselves which course of action is represented as the more painful for Dorigen and her husband—keeping her oath to Aurelius or breaking it” (Crisis of Truth, 332). He means, of course, that breaking the oath is represented as more painful, even though the alternative is adultery. It is a reasonable argument if we begin from the supposition of a tragic dilemma between keeping and breaking the rash oath: in that case it will be hard to deny that the tale selects the former option then apparently approves the choice by Aurelius’s unexpected forgiveness of the illicit “debt” once the debtors show themselves ready to pay. The trouble is that Dorigen is not deciding between keeping her rash oath and breaking it; she is deciding between keeping her rash oath and



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killing herself. Green’s statement is not wrong, since “Dorigen and her husband,” once he reappears, do apparently believe themselves faced with the dilemma of keeping and breaking; but it is important to note that before his reappearance Dorigen is in another mental universe entirely.18 The complaint’s opening lines lay out her understanding: “Allas,” quod she, “on thee, Fortune, I pleyne, That unwar wrapped hast me in thy cheyne, Fro which t’escape woot I no socour, Save oonly deeth or elles dishonour; Oon of thise two bihoveth me to chese.” (1355–59)

Ambiguity is possible in the word dishonour: she might conceivably mean either the dishonour of fulfilling her rash oath—committing adultery with Aurelius—or that of breaking it. But whatever uncertainty persists at this point will not survive the remainder of the complaint, which returns over and over again (at lines 1363–66, 1395–98, 1405–1408, and 1420–23, among others) to the horror of choosing between an illicit sexual liaison and death. At this point, then, adultery and suicide are under consideration, whereas the notion of simply refusing Aurelius’s claim scarcely or never crosses her mind.19 Her rash oath, this most unreal and impotent of all laws, is for her an absolutely stable and unquestionable feature of the universe; better, even, to say that it shapes the space within which she thinks rather than appearing as an object inhabiting that space. She does not seem to see it at all. Further evidence for this blindness of Dorigen’s comes from the glaring mismatch between her exempla and her actual situation—not just the rapid-fire exempla near the end of the list, but even the lengthier ones like the stories of Lucretia and the daughters of Phildon. The majority of these stories have to do with suicide as a reaction to threatened or actual rape, not adultery.20 Dorigen is in like straits only to an observer who believes that she has no choice in the matter, that suicide is her only escape from an otherwise forced sexual liaison. She is, unfortunately, one such observer, believing (or perhaps willing?) herself to be passive in the face of a law that should have no force whatever.21 To an audience already on the alert against overly rigorous responses to law, her placing herself in such company is slightly ridiculous. We might justly react by asking one more time why she does not simply refuse—an option that she has but Lucretia and the others in her list did not. Nor does Arveragus’s return change the moral landscape as drastically as we might first think. True, there is suddenly no more talk of suicide; true, his forceful edicts about the need to keep trouthe (1474, 1476–79) are clearly arrayed against the possibility that seems not to

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have occurred to his wife, the possibility of simple refusal. And yet it would be inaccurate to say that Arveragus’s arrival sets off a similar struggle with a new set of options, that of keeping the oath and that of simply breaking it. The speed, force, and frequency with which he delivers his “decision” all speak of something other than struggle; we see him not so much making a choice as handing down the immediate consequence of a wholly unquestioned code of ethics. The question is why. One answer is R. F. Green’s: Arveragus’s response is automatic because this is a tale, one among many such, in which a private chivalrous culture of oath keeping is posited as supreme. I hope to have shown the viability of a different answer: that the supremacy of oath keeping is indeed posited but only by the protagonists. The tale as a whole suggests quite the reverse: that one of the most important things to know about oaths and other laws is when they are best broken. A variety of evidence has led to this ironic reading, beginning with established arguments skeptical of the protagonists’ general status as heroes, progressing through the nuanced polemic against rigour that marks the tale’s opening passages and ending with Dorigen’s strange inability to imagine anything but a rigorous interpretation of even the shakiest and most destructive oath.22 For a final piece of evidence, I now move to another source altogether—namely, the tale’s several points of resonance with its probable neighbor. These will suggest that “The Physician’s Tale,” despite its stark differences in genre and mood, is very much concerned with offering a more concentrated dose of the same medicine that “The Franklin’s Tale” has just administered.

Episode III: The Physician’s Tale and the Franklin’s It takes “The Physician’s Tale” just about two hundred lines to reach the point of despair that the Franklin’s arrives at in roughly three times the space. But it is, at least when seen through a certain abstracting filter, the same point. Critics have long since pointed out that each tale arrives near its end at an impasse involving a legitimate relationship between a man and a woman and a second man’s bid to interrupt the relationship in order to have his way with the woman.23 There are, obviously, great differences in the details. The stable relationship varies from husbandwife to father-daughter. The amount and kind of power wielded by the interloper differs widely: Aurelius seems to hold over Dorigen only the power of words and thoughts, whereas the powerful Roman judge Apius presumably could deploy a good bit more material force to achieve his



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ends. And the way the two stories end is drastically different, featuring stark horror in one case but a fantastic series of quit-claims, gratuitously released debts, in the other. Those differences are real, but there are also more and deeper connections between the tales than usually recognized; the device of classifying diverse kinds of law together brings them to light. First of all, in each tale the interloper stakes his dubious claim in approximately the same way. Apius has no real claim to Virginia other than the movement of his own will, but he invents a story which, if true, would enlist the legitimate support of the law to put her in his power. Aurelius’s appeal to Dorigen is not so very different: while the law on which he relies is only a dismissive word spoken in jest, not a complex system of statutes as in Apius’s case, nonetheless each man means to use his respective law in exactly the same way, as a stable regularity that governs wills and simply must be obeyed.24 Each tries, essentially, to hide his naked will behind a screen of law: if it can be blamed for the evil to follow, no one need observe that the real impetus is coming from a single person conniving to get what he wants. A second overlooked parallel between the two tales is even more to our purpose. Virginius, the father of the hapless heroine of “The Physician’s Tale,” suffers from an oddly familiar sort of blindness: he fails to understand his situation well enough to perceive the possibility of resisting the unjust law that afflicts him. Like Dorigen, he seems scarcely able to see out of a moral universe entirely shaped by that law. The result is very much the same: like Dorigen, he thinks himself trapped in a strict dilemma between death and sexual shame. And even the situation of the audience is similar to that in “The Franklin’s Tale,” for Chaucer has again larded the story with subtle indications that make the overlooked third option, a simple refusal of the bogus law, painfully obvious to the attentive. The quickest way to see those indications is by comparisons with the story’s primary source in the Romance of the Rose.25 Chaucer’s most spectacular innovation concerns the manner of Virginia’s death. In Jean de Meun’s poem, the execution takes place suddenly, immediately after the judge’s sentence, when seizure of Virginia is imminent: Juija par hastive sentence Appius que, senz atendance, Fust la pucele au serf rendue. ... Virginius, Qui bien veit que vers Appius

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Ne peut pas sa fille defendre, Ainz li couvient par force rendre E son cors livrer a hontage, Si change honte pour domage Par merveilleus apensement, Si Titus Livius ne ment; Car il, par amour, senz haïne, A sa bele fille Virgine Tantost a la teste copee E puis au juige presentee, Devant touz, en plein consistoire . . . (RR, lines 5621–23, 5627–39)26

Virginius’s violence is the last-ditch effort of a man desperate to save his daughter from a fate he considers still worse. The poem’s remark that he beheads his daughter “for love, without hate” suggests that the spectacle is one of pure tragedy, commended to our attention for its shocking display, and more likely to arouse a kind of awed (cf. merveilleus) horror at the whole occurrence than a moral condemnation of the actor.27 Chaucer follows de Meun in several particulars. Apius’s judgment is still “hastily” rendered in such a way as to interrupt what we are told would have been Virginius’s effective defense (191–98; RR, 5617–20), and some of what follows cleaves very closely to de Meun: Qui bien viet que vers Appius Ne peut pas sa fille defendre, Ainz li couvient par force rendre E son cors livrer a hontage . . . (5628–31) And when this worthy knyght Virginius Thurgh sentence of this justice Appius Moste by force his deere doghter yiven Unto the juge, in lecherie to lyven . . . (203–206)

But then Chaucer suddenly strikes out on his own. Instead of making a wondrous decision to exchange shame for the swift stroke of a sword, Chaucer’s Virginius reacts in almost leisurely fashion: “He gooth hym hoom, and sette him in his halle, / And leet anon his deere doghter call” (207–208). It is, of course, Virginia’s absence from the courtroom that allows this more deliberative approach; likely Chaucer has kept her away just in order to make the deliberation possible. Virginius, alas, does not profit from the opportunity. That is, his conversation with his daughter betrays no hint of wavering. While we are told that he feels pitee (211), the information comes with a disclaimer: “Al wolde he from his purpos nat convert” (212). Nor is he inclined to



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ask his daughter her thoughts on the matter. When she begs for mercy, his reply is as firmly negative as may be: “No, certes, deere doghter myn” (235–36). And though she asks for “a litel space” in which to “compleyne” her death, the tale does not tell us that it was granted. He gives her just time enough to fall down in a faint, then to get up again, by which point (and without any further mention of mourning or compleynt) she can give verbal assent to Virginius’s choice of dommage over honte: “Yif me my deeth, er that I have a shame” (249). He obliges immediately, marking with a sword stroke the end of Chaucer’s fortyeight-line invention, after which the tale returns for a while to nearly literal translation. The new version invites, or rather compels, the audience to begin questioning. A parent who kills his daughter in hot blood to save her from an immediate threat is one thing; a parent who strolls home to discuss with the daughter the (terribly piteous!) fact that he will soon behead her is quite another. If nothing else, we will begin to wonder, given the time he had for deliberation, could not Virginius have thought of a better way out of the situation? Why is there, as he tells Virginia, no “grace” or “remedye”? What about the traditional expedients of raising a loyal army to fight off the wicked judge or calling him to a duel, or fleeing into Egypt? As with “The Franklin’s Tale,” one might reply that such things are not considered here because Chaucer is following an existing story from which he cannot depart far. But here as there, his alterations to the story have strained, I think deliberately, the logic of the original. It made some kind of horrible sense when de Meun’s Virginius slaughtered his daughter; it makes much less sense when Chaucer’s character follows suit. We are expected to note the senselessness and begin asking these story-bending questions.28 The result again parallels what happens with “The Franklin’s Tale”: the audience finds itself coached toward an indignant questioning not so much of the offending law itself (for its injustice, in each tale, is clear for all to see) as of the protagonists’ failure to question it. In each case, they wring their hearts over a tragic choice between death and shame while the audience looks on wondering why the fools do not simply break, ignore, the worthless law without which they face no such choice. This account of Chaucer’s major adjustment to the story makes sense of a host of smaller ones. The tale’s denouement has changed slightly, for example. When Apius, enraged at the sight of Virginia’s head and thus the defeat of his foul desires, orders Virginius seized and killed, de Meun tells us the sequel in a quick couplet: “Mais ne

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l’ocist ne ne pendi, / Car li peuples le defendi” (5643–44).29 In Chaucer’s version we get a bit more detail: And when the juge it saugh, as seith the storie, He bad to take hym and anhange hym faste; But right anon a thousand peple in thraste, To save the knyght, for routhe and for pitee, For knowen was the false iniquitee. The peple anon had suspect in this thyng, By manere of the cherles chalangyng, That it was by the assent of Apius; They wisten wel that he was lecherus. (258–66)

Chaucer’s Apius, it seems, has been an unpopular judge all along. And this is not the only way in which Chaucer weakens Apius’s position and strengthens Virginius’s. He invents very little characterization for the knight—about four lines compared to the sixty or so given to his daughter—but one of the four tells us that this knight is “strong of freendes” (4). In fact, the family is so “strong of freendes” (again at 135) that Apius knows that he cannot take the daughter “by no force” (133); and no meede will work either, in part because of Virginia’s great personal goodness. Only the last of these reflections exists in de Meun; there is no mention of the family’s strong connections. Still more striking is Chaucer’s omission of a couple of lines already quoted from the courtroom scene, telling us that Virginius “bien veit que vers Appius / Ne peut pas sa fille defendre” (5628–29): apparently the suggestion of Virginius’s relative impotence did not suit Chaucer’s purposes. Thus by the tale’s end, with just a few small changes out of the main spotlight, Chaucer has contrived a complete reversal of the power relations between his male leads. The pressure on the audience to ask why Virginius does not resist Apius’s edict grows accordingly. A few more lines from the trial provide the strongest evidence for this view. Jean de Meun tells us that immediately before Appius’s judgment Virginius “touz estait prez de responder / Pour ses aversaires confondre” (5619–20).30 Chaucer adds something: the judge’s hasty interruption comes just before Virginius his tale tolde, And wolde have preeved it as sholde a knyght, And eek by witnessyng of many a wight, That al was fals that seyde his adversarie . . . (192–95)

Given that line 194 tells us of Virginius’s readiness to call on witnesses, line 193 surely means (as the Riverside Chaucer also suggests) that he is ready to “respond” not just with words but with sword—to do



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combat, in fine romance style, in defense of the truth of what he says. Once again Chaucer strengthens the character; one gets the impression that Virginius could have made short work of his accuser, the “cherl” Claudius, and perhaps of the unpopular and relatively weak judge Apius too. If a throng of angry commoners can later “thrust in” (260) and physically prevent Apius’s commands, could not this well-connected and apparently combat-ready knight have done as much? The parallel with, and intensification of, the leading couple’s misjudgment at the end of “The Franklin’s Tale” is clear. Virginius has as much material power as Chaucer could give him and every opportunity to buck the judge’s order; but the instant the edict is spoken, any hint of resistance crumbles, for our noble knight seems to have no inkling of the possibilities open to him. He is trapped, just as Dorigen and Arveragus are trapped, by the mistaken notion that this idea, this thing of words, shapes the world in a way that cannot be questioned or altered but can only be followed in machine-like fashion. This understanding of “The Physician’s Tale” also helps explain one final oddity of the tale—namely its appeal to Jephtha, a figure from the Book of Judges similarly faced with the prospect of killing his daughter: Virginia pleads with her father that Jephtha at least “yaf his doghter grace / For to compleyne, er he hir slow, allas!” (240–41). The allusion has little direct effect on the tale’s action, staying Virginius’s hand only long enough for a couple of swoons, but it seems to be a purposeful insertion: it does not appear in any other known version of the story, yet Chaucer gives it five piteous lines at the tale’s tensest moment. Moreover, it is a sudden and solitary reference to the Hebrew Scriptures in a tale otherwise entirely “pagan” in setting. The critics have, accordingly, sprung into action to explain what it is doing there.31 Jephtha is, of course, one of the twelve “judges” of Israel who give the book in which he appears its name. Despite the label (which holds in the Vulgate’s Liber Judicum as well) their function is in general more military and executive than judicial. Our concern is with what is perhaps the central incident in the chapter and a half that Jephtha’s life receives. Preparing for battle with the Ammonites, “Votum vovit Domino, dicens, si tradideris filios Ammon in manus meas, quicumque primus fuerit egressus de foribus domus meae mihique occurrerit revertenti cum pace a filiis Ammon, eum holocaustum offeram Domino” (Judges 11:30–31).32 After a successful battle, Jephtha returns home to a joyous reception from his only child, a daughter, who comes dancing out of the gates to meet him. Seeing her and remembering his vow, “scidit vestamenta sua et ait, heu, filia mi, decepisti me et ipsa decepta es; aperui enim

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os meum ad Dominum et aliud facere non potero. Cui illa respondit, pater mi, si aperuisti os tuum ad Dominum, fac mihi quodcumque pollicitus es, concessa tibi ultione atque victoria de hostibus tuis” (Judges 11:35–36).33 She goes on to make the request that Virginia mentions, asking for two months to “bewail my virginity” with her companions. He grants it, and at the end of that period she returns and is sacrificed as promised. Other than what we may infer from the characters’ own words, there is no reflection in the text for or against the morality of Jephtha’s promise or its fulfillment; the story simply concludes by noting the institution of a custom of “lament[ing] the daughter of Jephte” among Israelite women (Judges 11:40). To a modern reader who knows the story, the impact of Virginia’s allusion is likely to be one of increased horror. If “The Physician’s Tale” can serve as a reductio ad absurdum of the end of “The Franklin’s Tale,” so this passing reference to Jephtha’s vow is a further reductio of it: it is as if Chaucer, in the hope of getting through to some rather deaf listeners, resorts to more and more extreme versions of the basic point. Have you not seen that the ostensibly tragic dilemma in “The Franklin’s Tale” would not exist if it were not for the main characters’ diseased commitment to legal rigorism? Very well, here is “The Physician’s Tale,” in which the enforcing bit of law is not only legally void but also entirely evil, created by a character for whom it would be difficult to discover the least sympathy. Do you not see that in this tale too the enforcing law would have no power but for the mistaken reaction of the protagonists? Very well, at the high point of the story I make extended reference to a biblical figure whose similar inability to conceive of disobedience to a man-made law yields the ghastliest of results. And in case the placement of the reference is not sufficiently arresting, I arrange several other elements throughout the tale to prepare you for it. Some peculiar lines of the most voluble protagonist, for example: Why does Virginius call his daughter the “endere of my lyf” and “my laste wo” (218, 221), if not as an additional link to Jephtha’s moan that his daughter had “deceived” (or better “beguiled”—decepisti) him? And why else does Chaucer insert the new information that Virginia is an only child (6) if not to duplicate the situation of Jephtha more exactly?34 All this is, of course, only plausible if we believe that a fourteenthcentury audience would have reacted to Jephtha’s story with something approaching the horror and condemnation modern readers are likely to feel. Fortunately we have fairly strong evidence that this is the case, at least among one influential segment of the population. Christian



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theologians throughout the Middle Ages used Jephtha as an exemplum when they considered the proprieties of vow making; their practically universal conclusion agreed with that recorded by Peter Comestor: “In vovendo fuit stultus, quia discretionem non habuit, et in reddendo impius.” The vow was void for the usual reasons noted near the beginning of this article—most incontestably its lack of justitia but perhaps also including its lack of deliberation or judicium, which may be what Comestor means by discretionem.35 Late-medieval Jephtha differed from modern Jephtha, then, not so much in the content of the reactions provoked as in the simple question of how well he was known: far from being the dimly remembered figure he is in most circles today, he is one of the two names theologians inevitably dropped whenever rash vows and oaths came under consideration.36 (The other is that of Herod the Tetrarch, whose regrettably vague oath to his daughter cost John the Baptist his life. His oath, of course, found no more favor with the medieval theologians than Jephtha’s.) In the end, we can safely reckon that the reaction of a fourteenth-century audience would be about the same as ours: they would remember Jephtha’s vow and its consequences more than anything else about him, and the result, at least from the large majority, would be condemnation.

Reprise: Law and Oath in Chaucer How, then, are we to relate to laws? For this, I believe, is the question we should ask. Many past treatments of oaths in Chaucer have concerned themselves instead with the question, put simply, whether he was for them or against them: the results have been sufficiently intransigent in their mutual contradiction to suggest that we need a different approach.37 Briefly, then, let us return for a still more abstract look at the logic of “The Franklin’s Tale,” proceeding on the hypothesis that Chaucer is neither for nor against oaths (and other laws) in general but that he may have some recoverable views on how humans should interact with these irremovable features of their moral landscape. The law to which Dorigen feels bound as the end of her tale nears is a very prototype of the species, stated as a condition and its consequence, an A implying a B: Looke what day that endelong Britayne Ye remoeve alle the rokkes, stoon by stoon, That they ne lette ship ne boot to goon— Thanne wol I love you best of any man . . . (992–95)

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The three options Dorigen faces on learning that the impossible protasis has been fulfilled can be expressed in logical terms. She could fulfill the conditional by answering the true protasis A with a true apodosis B—in other words, by committing adultery with Aurelius: a horrible thought to her, true, but at least she would have done what she takes to be her duty by the law.38 She could refuse to fulfill the conditional, which would retroactively falsify her pledge, such as it was, to Aurelius, since it would mean that A had failed to imply B. And, finally, there is the radical solution that her compleynt favors: she could escape the whole problem by removing herself from the field of play, thus making fulfillment impossible. But how “radical” is this last option really? One can see why it would be thought so, a cutting of a Gordian knot by which Dorigen would otherwise be tied. From the point of view of the logical question, though, the move is not particularly bold. To make fulfillment of the law impossible in this way is more akin to finding a grisly loophole than to breaking the law itself; the rash oath would, in a very real sense, remain intact. That is, what Dorigen proposes to do is to demonstrate a hidden proviso of her “contract” with Aurelius: really, as all parties would surely have to agree, the arrangement is not merely “if you remove the rocks I will sleep with you” but “if you remove the rocks and I am still alive I will sleep with you.” One could discover any number of such unspoken conditions, most of which would be difficult to deny but so obvious as not to require articulation: if the world has not ended in the meantime, if a magician has not turned you into a tree, and so on. The idea of such hidden provisos is not at all foreign to some medieval understandings of vows and oaths. Aquinas’s treatment in the Summa, for example, is rife with cases of what he calls a conditio implicita, as when he writes that “the vows of persons subject to another’s power contain an implied condition—namely, that they not be annulled by the superior.” His point is often precisely that if a person fails to make good on the vow when such an implicit condition is not met, the vow itself has not been broken (see Summa Theologica II-II.88–89, particularly 88.9.ad2). Dorigen, unfortunately, proposes to take one of these overlooked conditionals and falsify it. The point for us is that such a maneuver would leave the oath itself, as a conditional statement about reality, true and unopposed. The protasis, now revealed to be a compound proposition involving both the disappearance of some rocks and Dorigen’s continued presence above ground, would be false, and therefore nothing would follow from it. She would not have broken her oath but merely circumvented the consequences it threatens.



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Viewed this way, Dorigen’s three options align rather differently. No longer is suicide the outlier of the three, a violent and, depending on one’s moral evaluation, either heroic or criminal destruction of an intractable dilemma between the other two choices. Instead we see two options (adultery and suicide) that maintain intact, in their respectively horrifying ways, the awful oath, and only one (simple refusal) that breaks it. This way of seeing makes it clearer than ever that Dorigen’s compleynt is impelling her toward the worst possible choice. It is not merely the worst because suicide would be wrong in itself, or because the oath is clearly invalid, or because of the condemnation of recognized moral authorities. Even on the rather dehumanized view of abstract logic, suicide does not meet the main problem: if what we fundamentally have here is a bad law, and the law needs to be opposed, the only way to do so is by simple refusal. Suicide is just another form of giving in. The final benefit of this abstract approach is that it uncovers yet another parallel with “The Physician’s Tale,” which matches its probable neighbor in this matter as exactly as in others. If Dorigen must choose among adultery, (apparent) perjury, and suicide, the paths open to Virginius line up the same way: sexual enslavement of his daughter, the contravention of a judge’s edict, and murder. Since Virginius is as blind as Dorigen to the real opposition that the middle option represents, the audience alone perceives that the remaining two possibilities—in each tale, a choice between shame and deeth—fall on the same side of a much more important determination to abide by law at any cost. This hidden “decision” seems somehow, tragically, to have been taken long before the characters became conscious of choosing. The option of law breaking, then, is the logical outlier. I would like to add one last argument for the proposition that it is also the option that Chaucer favors—an argument proceeding from Chaucer’s art itself. If it is true that there are two ways of understanding these stories, the way their characters understand them (privileging two different ways, the murderous and the meek, of obeying the law) and the way a perspicacious audience can eventually come to understand them (perceiving the full “trilemma” and recognizing the overlooked possibility of simple disobedience as logically distant from the other two), then the very fact that the latter understanding emerges slowly will give it a weight that the dilemmatic understanding will find it hard to overcome. A buried treasure, once unearthed, may be worth more than the same treasure long safe in the vault. So here: the overlooked possibility of simple disobedience stands out not only because it is logically the one that differs most from the other two; Chaucer has done it a great service by partial burial.

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The tales told by the physician and the franklin do not give a complete answer to the question of laws, but they do make a start. What they oppose is moral rigorism. What they support just begins to come clear: it involves a counsel about the proper relationship between a law and a human will. Do not be seduced, they advise, into seeing yourself as trapped in a universe shaped by a particular law: instead, notice the shaping, and allow it to suggest to you that the universe could have been another shape. If you do that, you will begin to see not from a position we might call “beneath” the law but from the plane on which the law dwells, or perhaps above it: like Apius you will be a shaper of law and thus able to choose, for any given law, to support or oppose it as a whole, along with the universe that it proposes to create. From the extraordinary efforts Chaucer’s protagonists make to remain blind, to avoid moving up from their position “within” or “under” the law, we can infer that the higher vantage is not always easy or pleasant. But it is, at least if these two cautionary tales can be trusted, the place where the human will actually dwells—no matter how slowly the fact may emerge to view.39

Notes   1. My text for all citations of Chaucer is The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).   2. George Kittredge put a similar claim memorably in trying to dissuade readers from over-fine attention to a similarly unexplained oddity, Walter’s cruelty in “The Clerk’s Tale”: such evidence, he wrote, has “no status in this particular court.” See “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” Modern Philology 9 (1911–1912): 436–37. The most certain source for “The Franklin’s Tale” is Boccaccio’s Il Filocolo, but the story also appears in the Decameron, and critics are increasingly arguing that Chaucer knew both. They are conveniently available, along with a summary of the recent arguments, in Robert Edwards, “The Franklin’s Tale,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), vol. 1: 211–77.   3. The judgment that “The Physician’s Tale” is “probably” the Franklin’s neighbor derives from arguments most extensively laid out in Robert Pratt’s 1951 article, “The Order of the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA 66: 1141–67—which finds no clear thematic connection between the tales but follows Fragment V with Fragment VI essentially because putting the latter anywhere else would interrupt some established link. Though that reasoning has found wide acceptance, one could obviously wish for a more positive kind of evidence. For that reason the arguments to follow here do not take the juxtaposition of the two poems as an antecedent certainty but merely as a suggestive hypothesis. That is, I do not initially expect belief in any closer links between the two stories than it would be reasonable to assume between any pair of Canterbury tales, or for that matter any two stories by a single author. On



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the other hand, the new parallels uncovered by this article’s end between the two tales might reasonably be taken to support the initial hypothesis and show its fruitfulness. (See note 14 below for more on the hypothetical method in interpretive work.)   4. Latin references to the Bible will be taken from Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, ed. Robertus Weber, O.S.B. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983). For a theological exploration of swearing that starts from Jeremiah, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1981), II-II.89.3. There is an excellent early survey of the literature on the validity of Dorigen’s oath in Alan Gaylord, “The Promises in ‘The Franklin’s Tale,’” ELH 31 (1964): 331–65; a later effort along similar lines, which also attempts to mediate between Gaylord’s criticism of the Franklin’s married couple and his opponents’ approbation, is Douglas J. Wurtele, “Chaucer’s Franklin and the Truth about ‘Trouthe,’” English Studies in Canada 13 (1987): 359–74. A thorough account of the requirements of different types of medieval courts for verifying oaths and contracts can be found in Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1999), especially in chapter 8, “Rash Promises.”   5. Dorigen’s protasis also expresses her bond to Arveragus a second way: the reason she would want the rocks removed, were it possible, would be to guarantee his safety. Wurtele (“Chaucer’s Franklin,” 367) is among those pointing out this Chaucerian innovation, absent from the source tales. The meaning of the oath’s impossibility appears earlier in James Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” Modern Philology 45 (1947–1948): 41b; and in Gaylord (“Promises in ‘The Franklin’s Tale’”), who notes the existence in critical circulation of that fact at least since Henry Barrett Hinckley’s Notes on Chaucer (Northampton, Mass.: Nonotuck, 1907).   6. Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage”; there is a good synopsis of twentieth-century reactions in the note to Fragment III in the Riverside, 863b–64a.   7. Wurtele notes both Arveragus’s failure to share maistrye (370) and his fartoo-rarely remarked death threat (368). Mary Hamel observes that his early departure for Britain appears to value honour over “marital happiness”; see “The Franklin’s Tale and Chrétien de Troyes,” Chaucer Review 17 (1983): 316–31, at 326. Two other articles dubious about Arveragus’s absence are listed in Carol A. Pulham, “Promises, Promises: Dorigen’s Dilemma Revisited,” Chaucer Review 31 (1996): 76–86, at 76n5.   8. It is, of course, a fair question in the oddly hybrid pagan-Christian world of “The Franklin’s Tale,” to what extent we should expect Dorigen to swear, or more generally act, according to Christian morality. Relevant approaches range from Sledd’s belief that the leading characters are Christian, to Kathryn Hume’s assertion that they are pagan, to A. C. Spearing’s suggestion that the entire universe portrayed here transforms, over the course of the tale, from a pagan to a Christian one, with a critical moment falling at lines 1245–55. My observations do not depend on the resolution of the question; I only mean that Chaucer could expect his audience to notice that Dorigen does not abide by the well-known requirements for Christian swearing. For Sledd, see note 5 above; Hume’s article is “The Pagan Setting of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ and the Sources of Dorigen’s Cosmology,” Studia Neophilologica 44 (1972): 289–94; and cf. Spearing, introduction to The Franklin’s Prologue and Tale, rev. ed. Spearing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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  9. For Dorigen’s histrionic swoons, see Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender (Oxford University, 2006), chap. 6, especially 160–61 and 166–68, and the references there. Gaylord (“Promises in ‘The Franklin’s Tale,’” 334, 338) remarks on the excessive swearing of both lead characters, though without noting the jarring contrast with Dorigen’s pleye. For the length and suspicious counterproductivity of her second compleynt, see Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” 36b, 41b, 43b. 10. The exception—the fact that the husband in Il Filocolo does decide for the couple how they will respond to the oath once the impossible condition is magically fulfilled—may only prove the rule. Chaucer has cast the husband’s taking charge in a new light by framing the tale with a lengthy treatment (considered shortly) of the couple’s wedding oaths, whose remarkable evenweightedness he sets up as if it were to be the story’s major theme. Thus, the husband’s decisiveness and control, while in the sources almost a matter of course and no object for discussion, become in “The Franklin’s Tale” a foreground element and a sixth reason to doubt any simple idealization of the protagonists. 11. From On Precept and Dispensation, §32, a treatise on the meaning and proper handling of monastic vows. The Latin (available in Sancti Bernardi Opera, ed. Jean Leclerq et al., 8 vols. [Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957–1977]) reads: “Verumtamen nemo, si caute profitetur, pollicetur se ultra in nullo transegressurum, hoc est iam non peccaturum . . .” 12. The locus classicus for the supporters’ view is again Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage.” See the Riverside Chaucer, 897A (note to lines 792–98) for a helpful list of more recent supporters and detractors of the wedding oaths in particular. 13. The Middle English Dictionary gives this meaning of pacience as 2.b. (“sufferance, leave, permission”), while the meaning considered below is 2.a. (“forbearance, moderation; self-restraint, calmness, equanimity”). 14. Some discussants have balked at this specimen of “consequent verification,” presumably out of fear that it involves inadmissibly circular reasoning; the concern is understandable but needless. In fact the logic here has a structure that is extremely common, if not unavoidable, in interpretive work: one starts from a hypothesis that cannot be conclusively proved in advance but that demonstrates its usefulness (and, to the degree that this is possible, its truth) by the fruit it bears. See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s description of the process in Truth and Method (New York: Continuum Books, 1989): Interpretation begins with fore-conceptions that are replaced by more suitable ones. This constant process of new projection constitutes the movement of understanding and interpretation. . . . Working out appropriate projections, anticipatory in nature, to be confirmed “by the things” themselves, is the constant task of understanding. The only “objectivity” here is the confirmation of a fore-meaning in its being worked out. Indeed, what characterizes the arbitrariness of inappropriate fore-meanings if not that they come to nothing in being worked out? (267) One major argument in favor of deploying the general notion of law just described is merely this: that its consequences, worked out below, are provocative and fruitful rather than coming to nothing.



