Mysticism and metaphor: Visionary literature in fourteenth-century England

Citation preview

MYSTICISM AND METAPHOR: VISIONARY LITERATURE IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Departments of English and Religious Studies Indiana University

January 2015

UMI Number: 3680820

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI 3680820 Published by ProQuest LLC (2015). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code

ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346

Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Doctoral Committee

________________________________ Patricia Clare Ingham, Ph.D., Co-Chair

________________________________ Constance M. Furey, Ph.D., Co-Chair

________________________________ Karma Lochrie, Ph.D.

________________________________ Shaul Magid, Ph.D.

December 17, 2014

ii

Copyright © 2015 Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My parents imparted to me a love of reading and a love of God that are now deeply intertwined in my life. I have felt their love and support in all my years in higher education, and I have known, as all children long to, that they are proud of me. They also imparted to me a quietness of mind that, in my opinion, makes academic work possible. They first taught me the meaning of home. My mother-in-law, Joanne Krieger, has welcomed me into the family, loved me like a daughter, and been unstintingly generous with her time, money, and, most importantly, Trefzger’s danishes. The only thing better than having her as a mother-in-law is having her as my son’s grandmother. I came to do graduate work at Indiana on the hunch that I might find the kind of mentoring that I desired here, and my advisors Patty Ingham and Constance Furey have exceeded my expectations. If I ever shape an inchoate idea into anything resembling an insightful argument, it is because they have labored so long to teach me how to think and write clearly. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Patty’s incredibly generous spirit and generative reading—her gift for opening up ideas and finding new perspectives is remarkable. Constance has taught me so much about how hard it is to write, but also how significant and fulfilling it is to craft a sentence that says exactly what you mean to say (and also, that you only know what it is you are saying when you write that sentence!). Both women model for me what it means to do scholarship that is both rigorous to the highest standards and humble in its search for new ideas and explanations. It has been a privilege to be their student. I also want to acknowledge the ongoing role of my undergraduate education and my first real teacher of the liberal arts, Curtis Gruenler. While in many different classrooms at Hope iv

College, I began to realize that there were uncharted waters to be explored, but Curtis helped me to see more than any other teacher “the beauty of the infinite” in medieval literature and theology. Many thanks to Heidi Torres and Laura Clapper for cups of tea and great conversations. Their constant encouragement helped me to believe that I could be a good scholar and a good mother at the same time. My friends have made my graduate school experience, and my dissertation, all that they are, but above all two friends—Corey Taylor Sparks and Elise Lonich Ryan. We started our time at IU reading Žižek and Badiou together, and we ended it reading one another’s dissertations. Each chapter has benefited from their insights and criticisms multiple times over, and my life has benefited from the deep camaraderie of our friendship. I feel about them as Tolkien felt about C.S. Lewis: “friendship with Lewis compensates for much.” Thanks goodness for video chats. Finally, to my husband Joshua Krieger, who is and always will be, if I may, “heaven’s last best gift.” Somehow after eight years, I find it hard to know what to say, when the words of gratitude flow for all others so easily, but I think this is because I already can’t tell in this mystery of our shared life where I leave off and he begins. He has made many sacrifices for me to pursue my PhD, and it has been my joy to watch him find himself as an engineer, a craftsman, and a father. What a privilege to share your life with someone so interesting, so gifted, so kind and loving. This dissertation owes much to him, not in its argumentative nuances and close readings, but in the very fact that it exists, that there is something rather than nothing in these pages. And to William Eugene Krieger—“I am your way home, you are my new path.” What a joy it is to be your mother.

v

Kerilyn Harkaway-Krieger MYSTICISM AND METAPHOR: VISIONARY LITERATURE IN FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND My dissertation demonstrates how the materiality of literary and poetic form, particularly metaphor, is crucial to the study of late-medieval mysticism. Dream visions and mystical visions share an as-yet-unnoticed preoccupation with key features of language: 1) the materiality of language at the level of the word, and 2) a focus on metaphor’s particularly paradoxical modes of signification. Drawing our attention to language, medieval visionary literature reveals the diverse ways that linguistic form radically shapes the understanding of reality and of the divine. Middle English dream visions Pearl and Piers Plowman highlight an intense materiality of poetic language (specifically within poetic devices such as puns and alliteration), so as to elucidate the mystical. Mystical texts—Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love and the anonymously authored Cloud of Unknowing—link mystical experience to metaphor, attending carefully to what both authors call the “bodily” and “goostly” aspects of language (Middle English equivalents for “literal” and “metaphoric”). The formal features of these visionary texts, I argue, cross oppositions of “letter” and “spirit” or “content” and “form,” and ultimately display the metaphorical surface as a place for engaging the ineffable. “Mysticism and Metaphor” contributes to our understanding of the formal linguistic and literary features through which mystical discourse operates. The constellation of questions that mystical texts raise about language and experience are relevant to the analysis of the formal features of literariness, both poetry and prose. Attending to the mysticism of language as a feature (paradoxically) of its materiality, my work argues that metaphor is key to how these late medieval genres construct the experience and language of transcendence. By examining these vi

two genres’ reliance on both materiality and metaphor, my dissertation contributes to emerging conversations about the similarities between the textual phenomena of dreams and religious, or mystical, experience. My analysis makes clear that records of religious visions and literary depictions of dreaming share certain linguistic features. An investigation of these shared features situates my dissertation between the disciplines of Religious Studies and English, and my interdisciplinary scholarship draws on both critical analyses of religious experience and mystical texts from a range of religious traditions, and from important recent work on medieval literary language and form.

________________________________ Patricia Clare Ingham, Ph.D., Co-Chair

________________________________ Constance M. Furey, Ph.D., Co-Chair

________________________________ Karma Lochrie, Ph.D.

________________________________ Shaul Magid, Ph.D.

vii

CONTENTS Introduction: The Mysticism of Language.................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Pearl and the Apophatic Poetic .................................................................................................. 27 Chapter 2 The Cloud of Unknowing and the Uses of Negation .................................................................. 64 Chapter 3 The Concealed of the Revealed: Julian of Norwich as Exegete ............................................... 114 Chapter 4 Piers Plowman and the Indeterminacy of Allegory ................................................................. 167 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................. 232 Curriculum Vitae

viii

INTRODUCTION THE MYSTICISM OF LANGUAGE The dream, as metaphor, is a transference that presupposes a gap continuously crossed but never collapsed, an opening that begets the merger of dissimilar entities without resolution of their difference. Rendered metaphorically, the metaphor is the bridge that spans the breach between literal and figurative, truth and fiction, the verbal leap that propels one across the space of an irreducible reducibility. Metaphor, on this score, is a form of language that materializes in the fissure that connects by keeping apart. - Elliot R. Wolfson, The Dream Interpreted Within a Dream1 If we attend to the Greek etymology of the word theology, then a curious state of linguistic affairs results from its combination with the word apophatic. For theology means ‘discourse about God’ or ‘divine discourse,’ so the expression ‘apophatic theology’ ought to mean something like: ‘that speech about God which is the failure of speech….’ What, then, of the ‘cataphatic’? The cataphatic is, we might say, the verbose element in theology, it is the Christian mind deploying all the resources of language in the effort to express something about God, and in that straining to speak, theology uses as many voices as it can. It is the cataphatic in theology which causes its metaphor-ridden characters, causes it to borrow vocabularies by analogy from many another discourse, whether of science, literature, art, sex, politics, the law, the economy, family life, warfare, play, teaching, physiology, or whatever. It is the cataphatic tendencies which account for the sheer heaviness of theological language, its character of being overburdened…. For in its cataphatic mode, theology is, we might say, a kind of verbal riot, an anarchy of discourse in which anything goes.”2 - Denys Turner, The Darkness of God

This dissertation began as a project defined largely by genre. Based on my argument that Pearl, fourteenth-century English dream vision, was deeply mystical, I wrote a proposal that examined similarities between religious dream visions (Pearl and Piers Plowman) and mystical texts (The Cloud of Unknowing and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations). The point of connection was to be form—the mystical “content” was not content at all, but was rather embedded within the texts’

1

Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 202. 2 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 20. 1

formal features. Form was the place where they most effectively gestured towards the transcendent. As the project evolved, two shifts took place. First, a very general focus on literary form gave way to an examination of figurative language and, in particular, metaphor. Due in large part to Elliot Wolfson’s work on the rabbinic treatment of dreams in A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, I started to see how these Middle English texts drew attention to how metaphor worked—in particular, how metaphor instantiated a paradox. Wolfson’s book highlights several features of metaphor, including its containment of a coincidentia oppositorum (a coincidence of opposites). This paradox at the heart of every metaphor occurs because a metaphor suggests two things at once—to use my favorite example, it suggests that “my love is like a red rose,” but also implicit in the metaphor is that fact that she is not like a red rose. My love has certain roseate qualities (beauty, appeal, prickliness), but she lacks others (she doesn’t need to be planted in the dirt, or to be pruned in the spring). My love both is a rose, and she is not. Every metaphor contains a coincidence of opposites, a coincidence of similarity and difference, because it is saying one thing metaphorically (my love is a rose) and another literally (my love is not a rose). When the metaphors are theological in nature, this tension between similarity and difference is even stronger. “This also is thou, neither is this thou,” Charles Williams wrote, evoking the simultaneous affirmation and denial of all theological language and thought.3 Williams, in his analysis of the figure of Beatrice in The Divine Comedy, is succinctly summing up the impulse to use images and objects relentlessly in an attempt to locate, understand, and commune with the divine, and subsequent failure of each attempt. C.S. Lewis glosses the two impulses of Williams’ thought in this way: The first maxim is the formula of the Romantic Way, the ‘affirmation of images’: the second is that of the Ascetic Way, the ‘rejection of images.’ Every soul must in some 3

Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice (Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2005), Introduction. 2

sense follow both. The Ascetic must honour marriage and poetry and wine and the face of nature even while he rejects them; the Romantic must remember even in his Beatrician moment ‘Neither is this Thou.’4 Lewis’ commentary points to the simultaneous necessity and inescapability of both affirmation and denial, but its division of Williams’ pithy formulation into two approaches seems to miss what is most astute about the adage: “This also is thou, neither is this thou.” This phrase comes off as the spontaneous and immediate response to a single object, image, or phrase. The same thing both is and is not God, both reflects and obscures the divine source. Furthermore, the “also” of Williams’ maxim suggests a serial movement through objects, images, and metaphors, in an attempt to find something about which could simply be said: “This is thou.” The success of the formulation lies precisely in its suggestion of a movement through a series of iconic objects, and in its peaceful acceptance of both likeness and dissimilarity. Metaphors of the divine are supposed to make clearer the opaque and difficult task of understanding and representing God. What they instead make clear is the simultaneous necessity and the failure of speaking about the divine. To say that metaphors fail perhaps seems to suggest that they are incomplete, ineffective in some way, but this is not the case. Metaphors are effective in part because of their failures, because they always contain the “neither is this thou” implicitly. The texts on which this dissertation focuses draw attention to this failure, to the disconnect between the literal, material referent and the metaphorical referent. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, for example, constantly reminds his reader not to think of an actual cloud, grey and wet, when he refers to a “cloud of unknowing.” Julian of Norwich, while using an allegorical narrative of a lord and servant to say something about God the Father and 4

Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis, Taliessin through Logres, The Region of the Summer Stars, and Arthurian Torso (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1974), 335. Lewis is providing a commentary on Williams’ poetry. 3

Jesus, pauses to say to her reader that she does not actually mean Jesus is at God’s right hand, but that his being to God’s right instead figures something about their relationship. These authors are clearly attuned both to the obvious need to use figurative language to communicate about the divine, but they also draw attention the failure of that language. The second shift the project underwent was a (metaphoric) re-situation of that reality that we call “ineffable” or “infinite,” the reality that lies perhaps beyond language, and thus is inherently incomprehensible. When I first started examining the conjunction of linguistic or literary form and mysticism, I often pointed out that language could only “gesture at” the infinite categories and realities that are, of necessity, beyond or outside of language itself. In discussing Pearl, I argued that the sheer density of the poetry caused the “bottom to drop out”— comprehension failed in lieu of beautiful but incomprehensible poetic form. These spatial metaphors, of “beyond,” “outside,” “beneath,” posited a binary between the materiality of the language itself and the materiality of metaphor’s literal referents, and the transcendence towards which this materiality could only point. As the project progressed and I considered at greater length both metaphor itself, and the ways in which this particular constellation of fourteenthcentury English texts utilizes and treats metaphor, I came to the conclusion that metaphor is a form of mystic speech par excellence precisely because it draws together immanence and transcendence, because it maintains its materiality even as it signifies metaphorically. Metaphors, in other words, are the ineffable, they embody, or en-form, or (speaking theologically) incarnate an infinity. This reading of metaphor is greatly indebted to Elliot Wolfson’s scholarship, which both connects dreams, metaphor, and mysticism as crucially related, and contributes to a more recent reconsideration of transcendence and immanence in the discipline of Religious Studies. In his

4

theorization of the dream, Wolfson argues that dreams function like metaphors; indeed, they are a form of metaphor. Dreams and metaphors are both a way of knowing and a particular sort of knowledge. In the dream binary logic and linear reasoning go by the wayside in deference to a truer, deeper, and more “real” form of knowing, one that transcends our binaries without negating them. Wolfson’s own linguistic strategies, as shown by the epigram that opens this chapter, symptomatize the difficulty in talking about this kind of knowing. He “metaphorizes” metaphor as both a bridge and a leap, suggesting that the very word or concept “metaphor” begets yet more metaphors. One metaphor can only be elucidated by another metaphor, which will in turn require another metaphor for explanation, and on and on. Furthermore, Wolfson uses the paradoxical expression “an irreducible reducibility” to signal the reality which metaphor alone can signify, and to which the dream allows access.5 The enigma captured in this phrase is symptomatic of Wolfson’s own style of writing, which is contradictory and puzzling precisely because the author is trying to signify something that is beyond our typical modes of signification and understanding. Metaphor is the best linguistic example we have of this “reality;” it is a form of language that can adequately reflect or express what is “really real,” but metaphor itself also constitutes this reality. The dream, in Wolfson’s analysis, is one of two modes of consciousness in which we most closely and clearly encounter this reality. The other mode is, unsurprisingly, mysticism. In A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, Wolfson explicitly evokes the connection between dreams and mysticism (his earlier scholarship

5

Wolfson is in fact fond of paradoxical, or chiastic, expressions like this one. From the Introduction alone: “Of the transcendent, all we can (un)say is that it is because it is not and it is not because it is” (28); “everything in its nothingness manifests the nothingness that is everything” (38); “the universe can be envisaged chiasmically as the invisibly visible specter of the visibly invisible” (41). 5

has treated Jewish mysticism, kabbala, at great length).6 Dreams are a sort of metaphor, Wolfson argues; it is in dreams (and their interpretation) in which we most clearly “know” in the paradoxical mode of metaphor. Dreams and metaphors are both true and false; they are always concealing and disclosing—in Wolfson’s characteristic wording, in his description of kabbalistic knowledge that nonetheless applies equally to dreams and metaphors, they “facilitate the disclosure of the concealed in the concealment of the disclosed.”7 In terms more familiar to negative theology, to say anything about God is also to fail to say something about him, while “unsaying” or denying something of God is simultaneously an act of affirmation. Wolfson argues that the coincidentia oppositorum, the seemingly impossible coexistence of opposites, is located in metaphor and in dreams. We see this in the way that dreams dispense with the law of noncontradiction, and in the way that metaphors move between truth and falsity, or between the literal and the figurative. As in mysticism, we often label these impossibilities “paradox,” indicating that they yield higher knowledge that is nevertheless also a kind of unknowing. In the spirit of the coincidentia oppositorum, in his introduction, “Transcending Transcendence,” Wolfson resituates the role of the material, the immanent world, in relation to the transcendent.8

6

Wolfson has been prolific in writing about Jewish mysticism. See, for example, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Luminal Darkness: Imaginal Gleanings from Zoharic Literature (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publictions, 2007). In A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream, chapter 4, “Coincidentia Oppositorum and the Mythologic of the Dream,” most thoroughly connects the rabbinic treatment of dreams with that of mysticism. 7 Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, 199. 8 “Transcending Transcendence” is another pithy and challenging dictum. What does it mean to transcend transcendence? How would one do it? What is “beyond” the beyond? On the one hand, we could understand the transcendence of transcendence as simply a return to immanence, to materiality and bodiliness. We could alternately figure it dialectically as a synthesis of transcendence and immanence, which is getting closer to Wolfson’s formulations. But ultimately transcending transcendence for Wolfson results in paradox, in the coincidentia oppositorum, the space where transcendence and immanence coexist, co-inhere. Transcending transcendence is also reminiscent in some ways of Pseudo-Dionysius’ hyper terms, which he uses to indicate the insufficiency of categorization and predication in talking about God. Affixing the Greek prefix hyper intensifies terms, making them the most extreme forms of themselves possible. To “transcend transcendence” 6

In my understanding of transcendence, I retain the qualities of elusiveness and exteriority, but reject the possibility of incorporation into a totality. Indeed, transcendence, as I regard it, precludes that possibility. There is nothing beyond nature that is not already part of nature….we are prepared to affirm that the transcendental field, which “eludes all transcendence of the subject and of the object,” is to be relocated on the “pure plan of immanence,” the life that is the “immanence of immanence, absolute immanence.” Thus we can think of transcendence within the immanent, which would preclude circumscribing immanence as immanent to a transcendent, that is, an “encompassing” that “is no more than a reservoir for eruptions of transcendence.”9 For Wolfson, then, the immanent and the transcendent cohere in one another, and dreams, metaphors, and mysticism are spaces where this coincidence is made clear to us. The texts this dissertation examines, both dream visions and mystical accounts, pay particular attention to the ability of metaphor, through materiality, to signify transcendence.

Classical and Medieval Treatments of Figurative Language Metaphor is one type of a larger category we often call “figurative language,” which includes simile, allegory, personification, onomatopoeia, hyperbole, allusion, puns. Figurative language is that which “says one thing and means another,” and thus has both a literal and a figurative level of meaning. Figurative language is thus a sort of “other speech;” both classical and medieval definitions of metaphor frequently employ the Latin alius. Cicero, for instance, in De Oratore, offers this definition: “Similitudinis est…verbum in alieno loco tamquam in suo positum si implies, all at once, to leave transcendence behind, but also to achieve the most transcendental form of transcendence possible. Both of these, Wolfson suggests, will take place only when transcendence is put into the proper relationship with immanence. 9 Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, 25–26. 7

agnoscitur, delectate…” (A metaphor [lit. similitude] is a word put into the place of another word as if it belonged there, and if the meaning is recognized, it gives pleasure),10 while Isidore of Seville gives the following: “metaphora est verbi alicuius usurpata translatio” (metaphor’s transfer of meaning usurps the place of another word). For Bede, metaphor is simply “rerum verborumque translatio” (a translation of words and things).11 The oft-cited etymology of metaphor, whose Greek root means to transfer, adds to the sense of metaphor as “other speech,” as sense that the metaphoric meaning is removed from the literal referent (Bede’s res) and transferred to the metaphoric referent (which the verbum now signifies). The idea of metaphor as a transfer or meaning can help to clarify how one thing comes to signify something else entirely, but I think that the etymologically-base definition, which has certainly had a hold on some types of scholarship, occludes other features of metaphor, namely, its preservation of both literal and metaphoric meanings, both res and verbum. In twentieth-century thought about linguistics and language, metaphor has often beem discussed in relationship to metonymy. Metonymy is also considered to be a type of figurative language, where one thing stands in for another, but the relationship of the literal and figurative meanings in metaphor and metonymy is very different. Metaphor figures by way of analogy and similitude, where one thing (the literal referent) stands in for another thing which appears to be obviously unrelated. Metonymy figures by way of contiguity, a part standing in for a whole, or one related component standing in for another. As part of the early and mid-twentieth-century structuralist approach to language and literature, Roman Jakobson considered metaphor and 10

Cicero, De Oratore I-III, ed. A. S. Wilkins (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2002), III.157 translation mine. Cicero uses similitudo, translatio, and transferri for metaphor, all of which expose key features of how metaphor was thought about in the classical world. Similitudo of course suggests the likeness that exists between literal and metaphoric referents, while translation and transferri are closely related to the Greek word for metaphor, suggesting how meaning is “carried over.” 11 These last two examples are found in Peter W. Travis, “Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor,” Speculum 72, no. 2 (1997): 405. 8

metonymy as fundamental aspects of language, while rhetorician Kenneth Burke identified them as two of the four “master tropes,” which describe how human beings identify truth and construct reality. A seminal step in Jacques Lacan’s groundbreaking dictum that “the unconscious is structured like language” was his association of metaphor and metonymy with two operations of the unconscious, condensation and displacement.12 In doing so, Lacan drew together Freud’s theorization about the operations of the unconscious and the work of dreams with the linguistic theorization of Jakobson.13 “Condensation” aptly describes the unique capacity of metaphor to embody the infinite, precisely because of the unique coexistence of literal and figurative meaning. Even allegory, which is often defined as “extended metaphor,” in fact operates in a distinctly different way than metaphor, as my chapter on Piers Plowman will show. The relationship between literal and figurative meanings in metaphor, rooted as it is in materiality, provides a point of connection between the immanent and transcendent that is not present in other types of figurative language, and so this dissertation considers only metaphor. The hermeneutics surrounding figurative language of all kinds, but especially allegory and metaphor, have been central to both Christian and Jewish exegesis. Figuration was also a central feature of classical education—consider Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” in The Republic, or his image in the Phaedrus of the soul as a charioteer driving the two horses of rational and irrational passions and appetites. Enmeshed as the earliest Christian exegetes were in 12

In his essay, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Lacan writes that “it is the whole structure of language that psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious.” Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 2007), 413. 13 Lacan goes on to associate metonymy with lack and desire; the restless movement of signification along the chain “allows for the elision by which the signifier instates a lack of being in the object-relation, using signification’s referral value to invest it with the desire aiming at the lack that it supports.” Metaphor, on the other hand, “is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning;” a function akin to that of the subject. Unlike the Cartesian subject, founded on the awareness of its own cogito, the psychoanalytic subject comes to be because “I think about what I am where I do not think I am thinking” (in other words, the unconscious operations of the psyche are constitutive of subjectivity, rather than the self-aware cogito). Metaphor produces meaning in nonmeaning, just as the unconscious produces the subject in its un-thinking. Ibid., 419–430. 9

either Jewish or Greco-Roman culture, an unquestioned assumption that religious texts have multiple levels of meaning is apparent. Origen was one of the first patristic authors to insist on the multiple levels of scriptural meaning (and to give primacy to the “spiritual” meaning of a text over its historical meaning), but in the Latin West, figures such as Jerome, Ambrose, and Augustine all contributed to the project of figuratively interpreting biblical texts. Ambrose’s allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament were in fact extremely influential in helping Augustine come to terms with the divine inspiration for texts that he found to be both rhetorically inelegant and morally shameful. Augustine himself then went on in De Doctrina Christiana to explore systematically how figurative language works, and how Scriptural exegetes can thus faithfully interpret the sacred text.

Figurative Language and Biblical Exegesis In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine becomes the first Christian author to spend considerable time parsing how we can identify literal and figurative levels of meaning. Metaphorical ambiguity is resolved, above all, by the rule of charity: “the passage being read should be studied with careful consideration until its interpretation can be connected with the realm of love” (III.80). The rule of charity in fact opens the possibility that a single figure of speech may have more than one correct meaning: “Could God have built into the divine eloquence a more generous or bountiful gift than the possibility of understanding the same words in several ways, all of them deriving confirmation from other no less divine inspired passages?” (III.86-87).14 Augustine’s carefully developed guidelines for determining literal and figurative meanings do not seem to have been absorbed by vernacular English authors, but by the later 14

Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), line numbers included in text. 10

Middle Ages, modes of figurative reading and passages with assumed figurative layers were commonly accepted. A striking parallel, however, is the association of overly literal reading with both carnality and with slavery. In the first case, remaining on the level of the literal meaning when a figurative meaning is present is connected with a sort of corrupted bodiliness. “For when something meant figuratively is interpreted as if it were meant literally, it is understood in a carnal way. No ‘death of the soul’ is more aptly given that name than the situation in which the intelligence, which is what raises the soul above the level of animals, is subjected to the flesh by following the letter” (III.72). The letter and the body, the literal referent (typically itself a material object) and the carnal flesh, come to be associated with one another. In Middle English, literal and figurative meanings are described as bodily and ghostly (i.e., spiritual); the use of bodily for literal suggests an Augustinian heritage. A focus on the literal meaning is also described as enslavement.15 Augustine grudgingly holds together body and spirit, literal and figurative meanings, though his preference is for the latter. The sign is precisely the type of speech that holds together two types of meaning (literal and figurative): “a sign is a thing which of itself makes some other thing come to mind, besides the impression that it presents to the senses” (III.30). Signs involve a material referent (an object, a gesture, a spoken or written word) and then the thing that the sign signifies. (Augustine gives the example of smoke signifying fire, or a nod signifying agreement.) The sign, then, is the metaphor considered as a whole, both literal and figurative meanings taken together. Augustine’s preference for the spirit, and his description of literal readings as enslavement, has a decidedly Neoplatonic disdain for the body, but his use of the language of the sign still holds together the

15

“It is, then, a miserable kind of spiritual slavery to interpret signs as things, and to be incapable of raising the mind’s eye above the physical creation so as to absorb the eternal life” (III.72). 11

two sides of the metaphor, still acknowledges the necessity of both, and his influence was felt throughout the Middle Ages. There is perhaps an alternate strand of Augustinian influence, however, that is less systematic, more mystical. Like almost all Christian theologians, Augustine at moments emphasizes the apophatic unknowability of God. He writes with typical rhetorical flair in the opening of the Confessions, Do heaven and earth contain you because you have filled them? Or do you fill them and overflow them because they do not contain you? Where do you put the overflow of yourself after heaven and earth are filled? Or have you, who contain all things, no need to be contained by anything because what you fill, you fill by containing it? (I.iii.4)16 Like other forms of language we describe as mystical, this passage attempts to undermine comprehension, to create by way of paradox a better understanding of the infinite deity. The two impulses within Augustine, to both affirm the unknowability, the paradoxical reality, of God’s existence, and the attempt to delimit carefully the parameters of figurative language, are never fully brought together, but perhaps suggestively open up the possibility that metaphor can bring both tendencies together.

Figurative Language and the Via Negativa Augustine is not alone in outlining a place for God’s absolute transcendence and ineffable infinity. All major patristic and medieval theologians acknowledge the unknowable, and hence ineffable, identity of God. Clement of Alexandria was so attracted to Plato in part because

16

Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 12

Platonic thought seemed to acknowledge the apophatic nature of truth.17 Cyril of Jerusalem claimed that “we explain not what God is but candidly confess that we have not exact knowledge concerning Him. For in what concerns God, to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge.”18 Apophatic thinking gained greater traction because of the prominence it played in the thinking of the Cappadocian Fathers; Gregory of Nyssa wrote “every concept that comes from some comprehensible image, by an approximate understanding and by guessing at the Divine nature, constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God.”19 But the most significant contribution to negative theology, particularly in the West, came from the author known as Pseudo-Dionysius. Little to nothing is known about who he is, but his writings in the sixth century solidified the place of apophatic thought in Christian theology.20 Accepted as the biblical Dionysius, who was converted by St. Paul in Acts 17, he was given apostolic authority in the Middle Ages—Aquinas quotes him 1,760 times in his Summa Theologica.21 Pseudo-Dionysius was translated into Latin by John Scotus Eriugena in ninth century, and then into English by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing in the fourteenth.

17

Henny Fiska Hägg, Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 18 Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture 6, NewAdvent.org. Accessed November 9, 2014. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310106.htm. 19 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 81. 20 For a good overview of Pseudo-Dionysius’ thought, see the multiple introductions in the Classics of Western Spirituality edition Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Paul Rorem (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 11–46; as well as Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism (Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism Vol. 1) (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004), 157–182; and Turner, The Darkness of God, 19–49. Timothy Knepper has recently written a somewhat fierce rejoinder to the late twentiethcentury interest in recovering Pseudo-Dionysius for a postmodern audience. Knepper argues that the Dionysian corpus has been read for far too long as encouraging apophaticism and ineffability, while he re-reads these texts as affirming a great deal about God. Timothy D. Knepper, Negating Negation: Against the Apophatic Abandonment of the Dionysian Corpus (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013). 21 Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 73. 13

Pseudo-Dionysius emphasized, as no other thinker before him had, the necessity of accompanying affirmations who God is (the via affirmativa) with negations that acknowledge what finite human beings cannot know about an infinite, transcendent deity (the via negativa, or way of negation). Also known as negative theology, the via negativa is concerned with what cannot be said about God. Indeed, since the infinite God is so far beyond finite human conception, negative theology asserts that the truest things human beings can say of God are statements about what he is not. The Greek terms apophatic and cataphatic (meaning denial and affirmation) have come to describe these two different theological impulses. In the second epigram that opens this Introduction, Denys Turner offers compelling definitions of apophatic and cataphatic theology, definitions that highlight the necessity of both kinds of theological language. Turner turns to metaphor in seeking to describe the nature of language about God. He describes cataphatic language as “weighty” and “chaotic,” and notes its metaphoric reliance on any number of other discourses. As is fitting, his description of the cataphatic is in fact lengthier (more than twice as long in its unabridged form) than the description of the apophatic, and the description of the apophatic is both brief and unadorned—without recourse to metaphor. But his definition does point to the fact that all theology is speech about God, that the apophatic cannot be, is never, mere silence or a bald statement of ineffability. Texts which we call “apophatic” are those which both speak about God and draw attention to their own failure to do so, texts which both say something and attempt to subvert it at the same time. Turner’s definition also exposes one of the slippery features of the terminology of apophasis and cataphasis. The terms literally mean “denial” and “affirmation,” and are often associated with theological affirmations and negations—the cataphatic pertains to what we can and do say about God, while the apophatic refers to statements about what we cannot say. But

14

Turner’s description of the cataphatic as the “verbose element” in theology also underscores the restless nature of affirmations about the divine. When affirming what God is, no language, to image or metaphor, is sufficient. In seeking to affirm things about God, theologians and mystics move from one affirmation to another, one discourse to another, which simply exposes the insufficiency of these affirmations. The sheer excess of description that Turner’s definition outlines is a hallmark of the failure of the cataphatic. And if the apophatic is “that speech about God which is the failure of speech,” then the line between the cataphatic and the apophatic disappears. Serial affirmations in fact become denials—the constant supplying of new affirmations exposes the failure of those that came before. While this point is implicit in Turner’s definition, he still maintains a distinction between apophatic and cataphatic theology, in part, I think, to do justice to the divisions that exist in Pseudo-Dionysius’ corpus. But if cataphatic theology (taken as a whole) exposes the failures of the via affirmativa, the via negativa does not provide an entirely satisfactory alternative. If we define apophatic theology only as theological negation (statements of what God is not), then we have not actually moved that far beyond cataphatic theology (if we have in fact moved at all). Denying things of God—saying, for instance, “God is not evil,” instead of affirming that “God is good,” does expansively open up the definition of God, leaving open a great number of possibilities for what God could be. What the negation fails to do, however, is move its description of the divine beyond the categorical construction of God in terms of the binary good vs evil. The same types of categories are utilized in negations about God, which keeps these seemingly apophatic statements tied to the same frameworks. “God is not evil” implies the possibility of a great number of affirmative statements about God. But these affirmations will still be framed by way of contrast with the category “evil,” which is thus never

15

really left behind. Furthermore, these negations, in their simplest forms, don’t actually fit Turner’s definition of the apophatic as a failure of speech. While rather more open-ended than the affirmations, these negations are still successful in conveying their meaning. So here lies the problem with the fast-and-easy definition of apophatic theology as simply “negative” theology, or theology that proceeds by way of denial: denials about God both rely on the same logical categories as the affirmations, and they assume a similarly successful mode of communication or signification about the divine. Apophatic theology, then, is best described not in terms of negation or affirmation, but rather as an attempt to move beyond these categories altogether. The only true apophatic theology, some might argue, would be silence. All apophatic texts both face up to and move beyond the challenge of what I call the “ineffability impasse”— the acknowledgement that nothing true can be said about God. In a related supposition, apophatic theology starts by accepting both God’s absolute transcendence of all finitude, all creation, and of the ineffability of the divine essence. So what more can be said? The assumption embedded in claims about ineffability or unknowability is that the transcendent and the immanent, the finite and the infinite cannot speak to one another. Yet mystical authors and theologians, heralds of the apophatic, continue to write, exploring how language can be used to say what seems to be outside of or beyond language itself. What we in fact see so often in mystical texts is an attempt to stretch language in new directions, to find expressions and images that can move beyond binary logic and finite constructions. Mystical texts are thus often filled with difficult language and paradoxical formulations. It is a mistake, then, to define the apophatic as purely “negative” theology, as concerned only with denials about God. What is proper to the apophatic is, rather, those modes of speech which confound and amaze, perplex and please. Turner’s definitions of the apophatic and

16

cataphatic highlights the simultaneous success and failure of all theological language. But we label apophatic texts that use language creatively to puzzle the reader. My attention to metaphor adds to discussions of the apophatic in Christian theology and devotion by turning our attention to metaphor. In fact, only one chapter of this dissertation considers a text explicitly interested in the uses of negation (The Cloud of Unknowing), while the other overtly mystical text I discuss (Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love) is not explicitly concerned with these themes, nor are the two dream visions. In the fourteenth-century English texts this dissertation considers, metaphor becomes the linguistic solution to the ineffability impasse. (Form, in other words, becomes the solution to the challenges of content.) Metaphor itself is the site of the ineffable, as I’ve pointed out, but three of the texts I examine fully exploit this fact, drawing attention to the dynamics of similarity and difference through attention to metaphor’s literal, material referent. It is precisely through exploiting the potential of metaphor’s materiality, through lingering on, developing, expanding on the literal, that texts such as Pearl and Julian’s Revelation make clear the apophatic potential latent in every metaphor. Thus while this project is clearly situated within the study of negative theology, it adds a discussion of the possibilities inherent in figurative language. While every text that treats apophatic topics is forced into the position of seeking creative and alternative forms of language, this dissertation examines how this constellation of fourteenth-century English texts in fact turns to materiality to pursue the mystical.