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That argument does not stand entirely alone, however. Gadamer goes on to advise that it is best if the interpreter does not proceed solely on the basis of the “fore-meaning already available to him” but instead “explicitly . . . examine[s] the legitimacy—i.e., the origin and validity—of the foremeanings dwelling within him” (ibid.). A related counsel used to be given by philosophers of science to prevent ad hoc hypotheses that adequately “explained” some puzzling phenomenon but were otherwise entirely off the wall, unrelated to accepted theories: they argued that hypotheses should ideally be so-called verae causae, which is to say that they should deal only in entities with recognized effects in other realms, rather than postulating new entities for which no independent evidence was available. The maneuver proposed here—of proceeding with a notion of law sufficiently general to “cover” many different kinds of regularity so that they may be considered together—satisfies both counsels rather well, as it does not originate with me but has already proven useful elsewhere. One example is Owen Barfield’s “Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction,” found in Essays Presented to Charles Williams (ed. C. S. Lewis [Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1966 (1947)], 127), which relies on an observation that “the nature of law, as law, is the same, whether it be moral, or logical, or municipal.” I first learned the idea, however, from a different source—namely the phenomenology and metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce, who saw the deep regularity that I call law (and that he most often called simply thirdness, or sometimes representation) as an enduring feature of reality, one of three fundamental categories used to classify all thought and all reality. For Peirce, probably the most basic form of thirdness is that of a simple conditional statement—if A, then B—though such laws for Peirce have a certain non-Newtonian complexity, a capacity to admit exceptions, built in. See, for example, “The Categories in Detail,” Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1931–1960), 1:141–80. (For a brief definition of vera causa, as well as a brief argument against understanding too absolutely the restriction of hypotheses to verae causae, see Peirce, Collected Papers, 6:242n and 6:65 respectively.) It is important to note, finally, that my thesis does not involve any claim that Chaucer explicitly thought in terms of this general notion, as though he sat down one day to write a romance about what I am calling law and produced “The Franklin’s Tale,” and sat down another day to write a cautionary exemplum about law and produced “The Physician’s.” But it is quite reasonable to find that a concept or structure that never entered an author’s conscious deliberation is nonetheless a useful interpretive tool; one (not the only) reason it can be so is that the structure may have been present and influential to the author as part of the background, rather than the foreground, of his thought. In the longer project from which this essay arises I offer independent evidence that a particular way of thinking about law—a way that matches what these pages unearth in Chaucer—was relatively commonplace in the late Middle Ages, and particularly in some of its best-known theological writers, including Bernard of Clairvaux. That lends yet a third level of plausibility to the deployment of law as a general category for the investigation here. 15. My understanding of the pacience counseled here is not far from that in Jill Mann’s Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002); I merely want to stress even more strongly the opposition to rigour and the resulting implication that the pacience in question involves a certain way of interacting with

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law (compare Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, 88–90). The writings of Bernard of Clairvaux provide good evidence for the currency of antirigorist stances in the high and late Middle Ages; see particularly his treatise On Precept and Dispensation, the source of this section’s epigraph and of such gnomic antinomianisms as the declaration that “perfect obedience knows no law” (§12). 16. In the end, Aurelius’s plea for “payment” (1311–38) is almost superfluous; Dorigen not only offers no resistance to his shifty arguments but also does not even go to verify for herself that the rokkes are indeed aweye (whereas her ancestors in Boccaccio do make the parallel investigation). Very little persuasion, it seems, is necessary, at least with one who understands oaths the way Dorigen does. 17. The audience has reason to be impatient. Saint Jerome, author of the antifeminist tract Adversus Jovinianum from which Dorigen’s exempla derive, already apologizes for going on at such length and with such multiplication of cases. “I know that I have included far more in this catalogue of women than the conventions of examples allow,” he writes (translation in Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves, ed. Ralph Hanna III and Traugott Lawler [Athens: University of Georgia, 1997], 1:175). It would have been hard for Chaucer to miss the apology and is thus all the more likely that the tedium of Dorigen’s presentation is deliberate. For critical remark of that tedium, see Sledd, “Dorigen’s Complaint,” and the other articles listed in the Riverside Chaucer, 900A, note to 1355–1456. 18. One could object that the two mental universes are actually one, because suicide is merely a more dramatic way (than simple refusal) of breaking the promise to Aurelius, so that the essential choice remains the same. The “reprise” that ends this essay will argue on logical grounds that the two ways of avoiding fulfillment must be considered as quite distinct—so distinct that only one of them can really be considered to break the promise. 19. Some critics, notably James Sledd (“Dorigen’s Complaint,” 37b–38a), believe that Dorigen does consider the full slate of three options. And it is true that she has heard from Aurelius mention of the possibility of breaking the oath—for example, at lines 1320, 1331, and 1335. But her mind does not seem to store the idea: her long monologue contains only two dim hints of the possibility, of which one is quite ambiguous. After the opening statement just quoted, Dorigen continues, “But natheless, yet have I levere to lese / My lif than of my body to have a shame, / Or knowe myselven fals, or lese my name” (1360–62). Sledd takes the last line to refer to simple refusal of the oath, after which Dorigen might well think that she had been “false” or “lost her name.” However, she uses the same phrase about fifty lines later to describe not the breaking of an oath but another illicit sexual liaison: Lucretia killed herself because “hire thoughte it was a shame / To lyven whan she hadde lost hir name” (1407–1408). And Dorigen would be just as “false” in keeping her rash oath as in breaking it—indeed more so, because she would be violating her prior, and much more valid, wedding oath to Arveragus. Thus it is uncertain whether line 1362 indicates anything beyond the same shame of body mentioned in 1361. (Using or to separate appositives is admittedly unusual, but Chaucer must be doing it here at least once; otherwise we would have to conclude that Dorigen lays out four options.) The second possible reference to a simple refusal comes in lines 1424–25: “I wol be trewe unto Arveragus,” Dorigen declares, “Or rather sleen myself in som manere.” The or rather suggests that these are two different possibilities and thus that in line 1424 it has briefly occurred to Dorigen that she might remain trewe



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in some way other than by killing herself. But even if so, this is one passing line out of a hundred; it remains clear that the choice overwhelmingly occupying Dorigen’s mind is that between suicide and adultery. 20. Richard L. Hoffman’s “Jephthah’s Daughter and Chaucer’s Virginia,” Chaucer Review 2 (1967): 20–31, on which more below, has noted this incongruity, as well as some of its possible connections with “The Physician’s Tale.” Hamel, “The Franklin’s Tale,” also notes the odd shifts between Aurelius’s ostensibly courtly appeal and the underlying implication of law-enforced rape (327–28). The frequently remarked inappropriateness of the shorter exempla, for its part, may be exaggerated. Take Bilyea, for example (line 1455): though her most memorable attribute is her forbearance to complain of her husband’s awful breath, Jerome also calls her “a woman so chaste that she was held up as an example” even in the allegedly pure world of ancient Rome. Her story, like many of Dorigen’s last exempla, concerns a woman’s lifelong faithfulness to a single man. See Hanna and Lawler, eds., Jankyn’s Book of Wikked Wyves, 1:172. 21. Dorigen’s misguided passivity is not unrelated to the counsel of pacience with which the tale begins: both are part of an extended exploration of good and bad patience that extends across at least the franklin’s, clerk’s, knight’s, and man of law’s tales. The larger project from which this essay is drawn begins from Jill Mann’s work in Feminizing Chaucer, attempting to extend it by showing that the questions about action and passion there are inseparable from theological ones of the kind Bernard of Clairvaux considers, particularly the question of the precise relationship between human and divine wills. Other helpful works on the question of passivity include Ralph Hanna III, “Some Commonplaces of Late Medieval Patience Discussions: An Introduction,” in The Triumph of Patience: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. G. J. Schiffhorst (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1978), 65–87; and Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering and Action in Chaucer and Spenser (New Haven: Yale, 1974); Blamires’s remarks on rigour as a near miss for the virtue of constantia (Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender, 157) are also germane. 22. A contrast with the teaching of a well-known theological source seems to render Dorigen’s inability still more blameworthy. Squarely in the middle of the first book of City of God, Augustine takes up the question as to whether a woman could ever licitly kill herself to avoid rape or in response to the shame of having been raped (I.16–26). The answer is a clear and resounding No. This means that, if influence from this source is plausible—and the book was one of the most-copied and -excerpted volumes in the Middle Ages, and this passage appears very near the beginning, surrounded by other themes of known interest to Chaucer—the tale’s audience has yet another reason to condemn Dorigen’s moral reasoning. Not only does she cast herself as caught in a dilemma far worse than her actual spate of three choices, she also makes exactly the wrong choice from the two options that remain. Also relevant, given Dorigen’s over-fecund multiplication of cases, is an observation Augustine lets drop in the midst of his own much shorter list. After noting from Lucretia and other pagans that suicide certainly has been used to avoid rape or murder, Augustine (possibly himself thinking of the lengthy list in Jerome’s tract, which seems to have been written about twenty years earlier—see note 17) counters that “We are not inquiring whether it has been done but whether it ought to have been done. Sound judgment is to be preferred even to examples” (I.22). A few sentences later he adds

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that “it is obvious that such examples as are produced from the ‘nations that forget God,’ give no warrant of imitation to the worshippers of the one true God” (ibid.). See Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 21–32. 23. For example, Peter G. Beidler, “The Pairing of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ and ‘The Physician’s Tale,’” Chaucer Review 3 (1969): 276; Dewey R. Faulkner, introduction to ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Faulkner (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 5–6. 24. One could object that Aurelius’s law has a conditional structure, while Apius’s is simply a flat order. But there are many precedents, some of them weighty with tradition, for understanding both types of law under a single category: for example, the “covenants” made by YHWH in the Pentateuch, of which some (Genesis 15) are promises outright without any conditions while others (Deuteronomy 29–30) impose a conditional or “if-then” structure on the world. Charles Peirce (in Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed. Kenneth L. Ketner and Hilary Putnam [Cambridge: Harvard University, 1992 (1898)], lecture 2) also groups the two types, by making the surprising claim that demonstrative statements are a special case of hypothetical ones; and see Green, Crisis of Truth, 305, for a discussion of “rash bargains” (like Dorigen’s) vis-à-vis rash promises proper, which are unconditional. 25. There may be other sources. The earliest known version of the story is in book III of Livy’s History (Ab Urbe Condita), but it appears also (besides in Jean de Meun’s part of the Romance) in Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus and Gower’s Confessio Amantis and, earlier, in a French version by Pierre Bersuire. Chaucer clearly worked primarily from Jean de Meun, though Edgar Shannon finds evidence that he knew Livy also. See discussion in Hoffman, “Jephthah’s Daughter,” 21–22; The Riverside Chaucer, 901–902; and Edgar F. Shannon, “The Physician’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1958 [1941]), 398–408. 26. The text is available with translation in Kenneth Bleeth, “The Physician’s Tale,” Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), vol. 2: 535–63, at 548–51. Here is a slightly more literal translation, partly indebted to several published ones, but in which the responsibility for errors is mine: Appius judged with hasty sentence that the girl should be rendered to the servant without delay. . . . Virginius, who saw well that he could not defend his daughter against Appius but would have to give her up by force and deliver her body to shame, therefore changed shame for injury by an astonishing calculation, if Livy does not lie; for he, for love, without hate, at once cut off the head from his beautiful daughter Virginia and then presented it to the judge, in front of everyone, in open court. 27. This sort of reaction may be familiar from a modern-day parallel, namely Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987); its protagonist, Sethe, who has escaped slavery by fleeing to the North with her children, when on the point of recapture cuts the throat of her infant daughter so that the child will not have to return to a slave’s life. One might debate how strongly to condemn the infanticide, but the first reaction the story provokes is horror at the situation that leads to the character’s actions rather



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than a moral judgment about the actions themselves. Likewise in de Meun’s version of this story—but not, for reasons given below, in Chaucer’s. 28. Even Chaucer’s reuse of de Meun’s most shocking line—“For love, and nat for hate, tho most be deed,” as Chaucer has it (225)—takes on a new and darker timbre in this context: deprived of the possibility of feeling the sort of cathartic horror that might attend de Meun’s execution scene, Chaucer’s audience is much more likely to hear the line as evidence of diseased thinking on Virginius’s part. 29. That is, “But [Appius] neither killed nor hung [Virginius], for the people defended him.” 30. “[Virginius] was entirely ready to respond in order to confound his adversaries.” 31. One plausible partial explanation arises from John L. Thompson’s useful scan of the history of Christian exegesis of Jephtha’s story in Reading the Bible with the Dead: What You Can Learn from the History of Exegesis that You Can’t Learn from Exegesis Alone (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 2007), which notes that his daughter “figures as an exemplar in many patristic and medieval treaties that commend virginity and the consecrated life” (236n4). She is appropriate to Chaucer’s Virginia at least that far. I suggest below, however, that Chaucer had in mind a more precise parallel between the stories. 32. From the Vulgate (note 4); I have added punctuation for clarity. I translate: “[Jephtha] made a vow to the Lord, saying: If you [will] hand over the sons of Ammon into my hands, whosoever should first come out of the gates of my house and run to me when I am returning with peace from the sons of Ammon, I will offer him as a holocaust to the Lord.” 33. “[Jephtha] tore his clothes and said: Woe, my daughter, you have beguiled me, and you yourself are beguiled; for I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I will not be able to do otherwise. To whom she responded: My father, if you have opened your mouth to the Lord, do to me whatsoever you have promised, since vengeance and victory over your enemies have been granted you.” 34. Even Chaucer’s way of phrasing this last fact may be an echo of Jephtha’s story: “No children hadde he mo in al his lyf,” he writes; “non enim habebat alios liberos” is the Vulgate’s line (Judges 11:34). I am indebted to Hoffman (“Jephthah’s Daughter,” 24) for the importance of line 6. As for lines 218 and 221, their very strangeness and injustice should serve to strengthen the link with Jephtha, since, as Thompson independently observes (Reading with the Dead, 34), his remark about beguilement is also strange and unjust. 35. Comestor’s Latin means, roughly, “In the vowing he was foolish, because he had no discernment, and in the yielding-up he was wicked.” By discretionem he could also mean to indicate more precisely the trouble with Jephtha’s oath: it does not discriminate between one possible “greeter” and the next. The source is Historia Scholastica 12 (in Migne, Patrologia Latina 198: 1284). The comment was well known: Aquinas quotes it at Summa Theologica IIII.88.2ad2 but misattributes it to Jerome, who was, however, of a similar mind; see the Christian Classics Summa, note 4 above, for references. For the claim that similar judgments were “practically universal,” see the chapter on Jephtha in Thompson’s Reading with the Dead and also see Hoffman, “Jephthah’s Daughter,” 25–26. It should be qualified to say that disapprobation was the norm among Christian theologians when they read the story literally; they also often read it as an allegory of Christ’s sacrifice of his own

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flesh, in which case, of course, they approved. Samples of that allegorical reading and an argument for transferring the allegory into “The Physician’s Tale” can be found in Hoffman, “Jephthah’s Daughter,” 29–30. One of the rare theological references not unequivocally disapproving of the literal story appears, remarkably enough, in the midst of Augustine’s abovementioned discussion of suicide and sexual violation. He writes that it can at least “be made a question” whether we should take Jephtha’s sacrifice to have been “in compliance with a command of God” and thereby justified along with Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice Isaac. See City of God I.22, p. 27. 36. The account in Gaylord’s article on the promises in “The Franklin’s Tale” (353–55) is a convenient beginning; but the basic point is already suggested by the fact that Jephtha rates three pages of consideration, just because oaths and vows are at issue, in an article that never mentions “The Physician’s Tale.” 37. Among works arguing that Chaucer more or less opposes oaths, I am thinking first of Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1989). His portrait is of course nuanced, suggesting a middle-class poet nostalgic for a golden age when the human world could proceed by reliance on the oaths and vows but extremely skeptical about the usefulness of such things in the ungolden fourteenth century. On the opposite extreme is, for example, Gertrude White’s piece, “The Franklin’s Tale: Chaucer or the Critics,” PMLA 89 (1974): 454–62, which suggests a Chaucer eager to support nearly every oath or vow he meets. R. F. Green’s impressive book (Crisis of Truth) does not go nearly that far, but it does push its readers back (relative to Strohm’s position, Social Chaucer) toward believing that Chaucer can, in his apparent praise of oath making, sometimes be taken at his word. 38. It should be acknowledged in this context that the protasis A really is not fulfilled, in that the rocks’ disappearance was not accomplished by Aurelius except indirectly, was nowise accomplished stoon by stoon, and in any event seems to be illusory rather than real. (This last appears to be yet another Chaucerian innovation aimed at communicating that Dorigen is under no obligation whatever: in Boccaccio’s two tales, though the suitor uses magic to fulfill the heroine’s impossible condition, the reader is allowed to think of the resulting fulfillment as real, not illusory.) But the logical analysis that follows is still fruitful, since the central characters in the tale do not notice that A is not really A. 39. Such ideas about will and law are not unique to Chaucer but seem to be abroad in high- and late-medieval culture more generally. Bernard of Clairvaux is an excellent place to begin looking, especially On Precept and Dispensation, where the phrase sub lege describes those who wrongly focus on the question of individual infractions or fulfillments of a law rather than the much more important matter of a general, or one might say habitual, stance toward the law in its entirety. There is also relevant material in late sections of On Grace and Free Choice (Spencer, Mass.: Cistercian Publications, 1988) and in On Loving God (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1995), especially in the appended letter (i.e., sections XII–XV). But this is matter for another space.

What Were the Ladies in the City of Ladies Reading? The Libraries of Christine de Pizan’s Contemporaries K a r e n Gr e e n

Contemporary discussion of Christine de Pizan’s works, her sources, the extent of her erudition, and her access to books is heavily indebted to the laborious work of early twentieth-century scholars—in particular, Suzanne Solente, Marie-Josèphe Pinet, and P. G. C. Campbell.1 These authors provided an invaluable service to future scholars. Yet in some ways their attitudes to the study of Christine’s sources may have been limited by the fact that they were formed during a period during which the intellectual history of women was almost entirely neglected. Despite famous exceptions, women were assumed to have been largely uneducated, and their significant role as readers and patrons of vernacular literature was overlooked. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that work on women’s access to books really got under way.2 Thus it was assumed that if Christine had access to manuscripts she must have acquired it through a relationship with a man’s library, and the oft-repeated surmise arose that she had access to the royal library at the Louvre.3 Yet no hard evidence exists that this was in fact the case. Certainly, there is little reason to assume that Christine had access to the royal library prior to 1403, when she was commissioned by the duke of Burgundy, Philip the Bold, to write a biography of Charles V and supplied by him with manuscripts, some of which may have come from this source; although, since his own library was extensive, he may have furnished her with books that he owned.4 In fact, Christine’s provable sources, in her works prior to 1403, correspond to a very small selection of the works available in Charles V’s library, which was inherited by Charles VI. It appears, indeed, that there is no need to attribute to

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Christine a favored access to the king’s library, for the majority of the books that she used for her own compilations were available in the libraries of her female friends, patrons, and acquaintances. Her intellectual formation can therefore be assumed to have been rather more typical of other aristocratic women at the French court than has been assumed, and her ideas can be fruitfully read as emerging from a selection of works readily available in the libraries of women, though her education was undoubtedly supplemented by some of the Italian works that had been brought by her father from Italy. Since the mid-twentieth century, work on the libraries of medieval women has forged ahead. Yet the results of this research have not yet been exploited to provide a more accurate indication of Christine’s intellectual formation and that of her contemporaries. Doing so sheds new light on the milieu out of which her distinctive voice emerged. Examining the libraries of Christine’s female contemporaries suggests new avenues of research for identifying Christine’s models and provides clearer evidence of the extent of her transcendence of those antecedents. In two passages in Le Livre de cité des dames Christine de Pizan mentions the names of women who were her contemporaries or near contemporaries.5 The first of these occurs in the first book, where Christine lays the foundation of her city on historical examples of reasonable women who have governed with prudence and justice. The second concludes the second book and introduces Christine’s royal patrons and friends into the city that she has almost completed in their defence. These two short passages allow us to glimpse beyond the walls of Christine’s construction onto the more expansive community out of which it arose. For the women for whom Christine wrote, and those whose virtues she acknowledged, are not entirely forgotten. In many cases, we can find traces of their activities and their libraries in inventories and testaments, and this allows us to reconstruct their intellectual and moral formation and to gauge more clearly both Christine’s debts to an already existent body of didactic ethical literature possessed by the women she knew as well as her transcendence of the models already available in her milieu. The first of these passages, from the Cité des Dames, is largely backward looking. It lists widows who ruled as dowagers in accordance with principles of justice. The passage as a whole operates as an implicit critique of the still quite recent exclusion of women from inheriting the French crown. Since many of these women governed their estates as widows, they demonstrate the falsity of the view that women are incapable of



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ruling. However, this feature of the list will not concern us here.6 Rather, I am interested in the literature available to these women and in particular the works of moral advice they possessed and its relationship to Christine’s later productions. Christine heads her list of widows with Blanche of Castile (1188– 1252), but it is the subsequent women who will interest us—Jeanne d’Evreux (ca. 1307–1371), widow of Charles IV, her daughter Blanche (1328–1392), who married the duke of Orléans (son of King Philip VI), another Blanche, Blanche de Navarre (1330–1398), who had been queen of France by virtue of her short marriage to Philip VI (and who is mistakenly identified as “late wife of king John”), the duchess Marie d’Anjou (1345–1407), and finally, the countess of La Marche (d. 1412). What we know of their libraries gives us a good idea of the literature available to French aristocratic women prior to Christine. We can assume that all of these women, who were her older contemporaries or near contemporaries, possessed some books, and in some cases we have evidence of their substantial book collections.7 The second passage introduces us to a significant group of women who were Christine’s closer contemporaries, patrons, and friends: the queen, Isabeau de Bavière (1371–1435); Jeanne d’Auvergne (ca. 1360–1424), who was the duke de Berri’s second wife; Valentina Visconti (ca. 1370–1408), who was Louis d’Orléans’ wife; Marguerite de Bavière (1363–1424), wife of Jean sans Peur; Marie de Berri, (ca. 1370–1434), who was married to Jean de Clermont and was daughter of the duke de Berri by his first wife, Jeanne d’Armagnac; Marguerite de Bourgogne (1374–1441), duchess of Hainault; Anne de Clermont (1358–1417), duchess of Bourbon, the countess of St. Pol; and Anne, the daughter of the count de la Marche (d. 1408), whose first husband was Jean de Berri’s son and who was subsequently the first wife of Isabeau’s brother, Louis de Bavière.8 The manuscripts belonging to the first group of women are not very likely to have been consulted by Christine. Those that had belonged to Jeanne d’Evreux, Charles IV’s second wife, were mostly left to Jeanne’s daughter, Blanche d’Orléans, while others were incorporated into Charles V’s library.9 Blanche d’Orléan’s own will only explicitly mentions four books, one of which she left to her cousin Blanche of Navarre.10 The legacies of this latter queen are more revealing: The considerable collection of books that she had amassed during her lifetime was distributed at her death, in 1398, among her relations and retainers, but there is reason to doubt whether Christine knew her well.11 The City of Ladies mistakenly names Blanche of Navarre as the widow of King John, and

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this appears to rule out anything more than a passing acquaintance.12 Yet Blanche was an important figure at the court of Charles V. She was the sister of Charles the Bad of Navarre, and their mother, Jeanne, had been passed over as the legitimate heir of the French crown when her uncle, Philip V, came to the throne in 1316. This Jeanne, the daughter of Marguerite of Burgundy and Louis X, had been the first in the series of female claimants whose right to succeed to the French crown would be denied and justified post hoc by the evolving claim that women could not inherit the crown of France.13 In the Grandes Chroniques, Blanche, along with Jeanne d’Evreux, is represented as a mediator whose intercession helped to seal the peace between King John the Good and his cousin, Charles the Bad of Navarre.14 It is therefore worth examining Blanche’s books in some detail, for they give us an excellent indication of the range of works that were read by, and to, influential women of the French court during Christine’s youth. When she married Philippe VI in 1349, Blanche of Navarre acquired a number of books that had belonged to Philippe’s first wife, Jeanne la Boiteuse de Bourgogne. This earlier queen had been particularly active in promoting vernacular translation. She had commissioned the French translation of a number of Latin texts: Les Épitres et les Évangiles des messes de l’année, the Miroir Historial by Vincent Beauvais, and Jacques Voragine’s Legenda aurea were all translated for her by Jean Vigny. She also commissioned the French translation of Bursuire’s moralised version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Ovide moralisé from an anonymous translator.15 Jeanne la Boiteuse, Charles V’s grandmother, had thus contributed significantly to the expanding of vernacular wisdom, a project that was taken up by her grandson. However, none of these important translations appear to have been inherited by Blanche, who mentions, in her testament, a psalter (n200), a breviary (n204), Le livre de Josafas et Balaham (n211),16 and a work beginning “Audi fili Israel” (n195) as having been previously the property of Jeanne la Boiteuse. Most of her books appear to be in French, but she knew Latin, and an almost complete French translation of the Latin missal is attributed to her.17 Her testament bequeaths forty-one items, some of which contain more than one work; seventeen are devotional works, psalters, breviaries, books of hours, or missals. Many of her nondevotional works are bequeathed to various male relations. She left an illuminated copy of La Somme le Roi that had belonged to Philip IV to the duke of Orléans and her Livre du gouvenement des princes selon theologie, with a Livre des eschaz, to Louis de Bourbon.18 Her copy of Le Livre du gouvernement des princes selon philosophy by Giles of Rome was left to



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Brother Robert Cresserel, her confessor’s companion, suggesting that it was not a luxury example.19 Other works are left to women, and this group is of particular interest to us, since they indicate the nondevotional works she thought of as particularly appropriate for a female audience. The duchess of Burgundy, Philip the Bold’s wife, Marguerite of Flanders, is bequeathed Le livre de Josafas et Balaham, while the duchess of Bar gets Le livre du lignage de Nostre Dame et ses suers. One sister, the countess of Foix, receives the Mirouer des dames, while another, Jehanne de Navarre, viscountess de Rohan, is given a Pelerinage du monde and a niece gets the Pelerinage de Jhesu Crist.20 The first of these works was among the works most commonly found in the libraries of the women mentioned by Christine. A copy of the Miroir des Dames— which is a French translation of the Speculum dominarum, written by Durand de Champagne, the Franciscan confessor to Jeanne of Navarre, wife of Philip IV—had also been owned by Jeanne d’Evreux, and as we will see Valentina Visconti and Mari de Berri both possessed copies.21 Blanche’s companion, a lady de la Mote, is left Le rommant de Sydrac,22 while another lady-in-waiting is given Le livre qui aprent à bien vivre et bien morir, a Miracles de Nostre Dame, and a book of surgery, as well as a breviary from which Blanche’s daughter Jeanne de France had been taught. Her other ladies are each left one book: another Miracles de Nostre Dame, a less-valuable copy of La Somme le Roy (n291),23 a book called Le Tresor de l’ame (n293) written by a Frère Robert for his mother,24 Le livre du Salterion de x cordes, de Anticlaudien, les vies de plusiers sains (n297), and a book that contained sermons and Le testament maistre Jehan de Meun (n299). She also gives Le livre de Si nous dit (n307) to a woman called Jehannete Sante.25 This is a work of moral instruction also know as the Composition de la sainte Escripture, an early copy of which work had also belonged to Jeanne d’Evreux. We have rather more fragmentary evidence concerning the books owned by the other dowager duchesses mentioned by Christine. Like Blanche de Navarre, Marie d’Anjou (who was born Marie de Blois) owned works by Guillaume de Digulleville. Indeed, one of the oldest manuscripts of his Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine (Heidelberg, Pal.Lat 1969) is decorated with her arms and those of her husband, Louis I d’Anjou.26 We also know something of the libraries of four of the younger women who were welcomed into Christine’s city. Isabeau de Bavière’s library has been only partially reconstructed.27 Like Blanche, many of her books were devotional, but she also owned Cent Ballades of Othon de Granson and Jacques de Voragine’s Legende Dorée.28 She gave a copy of Le Miroir du Monde (which is actually a version of La Somme le Roi) to the Innocents in Paris, suggesting that this was among the works she

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valued.29 In a small way Isabeau de Bavière contributed to the translation of Latin texts into the vernacular, commissioning a French translation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi of Psuedo-Bonaventura, now known as the Passion Isabeau.30 The library of Valentina Visconti is better attested. Approximately thirty works are identifiable in the library of Charles of Orléans as having belonged to his mother, Valentina.31 Once again, the majority of her books were devotional. Two volumes in her collection seem to have derived from Blanche de Navarre. As well as the breviary mentioned in Blanche’s testament, Valentina had acquired a copy of “le Miroir des Dames couvert de drap d’or, les fermaulx d’argent esquel sont Saint Jehan Baptiste et Saint Jehan Euvangeliste armoyez de France, de Navarre et d’Evreux.”32 She had also received, at some time, the gift of a copy of Les Chroniques des Roys de France, which had once been in Charles V’s library but was in her possession at the time of her death.33 In 1388, when she came to France from Italy, she had brought with her eighteen books, many of them devotional, but one of which was a copy of John Mande­ ville’s travels.34 She owned some works of history, including a description of the discovery of the Canaries, the Livre du Canerien, and a Livre de Lucan and L’Istoire de Troye. The first, by Pierre Boutier and Jean Verrier, relates the discovery and conquest of the Canaries undertaken between 1402 and 1404 by two French adventurers. A copy was also owned by the duke of Burgundy, and one manuscript of the work, British Library, Egerton 2709, was illuminated by the “master of the Cité des dames.”35 The Livre de Lucan could well be a copy of Les fais des Romains, which was later printed under the title Lucan, Suetoin et Saluste en français.36 The third is almost certainly a version of what Paul Meyer calls the second redaction of L’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. Valentina also possessed Ovide le Grant, Le livre des iij Maries, Le Livre des Eschecz, an Apocalice, and two works of Arthurian romance, Parceval le Galois and Giron le Courtois.37 Her Ovide le Grant is no doubt a copy of the Ovide Moralisé, which had been translated for Jeanne la Boiteuse de Bourgogne. Le Livre des Eschecz corresponds to one or other of the vernacular translations of Jacques de Cessolis’s moral treatise, which organizes its subject matter by means of the game of chess.38 While it is not clear from the description whether this was the translation by Jean Ferron or Jean de Vigny, it seems probable that it would have been the latter, for Vigny had dedicated his translation to Valentina’s grandfather. She owned a copy of the Composition de la sainte Escripture—that is to say, the Ci nous Dit.39 Valentina had also acquired a number of works by Christine, which I have not bothered to list here, since they are not relevant to the task at hand.



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Recent research by Delphine Jeannot has made available extracts from inventories from which Marguerite de Bavière’s library can be reconstructed.40 As with the other female libraries, more than a half are religious works; one, a Passion Nostre Seigneur, is most likely a copy of the Passion Isabeau. Although Jeannot does not draw this conclusion, it seems quite probable, particularly given the fact that Marguerite was a cousin of Isabeau’s.41 It is perhaps also worth noting that Bescançon 257, a collection of works copied by Henri Baume for Collette de Corbie, contains a copy of the Passion Isabeau (ff. 77–185) and that since Marguerite was a major supporter of Collette and of her foundations during this period, the conclusion that Marguerite’s Passion was the Passion Isabeau and source of Collette’s copy seems overwhelmingly likely.42 Other works in Marguerite’s library are familiar from the discussion above: two volumes of Vincent Beauvais’s Miroir Historial, Jacques de Voragine’s Légende dorée, and a copy of the Chroniques de France.43 Like Valentina, Marguerite owned a Giron le Courtoys, and she possessed a number of other romances, a Saint Greal de Tristan et de Galaad, Lancelot du Lac, and, from the history of the crusades, Godeffroy de Bouillon.44 Apart from these, Marguerite possessed a copy of Boethius’s Consolation, which Jeannot identifies with the same anonymous translation in prose and verse that was used as a source by Christine de Pizan.45 She also owned the Cas des nobles hommes et femmes in Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of Boccacio’s work, Le livre des propriétés des choses, and a Livre des proprietés des bestes.46 It is interesting to note that while she had a similar taste in romances to Valentina, she did not herself own any of Christine’s works, despite the fact that Christine’s Livre des trois vertus was dedicated to her daughter, Marguerite. Her library is also rather bare of the compilations of ethical advice noted in the earlier libraries. She did, however, own a copy of a contemporary work in this genre, Le livre des bonnes meurs by Jacques Legrand.47 No evidence of Marie de Berri’s library from the first years of the fifteenth century is readily available. That said, the books that she chose from her father’s estate, after his death in 1416, demonstrate that her taste in books was not too different from that of the other women mentioned by Christine.48 While Marie de Berri was able to acquire a number of books that were not in the libraries of the women discussed so far, she also chose many of the texts that we have noted in other women’s libraries. Going beyond what we have seen in other women’s collections, she acquired two copies of Raoul de Presles’ French translation of Augustine’s Cité de Dieu, as well as copies of Oresme’s translations of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, Du Ciel et du monde, and a copy of the Secret des Secrets attributed to Aristotle. She also acquired the Livre de Chevalerie

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by Vegetius, Honoré Bovet’s L’Abre des battailles, and Bruneto Latini’s Livre du Trésor. These last three were all major sources for Christine. The first two were extensively used by her in the Fais d’armes et de chevalerie, while the third was a major source for the third part of the Livre de Paix and was also used for passages in Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune.49 In 1418 [NS], when she dedicated her Epistre de la prison de vie humaine to Mari de Berri, Christine had thanked her for the help she had extended to her, and it is tempting to see in these acquisitions evidence of Mari de Berri’s appreciation of Christine and the importance of these texts for her works.50 More typical of the earlier women’s collections we have seen, Mari de Berri acquired the Pélerinage de vie humaine and Pélerinage de l’ame by Guillaume Digonville, the Légende Dorée, a copy of the Ci nous dit, and two copies of the Ovide moralisé. The history books she acquired included an unidentifiable version of the history of Troy, Livy’s Decades, and an example of the Faits des Romains. She also chose a copy of the Grandes chroniques de France as well as a copy of Jean Froissart’s Chroniques and a copy of Godeffroy de Bouillon. She acquired the Roman de la Rose bound with the Testament de Jean de Meun and other verse works. Last, like the other women whose books we have examined, she chose a copy of the Miroir des dames, while unlike them she was also able to acquire a manuscript of the French translation of Boccacio’s De Claris Mulierus. Among more recent works she acquired Christine’s collected works and Tignonville’s Dits Moraux des Philosophes.51 Having provided a reasonable overview of the works that can be identified as having belonged to Christine’s friends and contemporaries, I want now to demonstrate that these works include the bulk of the known sources of her early works. Christine tells us that after she was widowed she undertook a program of self-education. She began with history: . . . me pris aux histoires anciennes des commencemens du monde, les histoires des Hebrieux, des Assiriens et des principes des seignouries, procedant de l’une en l’autre, descendant aux Romans, des François, des Bretons et autres plusieurs historiografes.

[. . . I went to the ancient histories from the beginning of the world—the history of the Hebrews, the Assyrians, and the beginnings of the kingdoms—proceeding from one to the other, in descent from the Romans to the French to the Bretons and many other historians.]52 From history she moved forward to poetry, the subtle allegories and metaphors of which delighted her, and here she found a style that was natural to her and that she followed, at least in her earliest writing.



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The ancient history that Christine read is able to be identified by examining the sources used in her earliest long works, her Epistre Othea and Mutacion de fortune. The source of her knowledge of ancient history is L’Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, often called the Fais des Romans, one version of which, known as Le Roman de Troie, is very likely the work that appears as L’Istoire de Troye in Valentina’s library.53 A version of the history of Troy was also acquired by Mari de Berri from her father’s collection, indicating that this history was among the works that she had prized in her father’s library. Among poetical works, Christine clearly knew the Roman de la Rose, which she criticised in her exchange with Pierre and Gontier Col.54 She compared its moral influence unfavourably with that of Dante’s Commedia, another allegorical poem which influenced her.55 She was familiar with the poetry of Othon Grandson, Eustache Deschamps, and other contemporary poets. And she made great use of the long French poem the Ovide moralisé, which drew on Ovid’s Metamorphosis and Heroides.56 Not all of the works with which she was familiar were in the libraries of the women for whom we have records, but it is noteworthy that, apart from the Commedia, which Christine can be assumed to have known as a result of her Italian background, the great majority are works found in the book collections of women she knew. Among other works that have been noted as having been used by her, and that we find in these collections, are the Jeu d’echecs moralisé. Susanne Solente demonstrates that the third part of Christine’s Mutacion de Fortune is drawn from the Vigny translation of Cessoles’ work, which is the same as that which we saw was probably owned by Valentina. It is interesting to note that Christine also drew on John Mandeville’s travels for some of her descriptions in her Chemin de longue estude.57 There are, it is true some, works that seem to have been used by Christine that are not to be found in these collections. Some, like Tignonville’s Dits Moraux des Philosophes, were the confections of contemporary men and were presumably acquired by Christine directly from them. Others, such as Dante’s Commedia and Cecco d’Ascoli’s L’Acerba, derived from Italy and were no doubt part of her patrimony.58 Others include the Chapelet des Vertus, the Manipulus Florum of Thomas of Ireland, a French translation of the Flores Chronicorum by Bernard Gui, and Isidore of Seville’s Etymologia.59 She used as well a Mappemonde otherwise known as the Image du Monde.60 These constitute only a small number of works, and given that we have only patchy evidence of the books owned by a number of Christine’s female friends, we cannot be sure that these were not owned by them or that they were included in her personal collection, inherited from her husband or father.

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Among these works on which she is thought to have drawn, the Chapelet des Vertus is rather problematic as a source, since many of the passages that are assumed to have derived from this work differ somewhat from the Chapelet and so are supposed to have been corrected by Christine. Moreover, all of the surviving manuscripts of this compilation are later than Christine.61 So, until it is ascertained that there is not some common source for both the Chapelet and the Othea, one should perhaps not place too much confidence in this as a source. So, while the above exceptions must be acknowledged, we have demonstrated that the bulk of Christine’s known sources were available to women in the circles in which she moved. Indeed, since she places herself, in her Dit de la Rose, as a guest in the residence of the duke of Orléans, and since his wife, Valentina, was the recipient of both the letters on the Romance of the Rose, and of an early collection of her works, one is entitled, I believe, to surmise that Valentina may well have lent many of the volumes that she consulted to Christine.62 Since both women had connections with Italy, and since Valentina had a considerable education, a friendship of some kind is not hard to imagine, and at the very least a relationship of patronage is clearly attested. So we can, I believe, give up the idea that Christine’s education was completely exceptional and that she had some sort of privileged access to the king’s library in the Louvre. Apart from a few exceptions, in her early works she mined sources that were available in the book collections of the women she names. This fact, however, raises further questions: What of the other works found in these women’s libraries and not yet recognised as among Christine’s sources? Did they also influence her? And to what extent does Christine’s advice and worldview go beyond these works that circulated in her milieu? These are questions beyond the scope of this chapter. The initial results of comparing Christine’s Livre des trois vertus with Durand’s Miroir des Dames suggests that it is not so much the content of her advice as it is her style and rhetoric that distinguishes Christine from this earlier author.63 Through undertaking further work based on the simple catalogue provided in this essay, it is to be hoped that future scholars will arrive at a more just assessment of what is distinctive in Christine’s outlook and what is characteristic of the literature available to aristocratic women of her time and place.

Book of Hours

Le livre des bonnes meurs Legrand

2 including New York, Cloisters MS 54.1.265

7?

5

10 including Brussels BR, MS 11060-1106167

1

(Continued)

2

1 Brussels BR MS 9024-902564

Bible (French)

Marie de Berri

1 1

1

Marguerite de Bavière

Bible (Latin)

1

Valentina Visconti

Ballades Eustache Morel

2 including BNF nouv. acq. lat 314566

Isabeau de Bavière

1

1 possibly BNF MS fr. 9561

With Salterion de x cordes and Vies des sains

Blanche de Navarre

Apocalypse

Antiphonier

Anticlaudian

Jeanne d’Evreux

T a b l e 4 . 1 W ork s i n t h e L i br a r i e s of W om e n M e n t i o n e d i n t h e C i t é d e s d a m e s

2

cirurgerie

Conquest of Sicily

Concordement des 4 evangelistes

1

Chroniques des Roys de France

5

1

1

4 including Condé MS 5168 and 1887

Blanche de Navarre

Chroniques d’oultre mer

Cent Ballades:Grandson

Cas des nobles homes et femmes

Livre du Canarian

Breviary

Jeanne d’Evreux

1

2

Isabeau de Bavière

1

1

4 one from Jeanne d’Evreux

Valentina Visconti

1 Brussels BR 11053-1105471

1

1 Paris, Arsenal, MS 519370

2 including British Library, Harley 289769

Marguerite de Bavière

1

1

1

Marie de Berri

T a b l e 4 . 1 W ork s i n t h e L i br a r i e s of W om e n M e n t i o n e d i n t h e C i t é d e s d a m e s

Gouvernment des princes de Gille l’Augustin

Godeffroy de Bouillon

Giron le Courtois.

Evangelier et/ou Epistolier (Latin)

Livre de l’eschiele du ciel

Livre des eschaz (eschecz)

Enfances Ogier

Deduit des chiens et oyseau de Gasse de la Buyne

Cy nous dit or Composition de la Sainte Escripture

Consolation,Boethius

1

1

1

1

1

London, British Library Add. 2069772

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

1

(Continued)

1

1

1

Mandeville

Livre de Lucan (Roman de Ceasar)

Livre du lineage nostre dame et ses seurs 1

1

Marguerite de Bavière

1 Modena, Bib. Estense etr. 33 {α.w.5.7}73

1

1

1 BNF MS lat. 5692

Valentina Visconti

Legenda aurea

1

Isabeau de Bavière

3

1 (with Vies des Pères)

1

Blanche de Navarre

Lancelot du Lac

Le livre de Josafas et Balaham

L’Istoire de Troye

Gouvernment des princes selon theologie

Jeanne d’Evreux

1

2

Marie de Berri

T a b l e 4 . 1 W ork s i n t h e L i br a r i e s of W om e n M e n t i o n e d i n t h e C i t é d e s d a m e s

1 1

Ovide moralisé

Parceval le Galois

1

1

1

oroisons

2

3

1

6

1 clasps with St John Baptist arms of France, Navarre, d’Evreux. 2nd folio ‘si est mis’ BNF MS fr.610?76

Missal

1

2

1

1 Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 324.75

1

1 BNF MS nouv.acq. fr. 2454174

Miroir Historial

Le Miroir des Dames

Miroir aux Dames

Miracles nostre dame

(Continued)

2

1

Le livre qui aprent à bien vivre et bien mourir

1

1

4

1

Marguerite de Bavière

Livre des proprietés des bestes

1

Valentina Visconti

1 Brussels BR 909478

1

1

Isabeau de Bavière

Le livre des propriétés des choses

psalter 4

1

Pelerinage du monde (de vie humaine)

1 including BNF MS lat. 1052577

1

Pelerinage de Jhesu Crist

Pelerinage de l’ame

4

Blanche de Navarre

paternostre

Passion Isabeau

Jeanne d’Evreux

1

1

Marie de Berri

T a b l e 4 . 1 W ork s i n t h e L i br a r i e s of W om e n M e n t i o n e d i n t h e C i t é d e s d a m e s

Tresor (Latini)

Testament Jehan de Meun

1

2 one left to Orléans

Somme le Roi

1 may be Amsterdam, Bibliotheca PhilosophicoHermetica 11680

With Anticlaudian

1

1

1

Salterion de x cordes

Saint Greal de Tristan et de Galaad

Roman de Sidrac

Roman de Panther

Roman de la Rose

Livre de Renart

Reclus de Moliens

BNF MS fr. 22935 given to Innocents81

MS fr. 1430 rebound by Valentina79

1

1

1

1 (Continued)

1

1

1 (with Balaam et Josaphat)

1

Vie des Pères

Vies des sains

Vie de Notre Dame

Veufs de Paon et de Restors

1 1 with Salterion de x cordes and Anticlaudian

1

1

Valentina Visconti

Livre de Venerie

Isabeau de Bavière

1

1

Blanche de Navarre

Livre des Trois Maries

Le Tresor de l’ame

Jeanne d’Evreux

1

Marguerite de Bavière

Marie de Berri

T a b l e 4 . 1 W ork s i n t h e L i br a r i e s of W om e n M e n t i o n e d i n t h e C i t é d e s d a m e s



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Notes   1. See Solente’s editions: Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, ed. Suzanne Solente, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1936–1940; reprint, Geneva: Slatkine, 1975); Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion de Fortune, ed. Susanne Solente, 4 vols. (Paris: Éditions A & J Picard, 1959); and MarieJosèphe Pinet, Christine de Pisan (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974); P. G. C. Campbell, L’Épitre d’Othéa, étude sur les sources de Christine de Pisan (Paris: Champion, 1925).   2. A great deal of work has been undertaken—without which this paper could not have been written—since the seminal paper by Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” Signs 7 (1981–1982): 742–68. I am particularly indebted to A.-M. Legaré and B. Schnerb, eds., Livres et lectures de femmes en Europe entre moyen age et renaissance (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).   3. Campbell, L’Épitre d’Othéa, 67. Even Joan Holladay accepts this, despite having contributed to our knowledge of women’s libraries, though to be fair she is referring to the sources used in the history of Charles V. Joan A. Holladay, “Fourteenth-Century French Queens as Collectors and Readers of Books: Jeanne d’Evreux and Her Contemporaries,” Journal of Medieval History 32 (2006): 69–100, 95n93.   4. See Muriel J. Hughes, “The Library of Philip the Bold and Margaret of Flanders, First Valois Duke and Duchess of Burgundy,” Journal of Medieval History 4 (1978): 145–88.   5. Christine de Pizan, La città delle dame, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards and trans. Patrizia Caraffi (Milan; Trento: Luni Editrice, 1997), I.13 and II.68, 98–100 and 424. Or see it in translation: Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (London: Picador, 1983), 34 and 214. For a discussion of the other women mentioned at this point of the City of Ladies, see Glynnis Cropp, “Les personnages féminins tirés de l’histoire de la France dans le Livre de la Cité des Dames,” in Une Femme de lettres au Moyen Age, ed. Lilian Dulac and B. Ribémont, 195–208 (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995); and Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Political Thought as Improvisation: Female Regency and Mariology in Late Medieval French Thought,” in Virtue, Liberty and Toleration, ed. Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green, 1–22 (Amsterdam: Springer, 2007).   6. See my “Isolated Individual or Member of a Courtly Community? Christine de Pizan’s milieu,” in Communities of Learning, eds. Constant Mews and John Crossley (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).   7. She praises some of the same women in the course of her debate on the Romance of the Rose, identified in Charity Cannon Willard, ed., The Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York: Persea, 1994), 160n18. See also Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des trois vertus, eds. Charity Cannon Willard and Eric Hicks (Paris: Champion, 1989), I.23, 88; or see this work in translation—Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, trans. Sarah Lawson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), I.22, 84.   8. Pizan, La città delle dame, II.68, 98–100; or Pizan, City of Ladies, 212–14.   9. Holladay, “Fourteenth-Century French Queens,” 69–70. See 98–100 for a complete list of the books that can be associated with Jeanne d’Evreux. 10. Ibid., 87n49. 11. Léopold Delisle, “Testament de Blanche de Navarre, reine de France,” Mémoires de la Société de l’histoire de Paris et de l’Ile de France 12 (1886): 1–63.

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Blanche of Navarre’s bequests are also discussed in Brigitte Buettner, “Le système des objets dans le testament de Blanche de Navarre,” CLIO, Histoire, femmes et sociétés 19 (2004): 37–62; and also in Maguerite Keane, “Most Beautiful and Next Best: Value in the Collection of a Medieval Queen,” Journal of Medieval History 34 (2008): 360–73. 12. Blanche had, however, been promised to Philip’s son, John, and this may be the source of the confusion. See Buettner, “Le système des objets,” 40. 13. M. Paul Viollet, “Comment les femmes ont été exclues en France, de la succession à la couronne,” Memoires de l’Institut de France, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 34 (1893): 125–78; Sarah Hanley, “The Politics of Identity and Monarchic Governance in France: The Debate over Female Exclusion,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith, 289–304 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14. Paris, BNF, MS fr. 2813, fol 395, Comment le roy de france pardonna au roy de navarre la mort de charles d’espaigne connestable de france. For a discussion of the mediating role of Blanche and the other women in her circle, see Buettner, “Le système des objets,” 45. 15. Léopold Delisle, Recherches sur la librarie de Charles V, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1907), vol. 1, 278 and 160–62. C. de Boer, “Ovide Moralisé” poème du commencement du quatorzième siècle, 5 vols. (Weisbaden: Dr. Martin Sändig oHG, 1966), vol. 1, 10. For further information, see the entry Vigny in Geneviève Hasenohr and Michael Zink, ed., Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age (Paris: Fayard, 1992). 16. Delisle, “Testament de Blanche de Navarre,” 429–31n211. Le livre de Josafas et Balaham is a Greek novel attributed to Saint-John of Damascus, translated into French during the thirteenth century; see Paulin Paris, Les Manuscrits français de la bibliothèque du roi (Paris: n.p., 1836), vol 2, 107. 17. Delisle, “Testament de Blanche de Navarre,” 3n2. 18. Delisle, “Testament de Blanche de Navarre,” 30n202–207. Her copy of the Livre des eschaz corresponds to the vernacular translations of the Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobelium sive de ludo scaccrum by Jacques de Cessolis. The work was published by Jean Ferron as Le jeu des Eschaz moralisé, ed. Alain Collet (Paris: Champion, 1999), 15–16. 19. Delisle, “Testament de Blanche de Navarre,” 38n315. 20. Le Pèlerinage de Jésus-Christ by Guillaume de Digulleville, described in Ch.-V Langlois, La Vie en France au Moyen Âge, 5 vols. (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), vol. 4, 199–268. The Pelerinage du monde is also undoubtedly his Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine; it is given this title in Gilles Malet’s inventory of Charles V’s library. Delisle, Recherches sur la librarie, vol. 2, nos. 1155–56. 21. See Catherine Louise Mastny, “Durand of Champagne and the ‘Mirror of the Queen’: A Study in Medieval Didactic Literature,” Ph.D. diss. (Columbia, 1969); and also see Anne Dubrulle, “Le Speculum Dominarum de Durand de Champagne,” 2 vols., thesis (Ecole nationale des chartes 1987–1988). I am indebted to Madame Anne (née Dubrulle) Flottes for permission to consult her thesis. Jeanne d’Evreux’s copy can be identified as Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 324. 22. Sometimes called La Fontaine de toutes sciences, attributed to the Jew Sidrach, described in Langlois, La Vie en France, vol. 3, 198–275. Perhaps this is Amsterdam, Bibliotheca Philosophico-Hermetica 116, which contains the arms of France and Navarre; Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200–1500 (Turnhout: Harvey Miller, 2000), 244.



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23. See Langlois, La Vie en France, vol. 4, 123–89. Lorens d’Orleans, The Book of Vices and Virtues, ed. W. Nelson Francis (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1942). Blanche left her good illuminated copy of this work to Louis d’Orléans. See also Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers, 148–51. Delisle, Recherches sur la librarie, 236–47, gives an extended description of various exemplars of La Somme du Roi. 24. Soeur Marie Brisson, “Frere Robert, chartreux du XIVe siecle,” Romania: Revue Consacree a l’Etude des Langues et des Literatures Romanes 87 (1966): 543–50. 25. Gérard Blangez, ed., Ci nous dit: recueil d’exemples moraux (Paris: Société des anciens textes français, 1979–1986). 26. Anne-Marie Legaré, “La réception du Pèlerinage de Vie humaine de Guillaume de Digulleville dans le milieu angevin d’après les sources et les manuscrits conservés,” in Religion et mentalités au Moyen Âge: Mélanges en l’honneur d’Hervé Martin, ed. Sophie Cassagnes-Brouquet et al., 543–52 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003). 27. M. Vallet de Viriville, “La Bibliothèque d’Isabeau de Bavière,” Bulletin du bibliophile (1858): 663–87, 673. 28. Ibid., 666–67. 29. This is BNF fr. 22935. See Langlois, La Vie en France, vol. 4, 124n1. The text published in F. Chavannes, Mémoires et documents publiés par la Société d’histoire de la Suisse romande (Laussane: 1845), vol. 4, as the “Miroir de Monde” is quite different, though it has a common ancestry. Delisle, Recherches sur la librarie, vol. 1, 134. 30. Edelgard E. DuBruck, ed., La Passion Isabeau: Une édition du manuscript fr. 966 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris avec une introduction et des notes (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 31. Pierre Champion, La Librairie de Charles d’Orléans (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1910), lxix–lxxiv. 32. Mastny, “Durand of Champagne,” 131–32; Champion, La Librairie de Charles d’Orléans, lxxii. Champion suggests this is BNF ms. Fr. 610. 33. Delisle, Recherches sur la librarie, vol. 2, 163. Champion, La Librairie de Charles d’Orléans, lxxii and 34. However, in vol. 1, 120, Delisle suggests the beneficiary was Blanche d’Orléans, suggesting that this is another work inherited from Blanche; see the discussion above. 34. Champion, La Librairie de Charles d’Orléans, lxx and 18. 35. Hughes, “The Library of Philip the Bold,” 185. 36. Paul Meyer, “Les premières compilations françaises d’histoire ancienne,” Romania 14 (1885): 1–81, 4. 37. Champion, La Librairie de Charles d’Orléans, lxxii–lxxiv, 27, and 70. Roger Lathuillère, ed., Giron le Courtois (Geneva: Droz, 1966). 38. See F. Lajard, “Jacques de Cessoles,” in Histoire Littéraire de la France, 9-41 (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1971); see also Pamela Kalning, “Virtues and Exampla in John of Wales and Jacobus de Cessolis,” in Princely Virtues in the Middle Ages, ed. István P. Bejczy and Cary J. Nederman, 139–76 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 39. Champion, La Librairie de Charles d’Orléans, lxxii and 13. 40. Delphine Jeannot, “Les bibliothèques de princesses en France au temps de Charles VI: L’exemple de la bibliothèque de Marguerite de Bavière, duchesse de Bourgogne (1385–1424),” in Livres et Lectures de femmes en Europe entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance, ed. Anne-Marie Legaré, 191–210 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).

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41. Ibid., 202. 42. Elizabeth Sainte-Marie Perrin, La belle vie de sainte Colette de Corbie: 1381–1447 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1921), 100–103. 43. Jeannot, “Les bibliothèques de princesses,” 194 , 202–204. 44. Ibid., 203–204. 45. Ibid., 193. Glynnis Cropp, “Boèce et Christine de Pizan,” Moyen Age 87 (1981): 387–417. 46. Jeannot, “Les bibliothèques de princesses,” 203. Jean Corbechon, Le livre des propriétés des choses: Une encyclopédie au XIVe siècle, ed. and trans. Bernard Bibemont (Paris: Stock, 1999). 47. Corbechon, Le livre des propriétés, 205. See Jacques Legrand, Archiloge Sophie: Livre de bonnes meurs, part of Bibliothèque du XVe siècle, ed. Evancio Beltran, 49 (Paris: Champion, 1986). 48. See Colette Beaune and Élodie Lequain, “Marie de Berry et les livres,” in Livres et Lectures de femmes en Europe entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance, ed. AnneMarie Legaré, 49–66 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007). 49. Christine Moneera Laennec, “Christine Antygrafe: Authorship and Self in the Prose Works of Christine de Pizan, with an Edition of B.N. Ms. 603 Le Livre des Fais d’Armes et de Chevallerie,” Ph.D. diss. (Yale, 1988). See also Christine de Pizan, The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry, trans. Sumner Willard (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 1; Pizan, The Book of Peace, trans. Karen Green, Constant J. Mews, and Janice Pinder (University Park: Penn State, 2008), 325; and Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion, vol.1, l–lix. 50. Susan Solente, “Un Traité Inédite de Christine de Pisan, l’Epistre de la Prison de Vie Humaine,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole de Chartes 85 (1924): 263–301, 282. 51. Robert Eder, “Tignonvillana inedita,” Romanische Forschungen 33 (1915): 851–1022. 52. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de l’advision Cristine, ed. Liliane Dulac and Christine Reno (Paris: Champion, 2001), III.10, 110. Or find the work in translation: Pizan, Christine’s Vision, trans. Glenda K. McLeod (New York: Garland, 1993), 119, translation modified. 53. Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, ed. Gabriella Parussa (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1999), 36–46; Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion, lxiii–xcii. Meyer, “Les premières compilations.” 54. Joseph L. Baird, “Pierre Col and the Querelle de la Rose,” Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 273–86; Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane, La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 1978); Eric Hicks, ed., Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1977). 55. Hicks, Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, 141–42. For the influence of Dante on Christine, see Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Christine de Pizan and Dante: A Reexamination,” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 222 (1985): 100–11; Kevin Brownlee, “Literary Genealogy and the Problem of the Father: Christine and Dante,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993); Kevin Brownlee, “Le moi lyrique et la généologie littéraire: Christine de Pizan et Dante,” in “Musique naturele” Interpretationen zur französischen Lyric des Spätmittelalters, ed. Wolf-Dieter Stemple, 105–39 (Munich: Fink, 1995); Arturo Farinelli, “Dante nell’opere di Christine de Pisan,” in Festschrift H. Morf (Halle: 1905); Farinelli, Dante e la Francia dall’età



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media al secolo di Voltaire, 2 vols. (Milan: Hoepli, 1908); Anna Slerca, “Le Livre du chemin de long estude (1402–1403) Christine au pays des merveilles,” in Sur le chemin de longue etude, ed. Bernard Ribémont, 135–74 (Paris: Champion, 1998); Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 14–26. 56. Pizan, Epistre Othea, 32–36; and Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion, xxxi–iv; Boer, “Ovide Moralisé.” 57. Paget Toynbee, “Christine de Pisan and Sir John Maundeville,” Romania 21 (1892): 228–39. 58. Discussed in Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion, vol. 1, xlvi. 59. Curt F. Bühler, “The Fleurs de Toutes Vertues and Christine de Pizan’s L’Epître d’Othéa,” PMLA 62 (1947): 600–601; Bühler, “The Fleurs de toutes vertus,” PMLA 64 (1949): 32–44; Pizan, Epistre Othea, 46–60; Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion, vol. 1, l–lxii. 60. Pizan, Le Livre de la mutacion, vol. 1, xliii. 61. Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, “Prudence, Mother of the Virtues: The Chapelet des Vertus and Christine de Pizan,” Viator 39 (2008): 185–228. 62.  Christine de Pizan, Oeuvres Poétiques de Christine de Pisan, ed. Maurice Roy, 3 vols. (Paris: Librarie de Firmin Didot et Cie, 1886; reprint, Johnson Reprints, 1965), vol 2, 29–48; James Laidlaw, “Christine de Pizan: A Publisher’s Progress,” Modern Language Review 82 (1987): 35–75. 63. This comparison is explored in my forthcoming work, “From Le Miroir des Dames to the Livre des Trois Vertus.” 64. Jeannot, “Les bibliothèques de princesses en France au temps de Charles VI: L’example de la bibliothèque de Marguerite de Bavière, duchesse de Bourgogne (1385–1424),” 203. 65. Holladay, “Fourteenth-Century French Queens as Collectors and Readers of Books: Jeanne d’Evreux and Her Contemporaries,” 98. 66. Keane, “Most Beautiful and Next Best: Value in the Collection of a Medieval Queen,” 369. 67. Jeannot, “Les bibliothèques de princesses en France,” 202. 68. Holladay, “Fourteenth-Century French Queens,” 99. 69. Jeannot, “Les bibliothèques de princesses en France,” 203. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 204. 72. Ferron, Le jeu des Eschaz moralisé, 16. 73. Jules Camus, “Les ‘Voyages’ de Mandeville, copiés pour Valentine de Milan,” Revue des Bibliothèques 4 (1894): 12–13; Champion, La Librarie de Charles d’Orléans, 71n1. 74. Holladay, “Fourteenth-Century French Queens,” 98, 73n14. 75. The Miroir aux Dames and Miroir des Dames are identified by Delisle, Recherches sur la librarie de Charles V, vol. 2, 60, 338 bis and 338 ter. Holladay distinguishes them. Holladay, “Fourteenth-Century French Queens,” 82n24, following Alice A. Hentsch, De la littérature didactique au moyen âge s’adressant spécialement aux femmes (Cahors: A. Coueslant, 1903), 122–25. Mastny follows Delisle who convincingly identified Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 324 with the copy of the Miroir des Dames described in 338ter, see Mastny, “Durand of Champagne and the ‘Mirror of the Queen’: A Study in Medieval Didactic Literature.”

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76. Champion, La Librarie de Charles d’Orléans, 75. 77. Holladay, “Fourteenth-Century French Queens,” 99. 78. Jeannot, “Les bibliothèques de princesses en France,” 203. 79. Champion, La Librarie de Charles d’Orléans, 9. 80. Rouse and Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200–1500, 244. 81. Langlois, vol. 4 of La Vie en France au Moyen Âge, 124.

Review Articles England and Iberia José Carlos Redondo-Olmedilla

María Bullón-Fernández, ed., England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century: Cultural, Literary and Political Exchanges. New York, Palgrave MacMillan 2007. Pp. xiii + 250.

We know that many countries have a union, or even two, in their history, and for some it occupies a central place. So it is with Scotland and England, yet what strikes the connoisseur of Western physical specificities from the beginning of this book is the integrative term Iberian, a term wisely used to merge two geographical and cultural areas—Spain and Portugal—that fortunately/unfortunately and due to history have been most of the time living back-to-back. The designation is also wise as it captures the spirit of “mixing”—as the editor speaks about in the introduction (8)—without hinting at proportion. On equal terms the work’s title could apparently suggest a slight unbalance; otherwise, how is it possible that England is the realm on the one side and Iberia on the other? Why not Britain and Iberia? Nevertheless, we know that geographical conventions are but agreements or arrangements and that what truly matters in cultural exchange is the positive flux of ideas and their representation. The editor tries to justify this nominal choice, leaving Scottish and Welsh connections “for future studies,” but the explanation leaves ties unbound. The accuracy of her task lies in the chronological frame, and that is certainly what makes a good impression and the definite mark on the pattern. To the watchful reader some of the essays look like refined versions from previous works, and it is the compiler herself who honestly informs that several of them were presented as earlier versions at a session on England and Iberia at the International Medieval Congress in 2003 as Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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well as two other sessions on the same topic at the International Medieval Congress in 2005. She also puts forward that the first three essays act like overviews or opening studies that lead to the three following studies, more “Anglo-Iberian” in nature, to conclude with the last and more variegated essays. However, a conventionally innocent reader realizes that the book, ignoring the ending essay, could be well divided into two parts: one dealing with Anglo-Spanish relationships and the other with Anglo-Luso relationships. Needless to say that apart from that consideration, the arrangement seems to be more concerned with the totality of the medieval world via literary and historical exchanges than with historical segments. The content is more fully developed as it approaches multidimensional pieces of evidence and as it intends to heed “recent work on globalization and postcolonial criticism” (7). It equally pays attention to the fact that “nations have often constructed their identity on the basis of a discourse that excludes others and tries to define the nation against those others” (7). Equally multidimensional is the fact that the essays’ authors come from the “English” (British?), “American” (North American from the United States?), “Iberian” (Spanish and Portuguese?) realms. It sounds nominalist, but it is in fact a philosophy well grounded in the Middle Ages, and it may be that the medievalists in the book are playing tricks and putting into practice the same principle. In the collection’s conscientious and seminal introduction author María Bullón-Fernández makes it clear that the essays are interdisciplinary in nature and that they are examined through historical, literary, and art historical lenses. The work is realist, admitting that there is only a small number of studies on Anglo-Iberian relations in the Middle Ages. It similarly accurately gauges the abundance of studies on Spain, and the lesser number of those on Portugal, but lacks the consideration of viewing the history of Anglo-Iberian relationships like a kind of roller coaster with denouements and climaxes. The introductory chapters raise many issues, and the first essay, “Medieval England and Iberia: A Chivalric Relationship” by Jennifer Goodman Wollock, supplies us with core information not only on the circulation of chivalric poems and narratives between England and Iberia but also on other kind of exchanges among historical knights and royal family members. Goodman Wollock discusses what could be a slogan for an American political campaign, alluding to the “frontier spirit,” something not to be misunderstood. And just as frontier denotes separation, it also denotes a meeting point: Goodman Wollock states, Iberia is a “historic boundary region where Christendom meets Islam.”



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But if translocating is allowed thanks to postmodernity, the author’s usage of the superb term chivalric tourism is a good lesson for those who think that tourism is a nineteenth- or twentieth-century term. Equally valuable are the connections Goodwin Wollock makes between Englishmen—particularly seamen—and Portuguese in the North Africa raids against the Moors at Ceuta and the English aid against the Castilians at Aljubarrota, which help interpret the fruitful Luso-English friendship at the seas and during the golden age of navigation. In chapter 2, “British Influence in Medieval Catalan Writing: An Overview,” author Lluis Cabré makes it clear that “the direct influence of Middle English literature on medieval Catalan writing is, perhaps, merely nominal,” though he has performed a careful skimming of plenty of material to try to consolidate the Catalan reception of British works. Cabré interestingly alludes to the influence of Raymond Llul’s Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry as “the earliest case of a lasting influence of Catalan writing on English literature,” which might mislead those newcomers to the author of Tirant Lo Blanc. If we know, as Jennifer Goodman Wollock makes it clear, that Joannot Martorell is “the Valencian knight, future author of the great fifteenth-century Catalan chivalric romance Tirant Lo Blanc” (20), and that the term Aragonese is critical in explaining this essay’s essential issues, what, then, is the link between or the distinction among the Aragonese, Valencian, and Catalan realms? Further explicit explanation might aid those unfamiliar with the terms, clarifying the findings of Martí de Riquer or Rafael Beltrán Llavador. This essay—well documented—doubtlessly, would have presented a finer adjustment if the British and Catalan scopes had been scaled to meet the Anglo-Iberian target of the book. In spite of that, the study adds to the interpretation of the concept and meaning of Romance culture and reassesses the time-honored English connection of Tirant Lo Blanc. In “The Shrine as Mediator: England, Castile, and the Pilgrimage to Compostela,” Ana Echevarría Arsuaga analyses the especially popular shrine of Saint James in Compostela, Spain, second only to Canterbury as major destination for medieval English pilgrims. This popular route created a wonderful milieu for contact of all kinds between England and Iberia. Dr. Arsuaga analyses the interesting and intersecting values of the pilgrimage route through both maritime and land routes focusing on the Jacobean pilgrimage from England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She does so by equally addressing English records and Spanish sources. The study encompasses different periods and explains the peaks of the Jacobean pilgrimage and the reasons for them with detail and physical and sociopolitical range. Arsuaga attempts to demonstrate

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how the political scenario of the times influenced the cultural ideologies and how “shrines such as that of Saint James in Compostela played the role of mediator” as “visits to those shrines provided an excuse for exchanges that would have never been possible in the battlefield or the royal court” (62). In “Leonor of England and Eleanor of Castile: Anglo-Iberian Marriage and Cultural Exchange in the Twelfth and Thirtieenth Centuries,” Rose Walker examines the importance of these two queens’ marriages and their cultural and historical repercussions on Anglo-Iberian realms, taking as core material manuscripts and memory. The writer ably balances a study that at the outset seems unbalanced due to the unevenness of the data accessible—as the life of Eleanor of Castille has been considerably documented, while Leonor of England remains a relatively vague figure. This exercise results in a colorful comparison of striking similarities, as both women were active royal partners who either founded nunneries or cared for and involved themselves in the donation of money to priories. The similarities continue, as both “transported” their own styles: Thomas Tolley (68) refers to the “Spanish” style in relation to textile and decorative devices in the case of Eleonor of England, and she is even noted for the patronage of manuscripts. In the case of Leonor of England, referred to by Castilian scribes as Anglica Elionor and filia regis Angliae, there are allusions to the “English” style, “including elements of the Bible of Burgos and of the San Pedro de Cardeña Beatus” (71). Apart from the references to their respective native countries, this chapter offers an exhaustive iconographic and ideological analysis of the burial places of the two queens. In chapter 5, “A Castilian in King Edward’s Court: The Career of Giles Despagne,” Cynthia L. Chamberlin traces the development of the career of this yeoman courtier, thanks in large part to his Castilian background, as King Edward II took advantage of his courtier’s important connections, among other things. The writer grants due attention to the influence of Despagne’s Castilian heritage, which information is later used to support his position in international affairs. It is true that at Edward II’s English court some Castilians like Rodrigo de España, an official of Edward’s household, or Andrés Pérez de Castrogeriz, a merchant and occasional diplomat, among others, were in the king’s confidence; but the case of Giles Despagne is remarkable in spite of the fact that it can be only be traced in its outlines. He rose from sergeant-of-arms, or yeoman—an important post, as one of the yeoman’s main duties was to serve the king as personal bodyguard, implying Despagne’s social skills, education, and standing—to become a diplomat on missions abroad,



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augmenting on chief services to the king. His values were certainly cemented in his Iberian background, as he “knew geography, customs, and above all the language of the country to which he was sent” (101). Chamberlin’s chapter abounds in historical information and practically reconstructs the life of Giles Despagne through the records. Needless to say, the information is also useful for “the study of the practical mechanics of diplomacy between England and Castille” (110) and the elements involved, whether motivations or people. In the following chapter, Jennifer C. Geogue analyses “Anglo-Portuguese Trade during the Reign of João I of Portugal, 1385–1433” and the links forged between the two countries during this specific period. Apart from the nonresearch or cursory treatment Portuguese trade in some periods has received, Geogue mentions that a handful of scholars, like Violet Shillington, have dared to study its crucial features. She recalls the Portuguese ties with England back to the period of the Crusades and the time of Richard I the Lionheart, when English crusaders assisted the Portuguese Reconquest. Geogue’s chapter gives weight to the pact of mutual support binding both countries together against common enemies, ratified in the signing of the Treaty of Windsor in 1386, which holds to this day, with only two exceptional breaks—when the Portuguese throne fell under Spanish control for dynastic reason (and there was, therefore, no Portuguese monarch) and again during the protectorate of Cromwell (when there was, of course, no English monarch). Time would demonstrate the treaty’s usefulness, as it was employed to keep the Castilian kings and the Spanish influence away from Portugal. João I of Portugal came to signify the establishment of strong ties between both countries, as in 1387 the Portuguese monarch married Philippa, the elder daughter of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, by his wife Blanche of Lancaster. These ties were visible not only in the formal and diplomatic arenas but also in trade, as it was a kind of wonder marriage of convenience. England exported an unfaltering supply of grain and wool to Portugal, and Portugal supplied oil, figs, wax, honey, resins, dates, salt, hides, and the coveted wine mostly through the English ports of London and Bristol and the Portuguese ports of Lisbon and Porto. Trade between the two countries would remain a permanent flow, but the focus, especially on the Portuguese side, was to move from Europe to new territories in the age of exploration: Asia and Africa. In “Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal—and Patron of the Gower Translations?,” Joyce Coleman presents a study on the patronage and, to some degree, a scrutiny of the cultural enterprise exerted under the Portuguese queen Philippa of Lancaster, concentrating on her

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possible sponsorship of the translation of John Gower’s Confesio Amantis into Portuguese. Coleman’s chapter is also a description of the different realms and links associated with this charismatic royal figure. Confesio Amantis, a work by the English John Gower (1386–1390), is preeminent, as it was the first literary work translated into two contemporary vernacular languages: Portuguese and Spanish. Through a balanced and progressive itinerary, Coleman also wonders whether the queen was the patron responsible for that work’s translation into Portuguese. She offers some seemingly insubstantial connections and deductions that lead inevitably to this Lancastrian figure, as, for instance, Manuel Alvar (155) accepts without hesitation the association of this queen with the Portuguese version of Confesio Amantis: the Livro do amante (1430). The essay undoubtedly reveals colorful aspects of the tale through interesting details and features like the queen’s influence on the Portuguese court and royal household and her transcendence as an Anglophilia promoter. In chapter 8, “‘Os Doze de Inglaterra’: A Romance of Anglo-Portuguese Relations in the Later Middle Ages?,” Amélia P. Hutchinson uses a purportedly historical feat that caused “Os Doze de Inglaterra” (“The Twelve of England”) as a basis to study and analyze the AngloPortuguese relations of the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. The story, according to Dr. Hutchinson, is not to be understood as a mere trifle that describes the story of twelve ladies of the House of Lancaster, that, “having been insulted by as many English knights, ask the duke of Lancaster to help them to defend their honor; and how the duke had to ask the king of Portugal, his son-in-law, to send him twelve of his best men” (168). This story concludes with the victory of the Portuguese in London, with nine of the knights returning to Portugal and three of them seeking further adventures through Europe, and is, for Hutchinson, a true icon of Anglo-Portuguese relations. There is no historical evidence of these events, but it was not unusual to find Portuguese knights jousting or fighting all across Europe in those times. If we speak about iconicity, we cannot ignore that twelve is a magical number, and not only in the Christian tradition: of course, there are the twelve apostles; but in other well-established traditions there are also the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve deeds of Buddha, the twelve Deeds of Guru Rinpoche, and so on. So we can deduce that even though “The Twelve of England” is a blend of different episodes and rituals pieced together, there is a lot of ideology and intention, if not propaganda. The purpose of this work, a kind of Anglo-Portuguese romance, could be to reinforce or consolidate the Treaty of Windsor in the artistic and ideological



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sphere. According to Hutchinson, the romance can be a little “slanted” toward the Portuguese side, as the story shows the Portuguese superior to their English allies. Nevertheless, she notes that in “Os Doze de Inglaterra” “the preposition de denotes connection, not necessarily origin, and holds England as a point of reference” (183). The last chapter of the book, “Chaucer Translates the Matter of Spain,” by R. F. Yeager, certainly acts as a fit ending for the work, as it deals with something that can be breathed but is difficult to physically demonstrate. He appropriately calls it “the matter of Spain.” Most scholars know that Geoffrey Chaucer, the medieval author who lived during the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, was a proper European citizen, a human being full of Otherness, and it is the Spanish Otherness—“the matter of Spain”—from Chaucer that the medievalist Yeager sets to analyze. He makes use of the scarce evidence and references in the Canterbury Tales to enter into the realm of speculation and the possible firsthand Chaucerian knowledge of the Iberian Peninsula, specially Spain and Spanish literature. By travelling to Spain, Chaucer could have acquired some Spanish language and “could have (equally) acquired the ‘Matter of Spain’ on the ground” (193), but what is more clear is that “the number and nature of the references made to Spain and things Spanish in the Canterbury Tales suggests both an interest and familiarity” (194) derived both from contacts abroad and at home. For Yeager, “some degree of speculation is possible and potentially useful” (199), but there is a difference: familiarity with the peninsula is more than acceptable, while acquaintance with Spanish literature must remain speculative. On the whole, the book is a text of interactions that provides a state of the overview of important political—royal—and cultural Anglo-Iberian issues. From a postmodern perspective it could be interpreted as a study of the crosscultural milieu of the time. But if we contextualize, we soon realize that the collection could lead to a nominalist decline instead of properly addressing the target. The work meets its intention, declared in the introduction, to help put Anglo-Iberian relations in the Early Modern period into “greater historical perspective” (3). The work has been carefully edited and the chapters wisely assembled; but if some criticism is to be laid upon it, it is that the apparent jointness sometimes suggests disjointedness, paradoxically. For some critics, it could be because of lack of mortar, for others because more stone should have been quarried. The book is predominantly of interest to Middle Ages scholars, but it also makes a valuable contribution to those involved in literary and cultural affinities through time.