Negation and Metaphor Pseudo-Dionysius maintains the necessity of both the affirmation and denial, which treats in The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology respectively. In his negation of affirmation, he systematically works his way through negating metaphorical affirmations about God before

17

beginning to negate the more abstract, general affirmations—“we have to start by denying the qualities which differ most from the goal we hope to attain.”22 Denys Turner points out, however, that Pseudo-Dionysius’ assumptions about the efficaciousness of negation on all levels is misplaced, given that some of the affirmations are metaphorical.23 In other words, metaphorical affirmations (“God is a rock”) cannot be negated in the same way that abstract affirmations can be (“God is good”). “You do not negate a metaphor by negating its literal falsehood,” Turner writes; “What negates a metaphor is only another metaphor.” Consider the metaphorical affirmation “God is a rock.” The literal negation of this statement, “God is not a rock,” while literally true (God is not actually a rock), does not negate the metaphor “God is a rock,” which is communicating that God is unmovable, unchanging, a “firm foundation.” These metaphorical assertions (and there are, as in the example above, often several valences of meaning contained in the metaphor) are negated by another metaphor, perhaps “God is wind, air, or spirit” (the Greek pneumos of course neatly ties all three of these together), or maybe “God is alive.”24 The first metaphor suggests movement and invisibility, while the second suggests liveliness. Negating metaphors with other metaphors, however, is negation-by-affirmation— these are not “God is not” statements, but rather two affirmative “God is…” statements whose metaphoric valences negate one another. Two things thus become clear. First, because every metaphor contains implicit assertions of similarity and difference, every metaphor contains an affirmation and a denial. To say that “God is a rock” is also to say that “God is not a rock.” The literal negation is contained in the metaphoric affirmation. To negate one metaphor with another 22

Mystical Theology, 1040D. Turner attributes this to Pseudo-Dionysius’ philosophical assumptions, “Like most Platonists, he lacks an adequate appreciation of the logic of metaphors.” Turner, The Darkness of God, 35. 24 Ibid., 37. Turner’s suggestion for the metaphoric denial of “God is a rock” is “God is alive,” identifying God’s “reliability which is greater than any shifty living beings could be counted upon to possess.” This paraphrase of the metaphoric meaning of “God is a rock” was rather different than my first impression of the metaphor, suggesting again the multiple interpretive possibilities in play in most metaphors. 23

18

is really simply the addition of another metaphor—the piling on of yet more affirmation and negation. When Pseudo-Dionysius, then, negates his metaphoric affirmations, he is actually only repeating what is already implicit in the logic of the metaphor itself. The second point is the relationship between the forms of negation suitable to metaphor and those outlined in the extensive treatments of logic that existed in the Middle Ages (based largely on Aristotelian principles). Some of Aristotle’s texts treating logic existed in the West before the twelfth-century rediscovery, but the expanded Aristotelian corpus contributed to the rise of what is often called New Logic. Sarah Kay has shown considerable light on the use of logic as it pertains to a shared medieval interest in contradiction, an interest that spans scholastic theology, mystical writings, and courtly literature. Kay shows how medieval thinkers, following in Aristotle’s footsteps, carefully parsed out multiple types of contradiction (which she glosses as contradiction, contrariness, and sub-contrariness).25 This nuanced reading of both the broad uses of contradiction and the complexities of negation suggest again how attuned authors may have been to the possibilities inherent in contradiction. Kay identifies two ways of discussing contradiction in the Middle Ages; the first is Aristotelian and involved precise, dialectical treatment of the nature and forms of contradiction, most typically in the scholastic milieu. The other discourse around contradiction, which she calls Augustinian, grows from the Neoplatonic and apophatic conception of “God’s mysterious excess with respect to the principle of noncontradiction.” Kay herself glosses this religious treatment of contradiction as aiming at a “higher unity,” and hence deeply invested in a dialectical movement 25

See the excellent Introduction in Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Kay uses the same “semiotic square,” most familiar through the work of Algirdas Greimas, to parse out these forms of contradiction. The two contrary statements (the strongest form of negation) are on the top of the square (i.e., “God is good” and “God is not God”). The contradictories are below these statements—so the contradictory of “God is good” is “God is sometimes good,” while the contradictory of “God is not good” is “God is not always good.” These two contradictories are also subcontraries. 13–14. 19

towards synthesis, even if that synthesis is figured, as it often is in discussions of mysticism, as “beyond” or “outside of” the categories of human conception.26 She goes on to argue, however, that these two strands of thinking about contradiction were not, in practice, opposed to one another, but could be used in turn by a thinker like Anselm, who approached contradiction variously depending on the topic at hand. The fundamental importance of dialectical training meant that every schoolboy was taught to think about the nature, scope, and implications of different forms of contradiction….Individual courtly writers may have been drawn, some to one and some to another, of these different traditions of thought, but what was more important was the fact that these traditions coexisted, interacted with one another, and together pressed home awareness that contradiction lay at the heart of intellectual life.27 In an intellectual milieu where the complexity surrounding logics of affirmation and negation was assumed, it is unsurprising that even vernacular texts reflect nuanced forms of contradiction and contrariety, including in their use of metaphor. Kay’s glossing of the Neoplatonic strand of Christianity, which she associates with Augustine, negative theology, and mysticism (she never discusses Pseudo-Dionysius), is not a significant strand of her argument, but her fairly brief mention of it is framed in terms of synthesis and unity, which perhaps inadvertently connects to the scholastic use of dialectic to pare back false arguments in an effort to arrive at conclusive deductions. My reading of the use of metaphor in mystical texts is that the unity achieved is not one of synthesis, an erasure of difference or contradiction, but rather a maintenance of difference or contradiction alongside similarity, within the same linguistic formulation. Similarity and difference, within metaphor, are bound together by their contradiction, the space that keeps them 26 27

Ibid., 19–20. Ibid., 25. 20

apart is (metaphorically) the space that also connects them (their contradiction is also their relationship).

New Developments in Literary and Religious Studies In both its emphasis on metaphor and on materiality, this dissertation participates in broader trends in the disciplines of English and Religious Studies. The role of materiality of multiple kinds has played an important role in the recent study of religion. Starting with Colleen McDonnell’s Material Christianity in the mid-90’s, Religious Studies scholars have been carefully attuned to the ways in which material religious cultures are not just the products of devotional trends and theological investments, but in fact shape those very experiences and beliefs.28 More recently, scholars of medieval Christianity have turned their attention anew to the role materiality and material practices in the religion of the Middle Ages. Caroline Walker Bynum has, for example, turned her attention recently from the role of the body in Christian devotion (an object of study that has occupied much of her career) to examine a more broadly construed materiality.29 Even more recent work has attempted to reconsider how medieval Christians understood the doctrine of Christ’s incarnation to have implications, not just for the body, but also for the materiality of the natural world.30

28

Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). David Morgan’s work on religious visual culture has also proved seminal in shaping how religious studies scholars envision the relationship between embodied religions subjects and the material objects and images with which they interact. David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 29 Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2011). 30 Sara Ritchey, Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 21

New theoretical developments in the humanities have also turned our attention in new ways to materiality, embodied-ness, and the existence of the non-human world. School of thought such as Object-Oriented Ontology, Speculative Realism, Posthumanism, even science studies (all of which can be seen as contributing to, or part of the recently christened “new materialism”) have turned our attention anew to theorizing the material world without anthropocentric assumptions. In my efforts to reconsider the relation of the immanent, material world to transcendence, I do envision this project as tangentially connected to these theoretical projects. In arguing that the texts I examine locate “transcendence within the immanent,” and not formulating this relationship as “immanent to a transcendent,” as is so often assumed about Christian thinking regarding both materiality and literality (reducing the literal sense or the material referent to nothing more than a “vehicle” with which to convey the truth), I am turning attention anew to materiality and religion, a topic that many theorists of “new materialism” do not come near, despite the surprisingly spiritual themes and language that permeate their texts. But the material referents of figurative language, the material objects embedded in and referenced by medieval texts, these are not the only types of materiality I examine. As my concern with metaphor makes clear, this dissertation also has a strong investment in “reading for form,” which is also the study of another type of materiality—the materiality of language. Formal readings pay particular attention to the material features of language—how language looks on the page and sounds to the ear. Particularly in my analysis of Pearl and Piers Plowman, I attend to the poetics of these texts, thus exposing how materiality of multiple kinds coalesce in texts concerned with transcendence. This attention to form also situates my dissertation in relation to a new development (which is really a return to an old methodology) in literary studies—the new formalism. What gets referred to as “new formalism” more accurately

22

describes an approach to studying literature that is motivated by diverse expectations and assumptions rather than a unified methodology or school of thought. Some new formalists seek to reinvigorate historicist methodologies by attending to the relationship(s) between literary form and social formations.31 Also included in new formalist approaches are those who are reacting to what is perceived as a reduction of literature to historicist or cultural studies concerns. (This approach, as Marjorie Levinson points out, runs the risk of reifying once again the binary between art and history.)32 New formalism is thus a rather capacious method, and it does not appear clear yet that this variety of approaches has yielded any significant reconsideration of the category of form itself. What does seem clear, however, is a renewed interest in how texts work, and, in many cases, the relationship between how they work and their larger cultural and historical significance. Medievalists working on English materials have certainly been at the forefront of this push.33 Metaphor itself both speaks and subverts itself. Because metaphor communicates on two levels, every metaphor posits something (metaphorically) and denies that same thing (literally). It is possible to explain this contradiction by appealing to the two “parts” of metaphor, as my parentheticals have done above, by carefully splitting the literal and metaphoric, tenor and vehicle, bodily and goostly.34 But the paradoxical reality of metaphor is that these two levels of

31

See Caroline Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4 (2006): 625–57. 32 Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 559. Levinson provides an excellent introduction to new formalism across a range of historical periods. 33 See, for example, Cristina Maria Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Eleanor Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve, ix, 254 pp. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry, eds., Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011). 34 “Tenor” and “vehicle” were I.A.Richards’ terms for the two parts of metaphor, popularized in the mid-twentieth century, and particularly prominent in formalist methodologies. The terms bodily and goostly in Middle English are 23

meaning coexist. The literal referent never entirely disappears behind the metaphoric meaning, as we often assume, nor do the possibilities and valences inherent in the literal referent. (The notion of “sense selection” within cognitive studies of metaphor explains how an individual moves almost immediately when encountering a new metaphor into “selecting” which of the possible metaphoric meanings of the literal referent are operative.) The texts this dissertation examines, both mystical and dream vision, highlight these paradoxes, drawing attention to metaphor’s contradiction and multiplicity. In doing so, they explore the mystical potential of metaphor, the ability of metaphor to embody the ineffable, to become the site of the infinite.

Overview This dissertation considers two texts which have traditionally been considered “mystical,” and two dream visions. All four texts were written in England in the mid- to late fourteenth century, and all texts reveal the infinite dynamics of figurative language, but to varying effects. The dream vision Pearl is best understood not through analysis of its narrative content but instead its elaborate poetic structure. Specifically, this first chapter focuses on the effect of the poem’s ornate and intricate language—its highly wrought stanzas, which are simultaneously confusing and aesthetically pleasurable. I argue that the intense materiality of the language produces a mystical effect of displacement and that analyzing the poem as a dream vision reveals both the agency and materiality of this language. While Chapter 1 focuses on the mystical effects of poetic language, which affirms through its emphasis on poetic materiality, Chapter 2 focuses on the role of negation in medieval mysticism. I argue that what appear to be attempts on the part of the anonymous Cloud-author to used for the literal and spiritual meanings of religious texts. The term bodily underscores the materiality of the literal level, both in its language and in its correspondence to material objects in the world. 24

negate the literal or material referents of his metaphors in fact reveal a sophisticated approach to language and transcendence. His excessive interest in the literal referent emerges from fourteenth-century anxieties surrounding vernacular theology and the vitium curiositatis (the sin of curiosity), while his own use of language highlights metaphor’s “bi-directionality”—the literal referent determines how the metaphoric referent will be understood, but the metaphoric simultaneously shapes our apprehension of the literal. Chapter 3 examines unnoticed formal features of Julian of Norwich’s Long Text, focusing on her exemplum of the Lord and Servant. Often considered the lynchpin of her daring theology, I claim that Julian approaches this particular vision as a metaphor, whose interpretation requires both the figurative reading strategies of biblical exegesis, and a great deal of time for the exemplum’s meaning to emerge. The mobility of Julian’s own prose mirrors the generative indeterminacy of metaphor, and Julian’s text reveals the how, over time, “bodily” and “goostly” meanings come to expansively define one another. Following Chapter 3’s attention to prose treatments of metaphor, this chapter returns to figurative language in poetry. Piers Plowman provides a limit case for my dissertation. Like other chapters, I argue that the poem’s figurative language blurs the allegorical and literal. The poem also highlights the materiality of language through its use of the alliterative long line form. But the allegory does not come to embody the ineffable as metaphor does in the other texts I examine. I describe Piers as fundamentally metonymic, gesturing to the infinite beyond the text itself. In the English dream visions and mystical texts I examine, metaphor is key to how these late medieval genres construct the experience and language of transcendence. By examining these two genres’ reliance on both materiality and metaphor, my dissertation contributes to

25

emerging conversations about the similarities between the textual phenomena of dreams and religious, or mystical, experience. My analysis makes clear that records of religious visions and literary depictions of dreaming share certain linguistic features. Drawing our attention to language, medieval visionary literature reveals the diverse ways that linguistic form radically shapes the understanding of reality and of the divine. The formal features of these visionary texts, I argue, cross oppositions of “letter” and “spirit” or “content” and “form,” and ultimately display the metaphorical surface as a place for engaging the ineffable.

26

CHAPTER 1 PEARL AND THE APOPHATIC POETIC Ouer þis hyul þis lote I laӡte, For pyty of my perle enclyin… [On this mound this vision I received, Lying prostrate for sorrow over my pearl…] -Pearl, XX.1205-0635

This dissertation begins with the analysis a dream vision that is one of the most stunning examples of English poetry across the centuries. The anonymous poem Pearl appears alongside the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the didactic sermons Cleanness and Patience (the latter retells the biblical story of Job) in the now-famous Coton Nero A.x manuscript. All four texts exhibit a virtuosic facility with language, but Sir Gawain and Pearl in particular utilize baffling intricate poetic structures. Like all dream visions, Pearl’s narration involves a dreamer-narrator who we first encounter mourning his lost pearl in a garden. He then falls asleep, is transported to a dream-world with a surreal landscape, meets his dead daughter, and is allowed a glimpse of the New Jerusalem. When he tries to plunge across the river dividing his dream world to be with his daughter and dwell in the redeemed city, he suddenly awakes. Despite its other-worldly plot and preoccupation with spiritual instruction, Pearl foregrounds the significance of materiality of multiple kinds. Its baroque poetry thrusts forward the materiality of language, its dream-world invokes highly material descriptions, and the eponymous pearl never leaves behind its most literal identity as a gemstone as it undergoes numerous metaphorical transformations. For Wolfson the immanent and the transcendent cohere in one another, and dreams and metaphors are spaces where this crucial coincidence is made

35

All quotations are from Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron, eds., Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 3rd ed. (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1996). 27

clear to us. Pearl’s persistent materiality and metaphoricity, then, are significantly linked to its generic identity as a dream vision. The association between dreams and metaphor (and also between dreams, writing, and interpretation) which is so firmly established in psychoanalytic thought can in turn help us look at the medieval genre of dream vision anew. The Middle English dream visions seem to demonstrate a particular permutation of the genre and are, as a result, notoriously quirky and interpretively challenging. The frame narrative provided by the dream in dream vision leads critics in several directions in analyzing the genre. Many scholars have productively turned to medieval treatises on dreams and dream interpretation to help us unravel the often complicated narratives contained in dream visions. Critics like Steven Kruger, A.C. Spearing, and Kathryn Lynch examine authorities such as Augustine, Macrobius, and Calcidius who carefully distinguish between types of dreams and their subsequent reliability (or lack thereof).36 These scholars also often examine the medieval precedents regarding dream—biblical examples, such as Joseph and Daniel, as well as classical texts like the Somnium Sciopionis (the Dream of Scipio, part of Cicero’s De republica), to see how medieval audiences understood dreams to function. Some scholarship has surveyed those texts we categorize as dream visions in an attempt to descriptively enumerate the genre’s main features. Peter Brown’s excellent essay, “Middle English Dream Visions,” or Spearing’s early work Medieval Dream-Poetry provide useful overviews of the shared features of those texts we identify as dream visions, but offer only

36

Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), see especially chapters 3-5; A. C Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Kathryn L. Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 28

cursory examinations into the significance of these features.37 Quite recently, two monographs have also compared Middle English dream visions with mystical texts. Jessica Barr’s book, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages, attempts to frame the genre of dream vision in terms of medieval expectations and understandings about visionary experience more generally, while Claire Barbetti’s book Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory, examines dream vision in light of Barbetti’s own re-definition of ekphrasis.38 All of the studies above, which vary greatly in terms of methodology and conclusion, focus heavily on the content, or narrative structure, of the dream vision genre. Brown’s and Lynch’s studies, for example, provide excellent overviews of those features commonly found in dream visions from particular sub-periods of the Middle Ages. Lynch and Kruger both examine the cultural “work” the genre performs; Lynch arguing that high medieval dream visions are essentially conservative in their general commitment to philosophical exposition and instruction, and more specifically in their interest in maintaining the viability of Realist philosophy.39 Kruger, in discussing the Middle English dream visions, focuses on the self-reflexivity of the genre, a feature dream visions share with medieval understandings of the role of poetry or of the mirror, an object meant to encourage self-examination.40 Barbetti is the most explicitly interested

37

Peter Brown, “Middle English Dream Visions,” in Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. Peter Brown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 22–50; Spearing, Medieval DreamPoetry. 38 Jessica Barr, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010); Claire Barbetti, Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). It is worth noting that both Barr and Barbetti examine mystical texts from a geographic and chronological range (Barr analyzes writings by Gertrude of Helfta and Marguerite D’Oignt, while Barbetti devotes a chapter to Hildegard of Bingen’s Scivias), but both authors only consider fourteenth-century Middle English dream visions. This disproportionate nature of their comparisons skews their analysis, whereas Kruger and Lynch both examine a much broader range of dream visions from across the Middle Ages. 39 Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision. 40 Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, see in particular the chapter on "Dreams and Fiction," 123-149. 29

in the literary form of the dream vision, but, in her analysis, the texts themselves “function more as examples of Barbetti's developing theorization of ekphrasis than as objects of study in their own right.”41 Furthermore, Barbetti’s analysis doesn’t focus on the level of the word, per say, but on the “movements” of the text between the objects described and the descriptions themselves. I argue that Wolfson’s account of the proximity of dream, metaphor, and mysticism allows us to reread the persistent metaphoricity of Pearl as serving a mystical purpose. Pearl scholars have examined the poem’s rich reliance on figurative language to gesture towards the infinite. Sarah Stanbury eloquently points out, for example, how the poem highlights the relationship between metaphor and transcendence in her 2001 introduction to the poem: “The economy of metaphor, or rather its hyper-economy, lies in its uncanny ability to express both equivalence and multiplicity; ostensibly an equation of identity, marked by an equal sign, metaphor also adds up to the sum of its parts.”42 The paradox implicit in Stanbury’s claim is the same property of metaphor that Wolfson is pointing out—metaphor’s ability to hold together in linguistic form both similarity and difference, singularity and multiplicity. While Pearl scholars have noted the centrality of metaphor, Wolfson’s work explicitly helps connect the poem’s use of metaphor with its deep investment in materiality. The hyper-economy Stanbury identifies is not only located on the side of the pearl’s ever-increasing metaphoric referents. The literal referent, the material object (the other side of Stanbury’s equal sign) also multiplies wildly throughout the text. In paying attention to the pearls of the poem, rather than looking only for “the” pearl and its concomitant metaphoric meanings, we can come to see how, in Wolfson’s formulation, it is precisely the poem’s linguistic and historical immanence that brings forth its transcendence. 41

Shannon Gayk, review of Ekphrastic Medieval Visions. Choice Magazine (June 2012). Sarah Stanbury, ed., Pearl (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), par. 7. Available online at http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/stanbury-pearl-introduction.

42

30

Metaphor’s Multiplicity Through the poem’s repeated deployments of its central metaphor, we can see how it creates an aesthetically powerful, if interpretively confusing, surfeit of meaning. In the closing lines of the poem quoted above, for example, the text circles back on its own beginning, as the last line of the poem echoes the first. But the “pearl” that is referenced in this final stanza is not exactly the same as the pearl referenced in the first. Indeed, the image of the pearl has gone through so many transformations over the poem’s 1212 lines that it is difficult to know what, at this point, the eponymous object signifies. At the start, the poem seems to be an actual jewel, and the narrator a jeweler who mourns its loss. As this narrator enters his dream vision, pearls make up the gravel that crunches (“con grynde,” 80) underfoot as he walks through the dream landscape in Section II. We next see pearls in Section III when the narrator first catches a glimpse across the river of the young girl who will be his guide in his dream. She is dressed in pearls (“perlez pyӡte” is the concatenating expression of Section IV); they cover her dress (197-204, 217-220), adorn her crown (205-208), and her necklace is a “wonder perle withouten wemme” [an amazing pearl without blemish] (221-222). As a jeweler who clearly understands from the opening lines that jewels are an outward sign of class and status, that they are “to prynces paye” [for the pleasure of princes/due to princes] (1), he certainly must appreciate the significance of her royal attire. Yet, at the start of Section V, after spending all of Section IV describing the pearls which cover her clothing, the narrator refers to the girl herself as a pearl: ‘O perle,’ quoþ I, ‘in perles pyӡt, Art þou my perle þat I haf playned, Regretted by myn one on nyӡte?

31

Much longeyng haf I for þe layned, Syþen into gresse þou me aglyӡte’ (241-245). [‘O pearl,’ said I, ‘adorned in pearls, Are you my pearl which I have mourned, And grieved for by myself at night? I have concealed much longing for you, Since you slipped away from me into the grass.’] So the pearl is now a dead and much beloved girl; she appears to be the narrator’s daughter, and he is now the grief-stricken parent, rather than the forlorn craftsman. The narrator himself seems further to muddle the distinction between the lost jewel and the dead girl by describing her as having “slipped away into the grass,” a phrase that echoes the opening stanza: “I leste hyr in on erbere; / Þurӡ gresse to grounde hit fro me yot” [I lost her in a garden; it fell from me through the grass to the ground] (9-10).43 So from the very start, before readers encounter any clues to the fact that the pearl is more than just a lost object, the pearl is described as “she.” By the time the pearl becomes a girl, we are reminded of the lost gem. Additionally, the pearl seems to vacillate between singularity (the jewel of Section I, the girl of Section IV) and multiplicity (the pearls that pave the path and cover the maiden’s attire). Such an oscillation is discomfiting, because the unique identity of the jewel or the girl seems tied to the pearl’s singularity (this one special jewel that is treasured above all the others; the beloved daughter who cannot be replaced), whereas the countless pearls that appear at other moments provide no room at all for individual identity or distinction, especially the pearls that make up the gravel on which the dreamer walks—an image of banality if ever there was one.44 The sheer 43

The maiden also refers to herself as a pearl, as the jeweler’s pearl: “Sir, ӡe haf your tale mysetente, / To say your perle is al awaye” [Sir, you have misspoken about your experience in saying that your pearl is utterly lost] (257– 258). 44 The multiplication of the pearl is mirrored in the later multiplication of heavenly queens. The pearl-maiden describes herself as a queen, and the narrator protests that Mary is the Queen of Heaven, so the maiden’s assertion is 32

number of pearls on the ground or on the dress impart the magnificence of the dream world (they pave the ground with pearls here!) or of the girl. In short order, then, we see a paradox emerge out of the metaphor—a seeming contradiction between the pearl’s apparent uniqueness and its/her ordinariness. This oscillation between the pearl’s singularity and its multiplicity repeats as the poem turns explicitly to more spiritual themes. In Section XIII, the pearl-maiden re-tells the biblical parable of the pearl of greatest price, in which a merchant is “looking for fine pearls. When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.”45 In this section, the concatenating phrase is a pun that also functions as a homophone: “mascellez/maskellez [spotless] perle”46 and “makellez [matchless] perle.” Because the pearl is spotless and matchless, it is worth everything the merchant has. The homophone emphasizes the uniqueness of the gem and, concomitantly, its absolute value. But in the description of the New Jerusalem from Section XVIII to Section IX, the multiplicity and abundance reemerge: multiple pearls sit atop each of the gates to the city, and there is a great procession of virgins, all of whom are dressed like the pearl-maiden, “depaynt in perlez and wedez qwyte” [adorned in pearls and white clothing] (1101). The multiplicity of the pearl that we saw when the narrator first beheld the maiden proliferates again here, and pearl maidens of this host are indistinguishable from one another and from the one, unique pearl-maiden, the dead daughter. They are “in þe same gyse þat watz my blysful anvnder croun” [in the same fashion as was my blissful one beneath her illogical. The narrator’s perspective at this point in the poem thus reveals a similar confounding tension between singularity (there can only ever be one queen) and multiplicity (there are thousands of maidens who are queens in heaven). 45 Matthew 13:45-46. In the Vulgate: “iterum simile est regnum caelorum homini negotiatori quaerenti bonas margaritas. Inventa autem una pretiosa margarita abiit et vendidit omnia quae habuit et emit eam.” 46 This word is spelled four different ways (mascellez, maskelles, maskelez, maskellez) in its eight usages in this section. Middle English spelling varies radically even within a single manuscript, so it would be hard to make an argument about the significance of this inconsistency. But for the reader, this variety certainly adds to a sense of the instability of signification that the pun also marks. “Makellez” has only one, very close, variant: “makelez.” 33

crown] (1098-1099), and “alle in sute her liuréz wasse / Tor to knaw þe gladdest chere” [their garments matched; it was difficult to know which was the happiest face] (1108-1109). In these sections, which begin the poem’s conclusion, we see a proliferation of proliferation—a multiplication of the multiplicity witnessed in descriptions of the gravel and the maiden’s dress in Sections III and IV. The tension between the pearl’s multiple appearances in the poem, and the confusion of its status as singular and multiple, frustrate the reader’s attempt to assign the metaphor one meaning that could be used to interpret the poem. Instead we must continually shuffle between the pearl’s many meanings, in a sort of constant mental movement, redolent of Wolfson’s “gap continuously crossed but never collapsed.” The tension between singularity and multiplicity exists on the level of the pearl’s spiritual significance as well. The pearl of greatest price expressed in Scripture uses the formulaic language of parable; it is like the “kingdom of heaven” (simile est regnum caelorum). In Pearl the poet seems carefully attentive to this feature of biblical language, re-producing the simile: “This makellez perle þat boӡt is dere/…/ Is lyke þe reme of heuenesse clere” [this matchless pearl that was dearly bought…is like the bright kingdom of heaven] (733, 735, italics mine). Here the pearl has a singular spiritual significance—it metaphorically refers to the kingdom of heaven. And yet in the closing sections of the poem, this meaning shifts: “pearl” also comes to refer to those individuals who are saved by Christ’s sacrifice. The closing lines of the poem read, “He gef vus to be His homly hyne / Ande precious perlez vnto His pay” [Christ gave to us to be humble servants and precious pearls for His pleasure/satisfaction] (1211-1212). In this formulation, all Christians who submit to Christ’s lordship, who become his “humble servants,” are pearls. Spiritually, then, the pearl is both singular and multiple. Critics tend to take their cues from the singular title of the poem, tracing out the metaphoric meanings of the pearl, while

34

ignoring the tension inherent in its doubled (even multiplied) status.47 In the central metaphor’s instability, we can see Wolfson’s claim that “metaphor is a form of language that materializes in the fissure that connects by keeping apart.” The metaphor does not clarify meaning in the conventional sense—if it did, one metaphoric deployment of the pearl would be sufficient. Instead, Pearl shows us how metaphor itself works and by doing so illuminates the reality that Wolfson locates in the dream and in mysticism. The metaphor proliferates precisely because this reality “connects by keeping apart.” Each incarnation of the metaphor is a point of connection, of explanation, but also an acknowledgment of the ineffable, unexplainable nature of what is being communicated—each form the metaphor takes is both a disclosure and a concealment. This proliferation of the pearl, while similar in some ways to the multiplication of levels of meaning in Scripture, is also crucially different from the guidelines governing medieval exegesis. Allegorical readings of the poem, prominent in the early and mid-twentieth century, also take the pearl’s meanings to be multiple. D.W. Robertson’s early essay on Pearl neatly maps onto the poem the four levels of Scriptural interpretation: Literally, the Pearl is a gem. Allegorically, as the maiden of the poem, it represents those members of the Church who will be among the “hundred” in the celestial procession, the perfectly innocent. Tropologically, the Pearl is a symbol of the soul that attains such innocence through true penance and all that such penance implies. Anagogically, it is the life of innocence in the Celestial City.48 Robertson’s reading of Pearl suggests that the multiplied metaphors in the poem can be neatly identified and categorized according to medieval modes of interpretation. And yet it is 47

The title, of course, is a convention of modern editing. The first word of the poem is the singular “perle,” but that pearl, the one in the first line, is the object which is so rapidly multiplied, both literally and metaphorically. The title, while certainly fitting, also encourages readers to identify the pearl as singular. 48 D.W. Robertson, “The Pearl as a Symbol,” in The Middle English Pearl, Ed. John Conley. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970), 25–26. 35

surprisingly difficult to map out all of the metaphoric meanings of the pearl—more difficult than Robertson’s analysis would suggest. In his identification of the allegorical meaning, he has already skipped over the importance of the maiden’s filial relationship to the narrator, and hence her unique affiliation with the lost gemstone. Once the relationship between the narrator and the pearl maiden becomes clear, it is also much less apparent which is the literal referent and which is the metaphoric. It seems equally compelling to say that the girl and her father are the literal referents, while the pearl and the jeweler are the metaphoric ones. But the poem itself throws up roadblocks to such neat categorization of its metaphors precisely because of the moments where pearls are multiplied, but are not clearly metaphorized (again, the pearls used in adornment or as gravel). The proliferation of the object which is also the literal referent confuses our already difficult interpretation of the poem’s multiple metaphors (the pearl is the girl, the kingdom of heaven, the obedient Christian). The pearl in its countless forms creates an excess which defies our attempts at interpretation. Although clearly a metaphor in multiple modes, the pearl and the poem resist being reduced to the sort of metaphoric interpretation Robertson exercises, which attempts, at least in part, to fix the meaning of this elusive object. The multiplication of both metaphoric and literal pearls to the point of excess achieves a “merger of dissimilar entities without resolution of their difference.” Like Wolfson and his linguistic strategies, then, Pearl employs its own rhetorical and literary devices to gesture towards reality, towards the infinity it wants to present. The metaphor of the pearl in Pearl is thus inherently unstable, as other scholars have noted, though the vacillation between singularity and multiplicity goes unnoticed.49 The literal 49

Theodore Bogdanos, Pearl, Image of the Ineffable: A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983); Douglas Thorpe, A New Earth: The Labor of Language in Pearl, Herbert’s Temple, and Blake’s Jerusalem (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 45–51; Eugene Vance, “Pearl: Love and the Poetics of Participation,” in Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English 36

referent, or the “vehicle,” in I.A. Richards’ formulation, seems to be the gemstone of the opening sections whose significance plays a central part in the poem’s representation of value, reward, and distinction, all thematically central to the text. But the metaphoric referents, or “tenor(s),” abound, and the precise relationship of these to the literal referent is difficult to discern. How shall we understand those pearls which are multiple, such as the pearls used for adornment, or those that make up the gravel? Metaphor itself always institutes, or perhaps comes to exist in, the tension between literal and figurative referents, between the similarity and difference that coexist in the metaphoric relationship.50 (The girl is the pearl, but she also is not. She has qualities of purity, wholeness, exceeding value; she is beloved of the narrator, but she also is not an actual gemstone; she is not round, or white; she did not come from an oyster.) This tension between similarity and difference, between literal and metaphoric referents, is Wolfson’s “irreducible reducibility,” the “fissure that connects by keeping apart.” Pearl’s proliferation of metaphors (the pearl is the gem, the girl, the kingdom of heaven, the obedient Christian) highlights the workings of metaphor, since it reproduces again and again the metaphoric movement “across a gap continuously crossed but never collapsed.” The multiplication of both metaphoric and literal pearls to the point of excess achieves a “merger of dissimilar entities without resolution of their difference.” Wolfson’s account of the hermeneutic of dream and metaphor, then, can help us to see how Pearl employs its own rhetorical devices, poetic form, and literary genre to embody the Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991), 131–47. D.W. Robertson is perhaps the best example of those critics who read the poem allegorically—he explicates the metaphor of the pearl via the fourfold exegetical method, assigning it literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical meanings. His reading thus both acknowledges, in one sense, the metaphor’s instability, while still trying neatly to pin down its meaning. 50 Though Wolfson does not quote him, Paul Ricoeur himself makes this point, explicating the work of resemblance in metaphoric meaning (“resemblance” is itself another term that implies both similarity and difference). Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 193–215. In discussing the tension inherent in metaphor, he writes that “the literal is not accompanies the metaphorical is” (214). Ricoeur, furthermore, identifies metaphor as a “planned category mistake” (197); a phrase which seems particularly apt to describe the transmutation of the eponymous pearl, and which Sarah Stanbury cites in her introduction to the poem (par. 5). 37

infinity it wants to present. Although the poem has several strategies it employs to this end, I have just explored briefly the way in which the pearl (as object, metaphor, and poem) creates an interpretive excess capable of signifying its paradoxical and infinite truth. 51 As I will go on to show, this excess is also evident in other aspects of the poem—its reliance on puns, for example, and its use of the specific materials of fourteenth-century English culture. Pearl is, in fact, a highly material poem on several levels, and its reliance on materiality contributes to the centrality of metaphor in the poem, precisely because the poetry reveals the persistent materiality of metaphorical language.