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It fortunately tackles the concept of margin and center from a scholarly view and not from an abstruse postmodern one. The chapter authors take their time to properly analyze the complex cultural patterns, shedding light on plenty of cultural and historical connections joining lands and peoples. It is also a subtle reading of important processes directly linked to Otherness. Peter Burke (2001, 71) pointed out the way literary and cultural images were developed in an independent or semi-independent way. This look “by (the) Other” is so rich, so dual, so meaningful and evocative that a structuralist interpretation is possible as it encourages a sensitivity to oppositions and inversions. And as recommended by Dr. Juan Antonio Díaz López, the great Spanish scholar of Anglo-Spanish literary and cultural relationships, this book treats relationships like proper rapports between characters in real life and literary works, between manuscripts and history, between cultures and languages, between people, and between history and culture. It is a volume that suggests further venues for research in the area, a field of study that continuously teaches the contemporary man that umbilicalism is not the best practice and that many enthused and remarkable things were said before the present age. It is a product where a variety of dimensions cohabitate with ambitions, and because of that sometimes the reader will be stirred into sporadic disagreement, as in the cases mentioned: Let’s remember that Tirant lo Blanc is not an unrelated work and its appearance in Don Quixote is not merely chance. Cervantes remarked on it that it was “el mejor libro del mundo” (the best book in the world [Vargas Llosa 1991]). Sometimes, too, the kind of “associazionismo libero” brings unmatched results, as is the case when linking “Os Doze de Inglaterra” with Camões’s Lusíadas and when, above all, tracing its origins to the Cavalarias de Alguns Fidalgos Portugueses and the Memorial das Proezas da Segunda Távola Redonda. The overall discourse approach is excellent from the documentational point of view, as it proves good academic search, and not a hasty one, either. It is a stimulating piece of work that always brings us back to the modernity of the Middle Ages, an age normally associated with darkness, though brilliant in many respects, as if it was a transept for knowledge in difficult times. In this point the work has fulfilled its objective thanks to the efforts of accomplished medievalists. It also unbinds the bounded terrains as in the role played by the tension, inferences, and interferences between homeland and host land and through the plethora of historical and literary characters examined under the scholarly glass. It definitely presents the ability to show



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extensive treatments of Portugal and Spain without giving scant attention to the way these countries forged themselves and their common borders in the Reconquista. It is a work that sheds light and yields a good score of works in the domain of Anglo-Iberian studies and that has the added value of reconstructing tough intellectual masonry through brilliant falsework and scaffolding.

References Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Vargas Llosa, Mario. Carta de batalla por Tirant lo Blanc. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1991.

English Regional Identity Uwe Klawitter

Robert W. Barrett Jr., Against All England: Regional Identity and Cheshire Writing, 1195–1656. (Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern.) Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Pp. xvii, 307. 7 b/w figures and maps.

Robert Barratt’s historicist study is a valuable contribution to the field of identity construction in pre- and early modern England. Deliberately adopting a longue durée perspective to challenge traditional periodization, Barrett investigates four and a half centuries of Chester-based and Cheshire-oriented texts and performances to explore the mechanisms that maintained local and regional continuity. Due to its extraordinary position within the English polity of the time and a concomitant sense of regional distinctness, Cheshire is, as Barrett convincingly argues, an ideal focus for his investigation. The study counters the still-widespread neglect or even elision of the regional in studies of medieval and early modern Englishness. What it achieves is the revision of existing research positions on Cestrian identity, and, above all, it generates new insight into the complex dialectic between regional and national identities. Part 1 of the book, which focuses on writings and performances produced in and centering on Chester, demonstrates how such cultural productions were used in the contestation of urban space and local authority, but also, in some cases, how they were reappropriated for national purposes. Chapter 1 deals with the conceptualization of the city in the writings of two monks from the Benedictine Abbey of St. Werburgh’s in Chester, namely Lucian’s De laude Cestrie (ca. 1195), a Latin encomium urbis, which happens to be “the oldest extant piece of Cheshire writing” (1), and Henry Bradshaw’s vernacular legend Life of Saint Werburge (ca. 1506–1513). As Barrett reveals, Lucian’s allegorical signification of urban space and Bradshaw’s identification of the saint’s body with the wholeness of the city supported monastic claims of control. That Bradshaw’s life was republished in London in the 1520s, Barrett suggests for anti-Lutheran purposes and perhaps even as part of a property dispute with wider implications, indicates a more dynamic Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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exchange and negotiation between the regional and national than hitherto acknowledged. Chapter 2 is devoted to the lay appropriation of monastic space in sixteenth-century performances of plays from The Chester Mystery Cycle. In response to existing research on processional drama, Barrett emphasizes and exemplifies the radical polysemy resulting from multicoded urban sites and complex audience affiliations. As his two case studies of performance sequences from single Whitsun plays show, the civic appropriation of biblical text and Pentecostal rite could serve various political interests, such as supporting oligarchic exclusivity and undermining restrictions of the poor law. Chapter 3 considers an instance of provincial seventeenth-century pageantry, Chester’s Triumph, which was produced by the Cestrian ironmonger Robert Amery in honor of the upcoming creation of Henry Frederick Stuart as prince of Wales and earl of Chester and performed on Saint George’s Day, April 23, 1610, in Chester. Once again, drawing on his admirable knowledge of local sources and using other instances of civic pageants for comparison, Barrett evidences how the absence (but virtual presence) of the honoree was exploited by Amery for civic self-promotion and how a national concern thus turned into a matter of urban politics. Following up the London publication of Chester’s Triumph in pamphlet form in June 1610, Barrett is able to show that centralized print culture did by no means preclude the assertion of regional identity. The pamphlet, to Barrett, called attention to Chester’s palatine history to emphasize a distinctly regional contribution to Britain’s imperial ventures. Part 2 of the study widens the focus to the whole county. Chapter 4 looks at a text that is readily associated with Cheshire and localism, namely the late medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Starting from the thesis that “Gawain’s negative response to the gift of the girdle and to Bertilak’s hospitality results not in an interregional union of chivalric equals but in the limited, intraregional ‘cohesion’ and selfcelebration of Camelot” (138), Barrett examines “chivalric culture’s own investment in the idea of region” (ibid.) in the poem itself but also in the contemporary Scrope-Grosvenor controversy over coat of arms. This double focus on the honor crisis in the romance and the trial enables him not only to highlight the extent to which chivalric self-definition relied on regional affiliation but also to point out how the regional asserted itself in conflicts at a time often perceived as “the essential moment of transition between region and nation” (150). The expression of regional identity is augmented in chapter 5 by the discussion of the Stanley family romances, a series of encomiastic texts that assert and maintain the fame of the Stanleys (earls of Derby) and their Cheshire



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and Lancashire retainers. The late fifteenth- and early sixteenth–century texts that center on the battles of Bosworth Field (1485) and Flodden Field (1513) contributed to the dynastic legend by presenting Henry Tudor’s rise to power as crucially dependent on the support of the Stanleys and by neutralizing an unheroic and thus potentially detrimental episode that occurred in the latter battle. Barrett reads these and also a number of mid-seventeenth-century texts that continue the Stanley eulogy with a fine sense for the generic encoding of history. The texts’ negotiation between regional and national identities, as he rightly stresses, points to multiple shared identities. Indeed, as critics of Barrett’s study might argue, his welcome complication of nation-biased views of pre- and early modern Englishness could be further radicalized and applied to his own (somewhat inclusive, if not at times too unproblematized) conception of regional identity. Such criticism would, however, not do justice to what he achieves. Considering an impressive range of texts and performances with a historicist approach that engages with latest research and exhibits an impressive command of historical sources, Barrett reveals the dynamics that governed the persistent assertion of local and regional identity. Contrary to existing research positions, he succeeds in showing that a taking away of local and regional power by the cultural and political center could stimulate the expression of regional identity rather than weaken it. His findings offer arguments for a revision of traditional periodization and a more sophisticated view of collective identities. What is refreshing—and this demonstrates, once again, Barrett’s expertise—is that the epilogue provides examples of how the investment in Cestrian traditions continues even today. This meticulously argued and beautifully written study is highly commendable and should inspire further studies in this field.

Alternative Christianities, Part I Eva von Contzen

Daniel E. Bornstein, ed., Medieval Christianity. A People’s History of Christianity, vol. 4. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009. Pp. 409. 80 b/w illustrations/maps/figures; 23 color plates.

That it is well-nigh impossible to write a history of Christianity, even if it is a multivolume one, goes without saying. Rarely, however, is this problem acknowledged as clearly as in the foreword by Denis R. Janz, general editor of A People’s History of Christianity: “Is it comprehensive? Impossible. Definitive? Hardly. A responsible, suggestive, interesting base to build on? We are confident that it is” (xvii). His confidence is justified: the twelve chapters, distributed across five sections, do not fully cover the history of Christianity from the Fall of Rome to the Reformation, but they do provide snapshots of specific fields of Christian life, which, when put together, succeed in forming a fairly good picture of Christianity as experienced and shaped by the mass of people or “ordinary faithful” (xviii) who constituted the body of the church in the Middle Ages. Eighty illustrations and figures—among them twenty-three colored pictures, such as maps, photographs of archeological findings, extracts from saints’ lives, chronicles, letters, sermons, or plays, translated into modern English where needed—complement the articles. Daniel E. Bornstein’s introduction, “Living Christianity” (1–25), approaches the notoriously slippery terms of the clergy/elites versus the laity/faithful, which neither denote two homogenous groups nor can be clearly set apart from each other. The sources for modern scholars are also somewhat problematic, since late-antique and medieval authors usually come from a learned and clerical background, which makes extrapolations for ordinary Christian believers difficult. However, sources that function as cultural mediators between clergy and laity, such as sermons or manuals for parish priests, may be of help, as are chronicles, diaries, wills, and letters. Bornstein’s introduction shows a thorough understanding of the difficulties scholars encounter when studying the popular view of and participation in medieval Christianity when Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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he warns us not to base our findings on sources that are biased and restricted in their applicability in the first place. The people do not exist; instead, scholars have to accept “variations of devotional intensity” (17). The first section, “Christianizing the People,” comprises three articles that provide valuable insights into how the advent of Christianity changed and left its mark on the existing pagan culture. Yitzhak Hen, “Converting the Barbarian West” (29–52), focuses on the three main strategies Christianity used to start infiltrating Germanic—that is, barbarian—culture: they built on the pagan agrarian calendar by integrating Christian feasts into it before gradually replacing it altogether; Germanic kings and rulers were incorporated into the liturgy through royal patronage; and the personal life of the people was encroached upon by installing new marriage and burial rites as well as personal prayers for the weather, good health, and related matters. Hen, too, reminds us to bear the biases and perspectives of sources in mind, which, when written with propaganda in mind, may easily turn norms into facts and thereby blur the picture of what is or can be regarded as pagan. Supplementing Hen’s remarks on the personal life cycle, Bonnie Effros’s article “Death and Burial” (53–74) picks up on how Christianity changed the burial practices of late antiquity. She admirably combines mortuary archaeology with written sources, although, as in the case of saints’ lives, the actual tombs of the saints may tell a different story than their vitae, which “were often ideologically loaded” (57). Whereas burials used to be family business only, Christianity introduced a specific liturgy that required a priest and brought burials into the public domain, putting emphasis on the correct performance of the funerary rites that led to an idealization and commemoration of the deceased. Due to this performative aspect that moved from the family to a cleric, one can observe a decline of grave goods, such as amulets, food and drink, or Charon’s obol. The following chapter develops a point already mentioned: Bornstein’s “Relics, Ascetics, Living Saints” (75–106) traces the body/flesh metaphor as a central yet debatable aspect of Christianity. How can sexual renunciation be demanded while the body is at the same time a point of contact with the divine? Bornstein demonstrates convincingly that these contradictory attitudes were never solved but rather remained side-by-side without causing any problems; his examples range from the early ascetics and martyrs, the veneration of relics, the Eucharist and the problem of Transubstantiation, to bleeding-host-miracles and flagellation confraternities, thus providing a diversified, but still coherent, account of the importance of “the body” in medieval Christianity. Taken together, all three chapters effectively manage to shed light on



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the earlier phase of Christian influence and expansion, whereby it becomes obvious that devotional practices found in a specific place at a specific time are tentative findings at best when it comes to their general applicability. The second section deals with “Ordering Worship” and contains two articles, one by Richard Kieckhefer on “The Impact of Architecture” (109–46), the other by Gary Dickson on “Medieval Revivalism” (147–76), both of which show very well how worship is shaped by and for the people. Kieckhefer encapsulates this dynamic relationship with the terms initiative and accommodation when he looks into the different phases of the history of church construction (from a missionary phase, a “minster and manor” phase, consolidation and reform, to the elaboration of buildings and worship). It becomes clear that architecture and practices of worship go hand in hand to serve the needs of the believers, who also actively participated in adapting parts of the church building and its interior. A similar active participation forms the crucial incentive for medieval religious revivals, as Dickson explores in his article. Outbursts of religious mass enthusiasm, as the Child Crusade of 1212 or the Great Devotion in 1233, were “brief, intense, and public” (159), as well as extraordinary in nature, and they often responded to prophecies and were aimed at conversions. Dickson presents us with an analytical description of these revivals, offering a very useful distinction between programmatic and nonprogrammatic revivals, their modes of expression and their stages of development. Part three turns from worship to “Controlling Sex,” starting with André Vauchez’s article “Clerical Celibacy and the Laity” (179–203). Vauchez examines the complex history of Nicolaitism, or clerical fornication. Whereas the early church accepted married priests (albeit living with their wives like brother and sister), the situation changed considerably from the eleventh century onward, parallel to a change in public approval. However, as Vauchez argues effectively, the campaigns against clerical incontinence bear witness of many ambiguities so that the maintenance of celibacy seems to have grown stronger in the fourteenth century only. The female sex and the difficulties women were thought to impose on confessors is the subject of Roberto Rusconi’s “Hearing Women’s Sins” (205–25). Both the place of hearing a woman’s confession as well as asking the right questions were a threat and a challenge for the confessors, since the priest as a metaphorical physician and, later, judge facing women’s sins and problems had to be publicly visible and yet have a private conversation with the confessant. The problem itself and the medieval solutions allow for an extremely interesting

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insight into misogynist thinking and the treatment of women from the perspective of the church. Women are not the only marginalized group, which is what the fourth section, called “Defining Boundaries,” addresses: Grado G. Merlo concentrates on “Heresy and Dissent” (229–64), Teofilo F. Ruiz on “Jews, Muslims, and Christians” (265–99). Thus, Merlo’s examples of inner-Christian conflicts of individuals or groups regarded as apostate and in their views heretical range from the Cathars or “good Christians,” as they called themselves, to Valdès of Lyons, the Humiliati, or Gerard Segarelli and his followers. Merlo not only analyzes the actions and theological foundations of these heretics but also concludes rightly that heresy forced the Catholic Church to change and consequently was an important factor in refreshing the church, making it more attractive to their believers. In contrast, the situation of Christians in contact with people of other faiths—that is, Jews and Muslims—is less clear-cut. As Ruiz points out, this relationship was neither exclusively based on intolerance nor on mutual understanding and cooperation. The roots of medieval resentments against Jews have a long history, which Ruiz manages well to sketch in some detail, before he turns to the special situation in Iberia, where all three religions had considerable contact and where phases of integration and acceptance reverted to persecution and animosities against both Jews and Muslims. The fifth and last part, “Accessing the Divine,” begins with a highly interesting glance into medieval believers’ private spaces of worship and their practices of devotion. In her chapter, “Domestic Religion” (303–28), Diana Webb warns us that, due to the scarcity of sources, our picture of medieval domestic devotion is “fatally skewed” (305). Accordingly, sources generally deliver information on the upper classes or elites only, but even there the evidence is meager, precisely because private devotion was meant to be private and secure. In spite of the difficulty of defining “private space,” prayer books are one useful source Webb has thoroughly analyzed, in addition to devotional practices as attested by members of the gentry, which leads her to conclude that private religion was “not antithetical to public observance, but complementary” (325). Focusing on the public dimension of Christian everyday life, Katherine L. French’s contribution on “Parish Life” (329–51) discusses the communal structure of the parish, which accounted for the Christian demand for caritas, offered springboards for a political career, and incited the parishioners to actively take part in the design and construction of the church building, thereby constituting a central part of the importance and dominance of Christianity throughout medieval



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Europe. In the final chapter of the volume, “The Burdens of Purgatory” (353–80), R. N. Swanson thoroughly traces back the history of purgatory before he addresses its influences on medieval Christianity. As an important “strategy for eternity” (355), the concept of purgatory offered the unique opportunity to interfere with death, whether by annual commemoration and chantries after someone had died or by alms deeds and indulgences before one’s own death. The index at the end of the book is helpful, although it would have been a good idea to index the different European countries touched upon in the articles too, so as to allow scholars interested in a specific region to easily find the relevant passages. All in all, however, the twelve chapters of Medieval Christianity are successful in their attempts at approximating a people’s history of Christianity. As Denis R. Janz stated, it is neither comprehensive nor definitive; it does paint, however, a highly evocative multivaried picture that opens up the discussion for further research along the lines of an alternative history of Christianity.

Alternative Christianities, Part II Chr i s t o ph P i e p e r

Dale Kent, Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence. The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 268. 40 b/w illustrations.

Dale Kent is one of the world-renowned specialists of Florentine culture in the fifteenth century and especially of the time of Cosimo de’ Medici il Vecchio. Every new publication written by her hand must therefore attract the curiosity of anyone interested in this period. The book under review is her latest contribution to a field that she has dealt with in several books and articles since the 1970s: the system of friendship, amicizia, and patronage that organized a great part of public life in early modern societies. The volume consists of slightly adjusted versions of her three Bernard Berenson lectures, which she offered in the Villa I Tatti in 2007. It is not surprising that Kent’s own previous work on the field is present in the volume—in some parts of the chapters perhaps even too present to justify a new treatment in yet another book. But this critical remark is true for many published honorary lectures; perhaps it is even one specimen of this specific genre. The first chapter is dedicated to the question of what friendship meant (15–85). Kent starts from the assumption that the texts on amicizia recited during famous Certame coronario of 1441 have crucial importance to the later debates on friendship. Among Kent’s material for her further analysis, there are letters (public letters of recommendation as well as private correspondence), complaints on the death of friends, presents to affirm friendship, and medals of friendship. The second chapter treats the places where friends met (87–154). Here, Kent shows successfully through some case studies how geographically close patrons and clients lived in the city of Florence and how often their specific worlds could get in contact with each other. The third chapter discusses whether friends could be trusted (155–219). The conspiracy of the Pazzi Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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and the events around Cosimo’s exile in 1433 and 1434 are used as major cases to describe how seldom one finds long-lasting reliability of friendships in that time. Out of the vast amount of research on the concept of friendship within a society whose public life is organized by patronage, Kent regularly refers to the standard work by David Konstan (Friendship in the Classical world, 1991) in her end notes as the basis of her own approach. Furthermore, a distinction returning regularly in her book is the one between friendship as defined by Aristotle (based on necessity and the usefulness of friends) and the one Cicero develops in his Laelius de amicitia and can be described as a more idealized amicitia. One would wish, however, that this distinction would be dealt with a bit more systematically and that it would be developed further by inserting it into the bigger context of the reception of Cicero and Aristotle in the period. One of Kent’s central theses is that most men1 in the Renaissance invested in friendship to gain not intimacy but trust (9). As an expert on this field, she is well aware that in a culture based on public representation intimacy hardly ever has the chance to become visible for us. Nevertheless, she tends to use private letters as a keyhole, allowing us to peer into private life (110: a letter shows that someone feels friendship like Cicero; similarly 131). I argue that even in such letters the model of Cicero’s epistulae to Atticus or ad familiares is so clearly present that the Ciceronian feelings are shaped by literature and are therefore part of a process of self-fashioning but no expression of individual attitudes. Nota bene: Kent does not exclude such mechanisms out of her analysis—for example, when she defines three frames within which friendship was shaped in Florence: the classical, the Christian, and the “civic” republican tradition (11). Sometimes, though, the analysis (also that of paintings, cf. 90) seems slightly too factual and too detached from the theoretical framework she uses (it seems problematic, for example, to use Angelo Poliziano’s account of the conspiracy of the Pazzi as historical document for the events, although the text is, via innumerous intertextual links, recognizable as imitation of Sallust’s Coniuratio Catilinae, as Kent herself mentions, 171). The second main thesis of the book is highly convincing: According to Kent, the Florentines were aware that friendship with men was always imperfect; its trustworthiness too often proved to be rather weak. Therefore, they shaped the relationship between god and men as the best friendship imaginable. Kent identifies this concept so currently in well-known pictures and in literary documents that one can only be



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amazed how Renaissance humanism could ever have been described as a non- or even anti-religious movement. Very interesting in this context are the small boundaries between the humanist discussion of god’s friendship and that of a patron such as Cosimo de’ Medici. On the other hand, patronage also included the raising of public spiritual welfare, thus enabling the citizens to get closer to god, men’s best friend. Kent’s analysis of all this is presented with persuasiveness and great knowledge of artistic and religious discourses of the time. Apart from my major concern about the sometimes too factual treatment of the material, I have only minor quarrels with some details of the book: 1. Especially in chapter 1, Kent tends to call single poets representatives of “the Florentines.” It would have been helpful if she had added a short passage to explain why certain ideas about friendship were indeed specifically Florentine and in what way they differed from concepts in other Italian centers of humanism. 2. On page 57, Kent underestimates the role of poetry on public debate in Florence. Especially poems dedicated to fellow humanists or to (potential) patrons served indeed very similar aims as letters of recommendation (treated by Kent as superior material). Also the statement that such letters are purely private material seems inaccurate: Many humanists included their letters of recommendation in the (circulating or even published) collections of their correspondence. Also, in this aspect, letters and poems do not differ much. 3. On page 177, Kent deals with the love poetry by Lorenzo de’ Medici in which she finds “in modern terms . . . polymorphous perversity.” Whether such anachronistic parallels can have any use for our understanding of the texts is at least doubtful. The double entendre Kent reads in Lorenzo’s poetry is no biographical detail but the result of a careful reformulation of ancient models in which homosexuality was an accepted topic for elegy and even philosophical treatise (Plato!). These ancient texts were then read and imitated from the viewpoint of Petrarch’s volgare poetry, thus (perhaps) creating a sphere of conceptual vagueness. Any psychological interpretation of the poetry as hint to the author’s sexual preferences therefore seems methodologically problematic. 4. A bibliography would have been helpful. The reader has to collect the primary and secondary sources Kent has used from the notes (notes that, by the way, sometimes show inconsistencies),2 which is a pity, especially because of the rich material she quotes from so-far-unpublished archives and manuscripts.

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In short, Kent’s book is no groundbreaking study which radically changes our view of Florentine society; instead, it resumes the knowledge of the author which she has gained through more than thirty years of intensive research on the subject. The product is pleasant to read (and in the parts dealing with the friendship to god, especially in chapter 1, even exciting). The case studies offered, in combination with the tone of spoken language in which the chapters are written, make the book attractive not only for specialists of Florentine culture and society, but also for anyone interested in the mechanisms and rules of personal contacts in early modern societies.

Notes   1. Kent defends the absence of women in her study (13) by pointing to the extremely patriarchal structures, especially in Florence, in which friendship was considered to be a male business.   2. For example, when Kent quotes from Cicero’s Laelius, we find this work referred to once as “Cicero, De Amicitia, bks. 11–12 (236n51)” (the Laelius consists of one book only!); later, it appears as “Marcus Tullius Cicero, Laelius De Amicitia (English and Latin), in Old Age: On friendship, On Divination, trans. W. A. Falconer (Cambridge, Mass.: 1923), 103–211; 4:14–16, 125” (241n15, with irritating double counting of paragraphs and of pages in the Loeb edition).

Review Notices Amadis of Gaul. Volume 1, books I and II. Translated by Edwin B. Place and Herbert C. Behm from The Putative Princeps of Saragossa, 1508. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Pp. 685. Amadis of Gaul. Volume 2, books III and IV. Translated by Edwin B. Place and Herbert C. Behm. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009. Pp. 749.

While undergraduates and casual readers will appreciate this accessible translation of Amadis of Gaul, the lack of annotations and footnotes in the text raise doubts about its ultimate utility for scholars. Amadis served as the personification of a mature chivalric ethos that spanned the period from Chretien de Troyes to Cervantes, and whose popularity was enhanced after the compilation and printing of his stories in 1508 by Rodríguez de Montalvo. Numerous translations of his work appeared over the course of the sixteenth century, including the first in English in 1590, and by 1605 the popularity of the Amadis tales was solidified with the publication of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. The translation by Edwin Place and Herbert Behm produced originally in 1974 and 1975, and reprinted by the University Press of Kentucky in 2003 (vol. 1) and 2009 (vol. 2), brings this important piece of chivalric literature to the modern English-reading world. As R. P. Kinkade pointed out in his 1977 review of the first printing of this translation, Place and Behm are relatively unique in presenting the complete, unabridged Amadis for an English audience. The majority of previous English editions, most of them dated and anachronistic, had abridged the text. This edition therefore represents one of the few modern attempts to re-create the text as Montalvo had intended. The language employed by Place and Behm is among the strongest elements of this edition. Their translation is clear, concise, and beautifully rendered into modern English, but without losing the flavor of the original. Place and Behm do an admirable job capturing the essence of chivalric literature, including the importance of action and pace. The language, while recognizable to a modern audience, does not become anachronistic. Place and Behm do not sacrifice the idiosyncrasies of the original in order to make the tale read better in modern English. They Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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also maintain the consistency of the original language not only without being repetitive but also without artificially changing the translation purely for the sake of variety. The battle scenes, of which there are a great number, are presented with flair and excitement. The authors’ dedication to the careful rendering of the battle sequences is especially important considering the role that feats of prowess played in chivalric literature. Contemporaries, for whom prowess with edged weapons was the cardinal virtue of chivalry, expected such quality in the recounting of deeds of arms, and this translation reflects that interest. The dialogue is also presented effectively and passionately. The flow and cadence of the conversations is maintained and is designed to heighten the reader’s interest. The weakness of this edition of Amadis, as commented on by previous reviewers such as R. P. Kinkade, is in the lack of a proper scholarly apparatus. Kinkade attributed this weakness to the fact that Place had included a far-more complete contextualization in his definitive fourvolume edition from the late 1950s and early 1960s. While this is a rational supposition, the lack of this apparatus in the present volume means that English readers, the presumed audience for this translation, are essentially denied this crucial resource. The introduction that is included (a seven-page overview by Place), while valuable in its limited capacity, is inadequate for the requirements of a text of this importance. Place does, however, use the introduction to this edition to make some broad and valuable comments on a variety of aspects of the Amadis text. While this is helpful for first-time readers, it mostly serves to tantalize the scholar with what Place could have done with a comprehensive introduction. Place discusses the relationship of Amadis to earlier chivalric heroes, such as Lancelot and Tristan, but the interconnections and derivations are left undeveloped. He also comments on the importance of studying the Amadis in light of other major works of chivalric literature—such as the Lancelot-Grail cycle—but again the connection is left for the reader to discover on his or her own. In addition to considering the interaction between the Amadis and other pieces of chivalric literature, Place does draw attention to the tale’s relationship to elite society. He briefly considers the relationship of the Amadis to King Alfonso XI of Castile. The king’s interest and interaction with chivalric ideology is brought up but not developed. There is a rich vein here regarding the role of noble patronage of chivalric literature that could have been explored. Place could have also examined this relationship for what it can illuminate about fourteenth-century Castilian elite society.



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Place does discuss the supposed author of the Amadis, whom he describes as likely being a highborn individual, and very probably a cleric. This interaction between the chivalric ethos and members of the church is fascinating and certainly worthy of further consideration. Place focuses on the role that Amadis played in creating a prescriptive ideology for knighthood, a role in which he was designed to serve as a warning against the presumed worldliness and sinfulness of knights. His virtues appear to be directly contrasted with the seven deadly sins, whereas his adversaries embody those sins—most especially pride. Place continues this important contextualization by discussing the different foci of the four books of the original. He argues that the first two books of the “primitive original” had a three-fold focus: “first, to depict a knight motivated by courtly love in his struggle with the evils of his time; second, to extol the many foreign knights, mainly French and British, in the service of the Hispanic monarchs during the first half of the fourteenth century; third, to demonstrate that the greatest danger to their monarchies might derive from the possible deceit of royal counselors.” This brief analysis indicates some of the extremely important lines of inquiry that could have been developed in this edition. The importance of foreign knights in fourteenth-century Spain is a topic that can shed much light on the nature of their treatment in the Amadis, especially in reflection of the position of the supposed author, perhaps the highranking cleric Place alludes to. Perhaps of even more interest is the functioning of the Amadis as royalist propaganda. Royalism has a long pedigree in chivalric literature that could be developed further for readers of the Amadis. The interaction of the Amadis with other tales designed to highlight the perfidy of royal counselors would also help to set the tale within its larger fourteenth-century context and to highlight important elements of its social and cultural discourse. Place does consider the changing cultural framework of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain in his treatment of books III and IV. Book III lessens the importance of courtly love as a motive factor, and Amadis is eventually slain through his falling into the sins of pride and jealousy. In this newer incarnation of Amadis, the author generally derides courtly love as ridiculous and undermines its importance to the chivalric ethos. Montalvo follows the lead of the anonymous author and transfers the focus of the text onto Amadis’s son, Esplandian. Esplandian embodies missionary Christian zeal and nationalistic patriotism to a much greater degree than Amadis, and the endorsement of these twin ideas as pillars of chivalry reflect the changing nature of Spanish kingship and elite

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society. Place theorizes that “perhaps the specter of the Inquisition and the warring of the Catholic sovereigns against all deviations from Christian orthodoxy caused him to regret his long preoccupation with Amadis of Gaul.” Once again Place demonstrates the value of his analysis while simultaneously also conveying to the reader how much more could have been done had he devoted himself to creating a more comprehensive analytical structure for this edition. Also problematic with this edition was the decision by the publisher to rerelease the text without providing an updated introduction that takes into account the vast changes in the field of chivalric literature over the last thirty-five years. Holding Place accountable for his introduction from the 1970s does not excuse the decision to forgo an updated critical introduction for this reprint. While John Keller’s updated preface does discuss the process of reinvigorating this text for a modern audience, he is not able in the two pages provided to really explore the major changes in the field of chivalry studies. Any updated edition of a chivalric text as fundamental and important as the Amadis needs to, at the minimum, consider the implications of the interaction between chivalric literature and knightly ethos. There have been numerous studies over the previous thirty years that have illuminated important connections between chivalric literature and knightly culture. Scholars such as Maurice Keen, Richard Kaeuper, and David Crouch have all discussed in one form or another the role this literature played in the development of a knightly mentalité. While an introduction cannot be expected to make a comprehensive statement on a vast field such as chivalry, some account of these important developments would have been helpful. Overall, this edition of Amadis of Gaul will be a boon for readers who are interested in accessing, in English, one of the most important pieces of chivalric literature produced in late-medieval Europe. Undergraduates especially will find this version readable, engaging, and valuable for comparative study with other pieces of chivalric fiction. More advanced scholars, while they will appreciate the beautifully rendered language and imagery, will likely be frustrated by the unanswered questions raised by the text. Craig M. Nakashian Texas A&M University



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Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. viii, 312.