Language and Transcendence Many studies of Pearl have paid close attention to the complex workings of Pearl’s symbolic and metaphoric language, and pointed to how the language itself gestures at transcendent reality.52 J. Allen Mitchell, for example, compares Pearl to the genre of parable in its ability to take familiar language and make it “strange”—using the ordinary to point to the extraordinary (102–105).53 A.C. Spearing’s comparison of Pearl to The Cloud of Unknowing locates the poem’s mysticism in its use of images, which, he argues, employ a like-but-not-like technique akin to metaphor. The poem contains descriptions of cities, maidens, and forests, but none of these conform to the reader’s expectations. In their lack of conformity, these images actually frustrate attempts at 51

Cristina Cervone uses the term “supereffable” to refer to language’s “intellectually challenging fullness,” which “may provide a means to approaching the ineffable.” Although she does not discuss Pearl, she provides compelling readings of the “fullness” of figurative language in other fourteenth-century English writers. Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 11. 52 Theodore Bogdanos and Arthur G. Ross, for example, engage medieval sign theory, looking to see how figures such as Augustine theorized language’s innate ability to communicate divine truth. Cervone also provides an excellent introduction to medieval sign theory and its influence on Middle English poetics. Bogdanos, Pearl, Image of the Ineffable; Arthur G. Ross, “The Day of Judgment Is Now: A Johannine Pattern in the Middle English Pearl,” American Benedictine Review 38 (1987): 227–42. Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 19–55. 53 J. Allan Mitchell, “The Middle English ‘Pearl’: Figuring the Unfigurable,” The Chaucer Review 35 (2000): 102– 105. 38

comprehension. In Spearing’s identification of the mystical effect with the poem’s descriptions, we can begin to see how Pearl’s movement towards the transcendent emerges from its use of language.54 This body of Pearl scholarship fruitfully points out the ways in which this is a poem preoccupied with using poetry to “do” theology.55 My analysis here adds to this analysis of Pearl, and of “incarnational poetics” more generally, by looking at how metaphor in particular structures the poem’s efforts to achieve transcendence. Cristina Cervone has recently provided a compelling case for the prominence of and interest in incarnational poetics in late fourteenthcentury England, arguing that metaphor became a means of representing the hypostatic union across a range of media and genres.56 In a similar but distinct move, I am situating the poem in the rich tradition of medieval Christian mysticism (including mystical theology), focusing on metaphor’s figuration of apophatic theology. In Pearl metaphor does not “transform” language, but ties together the ordinary and the extraordinary, the finite and the infinite, the immanent and the transcendent, vehicle and tenor, similarity and difference, in an inseparable but 54

A.C. Spearing, “Language and Its Limits: The Cloud of Unknowing and Pearl,” in Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Roger Ellis and Dee Dyas (Rochester NY: D.S. Brewer, 2005), 75–86. Other studies have looked at the poem as a mystical text, treating the narrator’s dream as a religious vision. Such scholarship figures the narrative movement of the poem as one of mystical ascent, and considers the extent to which the dreamer is transformed through his encounter with the Maiden. Jessica Barr argues that the narrator’s worldly attachment to his daughter prevent him from achieving the state of detachment that is necessary for union with Christ, Barr, Willing to Know God, 122–151; Ann Astell compares the poem to Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermon on the death of his brother, locating a tripartite movement of ascent, descent, and reascent in the poem. Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 119–134; Annika Sylén Lagerholm compares the poem in the context of other fourteenth-century contemplative writing both in England and on the continent by examining how these texts struggle to convey in the contemplative goal of transcendent experience. Annika Sylén Lagerholm, Pearl and Contemplative Writing, Lund Studies in English (Lund: Lund University, Dept. of English, 2005). 55 The phrase is inspired by the title of Jim Rhodes’ book Poetry Does Theology. 56 Anne Howland Schotter briefly examines Pearl’s incarnational approach to language, but Cervone’s study is much more detailed in both her contextualization of “incarnational” language in the Christian theological tradition, and in her examination of the formal features with which fourteenth-century English writers gave shape to theological truth. Anne Howland Schotter, “Vernacular Style and the Word of God: The Incarnational Art of Pearl,” in Ineffability, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 23–34. 39

distinguishable linguistic bond.57 In doing so, metaphor quite literally embodies, gives shape to, the paradoxical reality that mysticism also pursues. Metaphor is not something that allows for transcendence, but rather the linguistic strategy (and a highly material linguistic strategy in Pearl) that is the very embodiment of that transcendence.

Pearl’s Multiple Materialities Through its repeated deployments of a single metaphor, Pearl also draws our attention to certain features of metaphor (its simultaneous reliance on similarity and difference to make meaning, and, along with this simultaneity, the enduring presence of the material referent). Other linguistic strategies in the poem work in similar ways. Puns, too, gesture towards a sort of infinite expansion or transformation of meaning. Sandra Pierson Prior and Douglas Thorpe argue that concatenation and puns transform the reader’s understanding, seeking to transcend earthly categories and finite comprehension.58 However, the poem’s metaphors and puns also return our focus to the materiality of language. In the case of puns, it is a materiality of the word as it is seen on the page, heard with the ear, and spoken with the mouth. And, as I will go on to argue, Pearl’s central metaphor keeps our focus on the material referent—in Sarah Stanbury’s words, “language and image never abandon the materiality of their metaphoric point of departure.”59 The poem’s formal and stylistic concern with materiality is not opposed to or even unconcerned with its extended reliance on fourteenth-century material culture. In its culturally specific 57

Jim Rhodes argues that the poem holds together the immanent and the transcendent, but at the level of the narrative, claiming “that the Dreamer’s voice counts as much as the Maiden’s in the theological and social discourse of the poem and that he shares the theological and moral center of the poem with her….What the Maiden attributes to the transcendent, the Dreamer continues to show is also part of the immanent, the personal, and the human.” Jim Rhodes, “The Dreamer Redeemed: Exile and the Kingdom in the Middle English Pearl,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 120, 139. 58 Sandra Pierson Prior, The Fayre Formez of the Pearl Poet (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), 174–186; Thorpe, A New Earth, 32–51. 59 Stanbury, Pearl, par. 11. 40

preoccupation with highly material concerns—labor and compensation, luxury goods, aristocratic dress—Pearl reveals a unified interest in materiality of multiple kinds. Even in its use of cultural materials, the poem gestures towards an excess that defies comprehension. Pearl’s mysticism is thus located in the center of its cultural and linguistic materiality. It would be misleading even to say that its mysticism “emerges out of” this materiality, insofar as “emerge” suggests rising above or surpassing. The poem’s transcendence is to be found in its immanence. Pearl is in fact a material poem on multiple levels. My reading of the materiality of the poem’s language, which privileges a more theoretical approach to the poem, might seem to exclude historicist readings.60 But many of the historicist readings of the poem, another important node in Pearl scholarship, in fact reinforce its material concerns, which, I am arguing, is precisely what lead to its mystical tenor. Scholars have, in fact, been quick to claim that Pearl’s definitive interpretation can be located in either historical or transhistorical concerns.61 60

Historicist scholarship of Pearl has gone in many different directions. I will discuss in particular scholarship that has situated the poem in light of its material concerns, but other studies have examined the poem vis-à-vis aristocratic religious culture and devotional practices (Nicholas Watson, “The Gawain-Poet as Vernacular Theologian,” in A Companion to the Gawain Poet, eds Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1997); Jennifer Garrison, “Liturgy and Loss: Pearl and the Ritual Reform of the Aristocratic Subject,” Chaucer Review 44, no. 3 (2010): 294–322.), or contemporary theological debates over the role of human works in achieving salvation (David Aers, “Christianity for Courtly Subjects: Reflections on the Gawain-Poet,” in A Companion to the Gawain Poet, vol. eds Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 91–101; Lawrence Beaston, “The Pearl-Poet and the Pelagians,” Religion and Literature 36 (2004): 15–38.). Some scholarship has analyzed the poem as a product of Ricardian court culture, and emphasized Richard II’s affiliation with Cheshire, the geographic region in whose dialect the Pearl is written (Michael Bennett, “The Court of Richard II and the Promotion of Literature,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hannawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 3–20; John M. Bowers, The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II (Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2001).). Lynn Staley’s thorough overview of Ricardian politics and literary patronage even leads her to argue for a specific identity of the poem’s narrator and the Pearl-maiden. Lynn Staley, “Pearl and the Contingencies of Love and Piety,” in Medieval Literature and Historical Inqiury, ed. David Aers (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 83–114. 61 See, for example, Helen Barr’s assertion that she will “break out of a closed hermeneutic system of juxtaposing the heavenly and the earthly, the literal and the figurative, and the aesthetic and the cultural, to show how the narrative strategies and verbal texture of Pearl are embedded in late fourteenth-century social concerns and practices” (59), or George Edmondson’s assertion that “Pearl, by its reliance on metaphor, tells us as much about 41

But one of the most remarkable things about Pearl is the way the poem tightly binds together an intense sort of materiality (necessarily culturally and historically specific) with larger concerns about language and the divine. The poem exposes how metaphor works, and in fact makes this operation central to its production of meaning. But this is not achieved at the cost of metaphor’s specificity. The metaphor of the pearl matters—it matters that the pearl is, well, a pearl, and not a diamond or a ruby. The jeweler matters, too, as do the myriad of other details. Pearl is a relentlessly material poem on several levels, one of them linguistic, and its varieties of materiality, including its status as a fourteenth-century literary work, in fact coexist with the much more “abstract” movement towards language and mystical signification. Scholarship on Pearl has enumerated at length the ways in which the poem is itself a product of the material culture and economic and political concerns of late fourteenth-century England. Studies have examined the significance of the pearl as a jewel—a luxury item whose possession and use as adornment would have signaled a certain status, while other studies have looked at the labor that went into producing jewelry and other luxury objects.62 The pearl not mourning in general, and about the troubled intersection of mourning and signification in particular, as it does about who or what it happens to mourn or about the specific ways in which Ricardian culture enacted the mourning process. In other words, the fact that Pearl can be returned to its proper ‘setting,’ contextualized as a product of Ricardian court culture, in no way guarantees that its meaning has been set” (31). Helen Barr, “Pearl; Or, ‘The Jeweller’s Tale’,” Medium Ævum 69, no. 1 (2000): 59; George Edmondson, “Pearl: The Shadow of the Object, the Shape of the Law,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 31.Scholars such as Jill Mann and Elizabeth Harper, however, instead show how the poem’s reliance on “fourteenth-century social concerns and practices” is tightly bound up in its movement towards figuring the transcendent. Jill Mann, “Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 17–48; Elizabeth Harper, “Pearl in the Context of Fourteenth-Century Gift Economies,” Chaucer Review 44, no. 4 (2010): 421–39. 62 John M. Bowers and Felicity Riddy both examine the significance of gems and jewelry to the aristocracy, and reflect on Pearl's concerns about labor, status, and worth by examining how such luxury items were tied up in the performance of rank. Bowers, The Politics of Pearl, 1–37; Felicity Riddy, “Jewels in Pearl,” in A Companion to the Gawain Poet, ed. Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 143–55. Helen Barr situates the poem's concerns about earning in relation to late fourteenth-century developments regarding labor and compensation. Barr, “Pearl; Or, ‘The Jeweller’s Tale’,” 70–72. All of these studies are also notable for their insistence that they are turning away from formal or religious readings of the poem in favor of historicist methodology. Tony Davenport challenges Barr’s and Riddy’s readings, claiming that Pearl in fact lacks the 42

only signifies wealth and status, but it also contains particular medieval significance, being associated with purity and virginity through its etymological affiliation with St. Margaret.63 Furthermore, the pearl’s spherical form suggests infinity, as a circle has no end or beginning. The narrator, as a jeweler, a craftsman, has concerns that reflect broader fourteenth-century anxieties about mercantilism, as well as labor, its material products, and its recompense. Readers should not be surprised that the narrator is bothered by all of this “unfair” compensation, or the imprecise quantification of innoӡe. He is, after all, a jeweler. Jeueler is a term that the Middle English Dictionary first registers in the mid-fourteenth century to refer to those who trade in gems and make jewelry. Part of the job of a jeweler is to be able to appraise the value of various jewels, and so we hear the narrator of Pearl telling us in the opening lines that he “Ne proued I neuer her precios pere” [I never saw/appraised her equal] (4). The narrator’s job requires him to put a price to particular objects, to delimit their value. The constant transformations that the pearl undergoes in the poem point simultaneously to the fact that the narrator can neither ascertain her value nor assert his prerogative as her creator. The pearl literally exceeds the jeweler’s natural attempts to contain and shape it, just as Pearl escapes language’s ability to make it signify, and just as God’s grace, which is grete innoӡe, frustrates any attempt at measurement. So even when this poem is examined as a product of its cultural milieu, its material concerns produce its transcendent effects. The particular, material details, then, cannot be divorced from the mystical tenor of this text; the mysticism is in the materiality. Pearl’s materiality, which exists on multiple levels, does the same thing. Its formal or linguistic technical vocabulary and familiarity with the methods of jewelry making that one would expect if its author were truly familiar with the trade. Tony Davenport, “Jewels and Jewellers in Pearl,” Review of English Studies 59 (2008): 508–20. 63 Josephine Bloomfield, “Aristotelian Luminescence, Thomistic Charity: Vision, Reflection, and Self-Love in Pearl,” Studies in Philology 108, no. 2 (2011): 165–88. James W. Earl had much earlier identified St. Margaret as a possible source for the Pearl-maiden. James W. Earl, “Saint Margaret and the Pearl Maiden,” Modern Philology 70 (1972): 1–8. 43

materiality parallels its deeply material and historical concerns, and there is, in the end, no incommensurability between this thoroughgoing materiality and the infinite, mystical reality. The latter is located firmly in the former. Pearl’s Linguistic Materiality Insofar as Pearl is a “freakishly formal” poem, it is also a poem deeply concerned with the materiality of language.64 Often described as a jewel itself, the poem features an incredibly complicated and yet surpassingly elegant structure. The work is divided into twenty sections, each section (with one exception) containing five stanzas of twelve lines each. Each section in turn utilizes a concatenating “link” word(s) that appears in the first and last line of each stanza, while the first stanza of a new section uses the link word from the previous section, tying the two adjacent sections together. The first line of the poem contains the link word from the final section, while the last line contains the first section’s link word, thus pulling together the first and last stanzas, creating the impression that the poem itself is a circle, a linguistic “pearl.” Finally, the poem also both alliterates and uses a consistent rhyme scheme throughout (ababababbcbc). All of these poetic devices (concatenation, alliteration, a strong rhyme scheme) emphasize the materiality of the language as it is seen and heard. Through the use of concatenation, the poem makes great use of puns and homonyms.65 Five of the twenty link words used are in fact homonyms (spot, date, ryӡte, mote, paye), and the

64

Lisa Kiser used this phrase when teaching the poem. For a differing analysis of Pearl’s “freakishess” in regards to form, see Edward I Condren, The Numerical Universe of the Gawain-Pearl Poet: Beyond Phi (Gainesvillle: University Press of Florida, 2002). Condren argues for an meticulous mathematical precision to the poems of Cotton Nero A.x. 65 Other scholarship focuses on Pearl’s use of puns. Sylvia Tomasch’s cleverly titled article “A Pearl Punnology” argues for a unity of form and content in the poem, though the theme that she identifies the form of the pun to be revealing is the “interconnectedness of all things.” She identifies over 140 homonyms in the poem and pays careful attention to how the sound of the homonyms (one sort of linguistic materiality) binds the poem together. Sylvia Tomasch, “A Pearl Punnology,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 88 (1989): 1–20. Of particular interest to me are Sandra Pierson Prior’s and Douglas Thorpe’s analyses, because both authors examine how the 44

repetitions within each section make the most of the range of meanings available. Consider, for example, Section XVI where the double meaning of mote (spot, blemish or city, castle) is played upon. At the start and end of each stanza, the reader or listener must determine which sense of the word is being used. But there are also other puns circulating in this section: ‘That mote þou menez in Judy londe,’ Þat specyal spyce þen to me spakk, ‘þat is þe cyté þat þe Lombe con fonde To soffer inne sor for manez sake, Þe olde Jerusalem to vnderstonde, For þere þe olde gulte watz don to slake. Bot þe nwe, þat lyʒt of Godez sonde, Þe apostel in Apocalyppce in theme con take. Þe Lompe þer withouten spottez blake Hatz feryed þyder Hys fayre flote; And as Hys flok is withouten flake, So is Hys mote withouten moote’ (937-48). [That special one then said to me, “That spot you mean, in Judea, it is the city that the Lamb of God visited and suffered in sorrowfully for humanity’s sake—I mean the old Jerusalem where the old guilt was satisfied. But the apostle speaks in his Apocalypse of the new Jerusalem, which was sent down from God. There the spotless light/lamp of the world has taken his fair host; and as his flock is without blemish, so is his city without blemish.”]

concatenations and puns work to “transform” the reader’s understanding. Transformation, however, suggests a fundamental divide between the earthly and heavenly, the immanent and transcendent. Without collapsing the transcendent and immanent into one another, I would still like to emphasize the way in which they are inseparable categories, constantly interpenetrating and mutually constructing one another. Prior, The Fayre Formez of the Pearl Poet, 174–186; Thorpe, A New Earth, 32–51. 45

The distinctive spellings (mote and moote) in the final line are clearly meant to urge upon us the two meanings of the word; throughout the rest of the section, the word is spelled the same (mote) regardless of its referent. In this stanza there is also a pun on Lombe and Lompe, both clearly referring to Christ, and on flok (flock) and flote (host), both referring to those who are saved. (And don’t forget that the flok is withouten flake, and the host is in fact a fayre flote!) In both of these cases, the identity of either Christ or his followers is destabilized, but this destabilization is the result of an excess of identity, rather than a confusion or lack. Christ is both Lombe and Lompe, Christians are both the fayre flote and the flok withouten flake. Even Jerusalem has competing identities—the old and the new, the city whose “place” is more than just geographic location, the “spot” (place) that is without a “spot” (blemish). The puns pile up so quickly in this stanza, especially in the last few lines, that it becomes difficult to register any meaning at all. Mote and moote are homonyms, flok and flake alliterate and rhyme (via consonance), and both of these puns are found in adjacent lines. Each line in turn repeats crucial words: hys (which falls on the same foot in each line, and is also found in the line preceding these two), the verb is, and withouten, which juxtaposes the punned upon words (and also appears two lines earlier). It is easy to lose track of the meaning of the poetry when so many near homonyms are concentrated in these lines. Puns always foreground the materiality of language, because they depend on the similarities between words as they are heard or read, but the rhymes in the stanza are also significantly complex. The first three b rhymes alliterate, all beginning with s- (spake, sake, slake) and the third, fifth and six b rhymes all end in –lake (slake, blake, flake). With all of these repetitions, the stanza sounds and looks tightly woven, so much so that it can be difficult to unravel any meaning, which makes possible an avoidance of meaning

46

on the part of poet or reader, insofar as comprehension might require the reader to forgo the pleasure of the language itself. Section XIII also uses a pun, which is almost a homograph, as the link word. The poem makes no distinction between the words mascellez (spotless) and makellez (matchless). When reading the section, it is easy to lose track of which adjective is being used, because only one letter distinguishes them, and the eye can easily skip over the ‘s.’ It is easier to tell them apart if the section is read aloud, because the ear can more clearly hear the difference one consonant makes. Hearing the poetry read aloud, however, highlights the pleasurable pun of the section’s closing line: “Al only þyself so stout and styf, / A makelez may and maskellez” [Only you are so strong and so firm/ A matchless maiden without blemish] (779-80, italics mine). The two terms also thus become associated with one another. To be makellez, in the context of this poem, is to be maskellez (and vice versa). But here we can also see how puns, especially when they are used as link words in this poem, exhibit a condensation of meaning.66 Makelez and maskellez, as they are used interchangeably in Section XIII, condense both meanings into either orthographic representation (so that when we see one form, we are aware of the other, despite the spelling of one particular usage). The same condensation is at work in the puns mentioned in the paragraph above—Lombe and Lompe, flok and flote, mote and moote. We can see that in Pearl the materiality of language often results in, or is itself the result of, the linguistic work of condensation (which has a strong connection to dreams in psychoanalytic thought). It is in the poem’s most basic level, at the level of the words themselves, that its hermeneutical agenda becomes clear. In its poetic form and its reliance on 66

Morton Donner demonstrates how thoroughgoing this condensation of meanings is and explores how the Pearlpoet uses certain features of Middle English grammar to achieve this condensation. Morton Donner, “A Grammatical Perspective on Word Play in Pearl,” The Chaucer Review 22, no. 4 (1988): 322–31. 47

puns, the poetry makes meaning that is also its unmaking; it manages to say more than one thing at a time, or, perhaps, we could say that it says and unsays at the same time. In the tradition of psychoanalytic thought, these modes of meaning are inherent to dreams and dream work, and so Pearl’s generic identity becomes more than just a frame narrative, but rather part of the poem’s hermeneutic agenda. The major processes of the dream work, which are driven by the unconscious, are thus unsurprisingly associated with the two fundamental modes or aspects (Lacan’s term) of signification: metonymy and metaphor. Structurally similar are the operations of the unconscious, displacement and condensation respectively. These two “mechanisms” (metonymy/displacement, metaphor/condensation) function identically in dreams as they do in discourse. In this essay, Lacan goes on to associate metonymy with lack and desire; the restless movement of signification along the chain “allows for the elision by which the signifier instates a lack of being in the object-relation, using signification’s referral value to invest it with the desire aiming at the lack that it supports (428).”67 Metaphor, on the other hand, “is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning” (423); a function akin to that of the subject. Unlike the Cartesian subject, founded on the awareness of its own cogito, the psychoanalytic subject comes to be because “I think about what I am where I do not think I am thinking” (in other words, the unconscious operations of the psyche are constitutive of subjectivity, rather than the self-aware cogito) (430). Metaphor produces meaning in nonmeaning, just as the unconscious produces the subject in its un-thinking. And yet, for Lacan, metaphor and metonymy are not entirely distinct operations. Metaphor, in particular, still relies on metonymy in its signifying function:

67

Lacan, Ecrits. 48

Metaphor’s creative spark does not spring forth from the juxtaposition of two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It flashes between two signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by taking the other’s place in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present by virtue of its (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain (422).

Metaphor makes meaning by holding in tension, or partially realizing, two signifiers. The association between dreams and metaphor (and also between dreams, writing, and interpretation) that is so firmly established in psychoanalytic thought can in turn help us look at the medieval genre of dream vision anew. The Middle English dream visions seem to demonstrate a particular permutation of the genre and are, as a result, notoriously quirky and interpretively challenging. In my claim above that Pearl “makes meaning that is also its unmaking,” we can see how the poem’s reliance on condensation locates it in the tradition of Christian mysticism known as negative theology. Also known as mystical or apophatic theology, negative theology takes as its starting point the assertion that human language always falls entirely short of the divine reality, and human comprehension can in no way conceive of what is infinite. But these are only the starting points—we do try to find ways to talk or think about the divine that escape the normal traps of predication and assertion. These sometimes counter-intuitive forms of language or thought, as they have been articulated in the Christian tradition, are akin to Wolfson’s “merger of dissimilar entities without resolution of their difference,” or “form of language that materializes in the fissure that connects by keeping apart.” Pearl, in its formal reliance on the materiality of language, in its operation at the level of the word, actually creates a paradox. Like the work of

49

pun or metaphor, like the hermeneutic of the dream, Pearl stretches language to say simultaneously more than one thing. Pearl, in other words, is a mystical text. The poem’s materiality and reliance on condensation extends to the descriptions of places in Pearl. The descriptions of the forest, in Section II, and then of the Heavenly Jerusalem, in Sections XVII and XVIII, both disorient and frustrate readers’ expectations to mystical effect. These descriptions parallel one another, for both landscapes, forest and city, are entirely “inorganic;” the narrator describes them by constant comparison to gems and precious metals. In the case of the forest, the gravel is made up of pearls, but there are also “crystal klyffez” (74), the stones in the bottom of the river are “stonez stepe, / As glente þurӡ glas þat glowed and glyӡt--/ As stremande sternez, quen stroþe-men slepe, / Staren in welkyn in wynter nyӡt” [brilliant stones that glowed and glimmered like light through glass, like stars stream with light in the winternight sky while earth men sleep] (113-115). Although the forest has trees, these trees would not have been recognizable to any medieval audience, Holtewodez bryӡt aboute hem bydez Of bollez as blwe as ble of Ynde; As bornyst syluer þe lef on slydez, þat þike con trylle on vch a tynde; Quen glem of glodez agaynz hem glydez, Wyth schymeryng schene ful schrylle þay schynde (75-80). [The woods were bright around the cliffs, with trunks as blue as blue of India; the leaves, which quivered thickly on every branch, slid over one another like burnished sliver. When the gleam from the sky hit them, they shone brightly with a lovely shimmering.] There is a decided lack of green in this forest, green and brown of course being the dominating palate of forests in England. Elizabeth Petroff comments that, in the landscapes of Pearl, 50

“[w]hite and brilliance are the dominating images, not color. In the entire poem, green is used only three times: once for the erber, once for jasper, once for emerald” (185). The gem tones of this forest are unnatural, inorganic, glaring and even hard. This is not a forest any reader of the poem can recognize, but not because the description is vague or abstract; the depiction is in fact incredibly concrete. The terms provided divorce extant notions of what a forest should be from what this forest is. The materiality of this forest is much more intense, much more difficult to imagine, than a forest whose tree trunks are brown and whose cliffs are grey. The descriptions in Revelation are commonly acknowledged to be the inspiration for the poem’s heavenly Jerusalem, but they perhaps also inspired the forest scene. The city itself appears to be made all of gold (989-90), and its base is adorned with twelve layers of precious gems (991-92). “þe stretez of golde as glasse al bare, / þe wal of jasper þat glent as glayre. / þe wonez withinne enurned ware / Wyth alle kynnez perré þat moӡt repayre” [the streets of gold were as clear as glass, the jasper walls shone like egg whites. The walls within were adorned with every kind of precious stone that could be there] (1025-28). The poet also adds to each of St. John’s twelve gates “a margyrye, / A parfyt perle þat neuer fatez” [a pearl, a perfect pearl that never fades] (1037-38). As with the forest, all points of reference for the landscape of a city disappear; instead, we’re left with an image that is concrete in its material detail, but still pushes the limits of the imagination.68 These two parallel landscapes, which seem to be opposites—the city, the locus of human technology and achievement, and the forest, the site of the untouched natural

21

Sandra Pierson Prior notes that “unlike Pearl’s vocabulary lessons, which suggest the ontological transformations of human things to divine reality, the physical and spatial features of the poem make explicit the essential separation between the earthly and the heavenly.” Instead of an essential separation, the transcendent reality the poem points toward is embodied in the immanent materiality of its spaces and descriptions. I do not see, then, a difference between how the wordplay and the spatial descriptions in the poem work. Prior, The Fayre Formez of the Pearl Poet, 178. 51

world—should be equally familiar to a medieval audience, and yet are both unrecognizable in their jeweled descriptions. Like the linguistic excess created by the puns, alliteration, and rhyme scheme in the stanzas discussed earlier, the highly material descriptions of the city and the forest, which pile on detail after detail, eventually produce an overwhelming sense that readers have no frame of reference with which to envision these spaces. The very excessiveness of the materiality in description results in the loss of any positive content. The bottom drops out, if you will, into an apophatic or mystical space. In Pearl, this excess is created, again, at the most basic level of the word, which not only demonstrates the condensation and metaphorization of meaning so common to dreams, but does so in such a way as to frustrate readerly comprehension and imagination. This paradoxical frustration (“imagine a city, but do not imagine it has the features that characterise the city you imagine”69) is the denouement of mystic speech. When, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius, the first systematic negative theologian, writes that “God is a luminous darkness,” he means to invoke both the affirmation “God is light” and its negation “God is darkness.” It is only when this metaphoric affirmation and metaphoric negation are taken together that their true inadequacy becomes apparent, and they give way to the paradox that is beyond affirmation or negation, which signals the collapse of those modes of speech and the categories those modes represent. Pearl’s paradoxes emerge from its excesses—from the metaphoric condensation around the image of the pearl itself, the surfeit of imagery in its landscapes, and from the linguistic reliance on puns or homonyms and the poetic forms of concatenation. Taken together, the effect overwhelms the reader; the poem signifies too much at one time, and we are forced back (or perhaps forward) into apophasis. 69

Spearing, “Language and Its Limits,” 68. 52

Returning to the materiality of the poem’s language, we can consider the effect of linguistic excess in Section IX, where the link word is date. In Middle English, date is a homonym with a rather wide range of meanings, including beginning, end, limit, point of time, date, season, and rank. Almost all of these are employed in the section, so that the phoneme or grapheme (the word as it is heard or seen) is repeated ten times, with six or seven different meanings, and at times the word’s use is productively ambiguous, as in “þer is no date of Hys godnesse” [there is no date of His goodness] (493), where date could mean end, or limit, but also season, or perhaps even rank or time. There is a “fullness of meaning” in this line, where all of these possible meanings come into play, because date is being used to describe God’s goodness, and because it is used in a negative construction—“þer is no date of Hys godnesse.” In the other nine uses in this section, the word always refers to a specific, positive, and hence limiting instance—the “season” of harvest, the “beginning” or “end” of the day, the “rank” of queen. It is only through its negation that date can adequately reflect divine infinity. Any attempt to describe God’s date in the affirmative would be doomed to failure because the very nature of the affirmation is limiting; it attempts to apply to God earthly categories. The negation, on the other hand, denies the correspondence between the earthly and the heavenly (even as it relies on those earthly categories), and so, somewhat paradoxically, opens up to a more infinite mode of signification. The concatenating word in Section IX thus embodies the very shift that the poem is trying to instill in both its narrator and its reader; a movement from a specific and always limiting (in terms of time or amount) understanding, to a recognition of the ceaseless and eternal nature of God’s goodness and reward. The poem also exhibits a very real concern with what we might call “computation”— evaluating or appraising the relative worth of certain actions or items. More shows up as a link

53

word twice (the only word to do so, and in one section it is actually part of a phrase, “ay more and more”), less is a link word, and so is innoӡe. Paye, which can mean payment, but also pleasure or satisfaction, is the link word in the final stanza (usually appearing as “pryncez paye,” meaning the prince’s/Christ’s payment/satisfaction/pleasure) and appears in the first line of the poem. The narrator is a jeweler, a trade that depended on payment for skilled labor, and involved considerable amounts of appraising and evaluating. Furthermore, the theological question of merit and worth is the governing tension of the poem. When the pearl-maiden appears to the narrator and begins to speak of her heavenly estate, she describes herself as a queen, as the bride of Christ (and her clothing, adorned in countless gemstones—pearls of course—certainly backs up her claims). The narrator protests that Mary is the Queen of Heaven, so the maiden’s assertions are outlandish. There can, after all, be only one queen, by definition any others would be usurpers. In political terms, this seems to be an entirely logical objection. But the maiden simultaneously praises Mary as the worthiest woman in heaven and yet continues to insist that she, along with several thousand other maidens, are all queens. She tells him this “The court of þe kyndom of God alyue / Hatz a property in hytself beyng: / Alle þat may þerinne aryue / Of all þe reme is quen oþer kyng” [The court of the kingdom of the living God has a unique property, such that all those who arrive there, regardless of where they come from, are either queen or king] (445-448). The kingdom of God has a “property” in itself—we might call this the property of abundance or even excess (which is still not the same as equality). Unlike in terrestrial hierarchies, the office of royalty is open to all, and yet the title is not reduced by its increased use or application, if the maiden’s clothing and her descriptions of her “blysse,” or the narrator’s description of the New Jerusalem, are any indication. So a category that is defined in an earthly logic by its very exclusivity, its value and appeal based almost entirely on its singularity (only

54

one woman gets to be queen), is in a heavenly logic opened up ad infinitum. Now, if we think of heavenly logic as eternal logic, it is possible to bend one’s brain enough to make this move make sense—the restriction of a position like queen to one person at a time is due to the limitations of time, resources, etc. But it is also natural to imagine how the status of queen might be reduced by such a liberal application, especially since its appeal is based in large part on its singularity. “Queen” perhaps seems to lose something of its force when so many receive the title in heaven. The concerns of worth, merit, and status which are addressed in the content of the poem, however, also make their way into the structure of the poem in the sections immediately following. The narrator goes on to protest that, since the maiden died when she was so young, she had no chance to earn the rank of queen—she cannot have that which other women have suffered, done penance, and even died for when “þou cowþez neuer God nauþer plese ne pray / Ne neuer nawþer Pater ne Crede” [you could neither please God nor pray; you didn’t know either the Paternoster nor the Creed] (484-85). In response, the maiden re-tells the Parable of the Vineyard, from the Gospel of Matthew. In this parable, the vineyard owner hires men on at the start of the day for a set wage (entirely fair for a day’s labor), then goes back every three hours, picking up more men to work in his vineyard and promising them, in the poem’s words, “resonabele hyre” (524) (“whatever is right” in the gospel). At the end of the day, the vineyard owner has his foreman (his “reeve” in the poem, 542) pay the workers, starting with those who came latest and ending with those who were hired first at the start of the day. In Pearl this parable spans two sections. In the first section, the link word is date, the homonym discussed above. In the second section that treats the Parable of the Vineyard, the link word is more. After the workers are all paid alike, and the laborers who worked all day are 55

forced to watch those who worked only an hour or two receive the same pay (this is heightened in the poem, where the vineyard owner instructs his reeve to line them all up, whereas in the gospel they are just “called together”). Those laborers who worked the longest of course begin to complain “‘Vus þynk vus oӡe to take more. / More haf we serued, vus þynk so, / þat suffred han þe dayez hete, / þenn þyse þat wroӡt not hourez two’” [We think we ought to get more, since we have worked more. We have suffered through the day’s heat while these men have not even worked two hours] (552-555). In the mouths of the laborers, more suggests entitlement, reward, fair payment.70 They have worked more, so they deserve more—more here is a word that represents their notions of compensation. More equals more, and less equals less; these terms have a significance that can be calculated and correlated. But as the maiden begins to gloss this parable, she uses more not to imply calculation or correlation, but to signify abundance. “þus pore men her part ay pykez, / þaӡ þay com late and lyttel wore, / And þaӡ her sweng wyth lyttel atslykez, / þe merci of God is much þe more” [Thus poor men always get their part, though they come late and work but little, and though they put forth little effort, the mercy of God is so much the more] (573-576).71 In the maiden’s usage, the direct correlation is broken; “little labor” doesn’t earn “little mercy,” but God’s mercy is in fact “much more.” Perhaps we could say, then, that we have an inverse correlation here—this is what the narrator seems to suggest at the section’s close when he says “Now he þat stod þe long day stable, / And þou to payment com hym byfore, / þenne þe lasse in werke to take more able, / And euer þe lenger þe lasse þe more” 70

Concerns about the fair compensation of labor were, of course, widespread in late fourteenth-century England. Helen Barr parses the shift to value labor itself, rather than to the thing produced (i.e. “the harvest”). Once labor has a value put to it, laborers, whether they be merchants or peasants, can complain about unjust compensation; they can claim that their efforts are not being fairly reimbursed. Barr, “Pearl; Or, ‘The Jeweller’s Tale’,” 59–79. 71 Jill Mann notes the same movement in the pearl’s proliferation over the course of the first few sections of the poem. The dreamer starts out mourning the loss of his pearl, and as he enters the dreamscape and encounters the pearl-maiden, he is sees pearls too numerous to count. The pearl thus moves from the object that represents the narrator’s loss and lack to an object that signifies abundance. Mann, “Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature,” 20. 56

[Now he who stood firm all day long, and you come to payment before him—then the one who worked less is able to take more, and the longer this goes on, less will be getting more] (597600). The last line here seems to descend into confusion, it is “more emphatic than logical,” to quote the editors.72 The narrator is almost sputtering; he is completely appalled by this notion of repayment that doesn’t depend at all on merit or effort. But the last line also suggests that he sees the threat of an inverse correlation: the longer this goes on, the more those working less will get.73 Oddly enough, in the mouths of the laborers in the parable and of our jeweler-narrator, more implies lack and finitude, a restricted economy where only so much is available, and so we must make sure that the limited resources are parceled out fairly. If the indignant tone of the line “And euer þe lenger þe lesse þe more” ends Section X, however, the maiden’s use of more in the first line of Section XI shifts the word’s valence: “Of more and lasse in Godez ryche…lys no joparde” [God’s riches/liberality does not lie in jeopardy; it is not subject to ‘more’ or ‘less’] (601-602).74 In the maiden’s usage, more is a sign of abundance, even excess. God’s wealth is so large, so unimaginably beyond comprehension, that the terms “more” and “less” cannot even be applied to it. It cannot be added to, and when it is taken away from, it still remains the same. God’s mercy is not only plentiful, it is in fact excessive, a point that seems almost indecent to the narrator, as caught up as he is in an economy of repayment and earning. In Section X, the link word is in fact a phrase (one of only two sections to use an entire phrase for concatenation)—“For þe grace of God is gret innoʒe” [For the 72

Andrew and Waldron, Poems of the Pearl Manuscript, 81. Gordon shares this reading in his introduction to his edited volume. E.V. Gordon, ed., Pearl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 66. 74 Elizabeth Harper contextualizes this shift in terms of medieval gift-giving culture. “[T]he whole language of giftgiving neatly shifts this discussion out of the realm of strict calculative/mercantile negotiation, in which money serves as an equalizer by allowing exact calculation of the worth of one’s labor, and into the realm of service, where lords reward faithfulness and service appropriately, but not calculatively.” Harper, “Pearl in the Context of Fourteenth-Century Gift Economies,” 436. 73

57

grace of God is great enough]. Innoӡe is a word that is both functionally precise and theoretically indefinite. When someone claims to have “enough,” an exact amount is implied, but it cannot be known whether that exact measurement exhausts the supply. (When I claim, for example, to have “enough flour to bake the cake,” I do mean that I have the precise amount that the recipe calls for—five cups, say. But my claim about enough also does not measure the total amount of flour; enough implies a sufficient amount plus the possibility of an unknown quantity beyond the measurement. If I have “enough flour” I have at least five cups, with the possibility of an infinitely greater amount that is not calculated in my statement.) Innoӡe is sufficient, but it is also plenitudinous; it meets specific needs or requirements but, in this usage, it is not exhausted by them, and in fact leaves us without any knowledge of “how much” is really there.75 It is always, eternally innoӡe. The significance of the word “enough” in fourteenth-century English literature more generally is discussed by Jill Mann, who shows how it is closely connected with the concepts of satisfaction and payment. Mann links innoӡe to the workers’ payment in the parable. The pearlmaiden’s assertion that all are “payed inlyche” makes sense precisely because all are satisfied. Equal payment, in the heavenly economy, doesn’t mean equal pay—it means equal satisfaction.76 Mann’s thematic connection of innoӡe and paye in Pearl reveals another aspect of the word (and the concept) of paye in the poem. Paye is most often glossed as “satisfaction” and “pleasure” in the poem. Certain types of satisfaction suggest pleasure—“satisfaction at a job well done,” for example, or satisfaction of one’s hunger with good food. But you can also satisfy your hunger with cheap fast food and potato chips, and the satisfaction of a debt or a legal requirement says only that the obligation has been met, nothing about the means by which it was met, or 75

The Middle English dictionary gives both “abundance” and “sufficiency” as the first two definitions for inough, supporting my reading here. 76 Mann, “Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature,” 25. 58

whether any of the parties involved took pleasure in the fulfillment. In light of Mann’s illuminating treatment of innoӡe, then, we can see paye take on a new significance in the poem. Innoӡe in the poem is connected to concepts of payment—the payment of the workers in the parable, the satisfaction of the debt humanity owes because of their sin, the payment of craftsmen for their labor—but it is more than that. In the face of innoӡe, “the idea of ‘more’ becomes an absurdity;” to have innoӡe is to be satisfied, to be pleased.77 The location of these two sections (those with more and innoӡe as link words) drives home their significance to the larger poem—these are Sections X and XI; they are the center of a poem, literally and thematically. At its center, the poem is shifting from understandings of God that are limiting and reductive to an understanding that is infinite and unbounded.78 Unexpectedly, perhaps, the poem does not have twelve hundred lines, but 1212—there is an extra stanza in Section XV. The link word in this section is les (which seems to link it to the earlier stanzas concerned with quantity), and in it the maiden explains, following on the telling of Christ’s passion in Section XIV, how it is that those in heaven all have such great rank and such happiness (regardless of earthly merit): “Lasse of blysse may non vus bryng…” [No one can cause us to have any less bliss] (853). Like more, the maiden uses the quantifier in a negative construction to gesture towards the fullness of the divine economy. The maidens cannot have any less bliss; the happiness they have cannot be reduced at all.

77

Ibid. Britton J. Harwood briefly argues that Pearl has a chiastic structure, perhaps inspired in part by medieval diptychs. The movement from Section X to Section XI is the movement from a limited earthly economy to the unbounded heavenly economy. Britton J. Harwood, “Pearl As Diptych,” in Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the Pearl-Poet, ed. Robert J. Blanch, Mirian Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman (Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1991), 61–66.

78

59

It is through the poem’s own repetitions that it manages to achieve a mode of signification best labeled as mystical. The poetic reliance on alliteration and puns also require certain types of repetition and often result in an excess of meaning (through the homonyms and puns), but also excesses in what is seen or heard (the repeated sounds or graphemes). The materiality, the concreteness of the language is precisely what provokes Pearl’s mysticism. The transcendent is achieved in the poem only because the immanent is so thoroughly embraced. And just as, in other mystical texts, cataphatic and apophatic language are dependent on one another—there is seldom any “pure” cataphatic discourse, and certainly no language that is only apophatic—it is the coexistence of both of the transcendent and the immanent that moves the poem into the realm of the mystical. If mystical language is not so much a discrete moment, but rather the effect of a complex interaction between the cataphatic and apophatic, then this particular poem is mystical because of the imbrication of immanence and transcendence—only where these two work together can we find the mystical, the place where more than one thing can be said, or where something can be simultaneously said and denied, or said and unsaid.

Pearl as Dream Vision The prominence of metaphor as the signifying mode of Pearl is unsurprising given that the poem is a dream vision. Several studies have devoted attention to Pearl’s genre, and in so doing have reinforced the poem’s concern with language and transcendence. In psychoanalytic thinking, “dream work” operates like language. Metaphor, in particular, makes meaning in a way that is homologous with the form of dream work Freud calls “condensation.” 79 Identifying 79

Freud identified two operations of “dream work”: condensation and displacement, which Lacan would go on to associate with metaphor and metonymy respectively. Identifying condensation as one of the structuring principles of 60

condensation as one of the structuring principles of dream visions helps elucidate some of the difficulties of the genre, leading us to examine Pearl on “the level of the word,” examining the poem not primarily in terms of content, but looking instead at the poem’s use of metaphors and puns, as well as the formal features of concatenation, alliteration, and rhyme. Such a focus turns our attention to “the agency of the letter,”80 to language’s ability to signify as much by its formal, material operations as by its contingent meaning. George Edmondson describes well the shift in focus that takes place when psychoanalytic thinking about language is brought to bear on the poem, contending that most readings of Pearl, “labor[] to define what the pearl signifies instead of confronting the pearl as a signifier—that is, as an ‘indestructible’ element, almost material in its presence, and so overdetermined as to be essentially meaningless.”81 Edmondson’s exploration of loss and language is in fact a compelling reading of the poem that offers an alternative line of analysis even to that Pearl scholarship that explicitly employs psychoanalytic concepts.82 His analysis, in contrast to historicist readings, situates the loss the poem explores in language itself (“the pearl as a signifier”), rather than in the narrative, and thus turns our attention to the level of the word when reading Pearl. Yet while he focuses his own analysis on

dream visions helps elucidate some of the difficulties of the genre, leading us to examine these literary texts on “the level of the word,” examining them not primarily in terms of content, but looking instead at “the agency of the letter.” 80 Lacan uses the term “the letter” to “designate the material medium that concrete discourse borrows from language” (413). “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 2007), 412–443. Both “instance” and “agency” are acceptable translations for the French word instance, which can also be translated as “authority.” 81 Edmondson, “Pearl: The Shadow of the Object, the Shape of the Law,” 32. 82 Both David Aers and Sarah Stanbury utilize psychoanalytic theorizations of mourning to attempt to understand the narrative content of the poem—Aers by identifying the dreamer as a melancholic who fails to find his final resolution in Christian consolation, and Stanbury by associating both the pearl-maiden and the city with the ultimate lost object of psychoanalysis, the mother’s body. But both these losses and their effect on the dreamer take place largely at the level of the narrative. David Aers, “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl,” Speculum 68, no. 1 (January 1993): 54–73; Sarah Stanbury, “The Body and the City in Pearl,” Representations 48 (1994): 30–47. 61

the work of metonymy in the poem, he has relatively little to say about the poem as an example of dream vision.83 Several studies of Pearl as a dream vision have brief recourse to psychoanalytic thought about dreams, but no study that I am aware of brings the genres of dream vision and psychoanalysis together in a detailed manner.84 The particular emphasis on metaphor and materiality, however, befits the poem’s generic identity as a dream vision. Metaphor is what best allows us to see what is so very dream-like about Pearl. And, as I hope I have already demonstrated in my initial reading of the metaphor of the pearl, condensation is a crucial part of how this poem makes meaning. Metaphor allows the poem to signify in excess of itself, to “say more.” The poem’s proclivity for puns and its formal reliance on concatenation (i.e. a particular form of repetition) also contribute to this condensation and surfeit of meaning.

Conclusion Elliot Wolfson’s analysis of dreams and language (the subtitle of his book contains, after all, the word “oneiropoiesis”) demonstrates that metaphor is the linguistic site of the phenomenon that we call “mysticism,” and that, furthermore, this same paradox is found clearly in the most common experience of dreams. Pearl, through repeated deployments of its central metaphor and through its exploitation of puns, highlights this paradox that lies at the heard of every metaphor, the simultaneous and irreducible coexistence of similarity and difference, but also of immanence and transcendence. Furthermore, both linguistic forms, metaphor and pun, reveal the significance of language’s material element. Pearl in fact relies on multiple forms of materiality (linguistic, 83

Edmondson, “Pearl: The Shadow of the Object, the Shape of the Law,” 30–31, 40–48. Spearing makes a brief mention of Jung’s claims about dreams; Kruger discusses modern interest in dreams, including psychoanalysis, in his introduction. Spearing, Medieval Dream-Poetry, 155; Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages, 1–6.

84

62

poetic, historical) to transcend the “merely” material. Of all the medieval genres, then, it should be unsurprising that Pearl is a dream vision. As a dream text, the poem demonstrates language’s ability to condense meaning. Metaphor is one sort of dream work, and its primacy in Pearl is one indication that the poem is in fact “dreamy” in ways that scholars have often not noticed. In its dreaminess, in the centrality of metaphor, and in its focus on materiality of several kinds, the poem can most aptly be described as mystical. Pearl demonstrates how inseparable transcendence and immanence are, and how the former emerges only when it is given form by the latter.

63

CHAPTER 2 THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING AND THE USES OF NEGATION

If Pearl is a relentlessly material poem, deeply invested in mining the resources of language’s materiality, as well as the material culture of its historical moment, The Cloud of Unknowing seems to be its mirror opposite. The fourteenth-century mystical treatise is not at all concerned, on the surface at least, with either the materiality of its language, or even with the material referents of the metaphorical language it employs so liberally. Unlike Pearl, which relies on its excessive materiality to achieve an apophatic effect, the Cloud attempts to reach the same goal by way of pure negation, negation that extends even to the treatise’s own use of metaphors. I will argue that the Cloud-author is particularly concerned with the possibility of misreading metaphor by favoring literal meanings over metaphoric ones, a possibility that seems to stem at least in part from the increasing concern about spiritual instruction in the vernacular in the fourteenth century and by broader discussions of the vitium curiositas (the sin of curiosity) which circulated in the Middle Ages. The treatise instead highlights the necessity of metaphor in the paradoxical, apophatic work of “unknowing.” The Cloud of Unknowing was written in the late fourteenth century; its anonymous author’s identity is unknown, though much speculated about. Unlike Pearl, it is firmly ensconced in the canon of “medieval English mysticism,” and thus has been studied alongside Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, and, to a lesser extent, Margery Kempe.85 But the Cloud 85

See David Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition (New York: Harper, 1961); Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Marion Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith (London: Longman, 1993); B. A. Windeatt, ed., English Mystics of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The journal Mystics Quarterly, which started out as 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter, were entirely devoted to these authors in the 70’s, 80’s, and even most of the 64

is the first and only Middle English text to make the via negativa central to its teaching, and it draws heavily on the continental authors most strongly associated with apophatic theology— Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Gallus, most notably.86 The Cloud-author in fact translated Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology (titled in Middle English Deonise Hid Divinite), as well as parts of Richard of St. Victor’s Benjamin Minor, and composed another text, The Book of Privy Counselling, which takes up similarly mystical themes.87 Like his continental predecessors interested in mystical theology, the Cloud-author emphasizes the need to surrender, eventually, intellectual attempts to understand God, and instead seek to find him only by loving and desiring him. It is part of the anonymous author’s commitment to leaving behind the intellect that causes him to deny such worry about metaphor. Early in the treatise, he attempts to deny his own use of metaphor by de-materializing these figures of speech, emphasizing the difference between the literal and metaphoric referents. In speaking of his central metaphor (the cloud), for example, he says [a]nd wene not for I clepe it a derknes or a cloude, that it be any cloude congelid of the humours that fleen in the ayre, ne yit any derknes soche as is in thin house on nights, 90’s. And then there are the eight Exeter Symposia on “The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England,” first started in 1980, with the most recent installment coming in 2011. 86 For studies of the Cloud-author’s sources and influences, see J.P.H. Clark, “Sources and Theology in The Cloud of Unknowing,” Downside Review: A Quarterly of Catholic Thought 98 (1980): 83–109; Kent Emery Jr., “The Cloud of Unknowing and Mystica Theologia,” in The Roots of the Modern Christian Tradition, ed. E. Rozanne Elder, Spirituality of Western Christendom 2 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Pubs., 1984), 46–70; Rosemary Ann Lees, The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology: An Approach to the Cloud of Unknowing, 2 vols., Analecta Cartusiana 107 (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983); Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism: 1350-1550 (New York: Crossroad, 2012). 87 All of the Cloud-author’s corpus, even the lesser known works, are available in editions: Phyllis Hodgson, ed., Deonise Hid Diuinite, and Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to The Cloud of Unknowing, Early English Text Society, No. 231 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955); Phyllis Hodgson, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling, Early English Text Society. Original Series, No. 218 (London: Oxford University Press, 1944). 65

when thi candel is oute. For soche a derknes and soche a cloude maist thou ymagin with coriousté of witte….Lat be soche falsheed, I mene not thus. For when I sey derknes, I mene a lackyng of knowing….And for this skile it is not clepid a cloude of the eire, bot a cloude of unknowyng, that is bitwix thee and thi God. (410-419)88 [Don’t think that I am calling it a darkness or a cloud, like any cloud that is made up of the humors that fly through the air, or any darkness that is like that in your house at night when the candle is out. You can imagine this kind of a darkness or this kind of cloud with the faculty of imagination…Stop such foolishness; I don’t mean this at all. When I say darkness, I mean a lack of knowing….And for this reason, it’s not called a cloud of the air, but a cloud of unknowing that is between you and your God.] This rhetorical move seems quite odd, not only because it is impossible not to think of a cloud when the metaphor is used, and even more difficult since the injunction not to do so immediately brings the image of the cloud to mind unbidden, but also because it seems to evince a rather silly and thoughtless treatment of metaphor. The Cloud-author wants to have his cake and eat it, too— he wants the cloud to signify something totally unmaterial, but he also wants to use the metaphor the signify something about that unmaterial reality. Savvy readers of metaphor are likely to identify his attempts as simultaneously impossible and obvious.89 The apparent attempt to separate literal and metaphoric referents is impossible; the metaphor “cloud of unknowing” only means something because the physical cloud itself conjures up images and associations for the reader. Attempting to deny or even obliterate the connection between the two would, could it ever be achieved, ensure that the metaphoric cloud 88

All quotations are from Patrick J Gallacher, ed., The Cloud of Unknowing, TEAMS Middle English Texts (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1997). 89 While the Cloud-author’s use of and subsequent commentary on metaphor is thorny, the entire treatise itself evinces a high level of sophistication and complexity. Especially in its recursive structure (which itself encourages a form of slow, deliberate consideration), The Cloud of Unknowing can prove difficult for readers. For scholarship that helps to provide an overview of the text, see McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 396–424; John P. H. Clark, The Cloud of Unknowing: An Introduction, 3 vols., Analecta Cartusiana 119 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1995). 66

was empty of any meaning (if you don’t know what a physical cloud is, you won’t have any idea what a “cloud of unknowing might mean). The literal, material referent ensures the meaning of the metaphoric reference, which is why, of course, we so often use metaphors to help us understand abstractions—the very materiality, and hence the specificity and familiarity, of a literal referent clarifies or even establishes the otherwise vague and opaque significance of an abstract concept. The Cloud-author’s attempt also highlights a key feature of metaphor, however, in that all metaphors proceed by way of similarity and difference. Metaphor always relies on both likeness and difference to make meaning. As I demonstrated in my last chapter, the difference between the two referents is the means by which the literal referent is able, sometimes in an especially surprising way, to reveal something about the metaphoric referent. The similarity between literal and metaphoric referents also requires an imaginative engagement with the metaphor, some investigation of the properties of both to appreciate fully how the metaphor makes meaning. Attention to the similarity present in each metaphor often overtakes any attention to the difference, but difference is also crucial to the metaphor’s meaning. Often the best metaphors surprise us precisely because of the difference between their two parts. Most interesting of all, however, is the coexistence of this similarity and difference hidden in every metaphor. In Elliot Wolfson’s terms, metaphor “begets the merger of dissimilar entities without resolution of their difference….” This is no Hegelian resolution, but rather a state where the tension holds these opposites together. The dissimilar entities in The Cloud of Unknowing’s central metaphor are the physical object, the cloud, and the state of mind, the lack of intellectual apprehension or even confusion that is the result of contemplation. The Cloud-author’s instruction to “wene not… that it be any cloude congelid of the humours that fleen in the ayre”

67

can thus be read in two ways—as denying the metaphor’s basic operations, or, instead, as simply reiterating what is obvious about metaphor. The problem with the Cloud-author’s attempt to “de-materialize” metaphor is that, if taken to the extreme (if taken literally), it seems impossible—it both renders the metaphor impotent, or at least unnecessary, and it would deprive his own treatise of part of its poetic efficacy. Why use the phrase “cloud of unknowing” if the author could have just said “lack of knowing?” And yet the treatise would be less interesting, and probably also less effective in its instruction, if the author only used the phrase “lack of knowing,” since he will expand on the metaphor of the cloud in his teaching about contemplation. Although the Cloud’s negations may seem to suggest the author’s confusion regarding metaphor’s linguistic operations, when considered more closely, these negations in fact seem designed to force a careful reconsideration of the materiality of metaphor. Rather than denying the literal referent, or de-materializing the metaphor, the Cloud-author’s carefully nuanced treatment, which is so easy to miss because of the much bolder statements about what metaphor is not, actually encourages the contemplative to re-think how she understands the relationship between materiality, metaphor, and the role of negation in mystical theology. Again, by way of contrast, if Pearl’s use of metaphor highlights the materiality of both metaphor itself and of language more generally, the particular form that negation takes in the Cloud reveals something crucial about the relationship between metaphor and materialism. The materiality of the Cloud’s metaphors is not as initially apparent (as it is in Pearl), but the treatise continually uses spatial metaphors, relying on them to communicate even as it denies their relationship to the materiality of the literal, physical spaces that are the source of the metaphoric signification. As will become apparent, these denials are in fact a particular form of apophatic 68

negation which are not as impossibly contradictory as might first appear. Rather, these negations are a linguistic strategy that re-envisions the relationship between metaphor and materiality, creating the paradoxical mode of signification and understanding that is the goal of mysticism. The form the Cloud’s negations take push the reader to see how metaphor simultaneously marks out similarity and difference, and how, in metaphor, the literal and metaphoric referents affect one another equally. These modes, which I will refer to as metaphor’s simultaneity and bidirectionality, are the means by which the treatise achieves its apophatic and spiritual goals.

The Cloud of Unknowing in the Apophatic Tradition Although the Cloud-author may attempt to deny the specificity and significance of his most central metaphor, any discussion of psychological or spiritual interiority requires, by its very nature, metaphor—language that reaches for external images and concepts to express the otherwise vague movements and impressions that take place within one’s mind.90 It is unsurprising, then, that the Cloud-author chooses the metaphor he does. The title of the treatise comes from one of two closely related Latin phrases: caligo ignorantiae or nubes ignorantiae; the former was used by Thomas Gallus, the latter by Richard of St. Victor.91 While both caligo and nubes have figurative meanings, caligo is used most often to signify darkness, and also fog 90

While the Cloud has received a moderate amount of attention from scholars of medieval English mysticism, only a few critics have focused in on the operations of metaphor as central to the treatise’s message. J. A. Burrow, “Fantasy and Language in The Cloud of Unknowing,” Essays in Criticism XXVII, no. 4 (1977): 283–98; Paul R. Rovang, “Demythologizing Metaphor in the Cloud of Unknowing,” Mystics Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1992): 131–37. 91 Alistair Minnis, “1215-1349: culture and history,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism, eds. Samuel Fanous and Vincent Gillespie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 77-78 and “Affection and Imagination in ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and Hilton’s ‘Scale of Perfection,’ Traditio 39 (1983): 323-66. The Cloud-author appears to have been influenced by Gallus, Richard of St. Victor, Hugh of Balma, and Guigo de Ponte. See McGinn’s discussion of Gallus’ influence in The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism: 1350-1550 (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2012), 397-98. 69

or mist; metaphorically it is often used to describe a mental state of “darkness, dullness” or a state of “calamity, affliction, or gloom.”92 Nubes, like nebula or nimbus, is more often used to signify the physical cloud. The Cloud-author was familiar with both Gallus’ work and with Richard of St. Victor’s, in which case he would have been aware of a range of possible translations. His translation of the metaphor makes it more pointed and efficacious in communicating some truth about mystical states of mind. Although a subtle distinction, the use of cloud to translate caligo/nubes, rather than some other vernacular cognate, demonstrates a preference for a term that is more physical, more material than the other available options. Clouds are a familiar part of the natural world to us today, as they would have been to a medieval audience, but it is also imaginable that a medieval English audience, so familiar with clouds, rain, fog, and mist, would find the idea of a “cloud of unknowing” in which one is supposed to “remain” or “dwell” especially compelling.93 The linguistic history of the word similarly supports the argument that the author was in favor of a more concrete, material metaphor. In Middle English, cloud was only used as a noun, and its figurative uses seem more limited, both in scope and in frequency, than they are in Modern English. The word only started being used as a verb in the sixteenth century, when most of its meanings given by the OED are figurative, rather than literal. The word itself comes from the Old English clod, which meant “rock” or “hill” (hence the first entry in the Middle English Dictionary gives the definition as “a lofty hill or cliff; a lump or mass of earth, the ground”), and

92

“Caligo, -inis,” Harper-Collins Latin Concise Dictionary (New York: Harper-Collins, 1997). “And yif ever thou schalt come to this cloude, and wone and worche therin as I bid thee, thee byhoveth, as this cloude of unknowyng is aboven thee, bitwix thee and thi God, right so put a cloude of forgetyng bineth thee, bitwix thee and alle the cretures that ever ben maad.” [And if you ever find yourselv in this cloud, then dwell there, and work within the cloud as I instruct you. Just as it is necessary that there be a cloud of unknowing above you, between you and your God, also put a cloud of forgetting below you, between you and all other created beings.] (421-24, italics mine).

93

70

the modern usage (referring to condensation in the atmosphere) only came into English circa 1300. It was thus a fairly new word when the Cloud-author was using it, and while it certainly had figurative valences, its material meaning had by no means been lost. The metaphor of the cloud also seems particularly appropriate to describe an apophatic goal when one considers the “materiality” (or lack thereof) of the literal object. Clouds are an “immaterial” sort of material object, nebulous, ephemeral, and lacking weight or solidity.94 The simultaneous presence and absence (a cloud, or even mist is “present,” but it cannot be grasped or contained; one can walk through fog) suggests something particular about the apophatic agenda. The cloud is appropriate as a metaphor, that is, not just because it suggests confusion and uncertainty, but also because it suggests the paradoxical nature of mystical work. So even as the text struggles to deny the materiality of the metaphor in certain places, the very use of the term cloud in the treatise reveals how the physicality of the metaphor’s literal referent increases the effectiveness of the metaphor for the contemplative.95 “Metaphorization” is inherent to the project of a mystical treatise. Mystical authors attempt to describe, to formalize vague changes that take place within an individual. The metaphors these authors use in turn give shape to, en-form mystical experience (both their own and that of others). The most common metaphors of Christian mysticism, those of interiority and ascent, are also the most fundamental to our conception of the world more generally, and hence often go unnoticed as metaphors. These spatial metaphors are incredibly fluid and endlessly 94

In situating The Cloud of Unknowing in the Christian mystical tradition, I am struck by how different the treatise’s central metaphor is from Teresa of Avila’s metaphors. The Interior Castle uses the metaphor of “mansions” or “dwelling places” to represent various stages of the soul’s relationship with God, but the image of the mansion or castle stands in stark contrast to that of a cloud. In her Vida Teresa uses the image of a garden and the means of watering it to signify the different types of prayer. 95 Cloud has the same continuum of literal and metaphoric usage in Middle English as it does in Modern English. Today we speak frequently of both “clouds in the sky” and of “being on cloud nine,” or “having one’s head in the clouds.” 71

adaptable, allowing mystical authors and theologians to show with more specific images and metaphors how the soul might ascend to God, or how it might move inwards to find him. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Journey of the Soul into God) combines both the metaphors of ascent with those of interiority: “In the human soul the inmost part and the highest part are the same. This is evident because it is according to both its highest and its inmost part that it especially draws near to God, so the more that it returns to its interior, the more it ascends and is united to things eternal.”96 Bonaventure then situates this dual metaphoric movement in another metaphor of journey (demonstrating the inescapability of metaphor in mysticism). The English cleric Walter Hilton, a contemporary of the Cloud-author, wrote a treatise entitled The Scale of Perfection, where the metaphor of ascent to God plays a central role through the image of a scale, or ladder. Hilton also utilizes the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to map out the soul’s advancement. The Cloud-author relies heavily on the metaphor of interiority as part of his instructional agenda, and it is precisely because of the “interiority” of spiritual work that the use of other metaphors falls under his suspicion. Because the “werke” of contemplation takes place interiorly, the use of any more concrete metaphors, even the spatial metaphors of “up” and “down,” can lead the contemplative to misunderstand what it is she is doing, what her true goals are. He repeatedly excoriates exterior displays of devotion which mistakenly exteriorize actions and emotions which should be purely interior. The Cloud-author thus runs the risk of problematizing one sort of metaphor (the cloud, spatial metaphors) at the expense of ignoring another, even more foundational one (the interiority of the “work” of contemplation). He does succeed near the 96

Quoted in Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism: 1200-1350 (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 105. See McGinn’s careful yet concise treatment of Bonaventure’s mystical theology, 87-112, as well as the chapter “Hierarchy Interiorized: Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum” in Turner, The Darkness of God. 72

end of the treatise in carefully navigating the possibility of this pitfall, a point I will treat at length later, but it is important to note early on his thoroughgoing reliance on the metaphor of interiority.97 An alternative use of the metaphor of ascent can be found in Pseudo-Dionysius, whose relatively small corpus had a substantial impact on theology in the Middle Ages. PseudoDionysius initiates a different use of the metaphor, mapping the mystical progression onto the hierarchical ordering of different classes of angels (briefly mentioned, but not well developed, in Scripture).98 The use of these angelic hierarchies was to have a very long reach through the Middle Ages. The Victorine canons Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Gallus would adopt these hierarchies as a figure for how the human faculties are used in mystical ascent.99 Richard of St. Victor also identifies “levels” of contemplation in his treatise The Mystical Ark (also sometimes

97

I have excluded from my discussion the common metaphors within Christianity of marriage and sexual consummation for two reasons. First, these are not metaphors which the Cloud-author makes use of. Second, in their literal application, these metaphors are more complicated than that of the metaphors of interiority or ascent. Men and women in religious orders, for example, pledged celibacy as part of their “marriage” to Christ, thus literally enacting one aspect of marital relations (sexual fidelity). And it is becoming less clear that the eroticism of certain mystical texts and authors is in fact metaphorical—the sexual language of their texts seems to point to the body’s role in mystical experience. See Constance M. Furey, “Sexuality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 328–40.. In regards to my first point, René Tixier examines the resonances of the Cloud-author’s use of “listi” and “listines” in Rene Tixier, “‘Good Gamesumly Pley’: Games of Love in The Cloud of Unknowing",” The Downside Review 108 (1990): 235–53. Even the few moments of “love play” that Tixier analyzes lack the erotic yearning that characterizes many of the Cloud author’s contemporaries, however. 98 For a good overview of how Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings came to influence English authors, see Robert Boenig, “Pseudo-Dionysius and the Via towards England,” in Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 21–37. For a specific look at how the Cloudauthor both used and adapted Dionysian theology, see Cheryl Taylor, “The Cloud-Author’s Remaking of the Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology,” Medium Ævum 75, no. 2 (2006): 202–18. 99 For a detailed treatment of Richard of St. Victor’s and Thomas Gallus’ use of the imagery of ascent and their allegorical treatments of the angelic hierarchies, see McGinn’s chapter on “The Victorine Ordering of Mysticism” in The Growth of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1994) and his section on Gallus in The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism—1200-1350 (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 78-87. 73

called Benjamin Major, or The Grace of Contemplation); the advancement of the contemplative through these levels is represented as an ascent and also as a journey.100 Both images of cloud and darkness, which I will refer to as natural metaphors, since the literal referent is drawn from the natural world, have become part of the commonplace by which texts in the tradition of negative theology express the uniquely apophatic goals and realities of approaching God by way of subtraction, denial, and erasure. All of the texts that draw on this imagery find something of their inspiration in the biblical account found in Exodus, where God’s presence is figured by a cloud descending on Mount Sinai and then on the Tent of Meeting, indicating to the Israelites that God is present among them.101 The people remain at the base of the mountain, or outside of the tent, while Moses ascends or enters in order to talk with God. The allegorical possibilities of these Old Testament narratives are clear—the majority of people will only behold God’s presence from a distance; only a few select and devoted followers will be able to enter into such an immediate experience of divine presence, and, like Moses when he returns down the mountain with his face glowing, they will be marked in some way by their encounter. Although Gregory of Nyssa’s The Life of Moses makes use of this Scriptural narrative, PseudoDionysius’ The Mystical Hierarchy is of unprecedented importance when it comes to expanding and developing darkness as a metaphor for God’s ineffable essence. In the opening hymn of his Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius writes Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture, 100

Though the Cloud-author’s “Dionysianism” is often discussed, it is worth noting that this aspect of PseudoDionysius’ theology is one that he does not adopt. This omission is even more surprising given that the Victorine authors, who the Cloud-author knew, also make use of the angelic hierarchies to categorize their own mystical theologies. 101 God also guides the Israelites through the wilderness using a cloud during the day and pillar of fire at night. Exodus 13:20-22. 74

where the mysteries of God’s Word lie simply, absolute, unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence. Amid the deepest shadow they pour overwhelming light on what is most manifest.102 This opening invocation begins by explicitly situating the apophatic project in relation to the typical cataphatic affirmations. If cataphatic theology affirms that God is light, PseudoDionysius’ mystical text begins with a prayer that believers be lead “beyond unknowing and light.” Not only does this line suggest that “the light” and “unknowing” both describe the same level of Christian understanding and experience, but it provocatively asserts that one can pass beyond the light. Given the biblical claim in 1 John that “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all,” the Dionysian prayer that God lead people beyond the light, and that “the mysteries of God’s Word lie…in the brilliant darkness” has struck some readers as heretical. But these mystical claims don’t use the imagery of darkness and shadow as straightforward assertions; these are descriptions of divine reality that work differently than the avowal that “God is light.” Pseudo-Dionysius uses the metaphor of darkness to create paradoxes—paradox being one of the few linguistic forms that can adequately capture the truth about the divine. The “brilliant darkness” which contains God’s mysteries and the “deepest shadow” in which “overwhelming light” makes the divine mystery clear are not straightforward affirmations like the claim that “God is light.” These are not only linguistic paradoxes, they are also statements that deconstruct themselves by making an assertion and a denial at the same time. They are “selfsubverting utterances” in Denys Turner’s words: “the utterance which first says something and then, in the same image, unsays it.”103 Not only would Pseudo-Dionysius’ use of the metaphor of 102

Pseudo-Dionysius, Pseudo Dionysius, 133. Turner, The Darkness of God, 21. The structure of Turner’s “self-subverting utterances” is similar to that of Aristotle’s formulation of contradiction. Aristotle’s writings on logic were rediscovered in the twelfth century,

103

75

darkness become incredibly influential in later Christian theology and mysticism, but his reliance on these paradoxical utterances would also have a significant influence on the tradition of the via negativa in Western Christendom.