In this book Christine Caldwell Ames forcefully challenges the “power” paradigm that has dominated the historiography of high-medieval persecution for more than twenty years since the publication of R. I. Moore’s Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987). She argues that inquisition into heresy was not driven by a quest for enhancing the power of a newly emergent bureaucratic elite or for maintaining the hegemony of “an outraged ruling block” (James Given). Instead, it arose from sincerity: inquisitors acted on their deeply held beliefs. But this turn to religion does not make inquisitors any nicer, for Ames dwells on their commitment to coercion, torture, and burning. Far from admiring their “sincere inquisitorial Christianity,” she sees this religion as one positing “a God who coerced, tormented, and burned.” Ames focuses her account on the ideology and activities of members of the Dominican order, the clerical group most responsible for upholding the theory and practice of inquisitorial persecution. Concentrating on the period between ca. 1230 and ca. 1330, her analysis is divided into two main parts, of which the second is greatly superior to the first. In the first part she proposes to show how Dominicans propagandized for the new institution of heretical inquisition by means of texts and sermons, canonizations, and an increasingly tendentious process of rewriting the life of Saint Dominic. Granted numerous keen and original observations, no chapter in Ames’s part 1 strikes me as fully successful. The treatment of texts and sermons is too skimpy. Ames neglects to consider the “Passauer Anonymous,” probably the most widely circulated Dominican antiheretical treatise in Germany, or the widely circulated “Pseudo-David of Augsburg,” which would perhaps have allowed for a control regarding traits that she sees as specifically Dominican. Similarly, by latching on to a few Dominican antiheretical sermons without considering a plentiful number of non-Dominican ones, she loses a chance to persuade us that there was anything truly distinctive in the Dominican specimens. Regarding canonizations, Ames perforce dwells on the cult of Peter of Verona, the only thirteenth-century Dominican inquisitor who was officially sainted. But was he revered primarily as a “holy inquisitor”? I doubt it, for his usual appellation as “Peter Martyr” underlines the point that his martyrdom counted the most. Nor was this surprising for a century that was short of prominent ecclesiastics who Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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were murdered for the faith in full view. Ending part 1 is an ingenious chapter in which Ames asks whether Dominic was ever portrayed posthumously as an inquisitor. As usual, she offers some keen observations, but her pursuit takes forty pages only to reveal that although Dominic was said to have handed over obdurate heretics for burning, he was portrayed as an actual inquisitor just once. Especially weighed against everything else that is said of Dominic in the various lives and histories, the results of this chapter emerge as meager. Ames’s two visual examples actually serve to undermine her overall argument that Dominicans eagerly portrayed themselves as inquisitors. Toward the end of her chapter about the “inquisitorializing” of Saint Dominic, she refers to a “flagrant” late example: the notorious painting of Saint Dominic presiding over an “Auto da Fe” by Pedro Berruguete. But this is hardly playing by the rules, since the painting was done around 1490 as a work of propaganda glorifying the Spanish Inquisition. As for the most famous medieval visual self-conception of the mission of the Dominican Order—the fresco in the Dominican refectory of Santa Maria Novella (ca. 1365)—this, despite Ames, presents a dramatic challenge to the “inquisitorializing” thesis. The fresco depicts the three Dominican saints: Dominic, Peter Martyr, and Thomas Aquinas, all variously engaged in combating unbelievers—infidels and Jews as well as heretics. But none of the three is portrayed as an inquisitor. Dominic sends the “hounds of the lord” to fight the wolves or “little foxes,” which they surely do most snarlingly at the bottom of the fresco. But Thomas opposes them by holding open a book (the Summa contra Gentiles?), and Peter Martyr engages them in rational debate, made clear by his gesture. Although Ames chooses to place the Peter Martyr detail on her cover, she neglects to point out that it shows a disputation in which the saint is clearly winning over some of his audience by means of peaceful argumentation rather than by a demonstration of “righteous persecution.” Dominicans, then, were teachers, preachers, theologians, and missionaries: carrying out inquisitions was not a major theme in their selfimage. Nevertheless, as Ames tough-mindedly demonstrates in part 2, they did mold a religious rationale for the coercion, torture, and burning of heretics. Thomas Aquinas may be depicted impassively with his book in the Santa Maria Novella fresco, but among the many brutal passages from Dominican sources that Ames offers to prove her argument about “inquisition as divine discipline,” to my mind the most stunning is from the Summa Theologica. There (II, IIa, q. XI, art. 3) Thomas adduces Paul to Titus 3:10–11 (“reject a man that is a heretic after the first and second admonition, [for he is] condemned of himself”) to conclude that if a heretic remains obdurate, the church should expel him from its body by



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excommunication and then “relinquish him to secular judgment to be expelled from the world through death.” Earlier Dominican writers had upheld antiheretical crusades and rejected the dictum that one should not kill, but it was none other than the greatest Dominican theologian who opened the way for explicit defense of judicial murder because of belief. Ames’s larger argument is that the years around 1200 saw the triumph in Western Christendom of an “ambitious ecclesiology of universal community,” signally marked by the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council. Authorities became committed to ensuring that all Christians belonged without reserve to the transcendent community of the church and were bent to accomplish that goal by “inquisition” in the confessional, supplemented if necessary by inquisition into “heretical depravity.” The Dominican Order, sincerely dedicated to this pastoral mission, engaged itself against heresy wholeheartedly to the extent of offering defenses of the cruelest measures such as torture and the death penalty. This sometimes entailed casuistry, as when Moneta of Cremona maintained that “he who is without sin should cast the first stone” really invited the casting of stones (i.e., the death penalty) since 1 John (1:7) spoke of Christians as “cleansed from all sin.” Yet Ames shows that such casuistry was not necessary for supporting the inquisitorial mission because of plentiful biblical examples of holy cruelty and killing. God was pleased that Abraham was ready to slay Isaac, and God himself killed. The employment of murderous examples was not new: they had earlier been used to justify holy war. Thus when Dominicans turned them on individual neighbors they were merely appropriating a “violent holiness perceptible in the Bible and in Christian tradition.” Many readers are not going to like Ames’s part 2; one can foresee a lively discussion. But I must congratulate the author enthusiastically for her courage and her proofs. Robert E. Lerner Northwestern University

Patricia Badir, The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550–1700. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Pp. xix, 300. 37 b/w illustrations.

Despite the dramatic religious, social, and political shifts in the early modern period, Saint Mary Magdalene’s importance as a symbolic Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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figure in the arts, established during the medieval period, persisted on the continent and in Reformation-era England. Patricia Badir’s Maudlin Impression offers a sustained, wide-ranging investigation of the ways English literature and the visual arts represented this figure from the early Reformation through the Restoration. Badir traces developments in aesthetic and representational practices to discover what the depictions and uses of this most malleable of saints can tell us about the multivocal intellectual and spiritual terrain of early modern England. Badir foundationally asserts the vitality with which authors and visual artists of postmedieval England portrayed the Magdalene. Selfconsciously entering “the ‘turn to religion’ in early modern studies” and engaging the debates in literary history set off by Barbara Lewalski and Louis Martz (19), the author meticulously explores “the resilience of a single topos across time, across belief systems, and across subject positions” (20). The evidence she presents effectively discloses a figure adaptable to differing periods and ideologies but constantly functioning as a site of poetic language that calls forth affective memory and a turning “toward the contemplation of beautiful things.” This hagiological engagement cites a wide range of source material, developing its ideas throughout five clearly presented chapters with numerous plates. The first chapter focuses on the transformation of the Magdalene’s traditional portrayal into an allegory of the religious conflicts of the Reformation, particularly centered on Lewis Wager’s drama, The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene. The medieval figure’s notoriously decadent and sinful past becomes an icon of the Roman church while the penitent who washes Christ’s feet reveals the newly reformed church in all its simple, penitential piety. Yet, Badir argues persuasively, the intimacy between Christ and the Magdalene here allegorized is one that must be seen and beheld, leading to a central concern of the entire work: the saint’s mediating role in the dialectic between a Protestant emphasis on the word and the Catholic emphasis on icon and image. Chapter 2 reflects on the post-Resurrection scene between the Magdalene and Christ as described by Southwell, Constable, and Markham, among others. Badir examines the interplay between the Magdalene’s initial blindness to Christ’s identity and his order not to touch him, claiming that the authors’ description of Christ’s post-Ressurection presence as a relative absence links these representations to features of ghost stories. Though this argument sacrifices some theological precision, the reading remains reasonable and establishes the Magdalene as a figure to be meditated upon in her own right, inspiring the remembrance of Christ. Expanding upon this ghostly metaphor, chapter 3 relates the Magdalene’s contemplative role to the inspiration for several poems



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dedicated to aristocratic Protestant women. While the chapter’s argument ultimately emerges, its somewhat diffuse nature lessens its lucidity. The fourth chapter returns to a focus on the roles of word and image raised at the beginning of the work. Badir examines the beauty of holiness represented in Magdalene paintings in the context of Laudian aesthetics before reading the compressed imagery of the Magdalene poetry by Herbert, Vaughan, Herrick, and Crashaw as troubling the boundaries between word and image. This poetry, along with the multiplication of plastic images of the Magdalene in the seventeenth century, draws attention to conflicts both political and aesthetic during the latter part of Badir’s period. The final chapter discerns an increasing worldliness of the Magdalene’s representations in Behn’s play The Rover and its use of portraits alongside the actual portraits of Charles II’s mistresses. The paintings of these mistresses, a la Madeleine, indicate a decreased need in this period for the specific kind of remembrance of Christ discussed thus far. Yet Badir capably maintains that the role of the portraits in Behn’s play keeps alive an attachment to the sinner-saint as a site of memory. The figure of the Magdalene, particularly her medieval depictions, has recently begun to receive more comprehensive attention from scholars. Badir’s detailed treatment in The Maudlin Impression admirably extends this growing scholarship into the Reformation era. Students of the period will find that Badir’s insight into the methods and goals of early modern representations of the Magdalene abundantly repays a careful reading. Jacob Riyeff University of Notre Dame

Koenraad Brosens, ed., European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. 408. 159 duotone illus.; 138 color illus.

The publication of the European tapestry collection at the Art Institute of Chicago follows in the scholarly tradition of tapestry catalogs from great American collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Cavallo 1967); the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (Bennett 1976, 2nd ed. 1992); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Standen Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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1985; Cavallo 1993); the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (Cavallo 1986); the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Adelson 1994); and the J. Paul Getty Museum (Bremer-David 1997). This long-awaited catalog provides readers with in-depth technical, stylistic, and iconographic analyses of the nearly one hundred tapestries in the Art Institute’s collection. Christa C. Mayer Thurman, curator of the Art Institute’s textile collection until her recent retirement, oversaw the immense endeavor that involved the cleaning, conservation, and cataloging of the tapestries. Koenraad Brosens was appointed the primary author and editor of the current volume, writing the vast majority of the catalog entries (forty-two out of sixty-two). Affectionately known as the “Chicago Tapestry Project,” the publication presents the Art Institute’s collection that ranges from FrancoFlemish and Flemish tapestries (cat. 1–38) to tapestries woven in French ateliers (cat. 39–53). The collection spans from the middle of the fifteenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth century. There is, however, one postindustrial piece: Pomona (from the Flora and Pomona series) woven in 1906 at the Merton Abbey Tapestry Works by William Morris and designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones (cat. 59). In addition, the collection at the Art Institute comprises tapestries from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and England (cat. 54–58). Surprisingly, a noteworthy Peruvian tapestry (cat. 60) was included in the catalog because it looks amazingly like a European tapestry—its remarkable stylistic affinities to those tapestries produced in Europe are so strong that for decades scholars were quite uncertain about its place of manufacture. The 2004 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and its accompanying exhibition catalog, The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530–1830 (Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina Esteras Martin, eds., Yale University Press), however, helped scholars attribute the Art Institute’s tapestry to an unknown Peruvian workshop, based on weaving techniques characteristic of Andean textiles. The last two catalog entries (cat. 61–62) describe two “table carpets”— textiles woven in a tapestry weave (a type of tabby weave, but with discontinuous weft threads), which are not technically related whatsoever to a pile weave that the term carpet may suggest. Koenraad Brosens authored both essays in which he states that the original function of these textiles is a point of divergence among scholars. While some scholars believe that their intended use may have been to cover floors or walls, Brosens argues that they were used as coverings for tables, it being doubtful that such an expensive and delicate medium as tapestry would have been used on the floor, where it would probably have been placed beneath



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furniture and even trampled upon. He also contends that these tapestries were not likely to be hung on the wall because the pieces have no compositional orientation, either vertically or horizontally. Brosens’s interpretation, although logically persuasive, should be regarded as not definitively established; while, as he points out, there is no archival evidence that supports the use of these tapestries as floor or wall coverings, nor is there any for the proposition that they are table carpets. The catalog ends with four pages dedicated to detailed reproductions of the weavers’ marks and signatures found in the collection of tapestries at the Chicago Art Institute. For those readers interested in the formation of the Art Institute’s tapestry collection, Christa C. Mayer Thurman’s essay “A Collection and Its Donors” (7–15) describes the period that saw its founding and growth. She explains that the Gilded Age in America was a period in which the personal possession of European tapestries was a central component in the creation of an aristocratic lifestyle. Similar to other major American tapestry collections, most of the textiles at the Art Institute entered into the collection through bequests, donations, and contributions for acquisitions. Several members of the Antiquarian Society were responsible for the purchase or donation of much of the Art Institute’s early collection, which over the following decades was augmented by generous individuals, including Robert Allerton and Edward E. Ayer, along with the Potter, Deering, Crane, and Worcester families, among others. Interestingly, the famous Chicago department store, Marshall Field & Co., also played a significant role in the development of the collection. Unlike most of the above-mentioned catalogs of tapestry collections in the United States, this publication offers a lengthy and detailed description of the processes involved with the cleaning and conservation of the Art Institute’s collection, which took place over a twelve-year period. In his essay Yvan Maes De Wit explains the state-of-the-art technologies—step-by-step treatment methods—applied to these fragile and often times damaged works of art. Few textile conservation labs would have been able to tackle such a monumental job. The De Wit Royal Manufacturers, located in Mechelen, Belgium, was clearly up to the task. A family business for four generations, they have the resources and a high level of expertise. A group of well-regarded scholars contributed to the catalog—PascalFrançois Bertrand, Charissa Bremer-David, Elizabeth Cleland, and Nello Forti Grazzini—providing the reader with the most up-to-date technical information, as well as thorough and expansive catalog entries. On the

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whole, the catalog entries are incredibly exhaustive in that they fully describe the style of the tapestry at hand and, if applicable, identify the narrative, which is typically followed-up with an account of the story that inspired the design of the tapestry or tapestry series. For instance, readers will learn about a variety of subjects, from mythological tales such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (cats. 11, 22, 27, 28, 49, 53a–b), Homer’s Odyssey (cat. 18), and Herodotus’s Histories (cats. 20a–b) to biblical narratives including the Transfiguration of Christ (cats. 1a–b), the Noli me tangere (cats. 3, 12), the Holy Family with the Infant Christ Pressing the Wine of the Eucharist (cat. 4), the Story of Jacob (cat. 13), and the Annunciation (cat. 55). The collection also includes tapestries with the following subject matter: ancient history (cats. 16, 19a–n, 21, 37, 46a–b, 57); the Months and Seasons (cats. 9a–b, 10, 23, 42a–b); allegory (cats. 6, 8a–b, 24); mythology (cats. 14a–b, 15, 27, 28); millefleurs (cats. 5, 29, 30); verdures (cats. 31–35); armorial (cats. 36, 56); and genre (cats. 51, 52), notably panels from the famous eighteenth-century Teniers series (cats. 25, 26). Cultivated readers will quickly discover how much connoisseurship still plays a vital role in the study of tapestry. For example, many of the entries underscore the strong stylistic and/or iconographic connections between tapestry design and other media, such as illuminated manuscripts, prints, drawings, engravings, and panel and oil paintings. These correlations reveal how conversant tapestry historians are in a variety of artistic mediums, literature, and even dramatic productions. For instance, the essays in the catalog present wonderful examples of tapestry design drawing from an assortment of sources, including Shakespeare’s play Antony and Cleopatra (cat. 17); a sixteenth-century Parisian apothecary’s book of poems, sonnets, and drawings titled L’histoire de la Royne Arthémise (cats. 39a–b); the first-century wall paintings from the Domus Aurea, the Roman Emperor Nero’s private house (cat. 43); a seventeenth-century chronicle of travels by Johannes Nieuhof, a Dutchman who worked for the East India Company (cat. 45); and the stage sets for the French eighteenthcentury pantomime Les Vendages de Tempé (cat. 47). The majority of the essays for individual catalog entries present a literary review, and several challenge outdated scholarship. In addition, the essays clearly illustrate the complexity and technical skills involved in the tapestry field. This leads to a few critiques. On the one hand, for those academics interested in the medium of tapestry, the catalog provides a wealth of new knowledge, fresh insights, and, in several areas, ideas for further research that may prove to be fruitful lines of inquiry for scholars. On the other hand, it should be noted that the intent (as stated in the foreword) to inform a wider audience overreaches its mark. Ironically,



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this is due to the high level of scholarship, art-historical revisionism, and, at times, highly technical vocabulary. While some of the essays at the beginning of the catalog may certainly speak to the general museum-going public, it would take a dedicated reader to stay the course. Furthermore, since nearly all the tapestries with religious subject matter were woven in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a more contemporary biblical translation would have resulted if, instead of using the early seventeenthcentury King James Version of the Bible, the English translation of the Latin Vulgate, found in the Douay-Rheims edition, had been used. Nevertheless, the catalog greatly contributes to the field—tapestry scholars certainly will reach for the Chicago Art Institute’s catalog as a foundational and important reference book, as well as one that serves as a springboard to new discoveries. Each of the sixty-two catalog entries is accompanied by a lavish full-page color illustration, demonstrating Yale University Press’s continued sponsorship of richly illustrated publications that are devoted to textiles; this will absolutely dazzle readers. In the end, an even deeper appreciation and understanding of the medium will be evoked for those readers of the catalog who return to visit the distinguished collection of tapestries at the Chicago Art Institute. Kate Dimitrova Wells College

John A. Burrow, The Poetry of Praise. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 208.

The premise of John Burrow’s Poetry of Praise is the notion that praise or encomia has become a rare element in literature, which is either regarded suspiciously or treated ironically. Heroic characters whose power and achievements are beyond comparison may be acceptable in popular culture, but literary taste has long since banned them. Although praise is thus as much absent from literature as from the minds of scholars dealing with it, this literary mode was a dominant, even indispensable, feature of literature in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Burrow explicitly wants to focus on this important mode of praising that tends to be neglected and has, in his view, too often been misinterpreted by scholars Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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who cannot accept that a text or passages of a text may simply and straightforwardly be encomiastic and who therefore imposed readings of irony instead of appreciating the text for what it is. The scope of this small volume is vast, starting as it does with Pindar and Homer and concluding with the contemporary poet Christopher Logue. One might wonder whether such a long temporal scale can ever rise beyond mere commonplaces and survey-like summaries, but the answer is a clear affirmative: Burrow provides us with a witty, coherent argument that successfully traces the overall employment of encomia in poetry from antiquity to today, with the clear focus, as we would expect from Burrow, on the Middle Ages. Admittedly, the sections on encomia in antiquity are rather short and simplify the complex situation of praise in Greek and Latin literature. For instance, he does not mention problematic encomia such as Lucan’s praise of Nero, and he might have stressed the necessary gaps and simplifications. Yet, the overall structure of the book is straightforward since it is chronological, and benefits from Burrow’s helpful guidance; he never leaves the reader in doubt where his argument is going or how it relates to the preceding and subsequent chapters. Beginning with Pindar and Homer, Burrow recollects that praise was an integral part of Ancient Greek literature that transcended all genre boundaries and thus could be found in lyrical poetry, epics, panegyrics, and biography alike. Since Greek and, later, Roman literature was exceedingly encomiastic (or its opposite, invective) in nature, the European Middle Ages with their heavy reliance on classical literature inherited this important mode of telling and incorporated it into their vernacular literature. Yet, from the seventeenth century onward, this primacy of praise has declined, which is, according to Burrow, the reason why modern scholars and readers fail to acknowledge this device when dealing with medieval texts. Why, then, was praise so important in antiquity? The first chapter, devoted to the “poetics of praise,” discusses the rhetoric and theorizing of praise, of which the most important source was Aristotle’s Poetics. For Aristotle, poetry can be either praise or invective. This distinction suggests not a gradual scale but a clear-cut opposition; there is no inbetween or gray area of uncertainty. Again, the situation is simplified, however: Burrow does not mention that Aristotle maintained that in tragedy, the prototypical hero should be between the extremes of being too good or too bad; in this context, praise and invective are put into perspective. Obviously, the Greek philosopher was also responsible for the basic classification of rhetoric (in his Rhetoric), which was taken over



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by the Romans via Cicero’s De inventione and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (falsely ascribed to Cicero). The Latin terminology remained influential in medieval handbooks of the subject, of which the widely known classification of the genus iudiciale, the genus deliberativum, and the genus demonstrativum (the Greek epideictic genre) is taken. The object of praise could be virtually anything: an individual with his or her outstanding deeds, outward appearance, character traits, but also animals, plants, cities, countries, or monuments, which is achieved by the stylistic device of amplificatio or auxesis, the “magnifying” of the person or thing in question. Although praise is not restricted to poetry alone—it can also be part of prose treatises, biographies, orations, etc.—poetry is traditionally the genre most closely related to eulogy. This is exactly the view stated by such medieval theorists as Matthew of Vendôme, John Garland, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, who all interpreted Aristotle’s theory in their rhetorical treatises, stressing the primacy of praise that finds its employment by means of hyperbole and amplification. Hermann the German’s translation of the “Middle Commentary” on the Poetics by Averroes into Latin maintained that all tragedy was a carmen laudativum, a view that remained influential in the Middle Ages. Vincent of Beauvais, for instance, observed, as Burrow’s summarizes, that the function of poetry was “to make virtue attractive and vice repellent” (18). Thus, the Aeneid is meant to praise Aeneas, the Heroides either praise someone or blame him or her. Against this backdrop of rhetorical theorizing, the main part of the book focuses on numerous examples of praise in Old and Middle English literature. Burrow is aware that generalizations about the context of Old English writings must be treated with caution, as are the findings from texts that too often stem from religious contexts. Yet, the transmission via religious houses makes it highly plausible that the authors and composers were familiar with the theoretical background of praise, so that lauds like Cædmon’s Hymn or the Old English Genesis, which praise God by using expressions from epic/heroic poetry, may indeed be modeled on classical rhetorical rules. Apart from Christian encomia (as in Judith, Andreas, Daniel, or Juliana), secular praise to contemporary individuals is rare, and the second major context of praise is within the heroic poems, of which Burrow gives most space to Beowulf. Indeed, one can find traces of the praise-blame dichotomy in this poem, which may be due to its transmission via Christian communities. Burrow’s interpretation of Beowulf is particularly perceptive, which consists of close readings and links style and content with the overall context of the poem.

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Burrow discourages skeptical readings of Beowulf’s overestimation of his abilities and instead suggests that these are “measures of Beowulf’s superiority to the speakers” (60). The problem of tackling Middle English literature in the following chapter is exactly the opposite of the Old English corpus: here, the number of texts is so large that it is difficult to limit the selection. However, Burrow makes a pertinent choice of texts: he gives The Owl and the Nightingale as an example of praise of an individual, touches upon the court poets John Skelton and William Dunbar as professional laudatores, singles out the laudes Mariae of Hoccleve, Dunbar, and in the Pearl poem as Christian examples of praise, before he turns to “historical” narrative poems, notably Layamon’s Brut, the alliterative Morte Arthure, and the Wars of Alexander. Whereas the Brut is strongly auxetic or encomiastic throughout, Arthur and Alexander in these poems are often regarded as objects of criticism. Once more Burrow warns us not to read too much into a text; one should accept that Arthur is praised more than he is criticized in the Morte Arthure and that criticism of Alexander goes hand in hand with his glorification. The analysis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight yields one of the most important insights of the book: praise becomes “voiced” and distributed across the characters’ varying views. Thus, the court, the Green Knight, and Gawain himself evaluate his actions as either praise- or blame-worthy, depending on what is acceptable from each party’s point of view. A similar voicing can be found in Chaucer, especially when fictional characters evaluate each other—for example, in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer displays the widest scale of the different types of praise of all the Middle English poets discussed by Burrow, ranging from wholehearted individual praise in The Book of the Duchess, the self-reflexive metatreatment of the matter in the House of Fame, where Aeolos’s two trumpets either praise or slander, to Troilus and Criseyde, in which Criseyde is praised despite her actions. Burrow questions ironical readings of the knight and Theseus in “The Knight’s Tale” and instead suggest that the two characters should be accepted as they are—the knight as a model member of his class, Theseus as negotiating from a difficult position between the young lovers and old Egeus. That literary praise has declined since the seventeenth century is tackled in the penultimate chapter with reference to Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Wordsworth’s Prelude, all of which display a completely different understanding of praise to the medieval understanding, one that is embedded in moral and allegorical contexts and becomes increasingly ironic and satirical. One modern exception is



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Christopher Logue’s War Music, modeled on the Iliad, which still maintains something of the encomiastic air of classical and medieval poetry. In his concluding chapter, Burrow summarizes that there are different subgenres of praise: here-and-now praise of contemporaries, professional praise as in the case of the court poets, religious praise, praise in narrative poems to serve didactic purposes, and love praise as a rhetorical commonplace. Although Burrow does provide some valid reasons for the decline (change in warfare, in kingship, in audience; especially the decline of public rhetoric), I think he may have overlooked another, very important, one: the decline of poetry in general. With the gradual loss of the dominant role of poetry in literature and society, the traditional basis for praise was lost as well. Is it inappropriate to praise a book on praise? John Burrow’s Poetry of Praise is—and I say this without a sense of irony or sarcasm—an excellent discussion of the topic for medievalists: concise, coherent, well written, and well argued, which indeed succeeds in heightening our awareness of encomia and auxesis in medieval literature. Eva von Contzen Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Martin Carver, Catherine Hills, and Jonathan Scheschkewitz, Wasperton: A Roman, British and Anglo-Saxon Community in Central England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009. Pp. x + 372. 2 color, 71 b/w illustrations, and 45 tables.

Wasperton is a detailed report and analysis of the archaeological excavation, conducted from 1980 to 1985, of a Romano-British and AngloSaxon cemetery in Warwickshire, near the village of Wasperton, situated between Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick. The cemetery was used from the fourth to the seventh centuries, thus spanning the period when the Anglo-Saxons supplanted the Romanized Britons as the culturally dominant group in what eventually became known as England. The cemetery contained 241 graves (215 inhumations and 26 cremations) of Romans, Britons, and mostly Anglo-Saxons. The graves were relatively low status, befitting the agricultural community that Wasperton was at that time. A number of the graves contained grave goods, though no spectacular finds along the order of the treasures of Sutton Hoo, Mound Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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1, were made. The excavation was done under duress, for the fields in which the graves lay were being strip-mined for their gravel. Later analysis of the rescued material involved such methods as radiocarbon dating, stable isotopes, bone analysis, and analysis of oxygen and strontium isotopes, as well as stratification analysis and analysis of metals and textiles. Though little in the way of bone survived, the comprehensive work produced reliable and significant results that can tell us much about the interaction of the early Anglo-Saxons and the Romanized Britons. The book’s lead author, Martin Carver, has compiled work and summarized findings of his colleagues, a team that includes not only those listed as coauthors, Catherine Hills and Jonathan Scheschkewitz, but also specialists who performed the scientific analyses mentioned above. Scheschkewitz’s 2004 dissertation on the Wasperton cemetery laid the groundwork for the later analysis. Wasperton is moreover a hybrid print/ digital book, for the book often refers readers to websites where specialist information is presented in a detail not possible in print. The volume is also replete with photographs, drawings, maps, and tables. The analysis of the site comprises approximately two-fifths of the book, with the remainder dedicated to a catalog describing each of the graves and their grave goods, if any. Wasperton offers a rewarding read for those who approach it with patience and attention to its technical detail. Its findings are revisionary, with important implications not only for archaeology but also for Anglo-Saxon studies in general. What makes the conclusions possible is not only the presence of materials that help in fixing the cultural orientations of many of those interred or cremated (cremations pots and grave goods demonstrably Roman or Anglo-Saxon in style) but also the stratification of a number of the graves (where a later grave cuts into an earlier one). The oxygen isotope analysis, which revealed the geographic origins of the deceased, was also crucial for determining that some people where born in the Mediterranean region, suggesting their identity as Romans rather than Romanized Britons. The sequencing of the graves thus suggests much of significance about how the culturally diverse peoples might have interacted. A passage from Carver’s concluding remarks is worth quoting here as a forceful expression of the significance of Wasperton’s cemetery: The message from their cemetery is that British continuity and Germanic intrusion . . . are both probable. The result of the encounter [bespeaks] more of coexistence and interaction than of ethnic cleansing. If the variations in burial practice are variations in ideology and allegiance, then the style of burial shows



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not continuous immigration but who is winning the argument. Political alignment is a driving force of thought, even at village level. (140)

Carver tempers this somewhat, lest Wasperton’s model lead to overblown conclusions. As he says, If the vocabulary of the grave structures, orientation, furnishing, and dress offer multiple references, then multiple references may well be the text of the message. To remain obsessed, as many are, by whether a mortuary attribute does or does not refer to Christianity, ethnicity, or status is to assume a priori that any of these things mattered to the burial parties then in the way they clearly do to many archaeologists and historians today. If we credit and re-empower the burial party with its own agenda, we might be surprised how little their feelings and sense of duty coincide with what later history found important. What we are being offered is a chronicle of changing perceptions, at family level, by people who may or may not have been aware of their future role as historical actors. This might be a disappointing conclusion for students of history, but is an exciting prospect for students of people. The object of excavating a cemetery is not to classify its community but to release its many voices.

In other words, we may not be able to generalize about how Roman Britain morphed into Anglo-Saxon England based on localized data. Since my specialties lie within medieval literature and language, I must allow archaeologists to evaluate Wasperton’s impact on their own discipline. All I can say is that I found the analysis compelling and thorough. In my mind questions linger about how these archaeological findings dovetail with linguistic evidence. As people working in the corollary disciplines of archaeology, history, and linguistics realize, conclusions drawn can lead in different directions. Compelling archaeological evidence is mounting for the gradual assimilation of Britons and Anglo-Saxons, but linguistic evidence cannot easily be reconciled to it. Simply put, if “coexistence and interaction” were indeed widespread, one would expect more of an impact of the Briton’s Celtic language on English than the evidence reveals, something along the model of the later assimilation of Norse words into English occasioned by the lengthy coexistence of Scandinavians and English in the wake of the Norse invasions of the ninth and eleventh centuries. Wasperton wisely avoids the attempt to present its evidence as anything more than local. Robert Boenig Texas A&M University

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Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon, eds., The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of the Soul. Papers Read at the 2007 Summer Meeting and the 2008 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Studies in Church History 45. Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K., and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 2009. Pp. 454. 11 b/w illustrations.

Notions and disputes about what happened to souls after death influenced and flavored debates between Eastern and Western traditions, were vital to the Reformation, and ordered the spread of the Christian religion beyond Europe. Obviously, the Christian church’s ideas about the afterlife have ever been central to its thought and possibly played a role as well in the faith’s spread. Bede reported that a sixth-century pagan compared human life to a swiftly flying sparrow in flight from a darkened to an illuminated hall and then again to a darkened one. Light, however momentary, offered a reason to convert. Thirty essays by ecclesiastical historians grace this ponderous tome whose central theme embraces the impact of belief in the afterlife on the church’s history and evolution and the manifold ways in which that belief has impinged on and been reflected in the lives, expectations, and aspirations of Christians across the centuries. By considering the whole chronological and geographic spread of the church’s experience, these authors, both senior and junior, seek to highlight the current excitement of scholarly study of the afterlife. Frequently questioned are such deeply held assumptions as the late development of purgatory in Christian thought, the divorce between the living and the dead in the Western tradition after the sixteenth century, or the importance of postdeath salvation in successful modern evangelism. Analysis of individual contributions being beyond the scope of a brief review, a sampling of topics considered will give some idea of the enormous and enormously interesting field considered. The span is both local and global, serious and humorous, the coverage focused and broad. They include eschatology and Creation; the Last Judgment; the theme of death in Augustine’s sermons; Anglo-Saxon and Byzantine notions of purgatory, hagiography, and soteriology; salvation among the Visigoths; the afterlife, its geography, and apparitions or revenants (ghosts); the judgment of the soul in Irish tradition; commemoration; the harrowing of hell; Colonial American piety; Chinese (Confucian), Korean, African, and Maltese views; eighteenth-century antiheathen Anglican theology; Evangelican Premillennialism; nineteenth- and twentieth-century angelology; and twenty-first-century views of the afterlife in York. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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After R. N. Swanson’s introduction, the contents follow: Fr. Young, “Naked or Clothed? Eschatology and the Doctrine of Creation”; J. Laffin, “What Happened to the Last Judgement in the Early Church?”; E. Martin, “Timor Mortis: The Fear of Death in Augustine’s Sermons on the Martyrs”; M. J. dal Santo, “Philosophy, Hagiology and the Early Byzantine Origins of Purgatory”; P. A. Booth, “Saints and Soteriology in Sophronius Sophista’s Miracles of Cyrus and John”; A. O’Hara, “Death and the Afterlife in Jonas of Bobbio’s Vita Columbani”; J. Wood, “Individual and Collective Salvation in Late Visigothic Spain”; Sarah Foot, “Anglo-Saxon ‘Purgatory’”; L. Brubaker, “Byzantine Visions of the End”; C. Kostic, “The Afterlife of Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy”; Y. Papadogiannakis, “Michael Glykas and the Afterlife in Twelfth-Century Byzantium”; R. N. Swanson, “Ghosts and Ghostbusters in the Middle Ages”; C. Rider, “Agreements to Return from the Afterlife in Late Medieval Exempla”; S. Ryan, “Fixing the Eschatological Scales: Judgement of the Soul in Late Medieval and Early Modern Irish Tradition”; C. Burgess, “‘An Afterlife in Memory’: Commemoration and its Effects in a Late Medieval Parish”; C. Warr, “Performing the Passion: Strategies for Salvation in the Life of Stefana Quinzani (d. 1530)”; D. Bagchi, “Christ’s Descent into Hell in Reformation Controversy”; L. Sangha, “Revelation and Reckoning: Angels and the Apocalypse in Reformation England, c. 1559–1625”; A. Chastain Weimer, “Heaven and Heavenly Piety in Colonial American Elegies”; A. Cambers, “‘But Where Shall My Soul Repose?’: Nonconformity, Science and the Geography of the Afterlife, c. 1660–1720”; P. Rule, “The Chinese Rites Controversy: Confucian and Christian Views on the Afterlife”; F. Ciappara, “Strategies for the Afterlife in Eighteenth-Century Malta”; S. Handley, “Apparitions and Anglicanism in 1750s Warwickshire”; R. Strong, “Rescuing the Perishing Heathen: The British Empire versus the Empire of Satan in Anglican Theology, 1701–1721”; A. Finch, “‘In Their Madness They Chase the Wind’: The Catholic Church and the Afterlife in Late Choson Korea”; M. Spence, “The ‘Restitution of All Things’ in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Premillennialism”; G. Byrne, “‘Angels Seen Today’: The Theology of Modern Spiritualism and its Impact on Church of England Clergy, 1852–1929”; M. F. Snape, “Civilians, Soldiers and Perceptions of the Afterlife in Britain During the First World War”; D. Goodhew, “Life Beyond the Grave: New Churches in York and the Afterlife, c. 1982– 2007”; P. Gifford, “African Christianity and the Eclipse of the Afterlife.” Raymond J. Cormier Longwood University

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Leah DeVun, Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time: John of Rupescissa in the Late Middle Ages. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 255. 4 b/w illustrations.