The Cloud’s Interpretive Instruction The Cloud-author offers careful instruction to contemplatives on how to interpret metaphors. Although it initially appears that he is denying the “metaphoricity” of metaphor, he uses the distinction between “goostly,” or spiritual, and “bodily,” or literal, meanings to parse out how a novice contemplative should properly understand the language of his own religious experiences. In keeping with Christian tradition, he privileges the former, but is careful to maintain the necessity of the literal referent as a vehicle for signification. Metaphors are misinterpreted and misused, he warns, when their goostly and bodily meanings are confused. The Cloud-author’s goostly and bodily meanings correspond to the literal and spiritual modes of interpretation that mark the history of Christian exegesis. Spiritual meanings are almost always figurative— typological, allegorical, or metaphorical. The care which the anonymous author displays when parsing out the differences between the literal and spiritual is thus not a new one. Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana treats the problem at great length, though the North African bishop is certainly not the first Church Father to do so. Like Augustine, the Cloud-author takes pains not to entirely dismiss the role of the “bodily,” the physical or material referent that allows language to achieve its goostly signification.

contributing to the rise of the New Logic in the universities. But whereas Aristotle’s “law of noncontradiction” designated it impossible for two contrary statements to both be true, this sort of theological equivocation instead turns us towards paradox. See Kay, Courtly Contradictions, 146. 76

The anonymous author warns that uninitiated novices may misunderstand metaphorical, or goostly, language. These neophytes may “hereth…how that a man schal lift up his herte unto God, and unseesingly desire for to fele the love of here God. And as fast in a curiousté of witte thei conceive thees words not goostly, as thei ben ment, bot fleschly and bodily, and travaylen theire fleschly hertes outrageiously in theire brestes” [hear how a man should lift up his heart to God, and desire to feel love for God without ceasing. And in their crude imaginations, they understand these words not spiritually, as they are meant, but physically and literally, and they stir up their physical hearts outrageously in their chests] (1589-93). The Cloud-author paints these beginners as obtuse, and their efforts as comical, as they labor to bring about a certain bodily state in an effort to fulfill clearly metaphoric commands in Scripture. Such literalism seems much less likely, however, in the case of metaphors of cloud and darkness. It seems readily apparent that the “cloud of unknowing” or the “cloud of forgetting” cannot be physical clouds, and it is hard to see how literalism might be misleading. (It seems unlikely that a novice contemplative would park himself on a hilltop in order to somehow “dwell” in a cloud). But perhaps the greater temptation confronting the novice is the allure of the image of the cloud itself—the pleasure of imagining a cloud, holding a picture of the object in one’s mind, might overtake the work of unknowing, which requires the contemplative to try to let go of any such images. Another temptation would be the pursuit of experience—the Cloud-author warns beginners against making physical or emotional experiences a goal of prayer, identifying such experiential moments as the result of a misreading of metaphorical language. These devotional practices only occur when a contemplative is insufficiently advanced to recognize the difference between goostly and bodily meanings and so misunderstands an injunction such as “fele the love

77

of God” (one might think here of Rolle’s expressions “fire of love” or “heavenly song”) to be literal and hence physical. This concern over literalism is most likely a response to late medieval devotional trends in England—the laity was increasingly literate and also interested in more substantial forms of personal devotion, but entirely untrained in the interpretive modes of metaphor and allegory which would have been much more reflexive for men and women in monastic contexts.104 While the fourteenth century only begins to evince trends that will become fully realized in the early fifteenth, Walter Hilton’s treatment of the “mixed” life, in his Scale of Perfection—a text that appears to be geographically and chronologically very close to the Cloud—provides evidence both of increasing religious instruction in English, and of increasing lay interest in contemplation as a devotional pursuit. Much has been written on the extent to which church authorities censored vernacular religious writings in the fifteenth century,105 but official concern on the part of the church regarding lay access to religious texts seems to have been much less pronounced in the late fourteenth century. The Cloud-author’s worry about his reader’s inability to distinguish between the goostly and bodily meanings, however, suggests a perhaps more subtle problem with the possibility of vernacular religious writing (and the broader lay access implied by it)—that

104

Marion Glasscoe posits a similar explanation for the author’s worry that readers might confuse levels of meaning: “In view of his inheritance of explicitly sanctioned anagogical use of language in which sensible things are used to designate things which are invisible and divine and of the general understanding of figurative reading in art and literature in the Middle Ages, the Cloud-author’s preoccupation with the relationship between tenor and vehicle in metaphor must surely arise from particular circumstances.” Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics, 180. 105 Nicholas Watson’s seminal 1995 article “Censorship and Cultural Change” set off a firestorm of scholarly response and kick started a lively and productive scholarly investigation into fifteenth-century lay devotion and religious politics. Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 70, no. 4 (October 1, 1995): 822–64. For overviews of how scholars of Middle English have responded to Watson’s claims, see the2006 ELN special issue (44.1) on “Vernacular Theology and Medieval Studies,” edited by Bruce Holsinger, or Kantik Ghosh and Vincent Gillespie, eds., After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011). 78

English, and those who could read it, are more prone to misunderstand figurative language (whereas Latin readers, especially those within a monastic or ecclesiastical context would be more carefully attuned to these differences).106In the same chapter containing the warning about misunderstanding metaphoric langauge, the Cloud author goes on to suggest that such an overly physical interpretation can in fact result in demonic misleading. Any emphasis on the body and physical responses to spiritual experiences came to be viewed with suspicion in the later Middle Ages,107 and the chapter seems to reinforce the assumption that too much bodiliness invites spiritual deception and demonic intervention—“for goostly blyndnes and for fleschly chaufying of theire compleccion in theire bodily brestis in the tyme of this feinid beastly and not goostly worchyng…thei conceive a fals hete wrought by the feende, theire goostly enmye, causid of theire pride and of theire flesclines and theire coriousté of wit” [spiritual blindness and physical exertion of the body is a feigned and demonic work, rather than a spiritual one…they will experience a false heat brought about by the devil, their spiritual enemy, caused by their pride and their bodiliness, and their overactive imaginations] (1599-1604). “Goostly blyndnes” to the

106

Nicholas Watson’s work has brought to light the extent to which the status of the vernacular was a topic of lively debate up until Arundel’s Constitutions abruptly decided things in favor of extremely limited lay access. Watson’s treatment of the Oxford translation debates also reveals that translation into the vernacular did have nuanced, articulate defenders in England in the 1380’s. But the ultraconservative resistance to translation stemmed in part from an opinion that the laity were simply not smart enough to read Scripture with nuance—which would include, of course, the ability to separate out the literal and spiritual senses. Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in LateMedieval England,” 840–846, esp 842–43. See also Nicholas Watson, “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God,” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 85–124. For a literary parallel, we might turn to the Wife of Bath. In her, Chaucer registers the possibility of a lay person (whose only access to the Bible would be in the vernacular) both presuming to interpret Scripture and, in so doing, confusing the literal and spiritual senses. The extent to which Chaucer’s portrait is a parody is, of course, up for discussion. In the Oxford translation debates, the critics of translation claimed that, if Scripture were available in English, women and rustici (unlearned lay people) would presume to interpret the biblical text, thus arrogating the clerical prerogative and, in the process, dramatically misunderstanding the word of God (as, in one reading, the Wife does). Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change,” 840-846. 107 Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Wendy Love Anderson, The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011). 79

spiritual significance of these metaphors of religious experience brings a contemplative under the influence of the devil himself. It’s not an exaggeration to say that metaphoric misreading is, in this treatise, demonic! Many scholars have noted that the Cloud-author’s concern with the deceptive possibilities of both the imagination and overly literal interpretations seem to be something of a response to the sort of affective piety and extreme emotionalism encouraged in some, especially Franciscan, stands of devotion, but also embodied in Richard Rolle’s own life and writings.108 Devotional practices such as Rolle’s emphasize strongly experience—in the Incendium Amoris, Rolle lays out his own spiritual trajectory, marked by the experiences of fire, sweetness, and song. Similarly, treatises such as Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, a meditation on Christ’s Passion, were meant to facilitate emotional response and engagement on the part of the properly devout reader.109 Texts such as Rolle’s and Love’s reveal the increasing popularization and “laicization” of piety in the later Middle Ages in England, as well as on the continent. Certain forms of devotion were spreading beyond the carefully controlled contexts of the monastery, as more and more lay folk adopted practices that had once been the exclusive purview of men and women in religious orders.110 Rolle himself is a testament to this new trend, 108

See Roger Ellis and Samuel Fanous’ contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 133-161, Bernard McGinn’s treatment of the Cloud in The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism: 1350-1550 (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2012), 413-15.. The Cloud of Unknowing is not unique in its rejection of Rolle’s extensive influence on late fourteenth-century devotional practices—similar themes are echoed in The Chastising of God’s Children, a text that also incorporates material from continental sources in its warnings against demonic deception and religious experience. 109 The Mirror is a translation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi, authorized by the archbishop Arundel in part to give devout laity guided access to the biblical texts while also avoiding the potential problems that arose when the unlearned read and interpreted Scripture independent of the Church. The Meditationes were often wrongly attributed to Bonaventure, though they certainly do show the strong influence of Franciscan piety. Love’s translation carefully and repeatedly emphasizes its own orthodoxy and adherence to the Church’s sacramental authority. 110 See Jeremy Cato’s contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism for an excellent overview of this trend in England, 113-131. Jennifer Bryant also documents the expansion of devotional texts for lay readers in Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: 80

as he had no institutional affiliation (with a monastic house, or with a particular bishop), but adopted the eremitic life as he saw fit. He also represented the movement of a continental emphasis on personal religious experience to the English context. His eventual popularity and influence among laity and religious alike—far more manuscripts of Rolle’s works survive than do those of the Cloud-author, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe combined—are a testimony to this changing devotional milieu. Hilton also expands the notion of the “mixed life” beyond those clergy who serve actively in the world to include laity who want to embrace the contemplative life. The Cloud participates in both trends, albeit in very different ways. The author seems especially wary of the potential for error should his treatise be read by those who are unprepared for his teachings, and though he is writing to a single addressee, he is also keenly aware that the manuscript will most likely circulate beyond this particular reader.111 While the first chapter contains an address to the “goostly freend in God” (spiritual friend in God), the Prologue contains a more general warning: I charge thee and I beseche thee, with as moche power and vertewe as the bonde of charité is sufficient to suffre, whatsoever thou be that this book schalt have in possession, outher bi propirté outher by keping, by bering as messenger or elles bi borowing, that in as moche as in thee is by wille and avisement, neither thou rede it, ne write it, ne speke it, ne yit suffre it be red, wretyn, or spokyn, of any or to any, bot University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), as does Jessica Brantley in Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 111 We know very little about the situation of the treatise’s original recipient. He is identified as being twenty-four years old (358-359) and as having recently committed himself to the contemplative life (232-241). But whether he was adopting some official religious commitment (joining an order), expressing an unofficial commitment to adopt of form of living (as Rolle did), or was simply a layman who wished to devote himself to contemplation remains unknown. 81

yif it be of soche one or to soche one that hath (bi thi supposing) in a trewe wille and by an hole entent, purposed him to be a parfite folower of Criste… (8-14). [I charge you and I plead with you, with as much force and virtue as the charity allows, whoever you are who has this book in your possession because you own it or because you have it temporarily in your possession (taking it to someone else or borrowing it for yourself), that you consider and decide not to read it, nor write of it, nor speak of it, nor allow it to be read, written of, or spoken of to anyone, unless it is someone who has (by your estimation) a true and undivided will, committed to being a perfect follower of Christ…] The author thus anticipates a much wider readership, and he attempts to control who reads the treatise, in an effort to ensure that only those who have “a trewe will and an hole entent,” those who are prepared to undertake the work of contemplation receive his instruction.112 (The Prologue continues with this warning for twenty-five more lines—the author certainly wants to emphasize this point.) And his anxiety over the treatise’s circulation are well founded—the text exists in seventeen manuscripts, most of which date from across the fifteenth century,113 and was furthermore translated into Latin twice—once by an anonymous Carthusian translator and then by Richard Methley.114 It was obviously a text in which a sizeable number of people were interested, and the Cloud-author’s anxiety about the proper distinction between the goostly and

112

The Cloud-author’s fear about circulation seems well founded given the monastic culture of letter writing. Jean Leclercq writes that letters of spiritual advice or direction were “almost always somewhat public in quality. It is generally taken for granted that the letter’s contents will fall under the eyes, or reach the ears, of several others and that the receiver will take pains to see that it is available….The writer of a letter took great pains with it because he knew it would be brought to the attention of a more or less extensive audience.” Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, 3rd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 181. 113 Hodgson, The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling, ix–xix. 114 Both the anonymous translation and Methley’s annotated translation are available in modern editions: John P. H. Clark, ed., The Latin Versions of the Cloud of Unknowing, 2 vols., Analecta Cartusiana 119 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1989); John P. H. Clark, ed., Richard Methley: Divina Caligo Ignorancie: A Latin Glossed Version of The Cloud of Unknowing, Analecta Cartusiana 119:3 (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 2009). For analysis see Laura Saetveit Miles, “Richard Methley and the Translation of Vernacular Religious Writing into Latin,” in After Arundel, ed. Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 450–66. 82

bodily meanings provides careful instruction for a readership that may not have been as familiar with or prepared for such careful interpretive work. In relation to the second contemporary trend, The Cloud of Unknowing does not entirely escape the pursuit of religious experience, though it attempts to do so. The Cloud-author is opposed to the sort of contemplation which takes “having an (religious) experience” as its goal. This particular understanding of experience, which relies on notions of interiority and a heightened sense of self-awareness, is only one sort of experience, when the term is understood to denote our perception of and participation in the world. Experience, like language, is a capacious and inescapable category that is inseparable from our means of knowing and communicating. But given the late medieval devotional context in which the Cloud-author is situated, it seems clear that he has a very particular sort of “religious” experience in his sights, the sort that mistakes psycho-somatic experiences for an encounter with God’s deepest being. The Cloud’s apophaticism is of the sort that, as Denys Turner has argued, denies experience, insofar as “experience” is located in a notion of a “self.” In Turner’s words, “if, in my deepest inwardness, I and God meet in a union beyond description and beyond experience, then an apophaticism of language about God and an apophaticism of language about the ‘self’ are obviously intimately connected.”115 Turner also persuasively argues that the Cloud-author divorces “interiority” from any notion of experience, including psychological experience: Those who seek ‘interiority’ only to translate it into mental acts of experienced inwardness become entrapped in a vicious circle, for they can only think in an ‘outward’ way of the distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ and so can only conceive of the ‘inner’

115

Turner, The Darkness of God, 6. 83

life materialistically: the consequences for their devotional and ascetical practice are therefore deformative of that true interiority which transcends imagination.116 Turner’s claim about apophatic theology more generally, and the Cloud more specifically, is that the category of experience is itself transcended or subverted. And yet even as the Cloud-author rejects one sort of experience, another sort is important to his treatise. He focuses on experience through his focus on mental states. Forgetting and unknowing, even as they serve the dialectical negation of somatic or emotional experience, are nonetheless descriptions of a sort of experience. And unlike Pseudo-Dionysius, whose metaphors and whose dialectical negations are all about the Godhead, the divine essence, the Cloud’s central metaphors and negations focus on the contemplative herself.117 Even as the author explicitly rejects certain contemporary emphases on experience as the goal and height of contemplation, then, it is equally clear that the nature of his apophatic reflection is still far more focused on the experiential nature of contemplation than is that of other mystical theologians such as Pseudo-Dionysius. Curiositas It is impossible to discuss the Cloud-author’s interpretive instruction without also examining his repeated warnings against the danger of the vitium curiositatis (sin of curiosity). Curiosity constantly threatens to derail the contemplative in his work, precisely because the vice privileges reliance on and interest in the senses while the work of spiritual interpretation requires the contemplative to sever the connection between the bodily senses and spiritual knowledge. The Cloud-author’s concern with curiosity and its ability to lead contemplatives astray also situates 116

Ibid., 206–208. In doing so, he is following in the footsteps of his medieval predecessors, Richard of St. Victor and Thomas Gallus, whose interest in mystical theology contains a much stronger anthropological element than PseudoDionysius’ Neoplatonic mysticism does. 117

84

him within a wider medieval discussion about curiosity, a conversation that had been given a new life after the advent of nominalism in the twelfth century, as Richard Newhauser’s work has shown.118 From the patristic era on, curiositas was not exclusively bad—as the “desire to know,” it was a virtue when pagans took an interest in Christianity, or when Christians desired to know more about God. But starting with Augustine, Christian writers express serious concerns about the sin of curiosity. Curiositas quickly became a sin when it grew concerned with knowing “obscure, useless or forbidden things,” or when the acquisition of knowledge led to or was caused by pride.119 In keeping with the word’s etymology, curiositas could also spring from excessive cura [care] for the world, including undue reliance on knowledge acquired by the senses and hence knowledge about the physical world.120 Finally, curiositas was often connected with pride. Knowledge can “puff up” (1 Corinthians 8:1), and so the desire to know might be rooted in pride, rather than devotion. Furthermore, those who are already prone to pride might find themselves filled with curiositas for things which are not fitting for humans to know. The curiosi might, in that most original sense of pride, desire to “be like God,” to know divine secrets.121 Curiositas is also a serious concern of the Cloud-author’s.122 He uses corious or coriousté (alternate spelling curious or curiousté) thirty times in the poem, and all of these usages have 118

The following overview is in fact indebted to Newhauser’s scholarship. For his work on curiositas, see the three essays collected in Richard Newhauser, Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).--"Towards a History of Human Curiosity: A Prolegomenon to its Medieval Phase," "Augustinian vituim curiositas and its reception," and "The Sin of Curiosity and the Cistercians." These essays are all reprints and retain their original pagination. 119 Newhauser, “Towards a History of Human Curiosity,” 562. 120 Ibid., 562-63, 571. 121 See Newhauser, “Augustinian vitium curiositas and its reception,” 104-105. 122 Samuel Fanous and Roger Ellis suggest that the author’s target when discussion curiosité is academics, possibly even Wycliffites, which is possible since curiositas is linked with heresy. But even more likely is the possibility that he is engaging the long tradition of discussing vitium curiositas and applying that conversation specifically to the work of contemplation. See Fanous and Ellis’ contribution to The Cambridge Companion, 149-52. 85

unambivalently negative connotations. S.S. Hussey in fact remarks that corious is “just about the dirtiest word in [the Cloud-author’s] whole vocabulary.”123 Curiositas is in fact one of the primary, if not the primary, temptation that he envisions the contemplative facing. In his extended warning in the Prologue (where he clearly envisions the possibility that his treatise will circulate beyond its original recipient), he refers to “corious lettred or lewed men” (31-32, again at 2480), so the vitium curiositas is not the exclusive purview of those who are learned. But the Cloud-author does often link the sin to knowledge and identify it as a particular temptation for those who are educated. “Coriousté of wit” is used ten times of the thirty total usages, and coriousté is also linked to “kunnyng and kyndely wit” (cunning and native intelligence) (55-56, repeated at 58). So curiositas is certainly an intellectual sin, a desire for too much knowledge, and knowledge of the wrong sort (cunning has implications of misplaced intelligence).124 In contrast, kyndely wit is envisioned as an ambivalent faculty. Much like the patristic authors, who saw curiosity as good when directed toward the knowledge of God and bad when motived by pride, the Cloud-author sees kyndely wit as good when it us used to understand the truth of “thi wrechidnes, the Passion, the kyndnes, and the wonderful werkes of God in His creatures bodily and goostly” (531-33). It is precisely curiosity, however, that can corrupt kyndely wit, and turn it to an evil purpose: Bot then is the use ivel, when it is swollen with pride and with coriousté of moche clergie and letterly conning as in clerkes, and maketh hem prees for to beholden not meek scolers and maystres of devinité or of devocion, bot proude scolers of the devel and maysters of

123

S.S. Hussey, “The Audience for the Middle English Mystics,” in De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989), 114. 124 See also 534-35: “coriousté of moche clergie and letterly conning as in clerkes, and maketh hem prees for to beholden not meek scolers and maystres of devinité or of devocion, bot proude scolers of the devel and maysters of vanité and of falsheed.” 86

vanité and of falsheed. And in other men or wommen, whatso thei be, religious or seculers, the use and the worching of this kyndely witte is than ivel, whan it is swollen with proude and corious skyles of wordely thinges and fleschely conceites, in covetyng of wordly worschipes and havyng of richesses and veyne plesaunce and flateringes of other (534-41). [But the use of natural intelligence is evil when it is swollen with pride and with curiosity about excessive learning and learned craftiness, as it is in clerks who are not as meek scholars and masters of divinity or of devotion, but as proud scholars of the devil and masters of vanity and falsehood. And in other men and women, whoever they are, religious or secular, the use of this natural intelligence is evil when it is swollen with pride and curiosity about worldly things and fleshly conceits, motived by a desire for worldly praise and for riches and for vain comforts and flattery from others.] In this passage, curiosity is what leads intelligence astray, what prevents genuine inquiry that would lead the Christian to God’s truth. Notice the links, prominent also in the patristic treatments of curiositas, to vanity, pride, and excessive concern with “worldly” (as opposed to spiritual) matters. The Cloud-author thus exhibits a particular concern with the ways in which the intellect can be led (or itself lead) astray in the work of contemplation. Coriosté is also linked to the faculty of imagination. Imagination was understood to be the mental faculty that produced images in the mind, and, while clearly distinct in the Middle Ages from intellectus or ratio, its connection to curiosity in the Cloud suggests, I think, that it was another way in which the mind could be led astray from contemplation. Alistair Minnis parses the Cloud-author’s position on the imagination, stressing how the author followed Thomas Gallus in claiming that, in the soul’s ascent to God, the imagination and other intellective properties must ultimately be left behind and that union could finally only be achieved by way of the affectus (willed desire). Given that the Cloud-author favors the faculty of affection over that of imagination, it is unsurprising that he finds curiosity to be such a cause for 87

concern—curiosity only serves to distract the mind from its ultimate goal, which is in fact the undoing of thought itself.125 And, finally, coriosté is identified in the Cloud with the tendency to (mis)interpret words in the bodily, rather than goostly, sense. In chapter 4, already discussed at length (“And wene not for I clepe it a cloud…”), the author writes “soche a proude, corious witte behoveth algates be born doun and stifly troden doun under fote, yif this werke [of contemplation] schal trewly be conceyvid in pureté of spirite” [it is always necessary to push down and put underfoot such a proud, curious wit if this work of contemplation is to be truly conceived in purity of spirit] (39496, italics mine). And much later in his warning about how novices misunderstand spiritual language, he specifies that these poor beginners are “kumbred in nice corious contenaunces in bodily beryng” [encumbered in fanciful, curious appearances of a bodily nature] (1853). Curiositas is thus a sin associated with bodiliness, and it in fact keeps contemplatives from pursuing spiritual work. This association (between vitium curiositas and a reliance on the senses) seems rooted in Augustine, for whom, as Newhauser points out, “the sin of curiosity led at least partially to a desire for sensory experience which merely verified itself.”126 For the Cloud-author, it is crucial that the contemplative learn both to interpret language non-literally and to not rely on sensory experiences during prayer or contemplation (so that they don’t “writhen here hedes onside queyntely, and up with the chin [or]…gape with theire mouthes” [oddly writhe their heads to one side and thrust up their chins, or gape with their mouths] (1854-55) when in prayer). The nexus of the senses and literal interpretation is, as I have already mentioned, linked to

125

A.J. Minnis, “Affection and Imagination in ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and Hilton’s ‘Scale of Perfection’,” Traditio 39 (1983): 323–66. 126 Newhauser, “Augustinian vitium curiositatis and its reception,” 113. Newhauser goes on to point how this particular aspect of Augustine’s thought gained particular traction in the Middles Ages and was widely popularized. 88

demonic deception. 127 The curiosi are, by way of their excessive interest in and reliance on in the literal, material level, likely to be deceived, to become one of the devil’s contemplatives (“the devil hath his contemplatyves” (1610)). Curiositas is thus an odd temptation in the Cloud because, while it stems from an excessive interest in or privileging of bodily, it is also a sin of the mind, linked as it is with “wit” and “imaginacion.” Curiositas reveals, from another perspective, how imbricated the goostly and the bodily are in the work of contemplation. As such, unknowing is in fact the antidote to curiosity. Unknowing, as the Cloud-author envisions it, is a refusal to become fascinated with the bodily, material realm (even as the treatise itself reveals a reliance on the physical to advance its instruction). The Cloud-author is not interested in the physical properties of a cloud, or of any other physical object which he uses in a metaphor. While nominalism’s growing popularity and influence on late medieval thought encourages examination of the natural world, The Cloud of Unknowing is strikingly indifferent to, perhaps even suspicious of, this mode of inquiry. The cloud of unknowing is meant to evoke a state of mind, not to encourage consideration of the natural phenomena (even as the Cloud-author chose the more material term cloud to translate caligo/nubilo). Where curiositas is undue interest in the material world, unknowing is unconcerned; where curiositas stems from pride and vanity, unknowing is full of humility, since it has no “knowledge” to attain or be proud of. The Cloud-author’s Use of Metaphor Despite his constant warnings about the pitfalls of understanding these metaphors and relying on or pursuing the wrong sort of religious experience, the Cloud-author constantly uses metaphors, 127

See, in particular, chapters 52-55 where the Cloud-author treats the ways in which the devil uses the senses to deceive the contemplative. 89

especially spatial ones, and he goes on to try to clarify in great detail how they should be interpreted.128 Over the course of six chapters, he carefully works out the role of the bodily register and the need to interpret bodily words and revelations spiritually (goostly). His argument here is much more nuanced than his initial “denial” of his own metaphor might indicate, and I will take the time to parse his argument at length before returning to several of its themes, in order to show how the treatise arrives at its apophaticism through the form of its own denials and affirmations as much as through its explicit content. The Cloud-author warns against taking literally the spatial metaphors he employs so liberally: “And therefore beware that thou conceive not bodily that that is mente goostly, thof al it be spokyn in bodily words, as ben thees: up or doun, in or oute, behind, or before, on o side or on other” [And therefore beware that you don’t understand literally what is meant spiritually, though it is all spoken of in physical terms, like these: up or down, in or out, behind or before, on one side or on the other] (2147-49). These words are inherently bodily because “speche is a bodely werk wrought with the tongue, the whiche is an instrument of the body” [speech is a physical labor made with the tongue, which is an organ of the body] (2150-51), but they must be understood and interpreted spiritually (i.e. metaphorically). He does, however, take six chapters to work out carefully the role of the bodily and how one goes about interpreting bodily words and revelations spiritually. The Cloud-author’s concern over parsing out goostly and bodily meanings is not a new one. Like Augustine and others before him, he takes pains not to entirely dismiss the role of the “bodily,” the physical or material referent that allows language to achieve its goostly signification.

128

Burrow, “Fantasy and Language in The Cloud of Unknowing,” 291–96; Tony Chartrand-Burke, “Against the Proud Scholars of the Devil: Anti-Intellectual Rhetoric in The Cloud of Unknowing,” Mystics Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1997): 119–20; Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics, 178–79. 90

[L]ate us pike of the rough bark and fede us of the swete kyrnel. But how? Not as thees heretikes done, the whiche ben wel licned to wode men havyng this custume, that ever whan thei have drunken of a faire cup, kast it to the walle and breke it. Thus schul not we do, yif we wil wel do. For we schul not so fede us of the frute that we schul dispise the tree; ne so drynke that we schul breke the cuppe when we have drunken….For men wil kysse the cuppe, for wine is therin (2022-34). [Let us pick off the rough bark and feed on the sweet kernel. But how? Not like these heretics do, who are like mad men having the custom of drinking out of a beautiful cup, then throwing against the wall and breaking it. We will not do so, if we want to do well. For we will not so eat the fruit that we will despise the tree, nor drink so that we will break the cup when we have drunk….For men will kiss the cup if wine is in it.] Denigration or dismissal of the literal referent is associated with heresy, and the author is careful to establish the necessity of the “cup” or the “rough bark,” without which we cannot have the wine or the “sweet kernel.” Even with these concessions, however, the Cloud-author still reinforces a strong hierarchy between the container and the contained, between that which is practically necessary and that which is inherently desirable. The physical referent, meant only to signal the goostly meaning, is at best saved from complete dismissal; it does not, in the formulation above, contribute any real meaning or significance, but serves simply as a place holder, one which could, presumably, be substituted out for another material referent and still have the same effect. While the Cloud-author is attempting to secure the relationship between these two types of meaning, to pin them down in a hierarchical relationship, he is also implicitly calling attention to the ways in which metaphor is arbitrary and hence ambiguous. The relationship between the goostly and bodily meanings might be hierarchical, in his formulation, but it is not necessary, in the sense that a given bodily meaning ineludibly produces a particular

91

goostly meaning. Any number of bodily referents could be subject to the same goostly meaning without compromising or confusing the latter. The Cloud-author attempts to address two objections to his claims about the arbitrariness, insignificance, and yet necessity of the literal referent. The first implicit objection he addresses is the prevalence of visions and revelations whose content is clearly physical—he gives the example of St. Martin, who encountered Christ in the guise of a beggar and gave to him half of his cloak, or St. Stephen’s vision of Christ in heaven during his martyrdom. These bodily revelations, the author assures us, have goostly meanings, which we must search out. In the case of St. Martin, he points out, it is not as though Christ had actual physical need of the cloak, nor did it “come…on Crystes owne body substancyaly” [was it physically on Christ’s body] (200911). Nor are we to imagine that, however St. Stephen might have seen Christ in his vision, Christ’s body is actually positioned in that way in heaven—we don’t know, he tells us, what Christ’s body is doing, whether it’s sitting, or lying, or standing. Rather, the fact that he was standing in the dream is meant to communicate a goostly truth, his “redynes of helping” [eagerness to help] (2051). These passages are perhaps in tension with the earlier chapter which takes up the wine/cup metaphor. While this metaphor does seem to suggest that the physical referent is absolutely arbitrary (i.e. it doesn’t really matter what cup the wine is in, as long as the spiritual content is made available), this chapter, with its treatment of famous hagiographic examples, reveals how the particulars of bodily revelation do matter—Christ’s “readiness to help” would not have been as effectively communicated, we might theorize, if Stephen had seen him in a different position. This tension between the arbitrariness and appropriateness of the physical revelation leads to the second objection which the Cloud-author explicitly addresses in Chapter 60. The 92

objection is as follows: “For thee think that thou haste verrey evidence that hevyn is upwards; for Criste assendid thedir bodely upwards, and sente the Holy Goost, as He Hight, coming fro aboven bodely” [For you think that you have real evidence that heaven is upwards because Christ ascended physically upwards, and sent the Holy Ghost, as he is called, coming from the actual sky] (2101-03). To which he responds, Sithen it so was that Criste schuld assende bodely, and therafter sende the Holy Goost bodely, then it was more seemly that it was upwards and fro aboven, than outher downwards and fro bynethen, byhinde or before, on o side or on other. Bot ells ne were this semelines, Him nedid never the more to have wente upwards then downwards….For heven goostly is as neigh doun as up, and up as down, bihinde as before, before as behynde, on o syde as other (2108-14). [Since it as the case that Christ ascended in body, and then afterwards sent the Holy Ghost bodily, then it was more seemly that it was upwards and from above, rather than downwards and from beneath, behind, or before, on one side or on the other. Except for this seemliness, he didn’t need at all to have gone upwards rather than downwards….For the spiritual heaven is as much down as up, and as much up as down, as much behind as before, or before as behind, as much on one side as on the other.] The physical particulars of the bodily revelation are “more seemly” than any of the alternatives, although they are not necessary results of heaven’s position vis-à-vis earth. The assertion of the seemliness, or appropriateness, of certain bodily referents, however, does seem to suggest that there is something in the category of up that is inherently, if not necessarily, better at communicating a particular spiritual truth. Aquinas employs a similar category of “fitness” in the Summa Theologica to argue that the Incarnation, while not strictly necessary (necessity subjects God to realities and imperatives outside of Himself), is the “most fitting” means to salvation, precisely because it is an expression of God’s essence, his goodness, and “what belongs to the

93

essence of goodness befits God.”129 For both Aquinas and the Cloud-author, “fitness” or “seemliness” avoids the trap of necessity, binding God to a system external to him that would seem to dictate his actions, but the category also indicates that the soteriological method (in Aquinas’ case) or a metaphor’s literal referent (in the Cloud-author’s case) does have properties that put it forth as truly the best option for expressing the divine nature.130 The category of “seemliness” explains why the Cloud-author, after initially warning sharply against misunderstanding the word up in a literal sense, still suggests that contemplatives might very well “lifte oure ighen and oure hondes yif we ben steryd in spirit” [lift our eyes and our hands if we are so stirred in spirit] (2001-02). He begins his treatment of the goostly/bodily split in interpretation by talking about how novices, just as they might strain their bodies in attempt to have literal experiences of metaphoric descriptions such as “lifting one’s heart to God” or “a stirring of desire,” may also hear the word up and think that they should stare into heaven to see God. Similarly, they will tend to imagine God on human terms: “Thees men wil make a God as hem lyst, and clothen hym ful richely in clothes, and set hym in a trone…” [These men will make a God as they like, and cloth him richly in clothes, and set him on a throne] (1982-83). In keeping with the traditional warnings of negative theology, these lines serve as a reminder of God’s transcendence when almost all of our theological discourses necessarily fall back on images and categories that implicitly or explicitly emphasize his immanence. And if the Cloud-author at times seem to misrecognize the true function of 129

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Article 1, Question 1 A theological interpretation of “seemliness” is at odds with J.A. Burrow’s reading. For Burrow, “seemliness” has to do with “the integrity of the natural world…’semely’ behavior is essentially natural behavior.” Burrows reads the Cloud-author as severing the physical, or natural, from the spiritual, which, in his defense, does seem to be, on the surface, what the author is doing. If he does so split the two, however, then his ongoing reliance on natural images and metaphors is inconsistent. It is simply not possible, as Burrow argues, to “express spiritual things in such a way that the ‘bodily words’ do not become confused with their spiritual referents.” Burrow, “Fantasy and Language in The Cloud of Unknowing,” 290, 295. 130

94

metaphor, emphasizing the metaphoric, goostly referent at the expense of the bodily referent, the mistaken neophytes he describes fall into the opposite camp—they understand metaphoric expressions of God’s location and station as purely literal, such that they imagine God actually to be clothed, or to be physically seated on a throne. (The Cloud-author seems wary even of imagery drawn from Scripture, such as that of God seated on a throne and clothed as a king, insofar as it too can be misinterpreted in literal terms and, because of its inherently authoritative status, might in fact be even more prone to such literalism.131) A few chapters later, the Cloudauthor repeats that it is, at times, necessary or helpful for the contemplative to direct himself physically upwards, as long as the spiritual significance of the action is maintained: [I]t is needful to lifte up oure ighen and oure hondes bodely, as it were unto yone bodely heven, in the whiche the elementes ben fastnid. I mene yif we ben sterid of the werk of oure spirit, and elles nought. For alle bodely thing is sogette unto goostly thing and is reulid thereafter, and not agensward (2124-27). [It is necessary to lift up our eyes and our hands physically, as if unto the physical heaven, in which the elements are situated. I mean, only if we are so moved in our spirit, and only then. For all bodily things are subject to spiritual things, and are ruled by them, and not in the opposite manner.] The bodily significance must be subject to the spiritual interpretation, but as long as this is the case, then it is acceptable, even “needful,” to respond physically to the word up. Again, we should note that the author’s careful emphasis “and not agensward”—bodily meanings must always be subject to spiritual meanings, never the other way around. The metaphoric 131

In fact, Janel Mueller argues that the Cloud contains an almost shockingly few instances of Scriptural citation or allusion. The Cloud-author relies on several biblical examples (Mary and Martha, or Moses, Aaron, and Beseleel), but in comparison with Walter Hilton or Nicholas Love, he seldom incorporates Scripture into his treatise. This surprising lack of biblical quotation is perhaps due to his wariness about misinterpretation. Janel M. Mueller, The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 1380-1580 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 67–74. 95

transference is unidirectional in this model, the bodily significance cannot, or at least should not, affect the spiritual significance. The Cloud-author exhibits a deep concern with the possibility of metaphor’s multiplicity, the ways in which metaphoric meaning moves in both directions. He is aware of the possibility that his readers will have “a bodely conseyte of a goostly thing, or elles a goostly conseyte of a bodely thing. And this is evermore feynid and fals, and anexte unto errour” [a bodily conception of a spiritual thing, or else a spiritual conception of a bodily thing. Both are incorrect, and lead to error] (2219-21); that is, readers will both spiritualize literal language or the material world, and literalize spiritual language. When translated into the language of metaphor, this passage exhibits an anxiety that literal language could be interpreted literally when it should be taken metaphorically, or that a metaphor is read as being only literal. This duality, however, suggests the way in which metaphor doubles meaning, not just in positing in a literal and metaphoric meaning, but in the affect that the literal meaning has on the metaphoric, and in the affect the metaphoric meaning has on the literal. But this is a possibility he attempts to foreclose due, it seems, to an anxiety that it will become impossible to “fix” meanings. Coincidentia Oppositorum If the Cloud-author is, at least on the surface, invested in denying the bi-directionality of metaphor, he nevertheless creates at other moments in the treatise evidence of the coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites), which, according to Wolfson, is the hallmark of mystical or dream consciousness.132 Although the Cloud-author’s curious attempt to deconstruct his own metaphor seems doomed to failure, he does manage to achieve a similar paradox in the

132

Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, chapter 4. 96

word “unknowing.” What does it mean to un-know something? The opposite of knowledge is most likely ignorance, or perhaps being misinformed. We usually understand “to know” as an active verb; knowledge is acquired by experience or education. Ignorance is a passive state, although we can also figure it as active when we talk of “willful ignorance,” a determined commitment to escape knowledge of a certain kind. In Middle English, “unknow” is almost always equated with a lack of knowledge, and hence with a passive state. In only one of the MED’s eighteen subcategories is the word used in an active construction, which has to do with a refusal to acknowledge or recognize something. But in what sense could one actively un-know something? It is easier to understand how someone might un-learn something through practice, but the very skill or habit that was un-learned is still known in some way, the mind still remembers the prior state. The Cloud-author only uses the participle “unknowing,” and always with the phrase “cloud of unknowing” (he never uses the verb “unknow” on its own). But the “cloud of unknowing” is not associated with a mental state that is entirely passive. For one thing, the entire treatise is devoted to instructing a contemplative in how to cultivate this mental state; the cloud of unknowing must be achieved through careful effort, rather than being the result of inactivity. In the third chapter, when the author first introduces the cloud, he writes Lette not therfore, bot travayle therin tyl thou fele lyst. For at the first tyme when thou dost it, thou fyndest bot a derknes, and as it were a cloude of unknowyng, thou wost never what, savyng that thou felist in thi wille a nakid entent unto God. This derknes and this cloude is, howsoever thou dost, bitwix thee and thi God, and letteth thee that thou maist not see Him cleerly by light of understonding in thi reson, ne fele Him in swetnes of love in thin affeccion. And therfore schap thee to bide in this derknes as longe as thou 97

maist, evermore criing after Him that thou lovest; for yif ever schalt thou fele Him or see Him, as it may be here, it behoveth alweis be in this cloude and in this derknes. And yif thou wilte besily travayle as I bid thee, I triste in His mercy that thou schalt come therto (288-97, italics mine). [Therefore, don’t stop, but work at it until you feel desire. For the first time you do it, you find nothing but a darkness, and a sort of cloud of unknowing, which you don’t understand, except that you feel in your will a naked intent for God. This darkness and this cloud is, whatever you might do, between you and your God, and it hinders you so that you can’t see him clearly by the light of your understanding, nor feel him in the sweetness of love in your heart. And therefore, plan to remain in this darkness as long as you can, always crying out after Him that you love; for if you ever feel Him or see Him, as might happen, it is necessary to always remain in this cloud and this darkness. And if you will busily work as I instruct you, I trust in His mercy that you will arrive at a true love of God.] The italicized verbs highlight paradoxically the effort that it takes to remain in a state of “unknowing.” Furthermore, it is clear in this passage that unknowing, while opposed to the pursuit of a certain kind of knowledge about God, is nevertheless compatible with the careful maintenance and cultivation of desire—“thou wost never what, saving that thou felist in thi wille a nakid entent unto God.” A few chapters later, the author writes that “the higher partye of contemplacion…hongeth al holy in this derknes and in this cloude of unknowing, with a loving steryng and a blinde beholding” [the higher part of contemplation is to remain all holy in this darkness and this cloud of unknowing, with a loving feeling and a blind beholding” (564-66). The “loving stirring” and the “naked entent” are both ways of indicating the fundamental role that desire plays in the pursuit of apophatic contemplation—in this text, at least, when all other forms of knowing are stripped away, desire remains.

98

“Blinde beholding” also suggests a sort of paradoxical state of knowing—comprehension through incomprehension.133 And there is the oft-employed mixed metaphor where the contemplative is instructed to “beat” upon the cloud with a “sharp dart of longing love”: “smyte apon that thicke cloude of unknowing with a scharp darte of longing love” [beat upon that thick cloud of unknowing with a sharp dart of longing love] (463-65, repeated almost verbatim in 68082). This phrase draws together both the need to engage actively with the cloud of unknowing and the role of desire; the contemplative’s engagement with the cloud comes through his desire. Furthermore, the mixed metaphor also creates a paradox—how can one “beat” upon a cloud, and how can one use a “sharp dart” to do so? Spears or darts aren’t used for beating, but rather for piercing, and piercing a cloud with such an object would seem ineffective if the desired result is to remove the cloud altogether (and piercing a cloud doesn’t seem particularly productive, since a spear or dart would do nothing to cause a cloud to dissipate). These paradoxes seem designed, as in so many other apophatic texts, to create a sort of evocative incomprehension. The puzzlement one feels over “blinde beholding” (reminiscent of Pseudo-Dionysius’ “luminous darkness) is perhaps logically unintelligible, but the phrase also manages to arouse, through its very inconsistencies, an awareness of an alternative form of comprehension and understanding. These paradoxes, particularly insofar as they seem both to refer to and to establish alternative forms of knowing, are central to the Cloud’s apophatic project, and share an affinity with the verb “unknow.” 133

Cheryl Taylor discusses the Cloud-author’s use of paradoxical formulations such as “blinde beholdyng,” arguing that they encourage “word-free, imageless contemplation…or (fail to) represent the divine as transcendent subject.” For Taylor, the Cloud ultimately remains trapped in the limitations of language, though she argues that all of the Cloud-author’s texts “strive to inhibit the physical associations and to recollect the figurative status of the images central to their message. This once again mimes the effort made in contemplation to transcend discursively produced reality.” I am instead arguing the Cloud-author exploits the materiality of images and figurative language, using their very materiality and specificity to help beginners grasp the transcendent within language. Cheryl Taylor, “Paradox upon Parodox: Using and Abusing Language in The Cloud of Unknowing and Related Texts,” Parergon 22, no. 2 (2005): 42, 46. 99

The Cloud-author sells himself a bit short, then, when he says that he means only “a lack of knowing” by the darkness or the cloud he describes—“unknowing” is actually a much more evocative term, one that negates the negation of knowing. Unknowing is learned ignorance (docta ignorantia), a paradoxical state of mind and a linguistic paradox.134 Like metaphor, which holds together similarity and difference in one linguistic moment, “unknow” also manages to maintain simultaneously states of activity and passivity, of knowledge and ignorance. This simultaneous co-existence of seeming opposites is both the strategy and the end goal of apophatic texts, since it best approximates the unknowable paradox of divine being, and also manages to bring contemplatives to an awareness of this paradox. Denys Turner writes that “[f]or the Cloud Author ‘unknowing’ is an apophatic strategy, not a mere ignorance; it is an achievement of the work of ‘forgetyng,’ a work which…is the normal routine of the spiritual life, a routine of progressive simplification and attenuation of the imagination and reason. To ‘unknow’ is, for the Cloud Author, an active verb-form.” 135 Turner’s emphasis on the active work of “unknowing” reveals how the term draws together the active and passive, accurately describing the work of contemplation, which requires both the most rigorous assertion of will and intellect, and a patient dependence while the contemplative waits for something to happen to herself. “Forgetting,” another of the Cloud author’s favorite terms, requires a similar blending of activity and passivity. Commanding someone to forget is paradoxical—forgetting is usually an unbidden and unwanted state of mind, something that happens to me, not a state that can be achieved through the assertion of my own will (which would only serve to fix more firmly in my mind the very thing that I am trying to forget). Like metaphor, then, these actions, “unknow” and 134

Nicholas of Cusa has a treatise titled De docta ignorantia, written in the 1440s, but Augustine uses the term in a letter (Epist. ad Probam 130, c. 15, § 28), which was almost certainly not known in the Middle Ages. PseudoDionysius uses an identical phrase in Greek in The Mystical Theology: ἀγνώστως ἀνατάθητι, “Lead us up unknowingly.” (This phrase is alternately translated, “lead us up beyond unknowing.”) 135 Turner, The Darkness of God, 197. 100

“forget,” so central to the Cloud’s mystical project, are able to hold together seeming opposites, activity and passivity, not in a sort of synthesis, but rather a simultaneous co-existence that signifies the apophatic reality. The Cloud of Unknowing’s Apophatic Strategies Metaphor’s Spatiality and Simultaneity Linguistic paradoxes are not the only means by which the treatise creates apophasis. In the Cloud’s careful parsing of how the bodiliness, or materiality, of metaphor is to be understood, we can in fact see how the text manages to communicate about an apophatic reality. I will now return to specific aspects of the author’s argument regarding how to interpret bodily meanings, which I outlined in the previous section. It is by now clear that the Cloud-author relies heavily on and uses repeatedly metaphors that are spatial, in addition to his employment of the metaphor of the cloud. The contemplative is to remain in the cloud of unknowing, to put the cloud of forgetting between himself and the world; the contemplative is beneath God and above all worldly things. And yet, to return to a passage already quoted, the Cloud-author does not shy away from undermining or undoing even these metaphors: “And therefore beware that thou conceive not bodily that that is mente goostly, thof al it be spokyn in bodily words, as ben thees: up or doun, in or oute, behind, or before, on o side or on other” [And therefore beware the you do not understand bodily what is meant spiritually, even though it is said in bodily words such as up or down, in or out, behind, or before, on one side or on the other] (2147-49). The Cloud-author thus extends this avoidance of literalism to the most basic set of metaphors that are nearly fundamental to discourses of Christian mysticism. The language of interiority and exteriority, of ascent and descent, are not only inseparable from Christian 101

mysticism from its very earliest instantiations through the Middle Ages, but these spatial metaphors can also be considered fundamental to our categories of perception and understanding. As Lakoff and Johnson have pointed out in Metaphors We Live By, these structural metaphors have a basis in physical reality, but the vast extension of spatial metaphors to describe states of emotion, consciousness, health, status, control, virtue, and even conditions of quantity and quality are all structured by spatial metaphors.136 Lakoff and Johnson’s claims that spatial, or “orientational,” metaphors are grounded in physical reality might seem to undermine (again) the Cloud-author’s claim that the language with which we describe heaven and its location is entirely arbitrary. Heaven needs to be oriented up because all of our bodily associations with up imply goodness, superiority, virtue, increasing quantity, etc. Here, again, the denial of the metaphor’s “metaphoricity,” of the ability of the literal, or bodily, to convey meaning seems to mark out an impossibility, and hence a rather obvious blindness on the part of the author. The language of the author’s response to the objection that the imagery of Scripture seems to suggest that heaven is in fact up is particularly telling: “heven goostly is as neigh doun as up, and up as down, bihinde as before, before as behynde, on o syde as other… [The spiritual heaven is as much down as up, or as much up as down, as much behind as before, or before as behind, as much on one side as on the other] (2013-14). The list of directional opposites in this claim attempts, at the same time that it asserts these binaries (up/down, behind/before, on one 136

Consider the following metaphors: “I’m on top of the world,” “to fall asleep,” “to fall ill,” “I have control over the situation,” “I’m at the bottom of the ladder,” “You have high standards,” “My income went up last year,” “The situation has gone downhill.” All of these are metaphorical statements that apply, according to Lakoff and Johnson, the human body’s physical orientation. Health and wakefulness, for example, are both characterized by an upright posture, while illness, sleep and death are all associated with a supine position. An increase in physical amount often corresponds to the level of a pile or container physically going up, while a decrease is the reverse. See Chapter 4 “Orientational Metaphors,” in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2003), 14–21. 102

side/on the other), to collapse them, and thus to force the reader to re-evaluate an understanding of heaven as a place. In fact heaven cannot be situated in any space, if we conceive of space physically—it is a sort no-place. The effect of the Cloud-author’s claim is similar to that of his claims about the cloud and the darkness. We can’t imagine heaven without utilizing the physical categories of space and place, but heaven, as a spiritual location, isn’t like any other space or place we’ve ever encountered. All our attempts to engage with mystical reality continually rely on modes and categories with which we are already familiar. And here at this crux, the Cloud’s ability to communicate as a mystical text becomes clear. Mysticism and mystical discourse are never an escape from language. Despite all the claims to ineffability, which are, of course, still themselves linguistic claims, mystical texts, and “mystical experience,” however much we will want to problematize this category, can never escape language. To use a metaphor given to me by Constance Furey, mysticism is not the trapdoor out of the room we live in (i.e. “language”) the rest of the time. Mysticism is the light switch that, when flipped, helps us to see that exact same room in an entirely new way.137 The Cloud-author’s use of metaphor, both spatial and otherwise, can never escape the materiality, and hence the literalism, inherent in any language. 138 If we were to try to understand

137

Note both the inescapability of metaphor in this helpful heuristic—in trying to explain the Cloud-author’s metaphors I am myself driven to metaphor, which in turn introduces new problems. This metaphor (of the room) spatializes, and hence metaphorizes, language. Alternatively, one could say that, rather than mysticism-as-lightswitch, mysticism could be metaphorized as seeing the room by way of echolocation or thermal sensitivity. These modes of awareness completely resituate a subject’s relationship to space—while in the same place, one’s awareness of that place is fundamentally realigned. 138 One possible explanation for the Cloud-author’s peculiar emphasis on the disjunct of metaphor is due to the fact that he follows Thomas Gallus and, to some extent, Richard of St. Victor in emphasizing the role of the mental capacity of affectus in the work of contemplation over and above the role of intellectus. Those theologians who find a place for the intellect and its exercise even in the highest reaches of contemplation, such as Pseudo-Dionysius and Hugh of St. Victor, don’t find it necessary to describe the abandonment of such categories and language, but rather describe how they are transformed through contemplation. Gallus and the Cloud-author, in their emphasis on affectus, don’t maintain the same categories in their description of contemplation’s apex. Bonaventure also posits the 103

The Cloud of Unknowing in these terms, then we would have to arrive at the conclusion that it is in fact a failure as a mystical treatise, since it continues to rely on its own metaphors to communicate, even as it seems, in one sense, to deny those metaphors. But if we approach the Cloud as a treatise that doesn’t attempt to escape or deny the metaphors inherent in all language, including the language of spatiality, then the goostly meaning of the words “up or doun, in or oute, behind, or before, on o side or on other” is not a denial of or an opposition to the bodily meaning. The goostly meaning is rather a recasting of the bodily meaning, the bodily meaning seen in a new light. Spiritual meaning and interpretation, in the Cloud, is not something else entirely, completely removed from the literal use of language. Just as in metaphor the tenor can never be divorced from the vehicle, and it is in fact precisely because of the vehicle that the tenor gains its surprising new meaning, in the Cloud, the spiritual meanings of words such as cloud and up recast and revise our understanding of the bodily, literal meanings.

Against the traditional understanding of apophatic language or theology, which figures the truest spiritual meaning as somehow “beyond” the literal affirmations, having somehow surpassed the bodily associations, the trajectory I’ve just outlined instead involves a sort of retrospective action, rather than a forward- or upward-moving trajectory. The spiritual meanings illuminate, precisely because they recast, revise the literal meanings, not because they surpass or leave them behind. In the example above, the author is not able to communicate something about heven goostly because he completely rejects materiality of the prepositions he uses. Rather, his “heven is as neigh…as…” formulation forces the contemplative to reinvest in the material definitions.

final, highest stages of contemplation as taking place per excessum mentalem et mysticum (through the overcoming of the mind and mystery). 104

The material meanings are always present; the spiritual meaning simply mines those definitions for new significance. The simultaneous existence of opposites in both metaphor, along with the Cloud’s unique contemplative strategies, is an image of what negative theology so often aims for—a paradoxical state of being that is beyond, or perhaps beneath and behind, our typical modes of knowing. This simultaneity, however, stands somewhat at odds with the more traditional and linear understanding of negative theology’s operations. In Pseudo-Dionysius, the first theologian to lay out this mystical progression, theology begins by affirming all that it can of God (the cataphatic mode), using all the resources of language to do so. But eventually, we come to realize that finite language cannot adequately express the infinite (indeed, cannot even begin to say anything about it, for the infinite does not stand in relation to the finite), and so theology then proceeds by way of negation, unsaying the things it has already said. And so we might move from saying “God is light” to its negation “God is darkness.” Finally, though, theological discourse must come to acknowledge that its affirmations and negations are really more of the same thing, they exist on the same ontological level, as it were, and are both equally inadequate (i.e., light and dark are both measure of the same quality), and it’s only when taken together that their true inadequacy becomes apparent. We must now, according to Pseudo-Dionysius and those who follow in his footsteps, negate the negation, we must try to find a language that is in some way beyond affirmation or negation, but also signals the collapse of those modes of speech and the categories those modes represent. And so we find Pseudo-Dionysius’ opening to The Mystical Hierarchy: “God is a luminous [or brilliant] darkness.” A seeming impossibility, a paradox, this third movement is the location of the apophatic. In systematic approaches to apophatic theology, including Pseudo-Dionysius’, this movement appears linear, almost dialectical: affirmation,

105

negation, apophasis. This linearity, however, can, at least for a contemporary audience, overly emphasize the seemingly dialectical tendency of this sort of theology; apophasis appears to be a kind of synthesis, rather than a paradox achieved by way of a double negation. Similarly, the linear nature of this progression seems progressive and perhaps fixed—if one proceeds in the appropriate manner, initiates the movement through these three stages, then the apophatic outcome is assured. Apophatic language doesn’t have to be the result of a linear progression, though, as my analysis of simultaneity shows. Certain linguistic forms, including metaphor, hold themselves firmly in between the twin pressures of affirmation and negation, losing neither, maintaining both. In metaphor, similarity and difference co-exist without cancelling one another out, just as in “unknow,” activity and passivity are both fully present. This co-existence gives us an image of apophasis, of which the Cloud-author masterfully makes use. It is more useful to abandon, at least some of the time, a model of apophatic or mystical discourse that posits a linear and temporal trajectory, implied even in my description of spiritual meaning as revising, recasting, or retrospective. A spatial imagining of apophatic theology can be more useful, insofar as it can better figure the tension, inherent in Wolfson’s model, and the retrospective movement that achieves an apophatic end. A linear model is, of course, also spatial, but it’s also typically imagined as two-dimensional, and suggests movement, progress, and hence also temporality. The model of spatiality I am suggesting is best imagined three-dimensionally, where it can figure the tension of metaphor. Wolfson uses spatial images when he writes that metaphor is “a gap continuously crossed but never collapsed…. the bridge that spans the breach between literal and figurative… the fissure that connects by keeping apart.” The simultaneity of apophatic paradox can be understood temporally, as two things, which we might assume to be mutually exclusive, existing at once, but it cannot fit into a linear model of temporality. As the

106

Cloud itself amply demonstrates, leaving bodily or literal language behind is impossible. But the goal of the treatise seems to be, in part, to provoke the contemplative to situate herself differently in relationship to that literal language. The category of “seemliness,” or “fittingness” (which the Cloud-author uses to explain why some of his metaphors are appropriate) is another way the he finds to encourage this resituation. “Seemliness” may seem to break cleanly the relationship between the literal and the spiritual—there is nothing inherent in the literal meanings that would lead to its spiritual significance; a particular bodily meaning is only the best candidate from among several for figuring some goostly truth. But it is also possible to understand “seemliness” as re-figuring the relationship between the literal and spiritual. While not relying on an inherent equation between the two sorts of meaning (the spiritual meaning being “really like’ the literal in some way), “seemliness” does indicate a relationship of some affinity. While not reducing the literal to the spiritual, or vice versa, “fitness” does provoke a thoughtful consideration of the similarities and differences between the two. The relationship between the literal and spiritual, when described as “seemly,” is neither intrinsic nor arbitrary, but somewhere between the two. In other words, in describing the literal language as “seemly,” the Cloud author is forcing us to reconsider the two types of meaning in terms of one another—the very sort of reconsideration that goes on when he says that heaven is “neither up nor down, behind nor before, on one side or on the other.” Consider this example again in the context of the larger passage where he also introduces the term seemly: Sithen it so was that Criste schuld assende bodely, and therafter sende the Holy Goost bodely, then it was more seemly that it was upwards and fro aboven, than outher downwards and fro bynethen, byhinde or before, on o side or on other. Bot ells ne were 107

this semelines, Him nedid never the more to have wente upwards then downwards….For heven goostly is as neigh doun as up, and up as down, bihinde as before, before as behynde, on o syde as other (2108-14). [Since Christ ascended in body, and after that sent the Holy Spirit in body, then it was more fitting that he went up and the Holy Spirit came from above, then down and from beneath, then from behind or in front of, then on one side or the other. Except for this seemliness, he would never have needed to upwards instead of downwards….Because the spiritual heaven is as close down as it is up, and up as it is down, as close behind as it is before, or before as behind, as close on one side as on the other.] In this passage, the author first introduces the prepositions in the context of their “seemliness,” suggesting that “fitness” as a category does the same work that the author’s “Heven is as neigh…as” formulation does. In both cases, the tension between the literal and metaphoric, between the similarity and difference, is exposed. Metaphor’s Bi-Directionality I have been arguing that the model of apophasis can be productively mapped onto a spatial model, more productively than a linear, and hence temporal, model. An apophatic reading of metaphor in turn keeps the literal, material referent present at all times, though the significance of the literal must be reconsidered in light of the metaphoric or spiritual referent. One might say that the metaphoric referent actually “interprets” the literal referent, insofar as it utilizes certain aspects of the literal referent while passing others by.139 But this reconsideration extends in both directions; not only is one required to rethink the spiritual in light of its metaphoric descriptions, but the literal meanings themselves, the material, “bodily” meanings,

139

Cognitive approaches to studying metaphor call this aspect “sense selection”—in processing a new or unfamiliar metaphor, the individual must choose between potential meanings the literal referent might have. For a good overview of sense selection and other work being done on metaphor in cognitive science of interest to literary scholars, see Cervone, Poetics of the Incarnation, 13–15, 31–39, 51–55. 108

must be re-thought as well. We expect spiritual metaphors to do the former—parables that begin “heaven is like,” for example, set us up to think in some new way about heaven. We understand the spiritual in light of the literal/material (despite the Cloud-author’s insistence that “alle bodely thing is sogette unto goostly thing and is reulid therafter, and not agensward” [all bodily things are subject to spiritual things, and are ruled by them, not the other way around] (2126-27)). What we don’t typically anticipate is that we will be forced to reconsider the literal meaning, the material referent, in terms of the spiritual significance. But such a reconsideration is precisely what the Cloud-author ends up prompting us to do. Statements like “Don’t think that I mean darkness like when your candle is out at night” and “Heaven is as near down as it is up” push the reader to think about what and how the relevant literal terms (darkness, up, down) signify. In the poem’s central metaphor, that of the cloud, the physical referent is continually reevaluated in light of the author’s claims about its spiritual significance. Typically the physical cloud has negative metaphoric meanings—clouds obscure the sun and block out light, making the visual field less clear or limiting the distances at which one can see.140 And so both Middle English and Modern English have produced a range of figurative meanings, where cloud refers to something that obscures understanding, or something that mars an otherwise clear or clean virtue or character. But The Cloud of Unknowing insists that cloud’s figurative meanings are not so negative as we might assume. The contemplative is instructed to “abide” in the cloud of unknowing, to work actively to remain “beneath” the cloud, which is then between the contemplative and God, and to put the cloud of forgetting “between” herself and all earthly

140

And in fact nominalism encouraged such an approach to physical objects—a careful investigation into their properties. Augustine himself suggests that we must understand physical objects to know how they might be used metaphorically: “Ignorance of things makes figurative expressions unclear when we are ignorant of the qualities of animals or stones or plants or other things….” Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 44. 109

things.141 These clouds (of unknowing and forgetting) are in fact desirable, and the mental states they produce are to be carefully cultivated. And while the cloud is typically understood to obscure and obfuscate (literally and figuratively), the cloud of unknowing actually illuminates. The cloud, even as it signifies a lack of knowing, makes clear other spiritual truths, namely the contemplative’s true relationship to God, and the inability of the intellect to approach divine truth.142 As the Cloud-author’s careful parsing of the relationship between the bodily and goostly reveals, he does not completely disregard the role of the literal signifier, as it might appear when he states “wene not for I clepe it a derknes or a cloude, that it be any cloude congelid of the humours that fleen in the ayre….” But he still completely subjects (“sogettes”) the bodily meaning to the spiritual significance. While bodily referents may be apt, or seemly, nothing about their material reality truly informs or shapes the spiritual meaning. And yet metaphors only create meaning because of their ability to transfer meaning from the literal to the metaphoric referent. The metaphor of the cloud is “fitting” to describe the mental state of unknowing only because the material properties of cloud, fog, or darkness give shape to the idea or experience of “unknowing.” The physical object of the cloud is thus not only “seemly,” accurately describing the state of mind the contemplative should set as his highest goal, but it also shapes, at least within this text, the reader’s conception of what that mental state is. We could imagine other “fitting” images meant to describe the mental state that is the goal of negative theology, but our idea of that state would not be the same as the one created when the metaphor of the cloud is employed. Furthermore, our notion of confusion, ignorance, or a lack of knowing is dictated in

141

“And therfore schap thee to bide in this derknes as longe as thou maist” (293-94), “whan thou wenest best to abide in this derknes“ (596-97). 142 These are truths the Cloud-author espouses; not all mystics or theologians would agree. 110

part by the metaphors we use to describe those states of mind. (“I’m in the dark on that issue,” “her judgment is clouded,” “it’s unclear to me,” “we cleared that up,” “he muddied the waters,” “the seminar was enlightening.”) When we use metaphors, meaning is made in both directions, the particularity of the literal, material referent both allows the metaphoric referent to signify, but the metaphoric referent in turn comes to shape our notions of the literal referent. The tension between these two “directions” of meaning, or the dynamic back-and-forth through which metaphor makes meaning, is homologous with the dynamic tension between similarity and difference that operates in metaphor. Just as within metaphor we find similarity and difference (between literal and metaphoric referents) co-existing, we find that the meaning of the two referents co-existing, mutually informing one another. The Cloud-author does not acknowledge the ways in which bodily meaning is subject to the goostly). But these dynamics are precisely the means by which The Cloud of Unknowing is able to communicate its apophatic message. It is in particular through the treatise’s negations, which may seem at first to be rather foolish and un-insightful on the author’s part, that the text finds a way around the “apophatic impasse.” These negations in fact draw attention to the dynamics of metaphor and, in so doing, prompt the reader to contemplate the paradoxes of mystical language and consciousness.

Conclusion The Cloud of Unknowing can be a particularly challenging text for several reasons. Although the author himself provides a table of contents outlining the topic of each chapter, the structure of the treatise doubles back on itself, repeating and developing key themes. It is, to quote McGinn,

111

“both linear and circular.”143 And although it is also a preeminently practical treatise, concerned with helping its readers in their devotional pursuit of God, the author does not often make connections between chapters and themes clear. The treatise offers both a description of and instruction in work of contemplation, but this instruction also requires a lesson in learning how to read. Contemplation in this text is inseparable from interpretation because the novice contemplative must learn first how to understand the language used to describe the work of desiring God. A proper understanding of that language in fact reveals that the language does not just describe contemplation, but in fact embodies the reality of the work. When the form of the language is properly understood, when the contemplative can see how this particular sort of Godtalk works, then the work of contemplation has been accomplished. And the interpretive program the Cloud is advancing is principally a lesson in how to interpret metaphors. When this aspect of the treatise becomes clear, the author’s simultaneous reliance on metaphor and his admonitions (“don’t think that I mean a cloud…) about those metaphors seem less odd. Metaphor and its interpretation are central to the instruction the treatise offers. The importance of metaphor to The Cloud of Unknowing becomes clear when the text is contrasted with the Cloud-author’s other treatise on contemplation, The Book of Privy Counseling. This latter text was written after the Cloud and attempts to clarify and defend the earlier text’s apophaticism. Privy Counseling thus relies more overtly on Scripture, theological authorities, and a more systematically developed theology to support the werk that is presented in the Cloud. But the text also abandons the use of metaphor as a heuristic to help the contemplative understand what it is she is to be doing. Consider the following description of the contemplative life: “It chargeþ not now in þee bot þat þi blynde beholdyng of þi nakid being be gladli born up

143

McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 402. 112

in listines of loue, to be knitted and onid in grace and in spirit to þe previous being of God” [Nothing in you matters now but that the blind beholding of your naked being gladly be borne up in the eagerness of love to be linked and united in grace and in spirit to the precious being of God just as he is in himself and nothing more].144 Although the phrase “naked being” appears in the Cloud, it is in the context of the extensive use of the metaphor of the cloud, which helps the contemplative to understand this somewhat abstract term. The entirety of Privy Counseling, however, uses this more abstract, speculative, and, in a technical sense, precise terminology, but the later treatise also sacrifices a different sort of clarity and a great deal of appeal. Furthermore, Privy Counseling does not signify, in the form of its language, the very tension that lies at the heart of mystical theology and the work of contemplation. Both the metaphors it uses and the instruction it offers about those metaphors are central to The Cloud of Unknowing. In contrast to Privy Counseling, the Cloud’s efficacy as a mystical treatise is grounded in the metaphors it uses, and it is through, or perhaps in, these metaphors that it communicates the paradoxical, apophatic message about God.

144

Hodgson, The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling, 139, line 11–14. 113

CHAPTER 3 THE CONCEALED OF THE REVEALED: JULIAN OF NORWICH AS EXEGETE

Scholarship on Julian of Norwich has long identified her parable of the Lord and the Servant as a watershed moment in the Long Text.145 The narrative is not included in her Short Text—she identifies it as showed “full mistely” (51.1), and it appears that the vision was in fact so baffling to her that she required “twenty yere…save thre monthes” to reflect on it and receive “teching inwardly” (51.73) to assist her understanding.146 But Julian herself identifies this particular vision as being the ground of all the rest of what she is shown, and the vision is shown to her in response to her own deep perplexity over the seeming contradiction between the content of her revelations about God’s all-encompassing love and the content of the church’s teaching about human sinfulness (a contradiction also felt acutely by the assiduous reader). The parable is not only itself an addition of the Long Text, but it comes in the midst of the largest chunk of material added. Of the twenty-two chapters that make up vision 14 in the Long Text, nineteen of them are entirely new material, including chapter 51, which contains the parable. Julian’s most original and daring theological insights are contained in these chapters—her claims about substance and sensuality, her depiction of the motherhood of God, and, perhaps most importantly, her assertion about how God sees (or more accurately, doesn’t see) our sin. More importantly for my purposes, in her presentation and interpretation of this vision, we see key features of both her methodology and her message. Her lengthy exposition of the initial vision is indicative both of 145

Julian’s text exists in two versions, commonly referred to as the Short Text and the Long Text. Though the dating of each has been a matter of scholarly debate, the Short Text was composed first, and hence is closer in time to her visions, while the Long Text is considerably expanded, and written considerably later than the Short Text. 146 All quotations come from Julian of Norwich, The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and a Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 114

the importance of time for Julian’s developing understanding of her shewings, but also her careful treatment of these shewings as a form of figurative language. Julian is not only a visionary, but also a skilled reader and exegete, sensitive to the capacities of figurative language to capture the infinities of the divine. Current scholarship on Julian is deeply indebted to Nicholas Watson’s ground-breaking work. Both Watson’s edition of Julian, with Jacqueline Jenkins, and his seminal articles on the dating and composition of her texts have shifted significantly how critics think of this remarkable author. His 1993 article challenged the scholarly consensus about the dating of Julian’s texts, arguing that Julian spent considerably more time reflecting on her visions before composing the Short Text, and then spent decades revising it into the Long Text, while a 1998 article persuasively argues that interpretation and revelation are inseparable in both texts.147 My work in this chapter builds on Watson’s attention to Julian’s personal biography and his careful reading of her rather flexible process of composition. But rather than attempting to create a timeline or pin down Julian’s shifting understanding through even closer close reading, I am crucially interested in the formal indeterminacy of the text, in Julian’s efforts to reflect in the very form of her writing the ways in which her revelations defy interpretation, both her own and ours. The mobility of Julian’s prose can be attributed to the lengthy period between her revelatory experience and to her decades-long composition and revision of two different accounts of these revelations. But I consider this mobility to be formally deliberate, an attempt to capture in the very nature of the text the time and effort that are as much a part of the experience of revelation as the mystical ekstasis. The text that Julian leaves us cannot be reduced to her own personal biography, though that biography does matter and it has taken meticulous scholarly attention to 147

Nicholas Watson, “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” Speculum 68, no. 3 (1993): 637–83; Nicholas Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1998), 61–90. 115

bring it to light. Biographical and historical attention to authors typically leads to an interpretation of their texts that fixes meaning. I am arguing in this chapter that a close reading of Julian’s text itself captures the indeterminacy and fluidity that seems to have been hallmark of her experience. While I have emphasized in other chapters the ongoing importance of metaphor’s materiality (Pearl), and the particular means by which mystical texts seek to inhabit and transform language’s materiality (Cloud), here I pay attention to figurative language’s temporal and bodily resonances. Julian puts the body, her own and Christ’s, in relation to language through her persistent attention to the unfolding interpretation of these bodies. Metaphor is so central to the Revelation, and the material element of metaphor in particular, because embodiment is metaphor—metaphors are a type of embodiment. The body is open to language in Julian, and language is open to the body. Time is also crucial to Julian’s own understanding and representation of her visions; the composition of both her texts took many years. But within the text itself, Julian emphasizes the temporality of both mystical experience and of figurative language. In the Revelation, we are reminded that to be embodied is to be in time. Julian’s own body, and the bodies in her text, take time to interpret. The embodied words, the metaphors and parables of the visions, also require time, without which their full meaning cannot be uncovered. Time and embodiment are textual features produced by Julian’s language, by the forms of language she uses.