The Franciscan John of Rupescissa (Jean de Roquetaillade, ca. 1310–ca. 1365) is well known to students of medieval apocalyptic thought, with critical editions of two of his most-important eschatological writings appearing in the last fifteen years.1 Rupescissa’s name is also a familiar one in the history of alchemy. His description of the quintessence, an alcohol-based remedy produced by the distillation of various plant, animal, or mineral substances, has long earned him praise as the inventor of medical chemistry. Yet, before DeVun, no scholar had examined both of these aspects of Rupescissa’s work. In this concise, erudite book, DeVun puts together the two halves of John of Rupescissa, discovering key convergences between his seemingly disparate interests and, along the way, raising important questions about the meanings of nature and religion in the later Middle Ages. DeVun demonstrates conclusively that Rupescissa’s interest in alchemy was directly linked to his apocalyptic sensibilities. Rather than separate out the scientific and the religious aspects of Rupescissa’s thought, DeVun instead argues that what she dubs naturalism was central to the friar’s apocalyptic vision. Convinced by scriptural exegesis, nonbiblical prophecies, visions, and astrological calculations that the torments of Antichrist were imminent, Rupescissa nonetheless insisted that humans, fortified with alchemical remedies, could weather apocalyptic disasters, fight and defeat the forces of Antichrist, and survive to create a new, more perfect world in a literal millennium to come. In chapters 2 and 3, DeVun lays out Rupescissa’s apocalyptic scenario, a vision heavily influenced by Joachim of Fiore’s tripartite view of history, particularly as appropriated by the Spiritual wing of the Franciscan Order. Rupescissa’s eschatology was also deeply shaped by his own experiences, as DeVun vividly recounts. No fan of the worldliness and excesses of the clergy of his time, Rupescissa’s publicizing of his own prophetic visions eventually resulted in his arrest in 1344 and imprisonment for virtually the rest of his life in the most trying of circumstances. In chapter 4, DeVun turns to Rupescissa’s alchemical writings, in particular to his Liber lucis and De quinta essentia, in which the friar presents his readers what DeVun calls “apocalyptic alchemy.” She notes, for example, that in the preface to the Liber lucis Rupescissa points to Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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the tribulations the church must suffer under Antichrist (including the plundering of its temporal riches) and proposes alchemy as a solution to the church’s money problems. Similarly, in the De quinta essentia, Rupescissa offers the secret of alchemical remedies that could restore health and prolong life in the difficult days to come. Furthermore, argues DeVun, not only did Rupescissa’s naturalism serve eschatological ends, but it also looked back to divine inspiration at its source. Just as Rupescissa in his prophetic works had cited visions and a divinely inspired scriptural exegesis, he also told readers of the De quinta essentia that God had revealed natural secrets to him in order to protect the health of the church. DeVun devotes much of chapters 4 and 5 to a discussion of Rupescissa’s notion of the quintessence, another area, as she demonstrates, in which the friar’s religious and naturalist thinking blend. Rupescissa’s quintessence, although not the same as the Aristotelian fifth element of which the heavens were composed, did nonetheless represent a bit of heaven on earth, in that it was, as Rupescissa put it, “incorruptible like the heavens” (70). According to DeVun, Rupescissa’s quintessence was thus not entirely natural but rather belonged to a category she calls “perfected nature,” a condition that enabled the elixir to work what Rupescissa repeatedly called “miracles” (73). In chapter 5, DeVun demonstrates the unique quality of Rupescissa’s alchemy, which goes well beyond the works of key sources like Roger Bacon, Arnald of Villanova, and Ramón Lull in gathering together eschatological and naturalistic themes. In chapter 6, DeVun underscores the deeply apocalyptic nature of Rupescissa’s alchemy through an analysis of the code names that he uses to refer to various alchemical substances and processes. DeVun examines three aspects of Rupescissa’s code names, all of which have deep religious resonances: his labeling of the quintessence our heaven or human heaven, his identification of Christ with the philosopher’s stone, and his use of blood imagery to describe stages in alchemical transformations. DeVun shares with her mentor Caroline Walker Bynum a conviction that metaphors reveal and structure deeper patterns of thought. Here, in the most speculative chapter of the book, DeVun skillfully parallels Rupescissa’s alchemical code names with passages in his prophetic writings to demonstrate his conviction that alchemy had an important place in salvation history. Although DeVun’s ostensible subject is the connection between Rupescissa’s eschatology and his alchemy, she continually raises larger issues about the meaning of nature in the friar’s works. In chapter 7,

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examining Rupescissa’s use of astrological theory to predict the arrival of Antichrist, DeVun argues that the friar envisioned nature as a book written by the creator. Although Rupescissa evidently never used the phrase Book of Nature, he employed the Joachite term concordances (used to describe the relationship between the Old and New Testaments) to speak of the essential agreement between nature and divine Scripture. In addition, as DeVun shows, Rupescissa several times suggested that human beings, through alchemical pursuits, could improve upon and perfect corrupted nature on earth, in effect turning the alchemist into a miracle worker of sorts. In short, DeVun argues against seeing Rupescissa’s “naturalism” in any sort of standard Weberian narrative of progressive “disenchantment” through an advance of science; rather the world of nature was itself made more sacred in Rupescissa’s work. DeVun’s final chapter examines the fate of Rupescissa’s ideas over the next several centuries, during which his writings circulated widely in manuscript and print. Despite her careful bringing together of two seemingly different aspects of the Franciscan friar’s opus, however, DeVun is forced to admit that, by and large, those interested in matters apocalyptic read Rupescissa’s prophetic works and not his alchemy, while alchemists ignored Rupescissa’s eschatology. Having argued so forcefully that Rupescissa must be understood as a whole package, DeVun appears to be a little uncertain what to make of the fact that his readers did not draw the same conclusion. Rupescissa’s reception by contemporary readers seems to undercut DeVun’s more forceful assertions that “what modern historians perceive as disparate intellectual disciplines actually made up a coherent body of knowledge in the fourteenth century” (99). She suggests, finally, that Rupescissa’s ideas may ultimately lay behind the “distinctly radical Joachite flavor” of the Paracelsian “vision of the future” (163). I suspect, however, that DeVun is right about ideas of nature and disciplinary boundaries in the later Middle Ages. Historians of late-medieval astrology have identified a number of figures whose works blend astrology and prophecy in precisely the manner that Rupescissa does. And more studies with the careful attention to nuance, language, and metaphor that DeVun’s book shows are likely to reveal more, and not fewer, complexities in the relationship between “science” and “religion” in medieval Europe. In sum, DeVun has written a splendid book about medieval alchemy and apocalyptic prophecy that is truly a pleasure to read. Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time will be an essential item for anyone hoping to understand the history of science and religion in the later Middle Ages.



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Note   1. John of Rupescissa, Liber secretorum eventuum, ed. Robert E. Lerner and Christine Morerod-Fattebert (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1994); Jean de Roquetaillade, Liber ostensor quod adesse festinant tempora, ed. Clémence Thévenaz Modestin, Christine Morerod-Fattebert, André Vauchez, et al. (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2005).

Laura Ackerman Smoller University of Arkansas, Little Rock

Sten Ebbesen, Topics in Latin Philosophy from the 12th–14th Centuries: Collected Essays of Sten Ebbesen, Volume 2. Ashgate Studies in Medieval Philosophy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. x, 244.

This book by Sten Ebbesen of the University of Copenhagen is the followup to Greek-Latin Philosophical Interaction: Collected Essays of Sten Ebbesen, Volume 1 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), and it explores, like its predecessor, the history of logic and semantics. Whereas the first volume is broader in scope, dealing with the “connections and/or differences between Greek and Latin theory and scholarly procedures, with special emphasis on late antiquity and the Middle Ages” (i in the first volume), the second volume deals “with issues in twelfth-century logic and semantics,” which mainly means the development of a terminist approach to logic (chapters 1–6), and “with the ‘modist’ philosophers of the late thirteenth century” (chapters 8–12) (vii in the second volume). Chapters 7 and 13 are centered around Albert the Great and on Buridan, respectively. Albert the Great was once thought to be a link between the terminist and the modist approaches (which he is not, according to Ebbesen), and Buridan stands for a revival of the terminist tradition in Paris. Volumes 1 and 2—volume 3 is already announced—both draw from the author’s rich production of papers between 1981 and 2005 (with the slight difference that volume 1 also has two completely new papers and one based on an earlier study). This has made it possible to create a very coherent book on the two important topics of terminism and modism. Combined with the author’s skill to explain these rather complicated issues in a vivid and clear fashion, we think that this book is a Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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good means of exploring these topics. However, students may want to use the excellent chapters that L. M. de Rijk and J. Pinborg contributed to the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge 1981) on terminism (chapter 7, “The Origins of the Theory of the Properties of Terms,” 161–173) and modism (chapter 13, “Speculative Grammar,” 254–69), respectively, as an additional introduction. According to the structure of the book, this review will first deal with terminism and then with modism. L. M. de Rijk defined a terminist logic is as “a logic of the terms considered as functional elements in a (verbal) context.”1 Ebbesen illustrates this with the following example: If you have two sentences like (1) Man is an animal and (2) Animal is a genus, then to avoid fallacies, you have to understand that animal in sentence 1 stands for some individual, while in (2) it stands for the “form of animal—i.e., the significate of the word, not any spatiotemporal particular” (5). The Latin word for stand for is supponere, and therefore a theory of supposition is at the center of terminism (or suppositionism, 19). In sentence 1, animal has suppositio personalis, whereas in sentence 2 it has suppositio simplex. So it is part of the terminist program to investigate the exact functions or properties that the terms have or can have in different contexts. This procedure means that things are becoming more complicated. But the terminist program also brings about an important simplification in comparison to a comprehensive theory of signs, because the term sign, in most cases, entails a relation to the cognitive powers of the recipient, which makes the sign relation triadic.2 Supposition theories, in contrast, focus on the dyadic relation between the term and that which it stands for. Supposition theory, due to its simplicity, is not only helpful in solving sophisms or fallacies (as in the example with animal). It is also used as “a method of stating the truth-conditions of sentences” (7). Take for example the sentence Every man will run. This is grammatically correct, but “if we wish to uphold the belief that Every man will run is a logically well-formed sentence, we must infer from the occurrence of the future tense in the predicate verb that every man has not past tense” (ibid.)— just as in the sentence laborans sanus erit (the ailing [man] will be well) we infer from sanus that laborans is masculine. What Ebbesen shows in a conclusive way is that the terminist approach has roots that are independent of the study of the Ars Nova (Analytics, Topics, Elenchi), and at one point he even says that the modistic theory “was much more congenial to Aristotelian logic” (10). As sometimes happens when new instruments are discovered, the old problems



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are being dropped. And some of the old sophisms with which the Logica Nova could not deal very well were simply dropped. This brings us to modism. Ebbesen says, “I am not convinced modism and suppositionism are incompatible, but they represent so different approaches to semantics and logic that it is no wonder occupation with one of them was usually at the expense of the other” (10). Pinborg is of the same opinion, but he adds that “the entire modistic theory of semantics obviously belongs to a type of semantics in which sense, not reference, is the focal point.”3 This explains why, as Ebbesen says, reference-related problems were solved by the modists with the old supposition theory (10 sq.). What makes modism so complicated and so promising is its endeavor to find similar structures on the levels of thoughts, signs, and things and to interrelate these structures. The starting point were modi significandi—as signs are a logician’s primary subject. But these modi significandi were said to follow modi intelligendi and modi essendi. By analyzing the modi significandi, the modists were optimistic to find out about the structure not only among signs but also among thoughts and things. “Modism seemed to hold promises of a unified system of grammatical, logical, epistemological, and ontological analysis” (10). To explain this, in chapter 8, “Concrete Accidental Terms,” Ebbesen uses the difference between concrete accidental terms (cats) like something white (album) and abstract accidental terms (aats) like whiteness (albedo). The modists assume that aats and cats “signify the same” (128), but under a different mode of being (122). Albedo signifies some property absolutely, whereas album signifies the same property as being in something (121). A problem that arose from this theory was that, if the truth of the sentences Socrates is white and Whiteness is a color and the falsity of the sentences Socrates is whiteness and Whiteness is white is to be explained with modi significandi, these modes have to be mutually exclusive (123). If the modus essendi of the abstract was “not as in a subject” and the modus essendi of the concrete was “as in a subject,” there would be no mutual exclusion (125). The famous modist Boethius of Dacia, in this case, deviated from modism by saying “that although it is impossible to conceive of a subjectless accident, albedo may signify an accident as subjectless” (126)—just as one half (dimidium) can be signified but not conceived of without the other half (nec tamen unum potest intelligi praeter alterum). A genuinely modistic solution was developed by Radulphus Brito and John Duns Scotus: First, they insisted that there is no “modally neutral name” for the property that is the subject of modification and that we

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might—in the case of white/whiteness—just call the unmodified form of whiteness (130). Second, they declared that the mode of being of album is ut est in subiectum and that the mode of being of albed is ut est essentia distincta (ibid.). This ingenious move leads to a mutual exclusiveness of whiteness and something white, and at the same time it preserves the connection between the two, namely through the (slightly opaque) unmodified form of whiteness. Having thus studied Ebbesen’s wonderful explanations and discoveries, we have to admit that modism remains much harder to understand than terminism. Maybe the reason is that the modistae located things like whiteness, or universality in general, on the level of being, whereas from an Aristotelian perspective they can only be found on the level of the intellect. But if all three levels (signs, thoughts, and things) are to be structured in a highly similar way, a process like abstraction would create unwanted discrepancies. What modism did definitely attain through resorting to the “Avicennian notion of common natures, each with several expressions called modes of being,” was a strong epistemological optimism: “There is something, we can know it, and we can communicate it” (181). Terminism’s approach, in contrast, in its limitation to the question of supposition, is very modest. But it is also very effective. Let me conclude with an example: Realists like Paul of Venice are going over long pages to show that the sentence Socrates says something wrong, uttered by Socrates, has a true adequate significate (adaequatum significatum) but is nevertheless wrong (because only a proposition that has a true adequate significate and does not contradict itself is true). William of Ockham takes the easy path by referring to the rule that no part can stand for the whole of which it is a part (Summa Logicae, III, 3, 46). After confirming that this case does not meet the requirements for an exception to this rule, he judges that something wrong cannot stand for the whole sentence. But as this is the only sentence Socrates utters (according to the case), it is not true that Socrates says something wrong. So the sentence in question is wrong.

Notes   1. L. M. de Rijk, Logica modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic II/1 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967), 117. See also S. Meier-Oeser, “Terminismus,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 10 (Basel: Schwabe, 1998), 1004–1009, here 1005.   2. See also S. Meier-Oeser, “Signifikation,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 9 (Basel: Schwabe, 1996), 759–95, here 766.



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  3. J. Pinborg, “Speculative Grammar” in Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, and J. Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 254–69, here 264.

Michael Renemann Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Susan Einbinder, No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion, and the Memory of Medieval France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. 280.

Susan Einbinder’s book Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France appeared in 2002 and quickly became a landmark of scholarly, sensitive inquiry into the cultural politics and poetics of medieval religious violence. In No Place of Rest, Einbinder has once again produced work that takes us deep inside the cultural lives of diaspora Jews in medieval Europe. These Jews were poised between worlds: between cultural assimilation and religious ostracism, between great wealth and precarious dependency, between intellectual achievement and the abjection of enforced expulsion. Einbinder’s elegant, often sophisticated, and calmly argued book takes as its main focus the expulsion of the Jews of France in 1306 and the way in which this expulsion was represented, rethought, and made sense of in the literature of following generations of European Jews. While the expulsion of 1306 was not the first such expulsion—notably the French Jews’ cousins in England had been expelled by Edward I in 1290 while yet earlier expulsions had taken place from numerous English and French towns (e.g., Bury St Edmunds 1190) and provinces (Gascony 1287)—Einbinder’s book suggests that in fourteenth-century France there developed a culture of Jewish expulsion and recall that culminated in the general decree of expulsion of 1394. Einbinder’s reading of these expulsions traces how universal themes and generic imagery of liturgical poetry was used by Jews to connect religious history with local detail, suggesting that liturgical poetry allowed later medieval Jews “to read all subsequent tragedies as echoes of earlier prototypes” (6). The great strength of Einbinder’s work is that she is not interested in providing a one-dimensional view of the terrible abjection of medieval Jewish life. On the contrary, her book reveals the highly literate, educated milieu of Jewish life in the diaspora, which Einbinder shows could be a “witty, Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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cultured world of luxury” (7), privilege, and elite cultural practices alongside political and very real difficulties of survival. The book is organized as five chapter-length case studies. Chapter 1 is an in-depth study of Isaac B. Abraham HaGorni, a refugee of the 1287 Gascon expulsion and then the 1306 French expulsion, whose poetry has been identified, in twentieth-century criticism, as “unintellectual,” the writings of a debauched, vagrant libertine far removed from the lofty philosophical, scientific, and religious worlds of medieval Jewish culture. Einbinder offers an intriguing reassessment of HaGorni, demolishing previous readings of his poetry as “Victorian, Romantic, and religious” (19); Einbinder argues that HaGorni’s self-representation as a drunkard locates him in Gascon culture and its “cultural stereotypes” (27); the conceits of wandering in his poetry were not a sign of his being a troubadour but rather reflect the aesthetic and liturgically inflected presentation of the postexpulsion wanderer. Einbinder delves into HaGorni’s literary spats with his contemporaries, which shows that, far from being a lonely outsider in his cups, HaGorni was profoundly engaged with Jewish literary culture and astronomical/scientific culture, the world of “rational learning” (36) from which Jewish historiography has dispossessed this fascinating figure. Chapter 2 introduces some little-known texts, Hebrew pantograms that reveal the ways in which Jewish poets “experimented with the commemoration of catastrophe” (38). Pantograms, “in which every word of a poem either begins with the same letter or contains that letter” (39) have, like HaGorni’s poetry, been disesteemed by literary scholars, but Einbinder shows how tragedy was ideally suited to such complex poetic, highly rhetorical forms. Chapter 3 sketches the history of the “forgotten sheep” of the French expulsions, Jews from the Comtat Venaissin (the region around the city of Avignon) whose “liturgical memories” in manuscript poetry move medieval suffering into “mythical, cyclical time” (63). Einbinder follows several manuscripts through the later Middle Ages and early modern period, showing how the memory of expulsion followed the Jews in their cultural artifacts through the Iberian peninsula to north Africa. Einbinder concludes here that exile experiences reconstituted themselves “in the image of the world that had rejected them” (77), with expulsion and resettlement understood in diverse ways by different communities. Chapter 4 moves into the history of medicine, in particular the verse versions of the Esther story by Crescas Caslari, formerly of Narbonne and expelled in 1306. Crescas’s “romances,” as Einbinder terms them, are within traditions of Provençal Purim literature and Iberian liturgical



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poetry, although they have been largely forgotten in favor of Crescas’s version of a Galenic dietary, the Regimen sanitatis. Einbinder sets out to show how “vernacular romance would have appealed to medically sophisticated male listeners as well as to women and children” (89), which is hardly a surprise to those familiar with the circulation of vernacular romances in France; Crescas’s medical knowledge about diet and cuisine finds its way into his florid descriptions of feasting and boozing. This is a particularly strong part of Einbinder’s book, at which Esther’s story of victimhood and survival dovetails with the French Jews’ dispersal, preservation of learning, and nostalgia for luxury. Chapter 5 continues the medical theme, and also the subject of the biblical Esther, with an examination of Jacob B. Solomon HaTzarfati’s writing in the aftermath of the plague of 1382, in which he lost his daughters Sarah and Esther. Einbinder describes how Jacob’s Evel Rabbati (“Great Mourning”) idealized Esther’s death via religious paradigms, a fairly straightforward commemorative text, but it is also, Einbinder argues, part of “an ongoing debate among Jewish physicians regarding the nature of the plague epidemics and the ways their communities might ideally respond to them” (113). The book closes with “Refrains in Exile,” which chapter considers the poetry of French exiles in northern Italy in the wake of the 1394 expulsion from France. This is followed by an epilogue, which brings the themes of the book together, describes the challenges Einbinder faced in writing the book, and gestures toward a theory of “memory repressed” at work in the writings considered here, painful recollection “peeking through walls built to bar it from conscious recall” (161). Einbinder’s book is beautifully clear, well written, and cogently organized, both telling a convincing overall story and narrating a host of contextualized, specific stories. The translations from the Hebrew are elegant (and the Hebrew is reproduced with admirable clarity) and bring much understudied medieval Hebrew literature into the scholarly domain. This book could easily be tackled by undergraduates reading in history, medieval studies, French or Jewish studies, and related disciplines. No Place of Rest, especially in the epilogue, speaks eloquently for the pleasures and rewards of manuscript-based research, and much of the book’s power comes from attention to details of manuscripts’ circulation, rewriting, and survival. Einbinder’s book redresses the overemphasis seen in much related scholarship on the eleventh- and twelfth-century horrors of Crusade, suicide, and ritual murder, showing instead how the cultural politics of suffering took on rich, ambiguous, and intellectually engaged forms in the later period.

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The book’s focus is simple, narrow, and unapologetically detailed. However, Einbinder might have pushed her material further, and I would have liked to see the book make larger, bolder literary-theoretical claims for the ways of reading Einbinder propounds. While drawing on Paul Zumthor’s work in chapter 2, usefully suggesting that form dictates rather than follows meaning, Einbinder does not consider medieval or contemporary theories of memory, mnemotechnique, or trauma theory, all of which might have added to the broader import of Einbinder’s work. No Place of Rest is constructed, broadly speaking, on a psychological level, with memory as a kind of anomie that pokes through, asserts itself, rushes in, at unexpected moments; I would have welcomed comparing this with medieval aesthetic theories of memory, in which violence, trauma, and pain were highly valued, rather than disesteemed, as cues to intellectual development. However, No Place of Rest is a terrifically readable, enjoyable book, concise but expansive, specific but of great importance, and speaks eloquently for the ongoing blossoming of a Jewish studies that integrates Jewish writing with the contexts in which it was produced. Anthony Bale Birkbeck College, University of London

Ferdinand Feldbrugge, Law in Medieval Russia. Leiden and Boston: M. Nijhoff Publishers, 2009. Pp. xxv, 334.

The author, a professor emeritus for East European law at Leiden University, explains in the introduction that the ten chapters of his book are, in all but one case, previously written chapters of Festschrifte or conference papers. He hopes that the collection represents “a reasonably balanced survey of the rich tapestry of the law of medieval Russia.” He admits, however, that the book contains little about the content of medieval Russian family, commercial, and criminal law. Like most collections of previously written works, the book lacks the continuity and comprehensiveness of a newly written monograph. The book is, indeed, a collection of essays on ten fairly narrow topics. With a few exceptions they are all of high quality, and in one Feldbrugge’s mastery of all Russian primary and secondary sources particularly impresses. Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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Chapter 2 is one of the best short works on the origins of the Russkaia Pravda or Russian law, the most important legislative monument of the Kievan period. Chapter 3, the only newly written chapter, is an exhaustive study of the purported influences of Roman and Byzantine law on the Russkaia Pravda and other Kievan law; the author finds no significant influences. Chapter 5 deals with the popular assembly or veche and chapter 6 with the system of princely succession and inheritance in Russia, giving priority to the elder brother but reserving provincial cities for younger brothers and nephews. Chapter 7 is an original study of the role of treaties between princes and princes and between princes and cities as providing a “constitutional” framework for the medieval Russian polity. Chapter 9 is the best study in English to date of the legal foundations of the Novgorod-Hansa trade. Chapter 10 deals with medieval law in Georgia and Armenia and provides an interesting comparative perspective. Chapter 4, which deals with land tenure, is disappointing because it neglects to mention previous studies on private property rights in the Russkaia Pravda, other medieval legislation, and early judgment charters, wills, and deeds. Chapter 8 is a general survey of human rights throughout Russian history; it unfortunately fails to cite or address previous studies on procedural due process and procedural equality in the medieval period. The book, moreover, is not a comprehensive survey of medieval Russian law. In addition to the author’s admitted omission of the contents of criminal law, family law, and commercial law, he also omits analysis of such important legislative monuments as the Pskov Judicial Charter and Novgorod Judicial Charter. He also fails to address or even cite numerous articles by the present reviewer on these topics as well as on the influence of Byzantine law. He likewise fails to address Daniel Kaiser’s widely accepted theory of the evolution of law during the medieval period from a dyadic (bloodwite, ordeals, duels, and absence of judicial officials) to a triadic model (criminal penalties, adjudication by judges, and “rational” evidence, such as eyewitness testimony and documents). In the thirty years since Kaiser’s book appeared, one of the great challenges facing historians of medieval Russian law is to explain the origins of the triadic model. The author fails to consider the influence of Byzantine and canon law as a model for this process or to suggest any other model. George G. Weindhardt San Francisco, California

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Hillel Gamoran, Jewish Law in Transition: How Economic Forces Overcame the Prohibition against Lending on Interest. Alumni Series of the Hebrew Union College Press. Cincinnati, Ohio: Hebrew Union College Press, 2008. Pp. x, 196; tables.

Gamoran’s compact book explores rabbinic interpretations and rulings regarding the biblical prohibition against lending at interest from the first century a.d. to the present. The prohibition was stated, with variations, in Exodus 22:24, then Leviticus 25:35–38, and last in Deuteronomy 23:20–22, which banned the taking of interest (neshekh) on loans of money, food, or anything from fellow Israelites. Interest-bearing loans made to foreigners or non-Israelites was permitted, but rabbinic interpretations of the biblical law allowing the exaction of usury from non-Jews is beyond the scope of the book. The motivating reason behind the prohibition was to protect the poor, especially to prevent the enslavement of poverty-stricken debtors and their children. Business loans, which were not treated in biblical law, came to the fore in the Talmudic period in Palestine (ca. 7–200) and Babylonia (ca. 200–500). This period witnessed an increase in manufacturing and trade in oil and wine, with a concomitant demand for credit by farmers and tradesmen. Gamoran describes how rabbis sought to preserve biblical law without stifling the economy. They accomplished their task by crafting legal fictions permitting credit-type transactions, such as forward contracts, involving advance payment by the buyer for produce or goods delivered at a later date; mortgages, allowing the mortgager to enjoy the mortgaged house or field and its fruits for a year; and business arrangements, enabling an investor to lend to a working party, with both parties sharing any profits and losses equally. It was the risk borne by the investing partner that transformed these arrangements, which to all intents and purposes were interest-bearing loans, into licit transactions. There was also a debate over whether the working partner should be paid for his labor, which was required by the Mishna redacted in approximately a.d. 200. The vibrant entrepreneurial activities of Jewish merchants in the Mediterranean under Islamic rule and in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages raised myriad questions about the morality of transactions entailing credit. This development is known from the thousands of responsa, the replies of rabbis to specific questions, which survive from this period in their original form or in extracts. Among the more notable Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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responsa discussed by Gamoran are those issued by R. Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi), R. Abraham ben David of Posquières (Rabad), and R. Moses Maimonides (Rambam). According to the author, medieval rabbis, in response to economic imperatives, continued to create new subterfuges for the purpose of circumventing the biblical prohibition. With regard to advance payment, the buyer technically became the owner of the item at the time of the sale, which entitled him at the time of delivery to any appreciation in the item’s value above the sale price. The Mishna’s prohibition against charging for an item purchased on credit was easily circumvented by allowing the seller to include the charge in the sale price. Discounts for immediate payment were also sanctioned. Still, strong rabbinic opposition was mounted against credit sales, a mainstay of Jewish economic life in the Middle Ages, and authorities like Maimonides offered conflicting opinions. Ultimately, Gamoran points out, “the rabbis were well aware of the needs of business people, and, as long as they could avoid overt and flagrant transgressions of the law, they allowed credit sales among the Jews” (80). His point applies equally to rabbinic arguments justifying mortgage profits and the protections against loss afforded to investing partners. Yet his book—which assumes, first, the unquestionable morality of innovative credit arrangements employed by Jewish storekeepers, traders, and bankers during the last two thousand years and, second, the farsighted realism of rabbis who sanctioned these arrangements—stands more as an apologia than as a work of historical scholarship. Negative rabbinic rulings that may have inhibited credit transactions are treated as inconvenient obstacles that were ineluctably—and fortunately—overcome. Gamoran’s teleological approach, leading him to use terms such as interest, capital, credit, enterprise, market price, inflation, and risk as if there were no difference between their past and present meanings, will strike philologists and economic historians as bizarre. Gamoran’s command of the responsa literature is commendable, but his failure to provide detailed and nuanced historical contexts makes the import of specific rabbinic rulings extending or curtailing the biblical prohibition against lending at interest extremely difficult to fathom. Julius Kirshner University of Chicago

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James Gardner, Marco Girolamo Vida: Christiad. The I Tatti Renaissance library 39. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. xxviii, 464.

Gardner’s new edition and translation of Marco Girolamo Vida’s (ca. 1458–1566) epic poem on the life and death of Christ (first edition 1535) is a very welcome advancement in the study of Vida’s work. Gardner’s thorough review of not only the two existing prints that are believed to have been supervised by Vida himself (Cremona 1535 and Cremona 1550) but also of the only known existing manuscript (1532, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, Conv. soppr. C 8 1177) leads to a more accurate account of the text and represents a huge improvement over the 1978 edition of the same work by Gertrude Drake and Clarence Forbes.1 Drake and Forbes just presented us with a text and a few notes on their edition and a translation that did not take into account the Florentine manuscript. In addition to the six books of the Christiad, Gardner’s book also has a rather extensive introduction (vii–xxviii). Various notes on the text and translation can be found in the back of the book (379–90). Notes to the translation (391–440), a bibliography (441–47), and an index (449–64) round out this book, which all Vida scholars will find to be of great importance to them. In addition, the handy format of this edition will contribute to an increase in Vida’s general readership and make this masterpiece of Neo-Latin literature accessible to a broader audience again. The introduction covers many issues. At its beginning (vii–viii), Gardner makes a compelling case for reading the Christiad as one of the key poems of its time. A reading that only emphasizes Vida’s influence on Milton, for example, does not do justice to the achievement that the Christiad represents in its own right. The biographical sketch, however, also contained in the introduction, is too brief (viii–ix). Even if it is true that we do not know very much about Vida’s life, we do know more about his political life, his role in the Counter-Reformation, and in general his work beyond 1556 to his death.2 At the same time, Gardner’s sketch of Vida’s life once more makes apparent how much more research is needed in this field. For example, we would like to know more about Vida’s position during the papacy of Adrian VI or during the papacies of the successors of Clement VII. For it is interesting that Adrian VI, whose reign separated the papacies of Leo X and Clement VII, is not mentioned in Vida’s personal Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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afterword at the end of the Christiad (376 and on), whereas Vida honorably and gratefully acknowledges in exactly this passage the role that Leo X and Clement VII played in his work. Gardner’s remarks on the revival of ancient Latin epic poetry are very thoughtful and responsible. He makes clear the relationship between this kind of literature and the gospels in the Renaissance, and the place of the Christiad within this context (ix–xii). Great insights into the portraiture of Vida’s characters can be gained from pages xiii and on. Some of Vida’s personae really are very one-dimensional figures, created for the unmistakable sake of teaching simple moral lessons. The modern reader will find other characters more true to life. On the other hand, in his portrait of Christ, for example, Vida had to and intended to follow the exegesis of the gospels of his time.3 Vida avails himself of the opportunity to deviate from the gospels at times4 or, in accordance with contemporary theological opinions, to merge what he regards as parallel passages in the bible. Therefore, I would agree with Gardner that Vida could have done more in regard to shaping each and every individual character in the Christiad. But I would also stress that Vida went comparatively far in what he already did with the characters that appear on the stage of his epic poem. Also Gardner’s remarks on Vida’s dealing with contemporary art (xiv and the following) represent an interesting first step toward an overview of Vida’s use of the visual arts. Yet, one is missing a few words on other features of Vida’s poem, like ekphraseis, for example, and in particular on the series of Christ’s explanation of the friezes at Jerusalem’s temple in book 1 of the Christiad. From this point, Gardner could have broadened the pertinent discussion once more to emphasize also Vida’s achievements in comparison to his predecessors. Gardner’s discussion of Vida’s apparent lack of “ostentatious display of learning” leads directly into a deliberation of Vergil’s importance for Vida (xv–xxiii). And everybody would agree: Vergil is the most important role model for Vida as far as his being an epic poet is concerned. Just as Vergil, too, avoids, for example, any pretentious boasting of his own learnedness, Vida’s verses are full of quiet allusions and other discreet traces of deep knowledge and independent literary insight. I also could not agree more with Gardner when he says that sometimes there are really grandiose similes in the Christiad. At the same time, of course, Gardner is also right that Vida sometimes made very infelicitous choices in regard to his similes, producing great incongruities between the aspects that are serving as points of comparison and the subject at hand in the narrative of the storyline itself (xviii–xxi). Yet I would regard the

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simile of the cannon (xx and following) in Christiad 2.205–13 as belonging to exactly this category of infelicitous similes. Nicodemus is expelled from Jerusalem by the priests as a projectile is shot from a cannon because a rapid chemical reaction has taken place inside the cannon. But the simile continues. The cannonball wreaks havoc on the defenders of a city. And Nicodemus is not doing that. Are we to assume that this simile has some further meaning that is not expressed in the story of Nicodemus’s ousting from the council of the priests? Leaving the topic of Vergil’s influence on Vida, Gardner turns to the subject of the influence that Vida’s work exerted over other poets in both Latin and the vernacular languages (xxiv–xxvii). He stresses that Vida’s Christiad repeatedly served as a starting point for many authors who also wrote epic poems on the Passion of Christ. After the introduction, the six books of the Christiad follow. Gardner’s translation strives for a modern English idiom. Sometimes, however, Gardner’s efforts by necessity are not as accurate to the Latin as one maybe would hope for. Take 1.18 and the following, for example: “Illum ingens comitum numerus iuvenesque senesque / sponte sequebantur, rerum quos fama trahebat / undique collectos.” Gardner’s translation reads, “Following him was a throng of young and old alike, who had heard of his miracles and had come running from all directions.” The Latin word sponte (“voluntarily”) emphasizes that the people who followed Christ were not forced by anybody else to do that. This aspect is only implicitly expressed in Gardner’s English translation so that the emphasis on this aspect is lost. Another example would be 4.548. “Mei modo ne fiducia desit” is rendered as “as long as he believes in me.” The Latin is a jussive subjunctive that can be kept in English. And whereas I applaud Gardner for his unified translation of the phrase “nec mora” in 1.282 and 1.286 (“without delay”), I am missing an English equivalent for “nec mora, nec requies” in 2.140. “Translation of poetry is always a hazardous enterprise,” Mario Di Cesare wrote in his 1980 review of Drake and Forbes’s edition.5 Overall, however, Gardner’s translation manages to give us a fairly accurate picture of the Latin original. The “note on the text and translation” (379–81) acknowledges the help of especially James Hankins and also John Gagné in the preparation of the text Gardner included in his edition (380). The edition of the text is based with good cause on the assumption that the 1532 manuscript was corrected by a second hand before the 1535 edition was printed. James Hankins sensibly weighs the possible solutions to the question whether the manuscript indeed was written or corrected by Vida himself and whether this manuscript really was given to



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Clement VII as Di Cesare believed.6 Wherever the manuscript and the two editions deviate from one another, this new text has made prudent choices and at the same time presents the evidence accurately, as for example the treatment of 6.929 shows (algida in both editions, aspera, not corrected, in the manuscript). It would have been more convenient for the reader, however, if the “Notes to the Text” (383f.) and the section “Variants of the First Redaction” (385–90) would have been merged into one apparatus. This apparatus then could have been given below the Latin text itself. Pages 391 to 440 include “Notes to the Translation.” Justin Stover and Richard Tarrant are credited with contributing parallels between the Aeneid and the Christiad as well as between the Bible and Vida’s epic poem (380). In essence, this collection of helpful remarks on various issues of the context of the Christiad and literary parallels and allusions contained in Vida’s work could, of course, be expanded further. For example, in 1.5 we find the word puer. This word, in my opinion, really starts the dialogue between the biblical story of Christmas, the Christiad, and Vergil’s fourth Eclogue, whereas the expression te duce in 1.11 (391) seems to be only a secondary allusion to Eclogues 4.11. Gardner’s notes, however, make it abundantly clear that, at some point in the future, we will need a full commentary on the Christiad. Gardner’s bibliography (441–47) represents progress in so far as he manages to expand Di Cesare’s list of editions and includes literature on the Christiad that has appeared since Di Cesare’s bibliography.7 The list of secondary literature, however, is the weak point of Gardner’s book, since it contains studies written in English only. A very helpful index (449–64) concludes Gardner’s book, which will undoubtedly promote further the renaissance of a masterpiece of NeoLatin literature that currently is known to too few specialists only. The book is well made and well edited. Typographical errors like the missing “be” in line two of the first paragraph of page 379 or the “1551” on page 383 (on book 1, note 6) are rare exceptions. Once more the editors of the I Tatti Renaissance Library have added a very important book to their series.