Elucidation and Obfuscation: The Lord and the Servant In this chapter, I focus primarily on the example of the Lord and the Servant because Julian explicitly identifies it as central to the whole of what she is shown, and because it is an extended

116

instance of her rumination an instance of figurative language. She writes that “in this merveylous example I have teching within me, as it were the beginning of an A.B.C., whereby I may have some understanding of oure lordes mening. For the privites of the revelation be hid therin, notwithstanding that alle the shewing be full of prevites” [in this marvelous example I receive an inner instruction, like the beginning, like an A.B.C., from which I might gain some understanding of our Lord’s meaning. For the secrets of the revelation are hidden in it, notwithstanding that all of the vision is full of secrets] (51.228-31). This exemplum is both the start, the “ABC” of Julian’s vision, and the key to interpreting everything else she has seen. It is not the start chronologically, since it appears in the Long Text approximately two-thirds of the way through the text. But it is the start in that this parable clearly establishes the most fundamental contours of Julian’s theological revelation and interpretive method. In this sense, it is the key to the “privites of the revelation”—the “understanding of oure lordes mening”—and what Julian realizes in her reflections on this parable must be read retrospectively throughout the first thirteen visions and then forward through the last two.148 And as the interpretive key, the parable unlocks the meaning of Julian’s entire revelation because it reveals key truths about how and why God looks on human beings with nothing but love and pity, but also because it reveals how Julian comes to understand that “love was his meaning” (86.14).The key to unpacking the revelation’s meaning, the parable unfolds as a multi-layered metaphor whose meaning Julian unpacks over time, as she reflects on the original vision she was given. The exemplum emerges out of Julian’s cry at the end of the fiftieth chapter: “A lorde Jhesu, king of blisse, how shall I be esede? Who shall tell me and tech me that me nedeth to wit, 148

Watson argues that the exemplum, and Julian’s understanding of its importance, stretches even to her presentation of the first revelation in the Long Text. Watson, “Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 99. He also calls it “the heart of the entire work in [the Long Text].” Watson, “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” 638. 117

if I may not at this time se it in the?” [O, Lord Jesus, King of bliss, how shall I be comforted? Who will tell me and teach me what I need to know, if I can’t see it at this time?] (50.31-33). At this point in the account of her visions and their concomitant reflections, Julian depicts herself as being in a state of anxiety because she is caught in a great tension. Her visions show her that “oure lorde was never wroth nor never shall” [our Lord was never angry, and never shall be] (46.24-25), and she accepts as nonnegotiable the church’s teaching that “we be sinners and do many evilles…wherefore we deserve paine, blame, and wrath” [we are sinners and do many evils…which is why we deserve pain, blame, and wrath] (46.21-23). Chapters 44-50 are in fact devoted to explaining this tension—Julian steps away from the otherwise chronological presentation of her visions and reflects on “all the revelations” (44.1), all that she has seen and written so far.149 She repeatedly emphasizes the reality of human sin and the fact that “oure lorde God…may not be wroth” (49.2-3), and this seeming contradiction leads her to much confusion and apprehension: “And betwene theyse two contraries, my reson was gretly traveyled by my blindhede and culde have no rest” [And between these two opposites, my reason was greatly troubled by my blindness and could have no rest] (50.14-15). To this cri de coeur, Julian writes that “oure curteyse lorde answered in shewing, full mistily, by a wonderful example of a lorde that hath a servant” [our courteous Lord answered by showing, very opaquely, a wonderful

149

These chapters, which are not really part of the fourteenth vision, reiterate that the exemplum (and the anxiety that effected its shewing) are an addition to the Long Text. Chapters 44-61 actually constitute a discrete moment in Julian’s thinking and are a result of her reflection on the entirety of her revelation, rather than being tied to her reflections on a particular vision. The visions she receives in these chapters, and the “words formed in her mind” are mostly reflections on what she has already seen, rather than visions that she received in the initial short time period and then reflected on. As she turns to reflect on “the whole revelation” in chapter 44, she also turns to the problem of sin, the tension between the church’s teaching and the content of her revelation, and introduces the distinction between substance and sensuality. These chapters then, contain the most original and daring of Julian’s theological contributions, suggesting that they are very much the result of a long period of reflection. And if we accept that these chapters are a much later addition (original, as opposed to a deeper understanding of the original visions), then the vision containing the parable of the Lord and Servant may well have not been part of the first series of revelations. 118

example of a lord that had a servant] (51.1-2). The exemplum in chapter 51 is thus explicitly identified as being central to the message of Julian’s shewings, and it resolves the tension that has been building between the revelation of God’s love and the church’s teachings about sin and damnation. And yet even after the initial shewing of the Lord and the Servant, Julian states that she “stode mekille in unknowing” [remained in great unknowing] (51.58-59). Julian knows that the exemplum is “geven me for answere to my desyer,” but she “culde…not take therein full understanding to my ees in that time” [given to me in answer to my desire…could not understand enough to be comforted at that time] (51.55-56, italics mine). The repetition of ees in this sentence reminds readers that the vision was provoked by Julian’s dis-ease as a result of the seemingly contradictory impulses of church teaching and her revelation (“A lorde Jhesu…how shall I be esede?”). A new shewing has been given, and yet she is still not reassured, still has not found the ese of understanding. And her lack of understanding is linked to the exemplum’s refusal to align neatly with a single metaphor—she goes on immediately to say that “[f]or in the servant that was shewed for Adam…I sawe many diverse properteys that might by no manner be derecte to singel Adam” [Adam was represented in the servant…I saw many different qualities that could in no way be contained by a single Adam] (51.56-58). Julian emphasizes that her lack of understanding is provisional (she did not understand “in that time,” a phrase she repeats often), and the rest of the lengthy chapter attests to her ability to discern, over a long period of reflection, the exemplum’s multilayered significance. But after expressing her initial confusion, she goes on to write “the full understanding of this mervelouse example was not geven me in that time, in which misty example the privites of the revelation be yet mekille hid. And notwithstanding this, I sawe and understode that every shewing is full of privites” [a complete

119

understanding of this marvelous example was not given to me at that time, but in this unclear example the secrets of the revelation were yet hidden. And notwithstanding this, I saw and understoof that every vision is full of secrets] (51.59-62, italics mine). Even as she emphasizes her provisional confusion (“in that time,” “yet”), she also goes on to say all shewings, all revelations, all insights from God are “full of privites”—full, in other words, of enigmas, of things that cannot or will not be understood. She expresses both the expectation that her understanding of his vision will grow, and that there will be some things she will never understand, some knowledge that will be too high for her. Julian’s transitional phrase “notwithstanding this” suggests that, even though she acknowledges her growing understanding of what she saw, she is acknowledging the continual unknowability of certain privites. The “this” of the transitional phrase could refer to her more general discussion—“notwithstanding my bewilderment over this exact vision, I saw that all revelations are full of privites.” But it could also refer to the specific content of her previous statement. “Notwithstanding the fact that I did not understand the vision at the time I received it (and, by implication, the fact that I would go on, with time, to understand more of it), I saw that all revelations are full of privites.” Julian in fact consistently acknowledges the incompleteness of her revelation. “This boke…is not yet performed, as to my sight” [This book is not yet completed in my sight] (86.1-2), she writes near the end. Again we see Julian looking for the continued unfolding of the privites revealed in her shewings, beyond the “end point” of the composition of the text. But we also see that there are privites revealed by the very content of her shewings! In the fourteenth vision, for example, Julian first records the revelation containing God’s promise that “alle shalle be made well.” But this revelation immediately raises the question of the apparent reality of sin. God’s response, “that that is unpossible to the is not

120

unpossible to me” [that which is impossible to you is not impossible to me] (32.41-42), presages another “grete dede” of God’s in the future, by which he will “save his worde in alle thing and…make wele all that is not welle” [preserve his word in all things and make well as that is not well] (32.46-47). The “grete dede” remains a complete mystery to the faithful; it is one of “theyse previties he wille we know thus hid into the time that he wille clerly shew them to us” [he desires that these mysteries remain hidden from us until the time when he will clearly show them to us himself] (34.2-3). It appears, then, that even as Julian is given further revelations, increased insight into the mysteries with which she struggles, she finds herself stumbling upon new tensions, new theological problems. Elliot Wolfson points out that, when speaking of dreams and mysticism, “elucidation itself is a form of obfuscation.”150 The vision that is supposed to answer Julian’s deep desire, to make clear what she does not understand, itself creates further confusion and provokes Julian’s awareness of new privites of which she was not formerly aware. The fact that the new vision is called an “example” heightens this dissonance. Medieval exempla were typically used in sermons to clarify and provide unambiguous instruction. This example, however, creates even more confusion for Julian. Every revelation, in other words, every attempt at elucidation, is also a concealment. However, even if Julian “culde…not take therein full understanding to my ees in that time” [could not be fully comforted in her understanding at that time] after initially being shown the example of the Lord and the Servant, she does go on to state that she is “somdele esed” [somewhat comforted] because of “thre properties” [three properties] of her vision (51.63-64). 150

Wolfson explicitly connects dreams and mysticism both as phenomena and as texts requiring interpretation. Here he is at length: “In the purview of the dream, what is revealed of the concealed conceals the revealed of the concealed. The exposure of the exposure perforce is a double concealment, a withholding of withholding, and hence, just as one cannot expect to understand the scriptural text without recourse to interpretation, one cannot expect to do so with respect to eliciting meaning from the dream….this is not simply to say…that interpretation makes explicit the implicit import of the dream. After all, interpretation is as much a covering up as it is an uncovering. The point, then, is that elucidation itself is a form of obfuscation.” Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, 161–62. 121

Julian’s ese at the three properties is also stated in the present tense—“I am somdele esed,” while her confusion after the initial showing of the Lord and the Servant is stated in the past— “culde…not take therein full understanding.” Her reassurance is thus partly the result of time, but even in the present in which she composes the Long Text, she does not confess to being either fully eased or fully understanding what it was that she has seen. The “somdele” also instantiates a double consciousness on Julian’s part—the comfort offered by knowledge of the three properties does not erase the discomfort she has felt and is still feeling at this moment of interpretation. Though it would appear that the tension Julian feels has not been fully resolved by the new shewing, she instead finds ese in the hermeneutic properties of the vision, if not in the content itself. At this point, when Julian turns to the three properties, it becomes clear that the text doesn’t fix the reader or itself, but creates a space for interpretation, hence Julian’s ese in the three properties, rather than an interpretation of the content.151

Julian’s Shewings as Metaphor As Julian recounts and presents the vision, her interpretation reveals that the vision itself has multiple figurative layers, in addition to the “three properties” that inform her understanding of the vision. Her exposition of the servant reveals a metaphorically doubled understanding of whom that figure represents (both Adam and Christ). Like the Cloud-author, she uses the language of bodely and gostly to help parse these levels of meaning. These multiple levels of meaning and multiple modes of metaphoric understanding, reminiscent of medieval biblical 151

There is a homology between these three properties and the anchorhold itself, whose space (and time) allows the anchoress to open up to herself and to God—allows for fluidity and mobility rather than fixity. See Corey Sparks’ dissertation chapter on Julian…Laura Saetveit Miles writes that “the anchorhold provides Julian with ‘a room of her own,’ a quiet room for devotional intimacy with God, the time and space to contemplate her vision, the reliable support of the community and enough privacy to heal any grievance against society’s potential hostility towards her gift.” Laura Saetveit Miles, “Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2008), 162. 122

exegesis. Julian differs from typical medieval exegetes, however, in that she does not always systematize, categorize, and connect these differing modes. She instead approaches her own vision as a metaphor that shifts, expands, and adapts, both as a cause and a result of her ongoing meditations.152 Julian’s own mode of rumination on her visions layers years of expanding comprehension of what she was shown—the depth of her understanding is thus linked to her growing metaphoric appreciation, which develops over time. As with the other texts I have examined, this use of metaphor belies a deeper significance, a homology between metaphor as a linguistic strategy and the theological reality of divine infinity, and also, unique to Julian, the life of the Trinity.153 At the outset of Chapter 51, Julian identifies that this particular shewing was “shewed double…That one perty was shewed gostly in bodely liknesse. That other perty was shewed more gostly withoute bodely liknes” [showed double…the one part was showed spiritually in a bodily likeness; the other part was showed more spiritually without a bodily resemblance] (51.35, italics mine). The “bodely liknesse” in both parts indicates what we might call the literal part of the exemplum—the narrative of the lord and the servant, which involve quite a few physical details that Julian “sees” in her vision. The first meaning, “goostly in bodely likness” refers to what we can easily identify as the metaphoric meanings—meanings that emerge out of physical details. The second meaning seems to refer to those aspects of the vision that Julian comes to understand, but that aren’t located in particular physical details, such as her insight into the

152

Scholars have often discussed the centrality of certain metaphors, such as enclosure, to Julian’s text, and Ena Jenkins argues that a few of Julian’s metaphors (sight, enclosure) and her reflection on them are central to the mystical nature of her text and her experience. Ena Jenkins, “Julian’s Revelation of Love: A Web of Metaphor,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, CT: Brewer, 2008), 181–91. 153 Several scholars have discussed the role of Trinitarian theology, particularly that of the Augustinian variety, in Julian’s conception of the soul. Alexandra Barratt, “‘No Such Sitting’: Julian Tropes the Trinity,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, CT: Brewer, 2008), 42–52; J.P.H. Clark, “Nature, Grace, and the Trinity in Julian of Norwich,” Downside Review 100 (1982): 203–20. 123

Lord’s or Servant’s interior states and attitudes, insight that she simply “receives” as part of her vision, rather than by way of interpreting details.154 This second meaning is puzzling with regards to the exemplum, because while it is “without bodely liknes,” it is still tied to the narrative of the Lord and the Servant. In other words, while the shewing may be “without bodely liknes,” it still applies to, and ultimately emerges out of/is provoked by, the “bodely liknesse” of the mini-drama that unfolds in Julian’s vision. There is no way to escape the parable in this chapter—all the meanings Julian is shown must at some point come back to the bodely, to the literal narrative. Julian’s reliance on bodely revelations also can cast discussions of Julian’s own body in a new light. As feminist scholarship on Julian has grown, many critics have turned to her text as a site of resistance to medieval misogyny regarding women and the body. Building on Caroline Walker Bynum’s work, both Elizabeth Robertson and Liz Herbert McAvoy have argued that Julian treats the body of Christ as inherently feminized, and hence identifies her own body as a site for both devotion and spiritual redemption. 155 By focusing on Julian’s use of the “body” in relation to language, specifically the material grounding of all (figurative) language, we can, I think, find an alternative emphasis in her thought. Julian is invested in the body, and in its 154

Although it seems possible to find a trinity in Julian’s description of the “doubleness” of her shewing that corresponds with the three properties her shewings she also identifies, this correspondence doesn’t quite work. In the “doubleness” of Julian’s vision are in fact three levels of meaning—the bodely, the “gostly in bodely liknesse” and the “more gostly withoute bodely liknes.” The three properties are, as Watson points out, more hermeneutic, referring to what she saw when she was first given the vision, what she came to understand later when meditating on the vision, and the whole of all her visions. 155 McAvoy is explicitly rejecting David Aers’ critical response to Robertson’s earlier argument, where Aers argues that Julian in fact resists adopting a gendered form of affective piety and a gendered view of the body, even if such a view entailed the feminized body’s redemption. Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 142–67; Liz Herbert McAvoy, “‘For We Be Doubel of God’s Making’: Writing, Gender, and the Body in Julian of Norwich,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, CT: D.W. Brewer, 2008), 166–80; David Aers and Lynn Staley, Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 77–95. 124

redemption, but this emphasis is not gendered in the same way it is in so many other texts by or about women.156 Because Julian’s text evinces a sustained interest in how the transcendent emerges only in conjunction with the immanent, the spiritual alongside the literal, “the body” is reevaluated. But any gendered aspect to this reevaluation seems overlooked by Julian—she simply doesn’t take much notice of it. Maria Licthmann writes that “Julian sees her body as the locus of spiritual enlightenment,” situating Julian’s own treatment of the body in fourteenthcentury emphases on incarnational theology and affective piety. I would revise Lichtmann’s claim slightly to read that Julian sees the body, the very reality of bodiliness, to be the locus of enlightenment. There are certainly gendered implications to this claim, insofar as the body was feminized in biological and medicinal discourses in the Middle Ages. 157 But Julian actually draws back from the possibility of such a strongly gendered association with the body—she is writing, after all, for her “even christen,” and her daring claims about substance and sensuality apply equally to each and every Christian. In locating the bodely as the locus of enlightenment, Julian’s text does, however, radically transform assumptions about gender, the body, and transcendence. As Amy Hollywood’s careful study of Luce Irigaray has demonstrated, locating the body as the site of transcendence has deeply gendered implications, including the possibility that the body, and women’s bodies in particular, can be re-essentialized, albeit along new, seemingly feminist,

156

Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast elicited an outpouring of scholarship both supporting and complicating her groundbreaking claims about how women recuperated on devotional and theological terms the misogynistic association of women with the body. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). For notable responses, see Amy Hollywood, Amy M. Hollywood, Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), And Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 157 Licthmann, writing before Robertson’s article came out, does not pursue the gendered possibilities of her claims. Maria R. Lichtmann, “‘I Desyrede a Bodylye Syght’: Julian of Norwich and the Body,” Mystics Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1991): 13. 125

lines.158 McAvoy and Robertson run the risk of re-essentializing women as bodies in the Middle Ages, even as they recuperate the strategies women used to deal with the oppressive conflation of women and bodiliness. Julian’s text evinces a different relationship between bodies and their figurative modes of meaning. Julian does outline in her text a “sensible transcendental” (Irigaray’s term), but she does so in a way that keeps the sensible and the transcendental equally in play, and, even more significantly for the purposes of this chapter, she does so in and through a form of language. Julian embodies, metaphorizes in language both the otherness and the identity of God (the ultimate other) and the self.159 She thus pays attention to the body and its spiritual significance with more nuance than any of her (male) mystical or theological contemporaries. Karma Lochrie’s work on mysticism and the body has demonstrated both the need to investigate what the “body” means, and the assumption that it meant the same thing in all times and places in the late Middle Ages. By bifurcating the usual category “body” into “body and flesh,” Lochrie begins to undermine simplistic associations (medieval and modern) of women with bodiliness.160 Focusing only on Julian’s gendered “flesh,” as I think McAvoy and Robertson do, forecloses attention to the fluid connections between the body, language, and revelation/devotion on which Julian lingers. Bodiliness for Julian is polyvalent, yielding multiple meanings over time. (The aspect of time is important—it’s only over long periods of time, when Julian can linger on the significance of her body, Christ’s body, and the bodiliness of her revelations, that she arrives at the fullest significance.) But all the meaning of her text is also singular, all the multiple meanings of her body reducible to one message: “Love was his mening” 158

Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002), chapters 6–7. 159 Hollywood suggests that otherness and identity is one of the central tensions of Irigaray’s work, with which Irigaray herself has not fully grappled. “I wonder if Irigaray’s project…to reconfigure subjectivity in terms of bodily encounters with others…might not be rethought in terms that recognize the alterity and similarity of each bodily subject to the other.” Ibid., 233. 160 Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh See in particular the Introduction and Chapter 1. 126

(86.51). Exploring the importance of bodily specificities of her visions, Julian recuperates the significance of the flesh to spiritual meaning and devotional interaction. Her attention to the body as/in language is gendered, but not always in the ways that we assume it should be. The body, the locus of revelation, opens up to a range of possibilities and to the fluidity of language, encompassing both those seemingly reductive yet recuperative associations critics have identified, but stretching far beyond them.161

Julian’s parsing of bodely and goostly underscores how “seeing” and “understanding” become especially blurred in this text. Both are equally revelatory, and it is impossible to identify with certainty which type of “showing” is at work at every point in the text. But “seeing” as knowing or understanding is a fundamental metaphor, a “metaphor we live by,” to use Lakoff and Johnson’s phrase. The interpenetration of the two terms is another way in which this text is both deeply metaphoric, and a way in which its metaphors are entirely fluid. A vision also exposes the how deeply this metaphor is rooted. Visions, even when they involve “seeing,” do not utilize the physical organs of the eyes. Julian does not always understand what she has “seen” in her mind’s eye, but she does recount her shewings vividly—their interpretation (her understanding of them) becomes part of her remembrance of their visual detail. Furthermore, there is an element of retrospection in Julian’s record of her revelations. The presentation of the “parts” of the shewing at the start of chapter 51 sounds coincident; all the parts were shown at the same time. But her three properties introduce the element of time—some of Julian’s “understanding” (which includes the metaphoric and gostly interpretation) comes as a result of her rather lengthy 161

One of Hollywood criticisms of Irigaray is that her formulation of women, bodies, and desire focuses exclusively on correcting psychoanalytic conceptions of lack as foundational to the subject (always defined as male). Irigaray’s alternative formulation of a female subjectivity that is not premised on autonomy is meant to de-centralize lack as constitutive, but in doing so, Hollywood argues, Irigaray also cannot account for the losses that all subjects, male or female, experience. 127

meditation on what she first “saw” (the literal, bodely example). And yet in the presentation of the Long Text, the only presentation we have of the exemplum, the bodely and gostly meanings are so interpenetrated that it is impossible to believe that the latter have not affected Julian’s recollection of the former. Her understanding, in other words, undoubtedly comes to shape her (remembrance of her) seeing. (Not that this retrospection should bother readers—it certainly didn’t bother Julian. These meanings are all, as she puts it, “oned.”) So unlike the Cloud-author, Julian is not interested in bifurcating gostly and bodely levels of meaning. She sees gostly meaning as existing on a spectrum. Rather than a meaning being gostly or bodely, some meanings can be more or less gostly than others (and Julian’s shewings evince degrees of both). The Cloud-author approaches contemplation as a work that will either be one or the other; Julian suggests a more complicated admixture. Julian’s interpretive possibilities are thus much broader than the Cloud-author, her ability to return to her visions and find new meaning because she isn’t limited to only two possible explanations. And it is precisely the interpretive, or hermeneutic, possibilities of her vision that make Julian’s Long Text what it is—a presentation of both Julian’s original vision and years of her reflection and growing understanding of that vision, but with these parts so “oned” as to be indistinguishable. Scholars have focused on how the “onyng” of Julian’s vision and her interpretation of that vision, but have always, in some way, tied the inability to distinguish between these parts to the autobiographical character of the text—to the experience of Julian herself in time. 162

162

Watson was the first to argue for the inability to distinguish in any meaningful way between the revelation and Julian’s reflection on it, attributing the fluidity of her vision to the fact that the Long Text is a compilation of both her original vision and her years of reflection, commentary, and expansion. He identifies this feature as the “Trinitarian hermeneutic” of the Long Text, and points out that “the underlying unity inherent in each stage of her experience of the revelation…both corresponds to and is a product of the unity that inheres in the Trinity itself.” Watson, “Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 81. Felicity Riddy writes that the “long version is a record of a mind in process, not just an achieved statement,” and she calls this process Julian’s “self textualization,” pointing out the many years 128

Approaching Julian’s visions as a type of metaphor can help us understand how and why she finds meaning in the way she does, and locates her hermeneutic approach in the forms of language that make up her text—an approach neither literary scholars nor theologians have tended to adopt when examining the Revelation. I am arguing that Julian treats of parable of the Lord and the Servant as a metaphor (as figurative language), and as such she posits both the literal meaning and the metaphoric meanings as revelation. Looking at the parable as a metaphor provides further insight into how and why revelation and reflection are so “oned” in Julian’s mind. Metaphors, I have already suggested, are bi-directional, which suggests not that meaning is “split” or bifurcated, but rather that it is multiplied, doubled. The metaphoric meaning comes to affect our understanding of the literal level, and hence even of material referents. Julian’s “inward lerning” most likely did affect how she remembered, decades later, what she originally saw. The figurative meanings, the spiritual import probably focused her memory of the concrete details, as can be seen in her recounting of Christ’s passion, which is actually presented much more vividly and in greater physical detail in the LT than it is in the ST. As Julian came to understand God’s meaning in all her visions, she remembered and identified what she saw with greater specificity. Approaching all of Julian’s visions as a type of metaphor can help us understand, not just the “onyng” between vision and interpretation, between imaginative and intellective visions, but how and why that “onyng” takes place.163

that it took for Julian to arrive at the text’s final form. Felicity Riddy, “Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization,” in Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchison (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 104. 163 And, furthermore, the bi-directional nature of metaphor would also contribute to Julian’s insistence on the contingency of all her visions. Part of the contingency of Julian’s knowledge has to do with the ongoing revelation of the spiritual significance of all that she has seen, which can, in turn, affect her understanding and even her “seeing” of the literal level, including the images and narratives. 129

But the language of bodely and gostly suggest the ways in which Julian’s visions more generally, and this exemplum in particular, function as metaphors.164 These two gostly meanings are dependent on the simple fact of the bodely likenesses, the literal referent, if we can call it that, of this parable.165 But this bodely shewing is not something Julian dwells on—its (literal) meaning is presumably self-evident. Julian goes on to write “I sawe two persons in bodely liknesse, that is to sey, a lorde and a servant, and therwith God gave me gostly understanding” [I saw two persons with specific physical appearances, a lord and servant, and God gave me spiritual understanding of what I saw] (51.6-7). The lord and the servant provide the literal grounding on which the two metaphoric meanings will build, but the literal level is in this case a narrative. The tendency of scholars to refer to the exemplum as a parable seems to emerge in part from this fact.166 As I mentioned earlier, Julian also evinces concern that her audience not overly literalize, thus acknowledging herself that the vision is metaphoric. I mentioned one moment of concern earlier, but a second such moment comes much later in chapter 51, when she has 164

This claim is not mean to deny that there are crucial ways in which an exemplum is not like a metaphor. The “difference” between the gostly and bodely meanings are not that great. The servant is a human figure standing in for another human figure (Adam) and for the Incarnate Christ. Unlike the eponymous pearl, or the cloud in The Cloud of Unknowing, there isn’t a large gap being crossed. Some metaphors enchant us because of the surprising similarity that emerges out of very different referents, while others, like the eponymous Pearl, rely on strongly symbolic properties (whiteness suggesting purity, roundness suggesting infinity, etc). Parables and parable-like exempla, while still a sort of figurative language, work differently. The “literal” and “metaphoric” referents are much closer to begin with, though crucial differences of course still exist. The servant, as Adam, is depicted as a fourteenth-century laborer, so the “lack” of difference is culturally particular. The symbolic meanings around the social positions of “Lord” and “servant” are central to the message of Julian’s vision. 165 It might be tempting to align Julian’s “three properties” with the one bodily and two goostly meanings, since these properties are most certainly related to Julian’s understanding of the degrees of gostly meaning in her vision (and hence to her metaphoric interpretation). The second property, for example, the “inward lerning,” is made up of Julian’s growing understanding of the gostly meaning of her visions over time, while the first property is the gostly meaning she understands immediately upon receiving the visions. But these three properties do not map onto the levels of metaphoric meaning. In the “doubleness” of Julian’s vision we find three levels of meaning—the bodely, the “gostly in bodely liknesse” and the “more gostly withoute bodely liknes.” The three properties are hermeneutic, referring to her evolving understanding of the visions, rather than to the structure of the visions. 166 The fact that the exemplum uses narrative as part of its figuration also suggests that we might call it an allegory. Scholars almost never refer to the exemplum as an allegory, however, which is due to some key features of the narrative. It is much more akin to biblical parables in its purpose (revealing something about God and his rule) and its materials (simple, composite characters familiar to the audience). 130

finished describing and interpreting her vision in great detail, Julian provides a spur-of-themoment aside reminding her readers that they are in fact hearing figurative language, and they need to be mindful of how they are hearing her descriptions. (Watson and Jenkins place these lines in parentheses, to indicate how they “interrupt” Julian’s train of thought.) “But it is not ment that the sonne sitteth on the right hand beside as one man sitteth by another in this life—for ther is no such sitting, as to my sight, in the trinite. But he sitteth on his faders right honed: that is to sey, right in the hyest nobilite of the faders joy” [But it is not meant that the son sits at the right hand as one man sits by another in the life—there is no such thing as sitting, to my understanding, in the Trinity. But he sits at his father’s right hand, which is to say, at the highest point of the Father’s joy] (51.273-76). This warning suggests Julian’s ongoing awareness that her metaphor could be misread if it was taken too literally, another point of concern she shares with the Cloud-author (who was concerned that people might be mistaken into thinking that Christ’s body was actually “up” above the earth somewhere, since he ascended when he left the disciples). Once Julian initially describes the basic narrative of her original vision, the “literal” meaning actually drops out. After she recounts the bodely sight and her brief impressions of its two gostly meanings, she writes that “the shewing of the example vanished, and oure good lorde ledde forth my understanding in sight and in shewing of the revelation to the ende….yet culde I not take therein full understanding to my ees in that time” [the showing of the example vanished, and our good Lord led my understanding forth in sight and in showing of the revelation to the end…yet I could not understand fully and be comforted at that time] (51.52-56). The literal meaning is, of course, insufficient on its own, but Julian emphasizes that her initial metaphoric

131

understanding of the vision was limited. Much more time and reflection were required for her to achieve a more complete (if always partially unfinished) understanding. Julian’s limited comprehension of her initial vision highlights another aspect of the shewings as a type of metaphor. There is a complex interaction between the levels of meaning embedded in the vision and hence in the revelatory status of Julian’s experience. Julian is “shown” the bodily meanings, but she is also “shown” the metaphoric meanings; both meanings are revelatory in nature.167 The narrative description of the Lord and the Servant is, of course, the literal, bodily meaning that she is being shown. But the term shewing is also used in chapter 51, as it is throughout the book, to refer to the goostly meanings as well. These meanings often seem to interpenetrate one another. For example, in describing the lord’s response to the servant’s dire predicament, she writes that the lord looks on the servant “with a doubil chere” [with a doubled cheer] (51.34). The first attitude is “outwarde,” the second is “inward, more gostly: and this was shewed with a leding of my understanding” [inward, more spiritual: and this was shown through the guiding of my understanding] (51.34-36). Of the second appearance, she writes that “this was of that other shewing. And now was my understanding ledde againe into the furst, both keping in mind” [this was part of that other vision. And now my understanding was lead again to the first vision, keeping both in mind] (51.38-39). “That other shewing” refers to the second of the two double meaning, the one that Julian describes at the chapter’s opening as being “more gostly withoute bodely liknes.” All three levels of meaning (the literal narrative description as well as the two metaphoric interpretations) are maintained both in Julian’s own mind (so she tells us) and in the text itself. Like Scripture, the literal and metaphoric meanings are equally inspired. 167

Watson notes the “flexibility with which she deploys words depicting her apprehension of the revelation.” Watson, “Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 67. Ena Jenkins writes that “the multiple ways of seeing which lead at last to understanding form a constant in the text and metaphorical pathway through it.” Jenkins, “Julian’s Revelation of Love,” 182. 132

And like Scripture, the fullness of meaning emerges only over time, as Julian approaches her own vision as a sacred text to be prayerfully pondered. The “doubleness” that Julian explicitly identifies in her vision also serves to distinguish this vision as metaphoric. The Lord and the servant are both “shewed double,” and just as the second property of her shewing emerges out of twenty years of reflection and “inward lerning,” so the doubleness of the servant emerges slowly over the course of the chapter. As she reflects at great length (about one hundred lines—longer than many chapters in the LT) on the nature of the servant, interpreting the significance of his clothing, and being granted insight into both the Lord’s and the Servant’s motivations, it becomes clear that understanding the servant only as Adam cannot sufficiently explain all the metaphoric qualities Julian is describing. She associates, or even conflates, Christ and Adam throughout the chapter, as when she writes that “in the sighte of God alle man is one man, and one man is alle man” [in the sight of God all men are one man, and one man is all men] (51.88-89), or when she identifies two falls—Adam’s fall into sin and Christ’s kenotic descent in the Incarnation. There are also puzzling moments surrounding the servant, as when she finds the servant’s plain and ragged torn clothing “unsemely” given that he is so beloved of the Lord, and that he is standing in a place of such great honor. If the servant is understood to be Adam, Watkins and Jenkins point out, this clothing is puzzling because it seems to suggest punishment before the Fall has actually taken place. And the servant is not commanded—he “sawe inwardly” what he could do to bring honor to the Lord. These moments hint at the fact that the servant’s significance is not sufficiently explained by identifying the figure with Adam. Eventually, Julian’s explicit identification of the Servant also as Christ seems to emerge out of more theological concerns in her vision: “I merveyled fro whens the servent came” [I

133

marveled at where the servant came from] (51.172), she writes, and then repeats exactly six lines later (51.178). God’s existence as eternal and omnipresent, the ground of everything else that is, is seen in the Lord of the exemplum. And though the Lord “hath within himself endlesse life and all manner of goodness,” all that he is and has is not entirely satisfactory: “it was not alle to his wurship till his servant hath thus nobly dighte it and brought it before him” [it was not all done to his honor until his servant nobly did this and brought it before him] (51.175-76). God the Father, as figured in the Lord, thus seems to lacking in some capacity. Here at last Julian is making explicit what she has been hinting at throughout the chapter—that the servant is not just a figure for Adam, but also for Christ: “In the servant is comprehended the seconde person of the trinite, and in the servant is comprehended Adam: that is to sey, all men” (51.179-80). Insofar as the servant is Christ, in his infinite identity as the divine Son, then Julian’s claims about the Lord’s lacking in some respect make sense. 168 In the perichoresis that marks the Trinity’s self-relations, God the Father’s worship is not complete until he receives back from the Son and the Spirit what he also gives to them. Furthermore, Julian’s careful wording “it was not alle to his wurship” reiterates the relational nature of that which God lacks. The Lord is not lacking some thing, some characteristic or possession, but he lacks worship, which implies that the lack is situated in a relationship. (One can only give or get worship from other persons.) The servant exists, in part, from the very beginning because the Trinitarian God is in himself a set of relationships, and because without these relationships God would be lacking.