Notes   1. Marco Girolamo Vida’s The Christiad, Latin-English ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).   2. For a somewhat more extensive biography, see also, for example, P. Hibst, Marcus Hieronymus Vida:
De dignitate reipublicae, Über den Wert des Staates,

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Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar (BAC 57) (Trier: WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2004), 26–33. Also see the biographical sketch in S. Rolfes, Die lateinische Poetik des Marco Girolamo Vida und ihrer Rezeption bei Julius Caesar Scaliger (BzA 149) (Munich: Saur, 2001), 15–25. Both accounts of Vida’s life make it very clear that a modern biography of Vida that would merit this title still needs to be written. On this claim, also see T. Gregory, From Many Gods to One: Divine Action in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 67.   3. One the problems that the divine and human sides of Christ’s existence posed for Vida was in regard to the task of creating a traditional epic character; see T. Gregory, From Many Gods to One, 80–89.   4. See R. F. Glei, “Jesus als Gottmensch in lateinischer Bibelepik,” in ed. G. Binder, B. Effe, and R. F. Glei, Gottmenschen: Konzepte existentieller Grenzüberschreitung im Altertum (BAC 55) (Trier: WVT, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003), 133–54.   5. Mario Di Cesare, review, Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 800–803. Also see Gardner’s own remarks on page 380 and the following.   6. See Mario Di Cesare, Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 27; and see also his Bibliotheca Vidiana: A Bibliography of Marco Girolamo Vida (Florence: Sansoni, 1974), 243.   7. Di Cesare, Bibliotheca Vidiana.

Wolfgang Polleichtner Ruhr-Universität Bochum

John M. Hill, The Narrative Pulse of Beowulf: Arrivals and Departures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. 119; includes works cited and index.

Professor Hill’s Cultural World in Beowulf (University of Toronto Press, 1995) remains one of the most useful background/context studies of the poem for students and scholars alike (if you haven’t already, see also his Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ethic: Reconstructing Lordship in Early English Literature, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). This new, slim volume adds some additional valuable points for the reader who, aware now of the perplexities of what to our time may seem an exotic context, now wishes to engage in additional close reading much in the tradition of Edward Irving. As a whole the book does not deal so much with “narrative pulses” as with the tensions between and complementary appreciation of gravitas (serious, judicious, realistic understanding of life and its problems) and celeritas (youthful, vigorous pursuit of achievement), as well as such ideas Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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as reciprocal loyalty. The term pulses is an interesting one, implying Paterian experience of the work as both locus of major ideas and source of incisive aesthetic experience. Association of pulses with arrivals and departures makes contributory but not exclusive sense: despite its fairly simple fabula, Beowulf has more than its share of narrative complexities, and they respond to a number and variety of readings, including this one. The actual body of the book comprises five brief chapters and a conclusion adding up to ninety-four pages. Chapter 1, from which the title of the book comes, responds to the popular critique that Beowulf “lacks steady advance” (Klaeber’s phrase). Much of its drama, Hill argues, comes from the sociomartial tensions of warriors arriving on or departing from the scene, what they must say and do to negotiate successfully interactions and adventures, particularly in host-guest situations. Chapter 2 explores the specifics of formal and often indirect exchange that characterize such encounters as those between the Danish coastguard and the arriving Geats or between Beowulf and Hunferð at Heorot. (By the way, despite editorial persistence in the Unferð spelling, the manuscript spells the name Hunferð with an initial H; one may check it easily in Zupitza’s facsimile edition, though I can assure you it’s in the original. I suspect the practice comes from an attempt at a particular allegorical reading of names that has become customary.) Pride and honor remain both central and suspect in the heroic world. Chapter 3 treats specifically the gravitas (Hroðgar) and celeritas (Beowulf) issue while also addressing kinship, loyalty, and one’s relative masculinity with respect to the exhibition of those traits. It closes by denying “effeminate irrelevance” to Hroðgar’s tears, as well it should: Charlemagne and Ruy Díaz would have understood them perfectly. Chapter 4 further explores the celeritas question with respect to Beowulf and the possible tensions produced with his own lord, Hygelac, once he has served and in a sense bonded with King Hroðgar through his elimination of the Grendel-kin. In one of the best points in this book, Hill argues that Beowulf, in recounting his experiences among the Danes, diffuses any concerns Hygelac may have over the hero’s loyalties by rearranging the details of his adventures to shift stresses and by formally delivering up all its spoils to his own lord. Chapter 5 treats the arrival of the dragon and Beowulf’s departure to fight it and his subsequent death and funeral. Hill observes how, in the second part of the poem, we find no entertainments such as we found in the first (harping, hawking, racing), but we find much more speech, necessary again to deepen loyalties before Beowulf’s battle and, for Wiglaf, to establish new ones if he is successfully to become the Geats’ new

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lord. The “two-generational, Danish model of kingship is here replaced . . . by a comprehensively extended one”: king becomes chief kinsman of both comitatus and people, locus of both celeritas and gravitas, “proposer, and disposer” of “kinship amity” (90). Arrivals and departures have “galvanized a highly dramatic, narrative poem about heroic tensions, surprises, hope, and joys . . . then sorrows” (90). No real surprise in that final point: fairly typically adventure/quest stories must follow similar structures that focus on liminalities either physical, spiritual, or cultural (i.e., comings and goings). The conclusion adds this special historical/contextual observation: Hill notes, “Wessex and Mercia and other Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are in a world of sometimes hostile arrivals and departures . . . even the killing of kings . . . often hard-won peace and nightmarish incursions from the sea if not from marsh and mere. Perhaps the narrative pulse of Beowulf courses strong from the times of Offa, Alfred, and beyond” if the poem in fact aims to provide the two good models of kingship, “Danish and Beowulfian” (91). This alighting point supports other strong, traditional readings of the poem as trustworthily, symbolically, culturally yet complexly didactic and, in the form in which we have it, rather later than earlier in date. The volume as a whole gives a readable, tenable, if not entirely comprehensive, largely theory-free (if one prefers such, as many early studies scholars do) reading of Beowulf—about as much as any intrepid reader may hope, if not all he or she may wish. E. L. Risden St. Norbert College

V. A. Kolve, Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. xxxiii + 368. 153 b/w illustrations.

V. A. Kolve’s Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II is a “sequel” (xv) and worthy successor to his influential and award-winning Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (Stanford University Press, 1984). The quarter century that has passed between the publications does not bespeak neglect and belated resumption of interest, for the recently published volume contains much work done in the intervening years. Kolve includes new work together with conference presentations and Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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contributions to Festschriften produced during that interval and also two pieces published earlier than the first book. This arrangement can generate some minor distractions and seeming inaccuracies—like referring to a twenty-year-old book as “recent” (198) or maintaining that “The Friar’s Tale” has not been taken seriously as a religious work (66)—true enough in 1988 but no longer so in 2009. But these are small issues in a fine work of scholarship. The new volume employs the same methods as its predecessor: analysis of medieval art (mostly manuscript illuminations) as a means of setting Chaucer’s work in a cultural tradition that today is difficult to access. As in the case with the first volume, read so long ago, I found Kolve’s analyses compelling. They challenged me to see anew passages I had passed over too quickly and confirmed in me my long-held belief that the more you investigate seemingly minor details in Chaucer the more you find. In chapter 1, “Looking at the Sun in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” originally published in a 2003 Festschrift honoring Henry Ansgar Kelley, Kolve concentrates on two dreams—Criseyde’s dream of an eagle snatching her heart, which she has near the beginning of her relationship with Troilus, and Troilus’s dream of a savage boar embracing Criseyde, which he has near its end. To contextualize these dreams, Kolve notes the violent sexuality of images used in medieval artificial mnemonics as an analogue and analyzes artworks involving the exchange of hearts among lovers, boar hunts, and eagles (particularly their legendary ability to gaze unharmed at the sun). Chapter 2, “From Cleopatra to Alceste: An Iconographic Study of The Legend of Good Women,” was first published in 1981 in a collection of articles edited by John P. Hermann and John J. Burke, titled Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry. Kolve modulates his iconographical analysis of images from those depicting Cleopatra dying from her asp bites through the so-called transi tombs (which depict those interred as both whole and decayed bodies) to illuminations of Alceste’s mythological resurrection. He thus demonstrates Chaucer’s intended organizing principle behind the fragmentary Legend of Good Women, whose first story is that of Cleopatra and intended last that of Alceste; the order honors Alceste, whose “body does not feed worms, and [whose] destiny transcends the grave” (65). Chapter 3, “Man in the Middle: Art and Religion in ‘The Friar’s Tale,’” was originally delivered as the 1988 Biennial Lecture of the New Chaucer Society and published in its annual, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, in 1990. Kolve identifies the easily overlooked carter episode in “The Friar’s Tale,” in which a carter first curses and then blesses his struggling horses, as the tale’s dominant visual image. By analyzing iconography of

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hay carts (both real and allegorical) and also people journeying along roads (with the road indicative of the pilgrimage of life), Kolve argues that the carter represents “man in the middle,” between salvation and damnation. As he forcefully puts it, “and so we have at the middle of ‘The Friar’s Tale’ an action that leads nowhere—an action complete in itself, serving as an emblem and an extension of the plot that carries it—in order that the plot might implicate us all” (92). Chapters 4 and 5, both new works, look at “The Merchant’s Tale” through the lens of the calendar pages that initiate so many fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Books of Hours. Such calendar pages depict the zodiac sign and also the traditional “labor” or “occupation” for a given month. Chaucer’s christening his tale’s two main characters January and May invited Kolve to do this. Chapter 4, “Of Calendars and Cuckoldry (I): January and May in ‘The Merchant’s Tale,’” focuses primarily on the occupations of the two months. That of January is feasting indoors by the fire. The two-faced god Janus is usually encountered on these calendar pages, sharing with Chaucer’s character not only the joy of feasting but also a concern for the past and the future (for he is often depicted with the closed door of the old year and the open door of the new). The occupation of the month of May is by contrast out of doors—often falconry and sometimes gathering spring branches as part of the maying rites. Maying, traceable back to a pagan past, involved fertility rites and, according to disapproving medieval moralists, sexual activities, thus setting the tone for May’s dealings with Damian up in the tree. Chapter  5, “Of Calendars and Cuckoldry (II): The Sun in Gemini and ‘The Merchant’s Tale,’” concentrates on the zodiac sign of May, the twins (Gemini). In a masterful analysis, Kolve traces how the convention of depicting the twins Castor and Pollux as male wrestlers raised anxieties about male same-sex desire. Illuminators consequently attempted to cover up their nakedness and, often, change the gender of one of them, thus transferring the act of wrestling to amorous activity. This tradition of eroticized outdoors wrestling suggests the “struggling” so important to May’s explanation of what she and Damian are doing up in the tree. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the Jesse Tree tradition in manuscript illumination, in which Jesse, father of David and ancestor of Christ, is depicted with a tree growing out of his loins that has branches representing his descendants. This tradition contextualizes May’s embrace of the tree in which, by implication, his heir has just been conceived.



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Chapter 6, “Rocky Shores and Pleasure Gardens: Poetry Versus Magic in ‘The Franklin’s Tale,’” delivered as a memorial lecture honoring J. A. W. Bennett and first published in 1990, concentrates on the magician’s cell or study in that tale. Though Kolve includes pertinent medieval images in his argument, iconography in this chapter is less central, more ancillary, than in the others. He argues against previous critics who maintain that the clerk of Orleans shows in his study to the visiting prospective customer Aurelius mechanical contrivances rather than “real” magic. He then makes a connection between that magic and Chaucer’s “own craft” (198)—a poetics of illusion. Chapter 7, “‘The Second Nun’s Tale’ and the Iconography of St. Cecilia,” published in 1981 in New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, a volume edited by Donald M. Rose, concentrates on depictions of Saint Cecilia’s martyrdom in a cauldron with a fire underneath in which she sits naked, awaiting beheading. The eroticism of the saint’s naked body evokes associations of medieval baths with brothels. Since she remains unaffected by the heat, the “coolness of Cecilia’s chastity protects her from the fiery bath as surely as it protected her from Valerian’s demands on the night of their wedding” (214). Chapter 8, “God-Denying Fools: Tristan, Troilus, and the Medieval Religion of Love,” first delivered in 1996 as the Presidential Address of the New Chaucer Society, a lecture I was privileged to attend, works its way only slowly to an analysis of Troilus and Criseyde. Kolve lingers among depictions of the fool of Psalm 52, who says there is no God, charting the evolution of that fool from a madman to a court jester, and investing him, contrary to medieval beliefs, with some human dignity. Kolve grafts onto these pictures his own anxieties about his career-long efforts to explicate texts and images from a past Christian culture whose beliefs he does not share. Tristan and Troilus, who follow love as a god, thus denying God, evoke the fool of Psalm 52. Like the poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl, and like the Chaucer who wrote Anelida and Arcite, all poems that reference their opening lines as they end, Kolve, by beginning and ending his book with treatments of Troilus and Criseyde, comes full circle and brings us back where we started. But by the journey’s end, we bring home a suitcase full of interesting images and compelling ideas. Robert Boenig Texas A&M University

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Paul Meyvaert, The Art of Words: Bede and Theodulf. Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2008.

For thirty years, Paul Meyvaert has been active among a small group of scholars who have transformed and deepened our knowledge of the greatest Anglo-Saxon man of letters, Bede, and our understanding of the intellectual environment in which he flourished in the early eighth century. Bede is well known through the substantial body of his surviving works, but much about the circumstances of their composition and the part Bede played in the monastic community of Wearmouth-Jarrow has remained obscure. Meyvaert’s contribution to the removal of some of the obscurities has been immense and is well represented in the eleven essays in this variorum collection, all but one of them published in the years 1995 to 2006. The first seven deal with a web of interconnected themes relating to Bede’s life and work; the final four examine aspects of the Carolingian world of Theodulf of Orléans, in many ways Bede’s intellectual heir. The volume opens with an early but important essay (1979), “Bede and the Church Paintings at Wearmouth-Jarrow,” in which Meyvaert argues from textual interpretation that the church paintings that Bede said had been imported to Northumbria were full-sized finished panels, not small sketches to be worked up into paintings. It is the Codex Amiatinus, however, that figures prominently again and again in these essays, especially in relation to the opening quire of that great Bible. By far the most important is the substantial “Bede, Cassiodorus and the Codex Amiatinus” (1996), in which Meyvaert has made the most impressive case, first for the identification of Wearmouth-Jarrow’s copy of an “Old Latin” version of the Bible as the one prepared for Cassiodorus in Italy during the seventh century, and second, for that Bible’s influence on the illustrations in the opening quire of the Codex Amiatinus. While other scholars have taken issue with details of Meyvaert’s case (and it must be admitted that some of the specific problems are ultimately unsolvable), none has yet offered a convincing refutation of the basic argument. The inclusion in Amiatinus of the celebrated “Ezra miniature”— arguably based on a picture in the above-mentioned Old Latin pandect—forms an important strand in Meyvaert’s argument for the dating of Bede’s commentary In Ezram (“The Date of Bede’s In Ezram and his Image of Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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Ezra in the Codex Amiatinus,” 2005); in Meyvaert’s view, it would not have been written without the stimulus of such a picture. Amiatinus features also in the seminal article “Bede’s capitula lectionum for the Old and New Testaments” (1995), in which Meyvaert shows that a long list of biblical capitula, known to have been composed by Bede but supposed lost, in fact survive at least in part, though not all have been identified yet. The Codex Amiatinus carries some; others came to be used in Theodulf’s Bibles. The final Amiatinan article, “Dissension in Bede’s Community Shown by a Quire of Codex Amiatinus’s” (2006), is more controversial. Meyvaert paints us a willful and even irascible Bede, who objects to the content and structure of the first quire of the Codex Amiatinus (with its various illustrations, diagrams, and introductory texts) and gets his own way, to the extent that one bifolium has to be cut into two and its parts rearranged. The speculation is brilliant and informed—if not finally persuasive. Other articles collected here include “Discovering the Calendar (annalis libellus) Attached to Bede’s Own Copy of De temporum ratione” (2002), in which Meyvaert concludes that copies of Bede’s work on computus circulated with his Easter tables and calendar attached. His argument—that the work “stands apart . . . as the product of [Bede’s] classroom teaching” and that Bede firmly believed that teaching computus was more effective done orally than from reading books—is persuasive and takes us as near as we may get to a picture of Bede in the classroom. To all his researches and musings, Meyvaert brings the essential combination of a perceptive understanding of Latin and a first-hand knowledge of monastic practice. What his work strives toward above all is an illumination of the “real” Bede, the teacher who was also a scholar and therefore always a student too and whose life was a mission—to elucidate and communicate (and thus to reaffirm) the truths of Christian history. In a fascinating preface to this volume, Meyvaert reviews his own scholarship and in so doing communicates something of the joys, and pitfalls, of the academic process, pointing out a few instances where he had overlooked the obvious in his earlier researches. What characterises Meyvaert’s work throughout is a sense of personal engagement and an enthusiasm that may verge on the polemical but is always tempered with a generosity of spirit. These are the very qualities that Bede himself so evidently possessed. Richard Marsden University of Nottingham

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Ulrich Müller, Ingrid Bennewitz, and Franz Viktor Spechtler, eds., Neidhart-Lieder: Texte und Melodien sämtlicher Handschriften und Drucke. Salzburger NeidhartEdition, 1–3. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Vol. 1: pp. XV, 516. Vol. 2: pp. XIV, 340. Vol. 3: pp. 646. Ill.

Neidhart, formerly erroneously identified as Neidhart von Reuental (which is only the name of his poetic protagonist), can be counted among the most creative and innovative Middle High German poets from the first half of the thirteenth century. But until today we have not been able to identify clearly and absolutely which songs he had composed himself and which are the result of his imitators. Neidhart presents himself primarily within a rural setting, and in his Summer Songs he enjoys erotic success with the peasant girls, whereas in his Winter Songs the situation is rather grim for this knightly lover, disregarding some songs in which he joins everyone in the pleasantries of outdoor activities typical of the winter season. Anglophone research has also paid some attention to Neidhart, but since we have always been lacking a solid historical-critical edition, the entire research situation has been rather hampered. The present three-volume edition represents a major new beginning in Neidhart scholarship and also in the fundamental approach to the editing of all medieval texts. Neidhart spawned a whole wave of imitators far into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the figure of Neidhart von Reuental even entered the early modern stage, fighting or ridiculing his archenemies, the peasants. In this new edition every text that can be associated with Neidhart, whether authentic or not, is incorporated in order to make the complete corpus available to research. That means, oblivious to possible cost constraints, the editors really present all the texts available in manuscripts and early modern prints in a synoptic fashion, each song text reproduced in all its various manuscript and print versions. The first song, for instance, “Owe sumerzit,” is extant in ms. R with six and in the mss. s, w, c, and d with seven stanzas. The edition of the Neidhart songs begins with a complete listing of those contained in volume 1 and then offers the notes as copied down in mss. c 94 and w 5, and thereupon presents each song version according to each individual manuscript or early modern print. The differences in the number of stanzas can be even much more extensive, as the subsequent songs demonstrate over and over again. A dramatic example would be “Bis willekomen, sumerwetter suess!” (B 52–58), which has Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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been preserved in ms. B with seven, in ms. C (here under the name of a Her Goeli) with twelve, in fragmentary ms. G with five, and in ms. c with eleven stanzas. To decide which of these stanzas can really be attributed to Neidhart, and which might have been creations by successor poets, would constitute a tantalizing, probably impossible, question. Hence, in light of “New Philology,” we should really distance ourselves from this kind of positivist thinking geared toward identifying the “genius” poet all by him- or herself, irrespective of the public forum at court where literary and musical performance was, in reality, much more a matter of communal activity than in the modern era. Whereas the first volume contains all those Neidhart songs that have been preserved in parchment manuscripts, volume 2 contains those preserved in paper manuscripts. Most pleasantly, the editors also opted to reprint the woodcuts that accompany these songs. In the third volume the editors address the critical issue of authenticity, comparing the differences in all manuscripts, highlighting variances, explaining the appearance of the texts in the manuscripts, the various scribal hands, the condition of the individual manuscript, and citing comments by previous editors. Only at the end of the third volume do we finally come across the basic information concerning the manuscripts and early modern prints, along with the relevant research literature. Importantly, the editors provide the essential concordances for each song, which makes it much easier to understand the differences among the numerous text versions. Here we are also granted insight into the critical issues underlying this new edition, a discussion that might perhaps have been better placed at the beginning of the first volume. We learn, for instance, how long, in fact, Neidhart’s songs experienced popularity, being handed down, copied, adapted, and transformed for many different purposes from ca. 1210–1220 down to ca. 1668. Next follows a thorough discussion of the value and problems of all previous Neidhart editions, culminating in the conclusion that the complete parallel edition of all texts somehow associated with Neidhart, except the plays staging Neidhart Fuchs, represents a absolute necessity, despite the high print costs. The editors explicitly underscore that there are no absolutely reliable criteria to determine the authenticity of any of Neidhart’s songs or the lack thereof. For the present edition, Müller, Bennewitz, and Spechtler opted for the principle of the base manuscript, against which all other text versions are measured, without any prejudice against those, however. Finally, the editors explain the principles of their editing policy and conclude with a comprehensive bibliography, along with a discography,

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compiled by Ruth Weichselbaumer from 1953 to 2005. The volume is rounded off with a complete listing of all Neidhart songs, separated by the various base manuscripts (R, C, c, d, f, pr, s, w, z). For easier access to this edition, all songs are then listed in an alphabetical system based on the first verse of each song, followed by a listing of the song titles in volumes 1 and 2. The list of all manuscript and print call numbers, the list of abbreviations, a concordance of all songs in the present edition, separated by volumes, a concordance of the songs in the Haupt/ Wießner edition, in the Wießner edition, and a concordance of songs in the Beyschlag/Brunner edition complete this volume. A number of questions remain, of course, particularly for those who would prefer a simplified, finite decision regarding the authenticity of Neidhart’s songs. This edition is not all that easy to use, but the real conditions of the entire corpus escape all attempts to achieve such a goal. The editors present a most welcome, highly transparent system, and they have given up on older efforts to abstract, deduce, stipulate, or even manipulate what constitutes the allegedly “true and original” oeuvre of the Neidhart songs. In other words, this edition might ruffle some feathers among German philologists, but it certainly sets new standards and offers the complete manuscript and print record. Of course, the next step could, or should, have been to abandon the traditional print mode and to make this edition available online. But in the present stage, this reprint of all text variants seems to be the best option the editors could pursue and for which they have to be praised highly without any doubt. Albrecht Classen University of Arizona

David S. Peterson, ed., Florence and Beyond: Cultures, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy; Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy, with Daniel E. Bornstein. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2008. Pp. 518.

In the introduction to Florence and Beyond, editors Peterson and Bornstein discuss John Najemy’s formative years, giving particular attention to his time as a student, noting that Najemy’s publications have contributed to a deepening understanding of humanism and above all the Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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Florentine Renaissance. But Najemy’s contribution to the field has also been methodological, and his approach to textual evidence has always made a strong impact on his students: “All of his students will agree that above all John teaches how to read texts closely. An hour spent with him analyzing the dedicatory letter of The Prince or to a comparable passage is enough to convince anyone that there is more to the text than they ever imagined and that there is still more to explore” (30). Florence and Beyond is subdivided into four parts, each of which concerns a fundamental aspect of Najemy’s formation and scientific production. Part 1, “Orientations,” serves as a point of reference for the remaining studies in the collection: herein are chapters by Gene Brucker (“The Uffizi Archives, 1952–1987: A Personal Memoir”) and by Anthony Molho (“Hans Baron’s Crisis”). Brucker’s chapter records his experience with the extraordinary archives, and Molho examines the creation of Hans Baron’s seminal work, Crisis of the Early Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (1955), one of the most profoundly influential books in the field of European Renaissance studies over the past fifty-five years. Access to previously unknown documents and Baron’s private correspondence has allowed Molho to offer new interpretations for the book’s origins, demonstrating the extent to which Baron’s personal vicissitudes contributed to formulation of the ideas and vision expressed in Crisis. Part 2, “Culture,” opens with a chapter by James M. Blythe and John La Salle, “Did Tolomeo Fiadoni (Ptolemy of Lucca) Insert Civic Humanist Ideas into Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Kingship? Reflections on a Newly Discovered Manuscript of Hans Baron.” This essay explores whether Thomas is responsible for the manuscript’s interpolations, perhaps even preparing a second edition of the work, or if it was the revision of Tolomeo. The supremacy of the contemplative life and the possibility of reconciling studies humanitatis with Christian spirituality are explored in William Hyland’s chapter, “The Climacteric of Late Medieval Camaldolese Spirituality: Ambrogio Traversari, John-Jerome of Prague, and the Linea salutis heremitarum,” and Nancy Bisaha’s chapter, “‘Discourses of Power and Desire’: The Letters of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (1453).” Amy R. Bloch’s “Lorenzo Ghiberti, the Arte of Calimala, and Fifteenth-Century Florentine Corporate Patronage” and Margaret Haines’s “Oligarchy and Opera: Institution and Individuals in the Administration of the Florentine Cathedral” take on the topic of religious patronage—in particular with respect to the decoration of the baptistry of Florence and the construction of Santa Maria di Fiore. Saundra Weddle’s contribution, “Saints in the City and Poets at the Gates: The Codex

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Rustici as a Devotional and Civic Chronicle,” examines an underrated aspect of the famous “code” and engages with the humanistic debate on the active versus the contemplative life. Through the examination of documents from the Cadastre Florentine of 1427, Robert Black’s “Literacy in Florence, 1427” inspects the affirmations in Giovanni Villani’s Chronic regarding the schooling of the Florentine population. Part 3 of the volume, “Society,” examines the relationship between the family ties and politics. Father-son relationships are examined in Giannozzo Throttles’s chapter, “Dialogus consolatorius,” Giovanni Morelli’s “Memories,” and Chara Armon’s “Fatherhood and the Language of Delight in Fifteenth-Century Italian Texts.” Alison Brown’s “Women, Children and Politics in the Letters of Florentine Notary, Ser Pace di Bambello” analyzes letters sent from the notary public Bambelli Pace to Niccolò Michelozzi, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s secretary, in which father-son relationships in the fifteenth-century are highlighted, along with concerns of educating the young. Julius Kirshner’s contribution, “Dowry, Domicile, and Citizenship in Late Medieval Florence,” centers on the societal importance of marriage during that age and its political and economic value: the chapter examines in particular the role of lawyers, who negotiated spousal dowries, and on the oppressive societal roles ascribed to women, especially the pull between loyalties to their own families and those to their in-laws. Edward Muir’s “In Some Neighbours We Trust: On the Exclusion of Women from the Public in Renaissance Italy” discusses the delicate alliances between families of north-central Italian powerbrokers, all balancing on one prudent political marriage. Through analysis of two generations of the members of the Colonna family, noblemen of central Italy, P. Renée Baernstein’s “Reprobates and Courtiers: Lay Masculinities in the Colonna Family, 1520–1584” suggests that the formation of a kind aristocracy in sixteenth-century Rome resulted in a profound behavioral shift and the eventual demise of masculine hegemony; the thesis is ably demonstrated in a study of the warlike and dissolute behavior of Ascanio Column and his brother Marcantonio, who was strongly influenced by his wife, Giovanna of Aragon, and her significantly diplomatic dowry. Alison Williams Lewin’s “Age Does Not Matter: Venetian Doges in Reality and Depiction” concentrates its attention on the Venetian Republic, demonstrating the importance of the physical representations of important political personages like the doges. Part 4, “Politics,” opens with Teresa Pugh Rupp’s “‘If You Want Peace, Work for Justice’: Dino Compagni’s Chronic and the Ordinances of



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Justice,” dedicated to the reform of the Orderings of Justice instituted by Giano of the Beautiful One. Next is Susannah F. Baxendale’s “Alberti Kinship and Conspiracy in Late Medieval Florence,” which shifts our attention to the period immediately following the revolt of Ciompi (1378), which resulted in a considerable strengthening of Florentine oligarchical power; the study concentrates its attention on the case of the Alberti family, which fell victim to conspiratorial accusations. The three next chapters analyze the period in which Florence, though remaining a republic formally, was in fact governed by the Medici. Dale Kent’s “A Window on Cosimo de’ Medici, Paterfamilias and Politician, from within His Own Household: The Letters of His Personal Assistant, Ser Alesso Pelli” studies the letters of Ser Alesso and shows “the key of communication in the family’s acquisition and maintenance of power” (357) to Florence. Margery A. Ganz’s “The Medici Inner Circle: Working Together for Florence, 1420s–1450s” centers on several of the important but relatively unstudied families hostile to the Medici—the Acciaiuoli, the Pitti and the Neroni—with whom Cosimo was forced to reckon after returning from exile and reacquiring control of the city. Melissa Meriam Bullard’s “‘Hammering Away at the Pope’: Nofri Tornabuoni, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Agent and Collaborator in Rome” details a more specific topic—the role Nofri Tornabuoni, medical administrator of the bench to Rome, played in cementing an alliance between Lorenzo the Magnificent and Pope Innocent VIII in the 1480s. Finally, five chapters are devoted entirely to the Florentine “secretary” par excellence, Niccolò Machiavelli. Mikael Hörnqvist’s “Approaching the Medici: Machiavelli as Co-author of Paolo Vettori’s Ricordi of 1512” concerns itself with the memorandum Ricordi di Paolo Vettori al cardinale de’ Medici sopra le cose di Firenze, shedding new light on the period documented. Robert Fredona’s “Liberate diuturna cura Italiam: Hannibal in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli” analyzes the figure of Hannibal as it emerges from numerous of Machiavelli’s works, which sheds great light on the relationship between “virtue” and “fortune” in Machiavellian political thought. Another subject much-beloved by the Florentine secretary—the political role the papacy played in Italian affairs—is explored in David S. Peterson’s “Machiavelli and the Petrine Succession.” The book’s final two chapters discuss Machiavelli’s writings concerning the theatre: Albert Russell Ascoli’s “Clizia’s Histories,” which discusses the favor they enjoyed among intellectuals during the Enlightenment, and Humfrey C. Butters’s “Machiavelli and the Enlightenment: Humanism, Political Theory and the Origins of the ‘Social Sciences.’”

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The volume closes with a bibliography of John M. Najemy’s works and an index of names, indispensable to orienting the reader to the vast and rich panorama of available studies on the topic. Nicoletta Marcelli University of Florence

R. N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 579. 18 illustrations.

The author, a distinguished professor of medieval history at the University of Birmingham, exhibits a highly refined competence for both conducting and reporting on archival research. A glance at the richly elaborated, forty-three-page bibliography of source materials that mention indulgences in late-medieval England suffices to confirm this evaluation. It also provides the potential reader who picks up this massive volume of erudition a glimpse of what he or she may expect to discover in the book’s more than five hundred pages. In short, we find a fascinating and mainly positive account of Catholic penitential practices from approximately 1300 to 1547, when the abrogation of indulgences by the reformed church of Henry VIII took final hold in England. Those who recall “The Pardoner’s Tale” from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales will find the pardoner’s self-description borne out in much of what the author narrates: “Bulles of popes and of cardynales, / Of patriarkes and bishopes I shewe, / And in Latyn I speke a wordes fewe, / To saffron with my predicacioun, / And for to stire hem to devocioun” (prologue to “The Pardoner’s Tale”). Even after Henry VIII broke with Rome, English pardoners such as Harry Cleepulle continued, we discover, to solicit funds for London charitable institutions, though without appealing for obvious reasons to a “papal indulgence” (496). This book however is neither cynical nor anti-Catholic. The author shows that while pardoners enjoyed access to English congregations, there is no evidence to confirm that they mounted English pulpits (190). The author rather concludes that purveyors of indulgences occupied a place in the economic and sociological structure of English society that responded properly to the religious requirements of English Catholics (523). Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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The impressive evidence that the author has assembled from the holdings of English archives all in all confirms Chaucer’s characterization of the fourteenth-century outlook on indulgences. The book however unearths a sociological snapshot of late-medieval piety more than it recounts a history of the church’s theology of indulgences, even though the author admittedly attempts to supply the theological background that legitimated the practices he reports. What follows aims to supply the student of medieval history with a general account of the theological understanding that governed and continues to govern the church’s practice of granting indulgences. The church associates indulgences with the penitential spirit that Christian life requires. She teaches that Christ’s redemptive sufferings— his satisfaction—can spiritually benefit those members of his mystical body who are properly disposed for spiritual renewal. To understand how an indulgence works one should recall that one person can share in the good deeds of another person, even as Christians are instructed both to pray for and to help their brothers and sisters. The gift of indulgences gives concrete expression to the communion of saints. Charity is not produced by magic. No serious person ever thought that. Authentic instruction on how to benefit from an indulgence stipulates that one must possess true interior contrition for past sins and have already confessed these sins to a priest. No one excluded by grave sin from communion with God can expect to receive the total gift of his mercy. So Saint Augustine explains, in his De Trinitate, book 15, that it is not the same thing to remove the arrow and to heal the wound—“non est idem abstrahere telum, et sanare vulnus.” This means that it is one thing to forgive sin—to remove the arrow—and another thing to heal the wounds caused by sin in human nature. The practice of granting indulgences shows that sin entails more than the infraction of a divine rule. Since it disregards the in-built purposes of human nature, sin leaves man in a state of personal disorder. Sinful actions affect adversely the psychology and character of the whole person. Each sinner requires a remedial discipline that can redirect his or her human energies toward virtuous activity. The “temporal punishment” due to sin can be explained by sin itself. Saint Augustine famously teaches that every disordered action brings about its own punishment. Sin reduces the human psychological powers to purposes that fall short of human flourishing. Since this sinful deformation implies disordered attachments to created goods, Christian conversion ordinarily entails the willing acceptance of satisfactory works. These “penances” are required because of the very human need

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to order one’s affective life toward good deeds and away from bad ones. A sinner needs not only forgiveness but restoration, which implies a real change of life, the gradual elimination of evil within. Healing the wounds that sin causes in the human person exceeds our native abilities. By his Passion, death, and Resurrection, Christ accomplished full satisfaction for human sins: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). The sovereign dignity of Christ’s person means that his work possesses a kind of infinite value. Christ’s work is so great that the church announces a treasure trove— the thesaurus ecclesiae. Indulgences draw upon this spiritual treasure chest that contains the good works of Christ and the saints. The personal actions of Christ and the saints make up the thesaurus ecclesiae or “the treasury of satisfactions” (8). Because they form one body in the church, all Christians can participate in this spiritual treasure, which is augmented throughout the ages by the good deeds of holy men and women who themselves remain united with the suffering Christ. By bearing evils and practicing charity, each Christian becomes an active participant in healing the world, completing “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body” (Colossians 1:24). The author indexes this theme as “Treasury of Merits” (578) and shows that the concept was open sometimes to misunderstandings both popular and theological. In the church, everything exists in a communion of charity. This belief explains the canonical rule that the one who presides over the universal church on earth possesses authority to distribute the treasury of the church. The pope extends indulgences to those united in charity with him. When the Successor of Peter grants an indulgence, he exercises the “power of the keys.” In Quodlibetal Question II, q. 8, a. 2, Aquinas provides the biblical foundation for this prerogative of the Roman Pontiff: “Therefore, dispensation of this treasure belongs to the one who is in charge of the whole church; hence the Lord gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 16:19).” The author refers to this element of Catholic thought, although the theological argument leaves him skeptical (15). One may inquire how an indulgence can change our psychological dispositions. The church teaches that Christ’s love remains powerful enough to alter what the sinner himself did not have the occasion (or perhaps even the will) to do for himself. Because Christ is the very Son of God, the church recognizes the exceeding value that his sufferings



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communicate to every member of the church. An indulgence provides a concrete way to participate in his obedient love. Christ’s heroic love can overcome even the habitual sinner’s psychological resistance to godly living. Of course indulgences do not provide an excuse for spiritual laziness. Still, the duly pardoned sinner who rejoices in the gift of the Father’s mercy is made ready for ultimate communion. Accordingly, an indulgence can be obtained on behalf of the souls of the deceased. The church applies the indulgence to the faithful departed because the elect who await final purification belong to the one communion of the church. The Incarnate Son establishes a wide communication of divine goodness that can overcome whatever indisposition sin may leave in the living or the dead. Only the mystery of the Incarnation can explain such a wondrous exchange that animated so much of Catholic life in late-medieval England. The author’s assessment based on “spiritual commodity and comprehensible utility” (22) falls short. Christ’s service of obedient love explains indulgences as much as graces can be explained. Why is pardon for sin through an indulgence less burdensome than ordinary efforts at reform of life? Aquinas in the aforementioned text gives the reason: “the labor of Christ’s sufferings suffices” (QQ II.8.2). In this mystery of a “vicarious life,” the eminent satisfaction of Christ and the superabundant satisfaction of the Virgin Mary and the saints are communicated to the pilgrim Christian. The practices that the author sets forth in his massive collection of materials reveal the vibrant piety of late medieval England. The church continues to grant indulgences, although the occasions for receiving them mainly center on spiritual activities such as jubilees and pilgrimages. It is an advantage of this book that it makes known the devotion of English Catholics in the late-medieval period. Their Catholic devotion enjoys solid theological standing even when attached to eleemosynary offerings. The book will be most useful to graduate students and those who want to understand certain aspects of the church’s sacramental life. Romanus Cessario St. John Seminary

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Vasileios Syros, Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua: Eine Untersuchung zur ersten Diktion des Defensor pacis. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2007. Pp. x, 364.

Vasileios Syros’s debut book focuses, as the subtitle makes it clear, on the first discourse of Marsilius of Padua’s magnum opus. And yet the study remains immune to George Garnett’s recent criticism of political theorists overemphasizing the importance of the treatise’s first dictio.1 Indeed, the primary goal of Syros’s book is not to evaluate the overall historical significance of the work, its complex fate in the context of fourteenth-century ecclesiopolitical debates, or the interdependence of its two massive discourses. Instead, the author concentrates on a task of purely theoretical relevance: to examine the reception of Aristotle’s political ideas in the Paduan’s work. Insofar as it was the first discourse where Marsilius set out his views on the nature, origin, and function of the political community, the limited scope of this study remains justifiable in view of the author’s primary intention. The book’s rather brief introduction presents the reader with an ambitious methodological program, structuring the whole study “after the model of concentric circles” (5). Around the focal point of Marsilius’s core themes and problems, the author examines (a) the reception of Aristotle’s texts in the Defensor pacis, (b) the impact of medieval Aristotelian commentaries on Marsilius’s ideas, (c) the general historical background of the work, and (d) the relevance of other non-Christian sources to the Paduan’s thought. On the first point, the study attempts to present “a nuanced picture” of Marsilius’s interpretation of Aristotle and to explore how Marsilius “combined” the ideas of the Greek philosopher with those of other ancient authors, “such as Cicero or the Neoplatonists” (7). As far as Aristotle commentaries are concerned, the author wishes to investigate how certain concepts and questions in Marsilius’s thought were interpreted by his contemporaries, “especially those who belonged to the university milieu of Paris” (8). With regard to the historical background, the study plans to relate Marsilius’s “picture of the ideal political community” to “the political organization of the Italian city-states, and especially to that of Padua” (8). Lastly, Syros attempts to reveal important connections between the political ideas of Marsilius and medieval Jewish and Arabic authors (e.g., Moses Maimonides, Averroes) (8–9). Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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The study is divided into three main parts. The first part, “The Biographical Background” (17–44), offers “brief accounts” (11) of the lives and works of Marsilius of Padua, Albertino Mussato, John of Jandun, and Peter of Abano, whose influence on Marsilius’s political thought has been traditionally recognized by scholars. The second part discusses the methodological premises that lie behind the Paduan’s work. Here, Syros deals briefly with the reception of Aristotle’s teleology in the Defensor pacis (45–52) as well as with the medical background of Marsilius’s political theory (53–62). The final part of the book, which is also the largest, covers the first discourse’s central themes. In particular, here Syros analyzes Marsilius’s theory of the genesis of the political community (63–100), its structure and organization (101–42), the different types of constitutions (143–70), and the principles of legislation (171–220) and political rule (221–80). The book ends with a brief outline of directions for further research (281–86) and two appendixes: a list of biological metaphors in the Defensor pacis (287–92) and excerpts from the statutes of Padua (293–97). Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this well-written book is its sober and thorough look at the reception of Aristotle’s moral and political philosophy in the thought of Marsilius of Padua. In this regard Syros’s study stands unprecedented and is likely to provoke much intense debate. The matter is that the author successfully brings out a number of aspects in which the Paduan—a homo magis Aristotelicus quam Christianus, as the famous cliché portrays him—departs from Aristotle’s main principles and doctrines. First of all, there is a crucial methodological discrepancy between Marsilius and Aristotle. Whereas the Greek philosopher attempted “to construct a general model based on material deriving from rich empirical investigation,” Marsilius’s starting point was only “the disclosure of the causes of the illness of his time” (51). Regarding the formation of the first political communities, Syros argues that Marsilius is much more dependent on Cicero’s doctrine of the political function of rhetoric and relates the formation of the first communities to “the collective decision of the first patresfamilias, who gathered together after the advice of wise and eloquent individuals and were convinced of the importance of the political community” (282). Unlike Aristotle, the Paduan identified the end of the political community as self-sufficient life “in a material sense, as the provision of things that are necessary for life, and not as happiness and the metaphysical realization of the human existence” (282). Furthermore, according to Marsilius “the laws are not created by a single legislator, as pointed out by Aristotle, but rather stand as the result of the collective prudence and experience of

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many persons” (283)—hence the importance of Marsilius’s theory of, in Syros’s terms, the “sovereignty of the multitude.”2 However, the study is not confined to the comparative analysis of the political ideas of Marsilius and Aristotle. The author also questions the relevance of other non-Christian sources to the Defensor pacis. While it would be very difficult to imagine anything more than conclusions of purely hypothetical nature in this regard, Syros does manage to outline an intriguing parallel between Marsilius’s doctrine of actus immanentes and actus transeuntes and Moses Maimonides’s understanding of divine legislation (111–14). Although the author provides an extensive bibliography of secondary literature on Marsilius (311–57), it is a pity that the book offers very little discussion of it. For instance, Syros could have dealt in more detail with Ewart Lewis’s “‘Positivism’ of Marsilius of Padua”3 or Michael Wilks’s seminal Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages,4 both of which offer quite different perspectives to Marsilius’s theory of legislation. So too with regard to the primary sources Syros could have done better. Charles H. Lohr’s lengthy series of descriptions of the known Latin Aristotle commentaries—a good point to start at—is not even listed in the bibliography.5 Similarly, whereas Syros deals extensively with Peter of Auvergne’s and Thomas Aquinas’s works on Aristotle, Albert the Great’s pioneering commentary on the Politics is hardly mentioned throughout the book. And yet, whatever its minor shortcomings may be, the Rezeption is to be welcomed with much respect and attention. The study offers a clear, convincing, and challenging interpretation of the meaning and theoretical context of Marsilius’s political thought. For this reason, and because of its brave and novel comparative approach, Syros’s book is bound to be a must-read for scholars working on the history of latemedieval political thought.

Notes   1. George Garnett, Marsilius of Padua and “the Truth of History” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14, sqq.   2. Vasileios Syros, “The Sovereignty of the Multitude in the Works of Marsilius of Padua, Peter of Auvergne, and Some Other Aristotelian Commentators,” in The World of Marsilius of Padua, ed. G. Moreno-Riaño (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 227–48.   3. Speculum 38, 4 (October 1963): 541–82.   4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, esp. 151–229.



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  5. “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries, Authors A–F,” Traditio 23 (1967): 313–413; idem, “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries, Authors G–I,” Traditio 24 (1968): 149–245; idem, “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries, Authors: Jacobus–Johannes Juff,” Traditio 26 (1970): 135–216; idem, “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries, Authors: Johannes de Kanthi–Myngodus,” Traditio 27 (1971): 251–351; idem, “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries, Authors: Narcissus–Richardus,” Traditio 28 (1972): 281–396; idem, “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries, Authors: Robertus–Wilgelmus,” Traditio 29 (1973): 93–198; idem, “Medieval Latin Aristotle Commentaries, Supplementary Authors,” Traditio 30 (1974): 119–44.

Martin Ossikovski St. Kliment University

Maria Vassilaki, The Painter Angelos and Icon-Painting in Venetian Crete. Variorum Collected Studies Series CS892. Farnham, England; and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2009. Pp. 382. 219 b/w images.

What is an artist? Image makers exist in most societies, but image makers known and valued by their names are rarer, and associated especially with the postmedieval West. Through the painter(s) Angelos, Maria Vassilaki’s volume studies the emergence of the eponymous artist in fifteenth-century Crete. A body of over twenty panels, signed “Hand of Angelos” and attributed tentatively to around a.d. 1600, has long stood out among Cretan icons; in turn, the will drafted in 1436 by a well-to-do Candiote painter named Angelos Akotantos has stood out among the documents preserved in the Archivio di Stato in Venice. Early in her career, building upon mounting evidence reassigning the icons to the mid-fifteenth century, Vassilaki proposed that Angelos and Akotantos were in fact one and the same. With this, two discrete funds of evidence—the one visual, the other archival—converged in a dramatic, three-dimensional portrait of an artist in the crucial decades in which East and West, medieval and Renaissance, Byzantine and postByzantine, converged in Venetian-ruled Crete. This volume assembles sixteen of her articles devoted to the identity of Angelos himself and to the mid-fifteenth-century environment that incubated the Cretan school of painting and with it the eponymous Greek painter. Two of the articles were written anew for this volume, and seven are available Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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for the first time in English translations from the Greek. Together they offer an invaluable overview of current research on the crucial decades on Crete in which the legacy of Byzantium was fitted for its future in the early modern world. The first nine articles treat Angelos, opening with Vassilaki’s initial piece arguing the identity of Angelos Akotantos with the hand of the signed icons. Their identity, now widely accepted, may be impossible to prove. But it is also impossible to dismiss in the wake of her methodical alignment of the evidence, and it is this that matters most to her. Her dominant concern is with the definition of the Cretan artist. The power of her articles lies in the deftness with which she plays archival evidence on the one hand against surviving icons and their signatures on the other to evoke both the kind of professional practitioner who stands behind the works and in turn the kind of works that must have distinguished the painters today known only from the documents. Thus we learn in the second article and in the epilogue about further documentary data on Akotantos. The son and brother of painters, who taught painters and held out hopes that his issue—if male—would follow the same pursuit, he was at the same time literate and well-off. He had a house in the center of Candia with a personal library, maintained friendships among the higher clergy, owned at least two slaves, and became first cantor of the Orthodox cathedral, a post of some eminence that required endorsement by the Venetian state. These are the terms in which social stature of some—at least—of the Cretan painters must be imagined. These terms emerge from documents; accordingly, the third and fourth articles illustrate the kinds of insights Venice’s capacious archives can yield on art. The very nature of the documents—wills, contracts, guild lists, apprenticeship agreements—makes clear the close bond between the definition of the artist and the institutional and legal structure of society sustaining him. Along with names not known from surviving works, the documents illuminate painters’ social status and standard of living, the dates of their commissions and the pace of their work, the nature of their contracts, their prices and modes of payment, the distribution of responsibility for work and materials, the relation of painters to patrons and of their creeds to the creeds for which they painted, their methods of teaching and workshop organization, and relationships among painters. The culminating example—Angelos Akotantos’s will—is given both in the bilingual Greek and Latin original and in English translation. Some one hundred painters’ names are known from fifteenth-century Cretan documents. Art was a burgeoning



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industry there, allowing some professionals like Angelos to become “great names” and—like Angelos Akotantos—to be wealthy. The following five articles explore Angelos through iconographic motifs particular to his hand. One sees Angelos inventing the imagery of a new saint, Phanourios, for an abbot known to have been a friend of Akotantos; one sees him appropriate century-old Venetian motifs into his Byzantine repertoire with a selectivity bespeaking thorough knowledge of Italian art; one sees him repeat for several patrons a motif surely supportive of union between his own ancient Orthodox Church and Roman Catholicism, a position suggestively congruent with Akotantos’s occupancy of the state-endorsed post of head cantor. Aligning Angelos’s iconography with what is known of Akotantos’s life, the articles reveal a painter able to shape content innovatively, to appropriate motifs with conversant selectivity, and to address divisive political issues in his art. The nine articles devoted to Angelos are followed by four devoted more generically to fifteenth-century Cretan art. The first and most powerful of these assembles documentary evidence of eminent Constantinopolitan painters working in Crete and aligns it with surviving but unsigned paintings to show how a sophisticated, deeply cosmopolitan high art from Constantinople steeped in late Gothic as well as Byzantine forms had begun to implant itself in Crete already before the cataclysm of 1453. This art provided both the matrix within which Angelos’s elegant technical and iconographic repertoire was formed and the foundation from which an Angelos Akotantos could rise to eminence. The ensuing articles flesh out this crucial convergence, drawing upon—among others—works in major American collections that lend the material an unexpected immediacy to American readers. Two of the final three articles were written anew for this book. They offer an illuminating view of practical matters. One treats the trade in Cretan icons. By the end of the fifteenth century, Cretan icons were being exported in huge numbers to western Europe. Vassilaki details the commercial firms, shipping arrangements, production and transport contracts, and arrangements among painters that enabled this brisk consumption of Cretan art. Unfortunately, comparable contracts for distribution to Orthodox lands no longer survive. The second article elucidates the organization of painting workshops in Crete. And the third draws upon Vassilaki’s exceptional knowledge of conservation to lay out the technology of Cretan painting. In the wake of instruments like JSTOR, it is important for reprint volumes like those in the long-esteemed Variorum series to offer something more than the sum of their parts. Vassilaki has accomplished this

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with particular felicity. The emergence of Cretan painting has exercised a special fascination upon historians, not simply because it went on to produce Domenikos Theotokopoulos, famed as El Greco, but because it offers such a fertile convergence of two powerful, different, and deeply vital traditions. Building upon the archival work of Father Mario Cattapan and the art-historical legacy of Manolis Chatzidakis, strong scholars whom Vassilaki cites—Maria Constantoudaki-Kitromelides, Nano Chatzidakis, Theo Chatzidakis, Anastasia Drandakis—have contributed significantly to our grasp of the Cretan development. Their publications have taken the form either of articles or of exhibition catalogues. None has written a monograph that integrates the Cretan story. With her careful selection of studies, on Angelos himself, on the archival and painted evidence, on the broader Cretan background to Angelos, and on the commerce and technology of art, Vassilaki fills this gap without implying the closure of a fully fledged monograph. Clearly written and now entirely in English, her volume will be invaluable to scholars of late Byzantium and required reading for scholars of Venice, who still perpetuate the myth of madonneri—Cretan painting, after all, was as significant to Giovanni Bellini as Italian painting was to El Greco. But the book will equally well serve any teacher eager to engage students in the question, What is an artist? Annemarie Weyl Carr Southern Methodist University

István Zombori, ed., Közép-Európa harca a török ellen a 16 század elso" felében [The Central Europeans’ struggle with the Turks during the first half of the sixteenth century]. Budapest: METEM, 2004. Pp. 219.

It is known that after he defeated the Hungarian army of Louis II at Mohács in August 1526—thereby bringing the medieval Magyar kingdom to an inglorious end—Suleiman II (the Magnificent, 1520–1566) did not at first plan to occupy Hungary. The traditional Ottoman Turkish policy has been that some regions occupied by the Turk were drawn into the inner administrative structure of the Ottoman Empire, while others paid feudal taxes to, followed the foreign policy of, and, as feudal territories, provided military aid for the Porte when called upon. Such Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.



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twofold treatment of land occupied by the Turk may be evident from the manner in which the Porte handled its relations with the Serbs and with the Romanian voivod[e]ships on the left bank of the lower Danube. On the other hand, for about fifteen years, Hungary received special treatment. John Zápolya in the eastern half and the Hapsburg Ferdinand I in the western half of the former realm retained their particular kingdoms, paid no taxes, but kept a political balance in the mid-Danubian region. Upon the death of Zápolya in 1540, however, the political balance was upended, and Ferdinand I with his Hapsburg might have formed a real threat to Ottoman interests. Suleiman II saw no alternative but to take possession of a large portion of the country, incorporating it into the administration of the empire and developing a functioning defense system in its territory. It is against this background that Ilona Czama´nska of the Adam Mickievic University in Poznan discusses such developments from the Polish point of view; in a thoroughly researched paper based on primary sources, she deals with Polish-Turkish relations during the early half of the sixteenth century. In a similar manner, the essay by Tomasz Ososi´nski, from the University of Warsaw, examines letters related to the approaching Turkish threat taken from the correspondence between the humanist Jan Dantyszek and Chancellor Krzysztof Szydłowiecki. The author depicts with a masterful stroke of the pen the Turkish issue, its political and intellectual background, as seen by the Polish leaders of the early 1500s. Fascinating is another study based on primary sources and presented by Henryk Gapski, director of the East Central European Institute in Lublin, where he analyzes, also from the Polish point of view, the emerging relationship between the church in Poland and the Ottoman Empire. His methodology is sound, the Hungarian translation of the Polish text smooth and reliable. Gapski’s topic corresponds with the detailed essay—based on published primary source material—by Antal Molnár, in which he examines the contact the Holy See maintained with the Catholic—that is, the western—part of Hungary under Hapsburg rule; he studies in detail how attempts were made at reform in the church on Hungarian soil, how Rome responded to maintaining that relationship, and what attitude the Roman See had taken up in the Turkish question. The paper by Vladimir Segeš of the Military Historical Institute in Pozsony (Bratislava) examines the idea of time and space in warfare of the late Middle Ages, a coherent piece of work that can only be expected from a military historian. Essays by Pál Fodor and Sándor Papp powerfully depict in strong colors the relationship between the Magyar kingdom and the Ottoman

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Empire during the early half of the 1500s. Both authors deal with the background of that relationship and its gradual evolution during that time period. The Jagiello-Hapsburg attempt to forcefully address the Turkish question through military means is masterfully dealt with by András Kubinyi—perhaps the best of all the essays published in this volume. He sheds new light on the behavior of the Magyar leadership in the age of the Jagiello kings in Hungary (1490–1526) and on how irresponsibly members of the upper social stratum faced the renewed Turkish threat—“renewed” in the sense that earlier, in 1456, with serious outside help the Hungarians defeated the Turks under the guidance of the regent John Hunyadi and of John Capistrano, a Franciscan friar—to arrive at the conclusion that they did not take the threat seriously and did practically nothing. The piece by István Zombori also addresses this topic: based on entries from the diary of Polish chancellor Krzysztof Szydłowiecky, Zombori analyzes the Jagiello-Hapsburg attempt to take preventative military action against the Turks in 1523; the negotiations led nowhere, and the attempt never materialized. Finally, Teréz Oborni writes an impressive piece on the metamorphosis of Transylvania in the first half of the sixteenth century—on how a province of the historic Hungarian realm evolved into a principality of its own. The readers owe special thanks to the editor of the volume, István Zombori, for the conscientious work he has done, and recognition is due to the publisher for issuing this handsome volume, which carries on its front cover a colored Turkish miniature depicting the capture of the Magyar capital of Buda by the Turk in 1541. †Z. J. Kosztolnyik Texas A&M University

Books Received Æ´lfric. Æ´lfric’s “De temporibus anni.” Edited and translated by Martin Blake. AngloSaxon Texts 6. Woolbridge and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2009. Pp. xii, 177 + 1 b/w figure, 2 b/w plates, 2 tables. $95.00. Aers, David. Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland and Fourteenth-Century Theology. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Pp. 285. $38.00 (paper). Alighieri, Dante. Monarchia. Edited by Prue Shaw. Le Opere di Dante Alighieri 5. Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettre, 2009. Pp. xxi, 437 + b/w figure. $68.00 (paper). Amtower, Laurel, and Jacqueline Vanhoutte, eds. A Companion to Chaucer and His Contemporaries: Texts and Contexts. Peterborough and Buffalo: Broadway Press, 2009. Pp. 480. $39.95. Angelov, Dimiter G., ed. Church and Society in Late Byzantium. Studies in Medieval Culture 49. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 2009. Pp. xi, 242 + maps. $40.00 (paper). Astell, Ann W., and J. A. Jackson, eds. Levinas and Medieval Literature: The “Difficult Reading” of English and Rabbinic Texts. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009. Pp. x, 374. $58.00. Averroes (Ibn Rushd) of Cordoba. Long Commentary on the De Abima of Aristotle. Translated by Richard C. Taylor. Subedited by Thérèse-Druard. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 608. $85.00. Balint, Bridget K. Ordering Chaos: The Self and the Cosmos in Twelfth-Century Latin Prosimetrum. Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts 3. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. Pp. x, 242. €93.00. Baranski, Zygmunt G., and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., eds. Petrarch and Dante: AntiDantism, Metaphysics, Tradition. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 414 + tables. $50.00 (paper). Bitel, Lisa M. Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovesa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 299 + b/w figures. $34.95. Bitterli, Dieter. Say What I Am Called: The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book and the Anglo-Latin Riddle Tradition. Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series 2. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 218. $75.00. Boyce, James, O. Carm. Carmelite Liturgy and Spiritual Identity: The Choir Books of Kraków. Medieval Church Studies 16. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Pp. xv, 524 + 13 b/w figures, 30 tables, 1 chart, 32 musical examples. €90.00. Britnell, Richard. Markets, Trade and Economic Development in England and Europe, 1050–1550. Variorum Collected Studies Series 918. Farnham and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xviii, 330 + b/w frontispiece portrait, tables, maps. $134.95. Catherine of Siena. The Letters of Catherine of Siena, vol. 3. Translated by Suanne Nottffke, O.P. Medieval and Renaissance 329. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University, 2007. Pp. xviii, 428 + 1 b/w facsimile, maps. $55.00.

Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series, Number 36 (Paul Maurice Clogan, ed.), Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010.

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———. The Letters of Catherine of Siena, vol. 4. Translated by Suanne Nottffke, O.P. Medieval and Renaissance 355. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Arizona State University, 2008. Pp. xx, 474 + 1 b/w facsimile, maps. $65.00. Collins, David J. Reforming Saints: Saints’ Lives and Their Authors in Gemany, 1470–1530. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xv, 227 + b/w figures. $65.00. Constable, Giles. Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century. Farnham and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xi, 375 + b/w figures. $124.95. Coppack, Glyn. Abbeys and Priories. Stroud: Amberley, 2009. Pp. 192 + 20 color figures, 110 b/w figures. £18.99 (paper). ———. Fountains Abbey. Stroud: Amberley, 2009. Pp. 176 + 14 color figures, 100 b/w figures. £17.99 (paper). Corrie, Marilyn, ed. A Concise Companion to Middle English Literature. Malden, Mass.; Oxford; and Chischester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Pp. xii, 268 + b/w figures. $100.00. Crawford, John, and Raymond Gillespie, eds. St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Dublin and Portland, Ore.: Four Points Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 424 + 26 b/w and color plates, b/w figure. $70.00. Dalarun, Jacques, trans. François d’Assise vu par les compagnons: Du commencement de l’Ordre Legende des trois compagnons. Revised by François Delmas-Gyon. Sources · · Franciscaines. Paris: Editions Franciscaines-Editions du Cerf, 2009. Pp. 230. €24.00 (paper). Davies, Wendy. Welsh History in the Early Middle Ages: Texts and Societies. Varioum Collected Studies Series 915. Farnham and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xiv, 346 + b/w figure and maps. $144.95. DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk, Colleen McCluskey, and Christina Van Dyke. Aquinas’s Ethics: Metaphysical Foundations, Moral Theory and Theological Context. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 243 + 1 table. $30.00 (paper). Dobie, Robert J. Logos & Revelation: Iban Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009. Pp. 313. $34.95 (paper). D’Onofrio, Giulio. Vera Philosophia: Studies in Late Antique, Early Medieval and Renaissance Christian Thought. Translated by John Gavin, S.J. Notrix 1. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Pp. 406 + 1 color figure. €65.00. Duffy, Eamon. Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 280. $28.50. Dunlap, Anne. Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Pp. xix, 319 + color frontispiece, 200 b/w and color figures. $80.00. Epstein, Steven A. An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000–1500. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi, 290 + many b/w figures and tables. $85.00. Fishbane, Ethan P. As Light before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist. Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Pp. xiiii, 322. $36.00. Flanagan, Sabina. Doubt in an Age of Faith: Uncertainty in the Long Twelfth Century. Disputation 17. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. Pp. xiii, 212. €60.00.



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Fletcher, Christopher. Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99. Oxford Historical Monographs. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xix, 316 + b/w figures and tables. $110.00. Flood, Finbarr B. Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii, 366 + 180 b/w figures. $45.00. Franks, Christopher. He Became Poor: The Poverty of Christ and Aquinas’ Economic Teachings. The Eerdmans Ekklesia Series. Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, Eng.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009. Pp. viii, 207. $27.00 (paper). Fulton, Kathryn Kerby, ed. Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis. Victoria: ELS Editions, 2009. Pp. 279. $30.00 (paper). Gale, Kari Ellen, ed. Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas, 2 vols. Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. Pp. cvii, 870 + b/w figures. $160.00. Gallagher, Eric James, ed. The Civic Pleas of the Suffolk Eyre of 1240. Suffolk Records 52. Woodbridge and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2009. Pp. 349 + 5 b/w figures, graphs, tables. $70.00. Galloway, Andrew, and R. F. Yeager, eds. Through a Classical Eye: Transcultural and Transhistorical Visions in Medieval English, Italian and Latin Literature in Honour of Winthrop Wetherbee. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. vii, 436 + b/w frontispiece portrait. $80.00. Gertsman, Elina, ed. Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts. Aldershot and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xvii, 348 + b/w figures, 1 table, 1 musical example. $99.95. Golden, Malcolm, and Susan Irvine, eds. The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s “De consolation Philosophiae,” vol. 1, 2 vols. With Mark Griffith and Robini Jayatilaka. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xlvi, 547 + b/w frontispiece, 1 b/w plate, 1 table. $365.00 (for vols. 1 and 2). ———, eds. The Old English Boethius: An Edition of the Old English Versions of Boethius’s “De consolation Philosophiae.” vol. 2, 2 vols. With Mark Griffith and Robini Jayatilaka. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. v, 634 + b/w frontispiece, 1 b/w plate. $365.00 (for vols. 1 and 2). Goodall, Peter, ed. Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale and Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Annotated Bibliography, 1900 to 2000. The Chaucer Bibliographies. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, in association with University of Rochester, 2009. Pp. xlviii, 338. $74.04. Granger, Penny. The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia. Westfield Medieval Studies 2. Woodbridge and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2009. Pp. x, 257 + color frontispiece, tables, 1 map. $95.00. Gunn, Vicky. Bede’s Historiae: Genre, Rhetoric, and the Construction of Anglo-Saxon Church History. Woodbridge and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2009. Pp. 256. $95.00. Hamesse, Jacqueline, ed. Repetorium initiorum manusriptorum Latinorum medii aevi, 2: D-O. With Shawomir Szyller. Textes et Etudes du Moyen Age 42/2. Louvain-la Neuve: Fédération international des instituts d’études médiévales, 2008. Pp. 802. €59.00 (paper). Hary, Benjamin H. Translating Religion: Linguistic Analysis of Judeo-Arabic Sacred Texts · from Egypt. Etudes sur le Judaiïsme Médieval 38. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. Pp. 360 + b/w figures, 4 tables. €130.00.

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Haynes, Gregory. Tree of Life, Mythical Archetype: Revelations from the Symbols of Ancient Troy. Foreword by Michael Witzel. San Francisco: Symbolon Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 347 + many b/w figures and tables. $31.50 (paper). Heffernan, Carol Falvo. Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio. Chaucer studies 40. Woodbridge and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2009. Pp. xi, 151. $90.00. Heyworth, Gregory, Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult Form. Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 2009. Pp. xvii, 358. $38.00 (paper). Hindley, Geoffrey. Medieval Sieges and Siegecraft. Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2009. Pp. vii, 182 + b/w plates, b/w figures. £19.99. Hingst, Amanda Jane. The Written World: Past and Place in the Work of Orderic Vitalis. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Pp. xviii, 272 + 2 b/w figures, 1 map. $40.00. Hornby, Emma. Medieval Liturgical Chant and Patristic Exegesis: Words and Music in the Second-Mode Tracts. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music 9. Woodbridge and Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2009. Pp. xv, 327 + 1 b/w figure, b/w facsimiles, tables, many musical examples. $105.00. Howard, Deborah, and Laura Moretti. Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Pp. 368 + 100 b/w, 20 color illustrations. $55.00. Ioannes Antiochenus. Fragments quae supersunt omnia. Edited and translated by Sergi Mariev. Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 47; Series Berolinensis. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. Pp. x, 599. €138.32. Jacoby, David. Latins, Greeks and Muslims: Encounters in the Easter Mediterranean, 10th– 15th Centuries. Variorium Collected Studies Series 914. Farnham and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xii, 322 + b/w figures. $134.95. Jansen, Katherine L., Joanna Dell, and Frances Andrews, eds. Medieval Italy: Texts in Translations. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Pp. xxvii, 591 + 30 b/w figures, 3 genealogical tables, 2 maps. $69.95. Joachim von Fiore. Psalterium decem cordarum. Edited by Kurt-Victor Selge. Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Quellen zur Geistegechichte des Mittelalters 20; Ioachimi Abbatis Florensis Opera Omnia 1. Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2009. Pp. ccxvii, 467 + 11 b/w and color plates, b/w figures. €75.00. Jong, Mayke de. The Penitential State Authority and Atonement in the Age of Louis the Pious, 814–840. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xxi, 317 + b/w frontispiece, 3 genealogical tables, 2 maps. $99.00. Jurdjeviv, Mark. Guardians of Republicanism: The Valori Family in the Florentine Renaissance. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xiii, 199 + genealogical tables. $110.00. Kirkham, Victoria, and Armando Maggi, eds. Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. xxiv, 542 + b/w frontispiece, 7 b/w figures, 1 table. $50.00. Lindgren, Erika Lauren. Sensual Encounters: Monastic Women and Spirituality in Medieval Germany. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 190 + 4 tables. $60.00. Magennis, Hugh, and Mary Swan, eds. A Companion to Ælfric. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 18. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. Pp. xv, 466 + tables. $209.00. Marenbon, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Boethius. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xv, 356 + b/w figures, tables. $90.00.



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Marti, Susan, Till-Holger Borchert, and Gabriele Keck, eds. Splendour of the Burgundian Court: Charles the Bold (1433–1477). Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2009. Pp. 382 + color frontispiece, many b/w and color figures, 1 color genealogical table, b/w color maps. $80.00. Patterson, Lee. Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009. Pp. 356. $38.00 (paper). Pugliese, Olga Zorzi, and Ethan Matt Kavaler, eds. Faith and Fantasy in the Renaissance: Texts, Images, and Religious Practices. Essays and Studies 21. Toronto: Victoria University, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2009. Pp. 360. Radke, Gary M., et al. Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. 216 + 201 color illus. $29.50. Snyder, Jon R. Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Pp. 280. $45.00. Wyatt, David. Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800–1200. The Norman World: North Europe and the Baltic c. 400–1700 a.d.; Peoples, Economies and Cultures 45. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. Pp. xix, 455 + 4 b/w figures and tables. €146.00. Zacher, Samantha. Preaching the Converted: The Style and Rhetoric of the Vercelli Book Homilies. Toronto Anglo-Saxon Series 1. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Pp. xxviii, 348 + tables. $50.81.