168

Although, as Denys Turner also points out, Julian’s reflection on the “godly will that never assented to sin” does seem to suggest that she understood some part of the soul to have existed eternally. Insofar as God is the “ground” of all things, and as God created ex nihilo, then all that “is” shares some part of the God who is himself Being, and that Being is eternal and immutable. Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 169–86. Denise Baker examines how Julian’s language of “point” and “ground” establishes the soul’s preexistence, but Baker also argues that Julian does not seem to go as far as Eckhart or some of the Beguine authors in suggesting its eternal preexistence. Denise N. Baker, “The Structure of the Soul and the ‘Godly Wylle’ in Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England Exeter Symposium VII (2004): 37–49. 134

The servant thus has two metaphoric meanings: Christ and Adam. But even when the servant is referring to Christ, then Julian complicates things further by insisting that she and we also distinguish between Christ’s humanity and divinity in this exemplum: “whan I sey ‘the sonne,’ it meneth the godhed, which is even with the fader; and whan I sey ‘the servant,’ in meneth Cristes manhode, which is rightful Adam” (51.180-82). So the servant is “double,” just as Christ is also doubled in his personhood. In the Incarnation, the eternal, preexistent Son is doubled, as the second person of the Trinity takes up Adam’s flesh, becomes a “new Adam.” Attempts to distinguish between the servant’s multiple meanings are only temporary—they bleed into and out of one another—they are doubled and “oned” at the same time. The servant’s doubleness is thus made obvious in the text, but Julian also asserts that the Lord is “shewed double” (51.3). Any doubleness in the Lord is much less apparent. Unlike her treatment of the Servant, Julian never identifies a double identity for the Lord, who always metaphorically represents God. I would suggest that the doubleness here must refer instead to the Lord’s relationship with both Christ and Adam. The doubleness of the servant’s metaphoric references is also underscored through Julian’s evocation of Scriptural texts. Consider the following, just a few lines after Julian has explicitly identified the servant as Christ: [T]he servant is the sonne Jesu Crist….When Adam felle, Godes sonne fell. For the rightful oning which was made in heven, Goddes sonne might not be seperath from Adam, for by Adam I understond alle man. Adam fell fro life to deth: into the slade of this wreched worlde, and after that into hell. Goddes son fell with Adam into the slade of the maidens wombe….For in alle this, oure good lorde shewed his owne son and Adam but one man. (51.184-95)

135

[The servant is the son Jesus Christ…When Adam fell, God’s son fell. For the union which was made in heaven, God’s son could not be separated from Adam (by Adam I understand all men). Adam fell from life into death: into the valley of this wretched world, and after that into hell. God’s son fell with Adam into the valley of the maiden’s womb…For in all of this, our good Lord showed his own son and Adam as one man.] Christ and Adam are oned, united, not just in their two “falls,” but even in heaven (probably a reference to Colossians 1:16, where Christ’s role in the act of creation is emphasized: all things are created “by him, through him, and for him”). As Watson and Jenkins note, the emphasis on the oning of Christ and Adam also seems to echo 1 Corinthians 15:21-22: “For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” The union also seems to echo Romans 5: Sin came into the world through one man… For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many…. For if, because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Both passages emphasize the similarity and difference of Adam and Christ. The refrain “one man” or “a man” creates a parallel; both men have fatefully impacted all of humanity. But the nature of this impact is completely different. Adam’s actions brought sin and death; Christ’s actions brought life, grace, and righteousness. Julian’s exemplum, likewise, relies on a strong identification—“When Adam felle, Godes son fell”—and an equally strong distinction prefaced on the impact each has on humanity: “The vertu and the goodnesse that we have is of Jesu Crist, the febilnesse and blindnesse that we have is of Adam” (51.195-97). The Romans passage, with its distinctly dismal, Pauline opinion of the human situation may seem rather unlike Julian’s approach in the parable of the Lord and the Servant, where she emphatically tries to clear the 136

Servant, not just the Servant-as-Christ, but also as Adam, of any sort of causal fault—of the sin that would be the source of all other sins. For Julian, evil enters the world almost by accident. “The most mischefe that I saw him in,” she writes of the servant’s predicament as he struggles in the ditch, “was failing of comfort” [The greatest fault that I saw in him was a lack of consolation] (51.15). She returns to this point quickly: “And I beheld with advisement, to wit if I culde perceive in him ony defaute, or if the lorde shuld assigne in him ony maner of blame. And sothly there was none seen” [And looked carefully, to see if I could perceive in him any fault, or if the Lord assigned him any sort of blame. And truly, there was none to be seen] (51.29-30). The emphasis of the Romans passage seems to be as much on Adam and Christ as entry points for the two forces that fight for humanity’s fate: sin and God’s grace. Adam is certainly not absolved of guilt in the language of Romans, but the weight of the passage is on sin coming into the world through Adam. (Christ provides a point of entry for God’s gracious love—a characteristic he, as the eternal Son, already possesses.) This similarity of function in Romans provides Julian with a starting point for her reflections, but, in Bernard McGinn’s words, she “pushes beyond the Pauline view by dropping any contrast between the two Adams. She absorbs the first Adam into Christ, not to negate the fact of a ‘Fall’ but to emphasize how humanity’s ‘Fall’ into sensuality is both included in and overcome by the Son’s ‘Fall’ into sensuality in the incarnation and his kenotic ‘Fall” into death on the cross.”169 In Julian’s Scriptural allusions we are reminded of the depth of her familiarity and her sophisticated understanding of these texts, but we also see a movement between Adam and Christ similar to that in the Lord and the Servant exemplum. Christ and Adam’s similarity and difference are both presented, and it is in fact only because of their similarity (as the entryway or conduit) that their difference (one brings death, the other eternal life) matters. 169

McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 452. 137

In multiple ways, then, the exemplum of the Lord and the Servant thus challenges our assumptions about how metaphors and parables work. The vision does not contain one literal meaning and one metaphoric one; as Julian receives “inward lerning” about her vision, and records this new understanding of what she has seen, we see the servant’s metaphoric meanings multiply and conflate. The metaphor of the Lord and the Servant, and Julian’s interpretation of that metaphor, are fluid. The doubleness of the narrative (the servant as Christ and Adam) and the mixture of goostly and bodily aspects of the vision contribute to the interpretive expansiveness of this particular shewing. The exemplum is thus able to more accurately capture the infinite, eternal reality that Julian is being shown. Furthermore, the metaphor’s flexibility also allows for Julian’s capacious theological reflection. In the fifty-first chapter alone, Julian covers a great deal of theological ground, including sin and guilt, atonement, and the Trinity’s role in salvation, and she finds all of these resonances in her vision precisely because it is so capacious. It is a testament both to the metaphor’s flexibility and to Julian’s theological insight and acumen that she manages to get so much material into just one of the eighty-five chapters that make up her book.

Julian as Exegete As many scholars have noted, Julian’s interpretive approach is akin to scriptural exegesis.170 Julian assumes a figurative depth to her visions, and through reflection on the initial, often literal,

170

See J.P.H. Clark, “Time and Eternity in Julian of Norwich,” Downside Review 109 (1991): 259–76; McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism. Watson does also point out, however, one crucial way in which Julian’s approach is different from that of the Scriptural exegete. “Yet while the analogy between Julian’s practice as an interpreter and those of a biblical exegete is a real one, it must not be allowed to blind us to a fundamental difference: that the revelation that constitutes the ‘text’ which Julian expounds is not a fixed entity…but rather an interaction between a number of profoundly mysterious and (in their way) highly intellectual visionary moments and their actively-engaged recipient, the boundaries of which are by their very nature so fluid as to be impossible to chart.” Watson, “Trinitarian Hermeneutic,” 76. 138

bodily showing, she comes to understand the levels of meaning that inhere in these visions. Her “three properties” are certainly indicative of this figurative depth (referring to the things she saw at first, the understanding she was given of these sights over time, and all of her showings seen together), but these three properties also don’t align neatly with standard medieval interpretive frameworks. While theologians and exegetes in the Middle Ages did at times outline a systematic understanding of Scripture’s levels of meaning, the properties Julian identifies do not neatly correspond with any of the standard rubrics for exegesis. 171 The third property is perhaps akin to the anagogical interpretation of Scripture, which located a given passage’s meaning in light of the future realization of God’s kingdom. Julian’s third property locates her understanding of the Lord and the Servant exemplum within the breadth of the entirety of her shewings—she suggests that the parts can only be truly known when the whole is seen and understood. But considered overall, Julian’s interpretive scheme, while deeply rooted in the assumption of the metaphoric riches of any text (including a vision) that was divinely inspired, diverges from more standard medieval Scriptural exegesis in its flexibility and fluidity. The influence of biblical interpretation is particularly clear in Julian’s approach to the details of the Lord and the Servant exemplum. Just as Christian exegetes found significance in the most minute details of Scripture (particularly when reading the Song of Songs), Julian here understands the particularities of her vision to carry meaning. It is not just the grand narrative, the general outline of what happens, but the precise way in which everything appears to her that shapes the meaning of her vision. In fact, it is the very richness of the details that helps her to 171

The notion of a “standard” rubric for medieval exegesis is somewhat misleading. The earliest Scriptural commentators assumed that the biblical text had at least two levels of meaning, literal and allegorical. By the later Middle Ages, under the influence of Augustine, multiple levels of allegorical meaning were assumed; typically these broke down into allegorical, moral/tropological, and anagogical. But the “fourfold” method of biblical interpretation that we often associate with the Middle Ages seems never to have been meant to be a linear rubric, but rather a suggestion of the possibilities inherent in any given passage. 139

determine that the servant’s double identity, since “poor clothing as a laborer” (51.193) helps her recognize the servant as Adam, while his “wisdom and goodnesse” helps her to see Christ. The doubleness of Julian’s metaphoric interpretation thus appears also in her approach to the vision’s specificity. She explains that the nearness of the servant to the Lord signifies the Son (Christ) in his united-yet-distinct relationship with God the Father, while the fact that the servant stands to the left of the Lord signifies Adam. She concludes her discussion of how the servant’s (now clearly Christ) appearance and position vis-à-vis the Lord has changed, signifying his glorification after the Incarnation. “Now stondeth not the sonne before the fader on the left side as a laborer, but he sitteth on the faders right hande in endlesse rest and pees” [Now the son does not stand before the father and on his left side as a laborer, but he sits at the father’s right hand in endless rest and peace] (51.272-73). The servant’s doubleness is once again reflected in how his position is moved across the telling of this exemplum. The details of what the servant wears do in fact become an important part of Julian’s analysis. Near the end of the chapter, she identifies Christ as wearing “Adam’s kirtel” [Adam’s tunic] and uses this metaphor, of human nature as clothing, to reflect on the nature of the Incarnation. The servant’s clothing becomes a sort of metaphor within a metaphor. When Christ dies, Julian writes “he beganne furst to show his might” (51.254) by harrowing hell and rising from the dead. In so doing, he transforms “oure foule dedely flesh” [our foul, decaying flesh] and transforming the Lord’s “seat.” After she identifies the servant’s doubled meaning, and begins discussing his significance as Christ, she turns her attention to the details of the servant’s clothing, just as she has closely noted the Lord’s appearance. “The whit kirtel is his fleshe. The singlehede is that ther was right noght between the godhead and the manhede. The straighthede is poverte. The elde is of Adams wering. The defauting is the swete of Adams travayle. The

140

shorthede sheweth the servant laborar” [The white tunic is his flesh. The fact that there was only one tunic signifies that there was nothing between his godhead and his manhood. The simplicity signifies poverty. It is worn out from Adam’s use. The deficiency is the sweat of Adam’s labor. The short length reveals that the servant is a laborer] (51.207-10). She has already identified the servant as signifying “Cristes manhode, which is rightful Adam” [Christ’s manhood, which is rightfully Adam] (51.182)—the servant is explicitly named as a metaphoric referent for Christ’s human nature, and Christ’s human nature is correctly identified with Adam, “oned” to Adam, as Julian says elsewhere in the chapter. The servant is thus double, but the servant’s clothing is itself a metaphor; the servant is dressed in clothes that represent Adam’s lot in the fallen world. In an arresting turn of phrase, “the whit kirtel is his fleshe,” the servant’s clothing represents the materiality, physicality of human existence. This metaphor, of clothing as signifying Christ’s incarnation into a human body,172 is compelling because of its fittingness (clothing is something that you put on) and its deep association with identity (particularly in the Middle Ages, when sartorial custom was legally enshrined), though it also perhaps fails to capture something of the true “oning” of Christ’s divine and human natures, since clothing is a somewhat superficial addition to the surface of the body (changing clothes isn’t commonly perceived as fundamentally altering identity or essence).173 Langland uses a similar metaphor when he has Christ joust “in Pieres armes” (XIX.614). In wearing the clothes, Christ transforms them, makes them “fair, new, whit, and bright, and of endlesse clennesse, wide and side, fair, and richer than was the clothing which I saw on the 172

Clothing also seems to indicate status in relation to the Lord. The servant’s appearance/clothing is changed depending on his standing with the Lord. 173 Julian also uses the metaphor of clothing to describe God’s love. In the fifth chapter she writes, “He [‘our good lord’] is oure clothing, that for love wrappeth us and windeth us, halseth us and all becloseth us, hangeth about us for tender love, that he may never leeve us” [He is our clothing, which for love wraps and winds around us, heals us and encloses us, hangs about us for tender love, in order that he may never be separated from us] (5.3-5). In this case, clothing, while external to the self, is still intimate in its total and permanent enclosure. 141

fader. For that clothing was blew, and Cristes clothing is now of fair, semely medolour which is so marvelous that I can it not discrive, for it is all of very wurshippe” [fair, new, white, bright, and endlessly clean, wide and ample in size, beautiful, and richer than the clothing which I saw on the father. For that clothing was blue, and Christ’s clothing is now of such a fair, fitting mixture which is so marvelous that I cannot describe it, for it is made entirely of true worship] (51.260-264). Christ’s newly purified clothing (Adam’s kirtel) is more beautiful than the father’s (this can only mean God the father, not Adam-as-father) precisely because of its “mixed” nature—the Incarnation, the “meddling” of the divine and human in Christ, is precisely the source of the Son’s great beauty and his glorification in heaven. (But, for Julian, we must remember that this “oneing” of the divine and human has always been, or has at least been since the foundation of the world and the creation of humans. Christ has always been one with humanity, at least with our “substance.” The Incarnation is nothing “new,” then, but rather a fuller expression of an eternal truth.) Julian’s metaphor-within-a-metaphor is not inapt or inconsistent, but instead is in keeping with the spirit of her Long Text, and particular with the way that her exposition of the Lord and Servant exemplum is unfolding. Just as she toggles between various “layers” or metaphorical meaning, and as her understanding of her own vision emerges slowly over time, with three distinct but interpenetrating properties, the metaphors within the exemplum are layered on top of one another. In multiple ways, then, the exemplum of the Lord and the Servant thus challenges our assumptions about how metaphors and parables work. There is not just one literal meaning and one metaphoric one, as modern commentators might expect. And Julian doesn’t hesitate to situate metaphors within the parable. We can thus see how Julian’s treatment of her own vision’s multiple meanings works differently from medieval biblical hermeneutics. Medieval scriptural exegesis assumed multiple

142

levels to the biblical text’s meaning, but these levels were discrete.174 For Julian, metaphorical meanings pile up via parataxis (as they do in Pearl). This accretive nature of Julian’s interpretation seems haphazard; she doesn’t move in a linear fashion from one level of interpretation to another, nor does she examine one detail thoroughly before moving onto examine the next. Instead, she jumps around in the narrative, returning to bodily meanings she has already discussed in order to add new interpretations, moving seamlessly between the literal and multiple figurative meanings.175 Julian’s interpretive method is at moments thus equally metonymic and metaphoric, and it encodes in the shape of the text itself her years of reflection and interpretation. Her exposition of the parable proceeds as any interpretive thought process does, lingering unevenly on puzzling moments, jumping forwards or backwards when one moment of realization sparks another. Meaning emerges for Julian and for the reader as a formal feature of the Long Text, rather than from a reconstruction of the timeline of her composition.

The “inward learning” Julian receives over time as she reflects on what she was initially shown emerges from her attention to the details (redolent of monastic modes of exegesis)—where the servant stands, what he wears—and a deeper, richer theological understanding emerges from her exposition of these particularities. Julian thus comes to understand the “privites of the revelation” through her consideration of the vision’s particularities. The parable becomes so central to the

174

Not every medieval exegete followed the same rubric (literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical), but the notion of “levels” of interpretation which were distinct from one another seems to have been consistently embraced, even if in practice these levels bled into one another. For an overview of how the “four senses” were generally interpreted and used, see Edward Synan, “The Four ‘Senses’ and Four Exegetes,” in With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, ed. Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, and Joseph W. Goering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 225–36. 175 “The meaning of these distinctions emerges as Julian undertakes the interpretation of the story in the manner of a biblical exegete, first more literally and increasingly in allegorical and meditative fashion. She also switches back and forth between several different scenes, so it is not always easy to follow the shifting metaphorical ground.” McGinn, Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 451. 143

text because, in its particularities, it comes to reveal the generalities of Julian’s theology, and because Julian’s interpretation makes clear that these particularities are in fact the way to the generalities. A similar move from the bodily particulars of a vision to the gostly generalities takes place in Julian’s meditation on Christ’s blood.176 As scholars have pointed out, this vision initially appears to fit into the late medieval tradition of affective passion meditations, but immediately upon describing the vision she had of Christ, Julian shifts away from what were the assumed responses and effects of such visions.177 The gret droppes of blode felle downe fro under the garlonde like pelottes, seeming as it had comen oute of the veines. And in the coming oute they were browne rede, for the blode was full thicke. And in the spreading abrode they were bright rede. And whan it came at the browes, ther they vanished (7.10-14, emphasis mine). [The great drops of blood fell down from under the wreath like pellets, as though they had just come out of the veins. And when they came out, they were brownish-red, and the blood was very thick. And when the spread out they were bright red. And when they came to the brows, there they vanished.] But rather than meditating on these drops of blood in order to provoke an intense emotional response, Julian immediately uses similes to expand further on what she has seen, and then to 176

This move is harder to see in the hazelnut example, because the particularities of that vision are left vague. It isn’t actually a hazelnut, after all, just something like a hazelnut, and the vision is much less vivid or specific. Vincent Gillespie discusses Julian’s deft use of the language of “seeming,” as well as phrases such as “as if” and “as thus,” identifying these comparisons cumulatively as a form of pastiche, which inculcates simultaneously a sense of the known and unknown. Vincent Gillespie, “‘[S]he Do the Police in Different Voices’: Pastiche, Ventriloquism and Parody in Julian of Norwich,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2008), 199–202. 177 Gillespie and Ross comment on how different Julian’s vision of and meditation on the passion are from fourteenth-century devotional trends. Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross, “The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of Norwich,” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England V (1992): 60–65. David Aers also makes this point vis-à-vis scholarly tendencies in the early nineties to claim that Julian’s representation of Christ’s bodily suffering was a vindication of the misogynistically inscribed female body. Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 77–104. 144

treat principles about God’s homeliness from the vision. First she goes on to say of the drops of blood that the plentuoushede is like to the droppes of water that falle of the evesing of an house after a grete shower of raine, that falle so thicke that no many may number them with no bodely wit. And for the roundhede, they were like to the scale of hering, in the spreding of the forhede. Thes thre thinges cam to my minde in the time: pelettes, for the roundhead in the coming oute fo the blode; the scale of the herring, for the roundhead in the spreding; the droppes of the evesing of a house, for the plentuoushede unnumerable (7.17-23, emphasis mine). [The plenitude is like the drops of water that fall on the eaves of a house after a great rain, which fall so thickly that nobody can number them with any bodily understanding. And in their roundness they were like the scales of a herring, in the spreading on the forehead. These three things came to my mind at the same time: pellets, for the roundness in coming out of the blood, the scale of the herring, for the roundness in their spreading, rain drops on the eaces of a house, for their innumerable plenitude.] Julian uses figurative language to communicate what she has seen here. Unlike the parable of the Lord and the Servant, where the content of the vision is itself a metaphor, this vision is straightforwardly bodily. But in order to describe what she has seen, Julian has to rely on the comparison of simile. As Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross point out, this need for comparison reveals the apophatic nature of Julian’s vision—the comparisons reveal that the shewing is at its heart inexpressible.178 However, even these similes reveal Julian’s method—moving from concrete details, shown in bodily visions, to gostly truths. In the case of first vision, which 178

Gillespie and Ross also mark the play of transcendence and immanence in Julian’s vision of the blood drops that is actually the purview of the mystical: “The images suggest an urge to ‘domesticate’ the horror of the passion, to defuse the challenge of its physicality by invoking homely means to interpret it. But God showed it without means and the effect of her gesture to conventional analogy is paradoxically to imbue the domestic and mundane with the force of the original image and with the substance of its subsequent significations. By making immanence more openly manifest, Julian also reclaims these homely images as gateways into the apophatic.” Gillespie and Ross, “The Apophatic Image,” 65. 145

includes the crown of thorns and the drops of Christ’s blood, Julian comes to understand “six thinges,” including that God “was and is and shalle be” and that he is “alle thing that is good,” and that God “has made alle thing that is made for love” (8.3-16). The “plentuoushede” of the blood drops, like rain drops on a house’s eves, much more than anyone could imagine counting, is suggestive of God’s infinity and eternality, while these images from the natural world are a befitting description of the God who created everything. Furthermore, it is in her description of the blood drops that Julian first calls God “homely,” signifying his familiarity and intimacy in his act of showing Julian these things. But homely in Middle English can also mean ‘of or related to the home or household.’ And the images to which Julian compares Christ’s blood are indeed homely, in this sense; they would have been familiar objects, recognizable for their functions in everyday life. As Watson and Jenkins gloss, for example (and the MED attests), pelotte was used of rain drops, but also of stones, cannonballs, and other projectiles, and for hunks of meat. Rain drops need no explanation of their familiarity, but herring was “a basic, abundant source of food in medieval Norwich.”179 The images which Julian uses, then, to express the inexpressibility of her vision are commonplace—typical of everyday like in fourteenth- or fifteenth-century medieval life in England. In this case, the vision requires figurative language if Julian is to share what she has seen, and the familiarity of these images to her audience reveals in turn something about God’s character—his familiarity with his creations. Julian’s description of her revelation of Christ’s blood thus both shows (again) the centrality of figurative language to her mystical agenda and shows how she moves from the particularities of her shewings to the theological generalities for which she has become so well known.

179

Watkins and Jenkins again. The gloss on lines 19-20, p. 146. 146

Julian’s Apophasis Part of what is involved in Julian’s move from particularities to generalities is her use of “seemly” language. Language which is seemly is always particular, literal language that figures in a fitting way a more general, abstract truth—another way that Julian’s language moves from particular to general. Julian’s approach to these particularities is thrown into vivid relief when one contrasts her with the Cloud-author. Practically speaking, both authors seem to proceed similarly in understanding the particularities of things like physical position to convey spiritual meaning. But the Cloud-author is anxious about this way of proceeding; he goes to great length to emphasize, for example, that just because of Christ’s Ascension, we are not actually to assume that his body is up above us somewhere. These details are, he says, given because they are “more seemly” than other alternatives, and, because of the associations they hold for us, they are able to communicate some spiritual truth. But while this concern takes up two chapters of the Cloudauthor’s attention, Julian simply does not seem to register concern. Her vision of the Lord and the Servant, and her ongoing reflection on that vision assumes both that the details are significant, and that their meaning is discernible. But Julian does use the term “seemly” repeatedly in chapter 51, acknowledging implicitly the metaphoricity of all language about God yet expressing confidence in the ability of some of these metaphors to communicate aptly about the divine. As in The Cloud of Unknowing, “seemliness” seems to designate language that is particularly fitting in its description. If most language about God is metaphoric, the category of seemliness indicates that certain metaphors are more than arbitrary, but in fact give us good, reliable insight into divine truth. Seemliness is the mean between necessity and arbitrariness. As I argued in my chapter on the Cloud, this seemliness is another image we have for what we

147

might call “apophatic reality.” Julian actually uses the word “seemly” a bit earlier in the chapter, when she is discussing another aspect of the vision’s doubleness: the Lord’s countenance towards the servant. “This fair loking [of the Lord] shewed of a semely medelur, which was marvelous to beholde. That one was rewth and pitte, that other joy and blisse” [This fair appearance showed a fitting mixture, which was marvelous to see. The one was compassion and pity, the other joy and bliss] [This (111-12). Julian goes on to say that the “rewth and pity” were for Adam’s fall, the “joy and bliss” Christ’s fall (into Mary’s womb, into the Incarnation).The vision’s “mixed” quality, its doubleness, is seemly, or fitting. And though the mixture of compassion and pity with joy and bliss might seem to be inapt, the coexistence of these opposites in the one vision is a formal image of the theological truth Julian is being shown and in turn showing her readers. It might seem odd that grief and joy are both shown in a single image, just as it might seem odd that in the Incarnation the human and the divine are joined. But these mixtures, incongruent as they may be, are fitting, seemly. This paragraph from which I have just quoted also evinces “seemliness” and doubleness in its form. Julian utilizes the two parts of her showing to structure the paragraph. The initial differentiation creates a parallel series of observations; linguistically speaking, the difference in fact produces similarity through both a structural and semantic repetition. This fair loking shewed of a semely medelur, which was marvelous to beholde. That one was rewth and pitte, that other joy and blisse. The joy and blisse passeth as ferre the rewth and piette as heven is above erth. The pity was erthly and the blissed hevenly. The rewth and pity of the fader was of the falling of Adam, which is his most loved creature. The joy and blisse was of the falling of his deerwurthy son, which is even with the fader. The merciful beholding of his lovely chere fulfilled all the erth and descended downe

148

with Adam into helle, with which continuant pitte Adam was kepte fro andlesse deth. And this mercy and pitte dwelleth with mankind into the time that we come uppe into heven (51.111-19). [This fair appearance showed a fitting mixture, which was marvelous to see. The one was compassion and pity, the other joy and bliss. The joy and bliss surpasses the compassion and pity as far as heaven is above the earth. The pity was earthly and the bliss heavenly. The compassion and pity of the father was for the fall of Adam, who was his move beloved creation. The joy and bliss were for the falling of his dearest son, who is ever with the father. The merciful sight of his lovely joy filled all the earth and descended with Adam down into hell, and with continual pity, Adam was kept from endless death. And this mercy and pity remains with humankind until the time that we ascend to heaven.] The distinction between “rewth and pitte” and “joy and blisse” is followed by parallel identifications—of one as erthly and the other as hevenly, the one with Adam’s fall, the other with Christ’s. The two “falls” are followed by the “descent” of God’s mercy down into hell. At the end of the paragraph, that same mercy the remains on earth until Christians go up into heaven. (Spatial imagery of ascent and descent run throughout the paragraph.) And there are two parallel moments of surplus—God’s mercy “fills” the earth until it overflows down into hell, just as the “joy and blisse” surpasses the compassion and pity as far as heaven is above earth (an echo of Psalm 103:12: “as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgression from us”). The writing is structured around a series of “semely” repetitions or twinned but opposite movements.180 Julian’s prose often progresses like this—it doubles back on itself, repeating key themes but with crucial differences. These repetitions and subtle differentiations pile up, building on one another, which is one of the reasons Julian’s argument can be more difficult to grasp. She doesn’t proceed by defining her terms and then laying out an argument by 180

Cynthea Masson identifies Julian’s tendency to use chiastic structures, and discusses several uses of chiasm in chapter 51, though she does not talk about this specific example. For Masson, the chiasm has an apophatic form, it is “a single unit with two apparently opposite parts; it must remain as a single unit and cannot, without changing its very nature, lose one of its two ‘sides.’” Cynthea Masson, “The Point of Coincidence: Rhetoric and the Apophatic in Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1998), 174. 149

way of dialectical progression. Her thoughts and claims instead emerge by way of repetitions and recursivity. The word semely is, in fact, used seven times in Julian’s Long Text, and all seven of these usages are in chapter 51. Most of them occur within the short space of thirty lines, referring to the appearance of the Lord—the “medelur” nature of his countenance is seemly, but so is his clothing (104), the color of his face (106), and his eyes (107, 131). Semely thus seems in part to signal the metaphoric descriptions of God the Father (the most transcendent, unimaged person of the Trinity); Julian uses the term to convey how God is imaged via metaphor. These physical descriptions each communicate something about God (and note, again, the importance of the details)—his clothing indicates his high status (104); his eyes reveal his “lovely pitte” (107). But of course God himself does not have physical attributes. Julian pauses in the middle of the lines that use semely repeatedly to tell us as much. “But man is blinded in this life, and therefore we may not se oure fader, God, as he is. And what time that he of his goodnesse will shew him to man, he sheweth him homely, as man. Notwithstanding that, I saw sothly we ought to know and believe that the fader is not man. But his sitting on the erth, bareyn and desert, is thus to mene…” [But man is blinded in this life, and so we cannot see our father, God, as he is. And at the times when he in his goodness will show himself to human, he shows himself unpretentiously as a man. Notwithstanding this, I saw truly that we ought to know and believe that the father is not a man. His sitting on the earth, in a barren desert, signifies…] (121-24, italics mine). Here Julian acknowledges the twin forces of metaphor: similarity and difference. God shows himself to us as (that key word, signaling the use of metaphor) a man, as “homely,” so that we, in our blindness, can see him and understand who he is. The homeliness of God’s revelation gives us similarities (and the use of “homely” is suggestive of those most familiar, comforting

150

similarities) with which to construct our understanding. But Julian recognizes the possible danger of coming to think that, just because God shows himself to us as a man, God is in some more fundamental way “like” us. Hence her caution that we “know and believe” that God is not human—that we recognize the difference inherent in the metaphor. She also identifies the need for this metaphor as resulting from our own “blindness,” from our inability to see God “as he is.” God’s transcendence is hidden from us as a result of our sin, but Julian seems to suggest that we will, eventually, be able to see him more clearly. In the last usage of the chapter, “semely medolour” is used again (263) to describe the servant (as Christ) after he harrows hell. The servant’s old clothing (a short and ragged kirtle, which signifies our human nature) is made new by Christ, so that it is “fair, new, whit, and bright” (260-61). “For that clothing [of Adam] was blew, and Cristes clothing is now of fair, semely medolour which is so marvelous that I can it not discrive, for it is all of very wurshippe” [Adam’s clothing was blue, but Christ’s is not fair, a fitting mixture, so marvelous I can’t describe it, for it is made up of worship] (262-64). Here the “medelour” describes the mixture of “Adams olde kirtel,” “oure foul deadly flesh,” with Christ’s own glory (which is, interestingly, never described—Christ simply “takes up” our humanity). Another seeming incongruity, but Julian represents Christ’s adoption of our flesh as both purifying the clothing that represents human nature, human embodiment, and as being made up of a “fitting mixture.” If any “mixture” remains than it might seem that some taint or stain would remain. Out of Psalm 51, the language of Christ “purifying” sin so the believer is “white as snow” is a common Christian metaphor, and is certainly the source for Julian’s assertion that Christ makes us “fair, new, whit, and bright.” The “fitting mixture” refers, of course, to Christ’s Incarnation, to the mingling of the divine and human natures, or, perhaps more accurately, to the perfect coexistence of two natures in one

151

person, without compromising either. The adjective “semely” is thus used both of metaphoric descriptions of God the Father and of the Incarnation of God the Son. Like the Cloud-author, then, Julian uses “semely” to describe key moments of tension. The tension inherent in metaphor (between similarity and difference) or in the Incarnation (between Christ’s two persons) figures what I have been calling the “apophatic reality” through a ceaseless movement between two opposites. This tension is described, by these two Middle English authors, as “semely.” (Though the Cloud-author finds it necessary to draw our attention to what he is doing, to the “seemliness” of figurative language, whereas Julian much more often assumes that her language is apt, and uses the word semely without drawing attention to it or belaboring a definition). The logic of seemliness appears in another, perhaps surprising moment in the Long Text. Julian starts of chapter 27 (the beginning of the thirteenth revelation) with a deeply felt concern over the power of sin in her own life and in the lives of all Christians. “I saw that nothing letted me but sinne. And so I beheld generally in us alle” [I saw that nothing stopped me but sin. And I saw that this is true more generally for all of us] (27.2-3). This leads her to recall the great theological quandary—how a good God could create a world where sin could exist: “I wondred why, by the grete forseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sinne was not letted. For then thought me that alle shulde have be wele” [I wondered why, in the great omniscient wisdom of God, the start of sin was not prevented. For then I thought all should have been well] (27.5-6). Just as the exemplum of the Lord and the Servant is later given to answer her deep anxiety over the seeming tension between the church’s teaching and the content of her revelations, here her vision of Christ is elicited by her existential experience of sin as a hindrance to God and her intellectual distress over the existence of evil. The vision that follows contains what are some of the most well known (and controversial) lines in all of Julian’s writings. Christ appears as says to

152

Julian, “Sinne is behovely, but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wel” (27.9-11). The second clause of the sentence has become something of a hopeful but trite refrain today, but it is useful to remember its context, following as it does Julian’s opening reflections on the Passion and her deep worry about how sin impairs our desire for God. The initial clause is the first intimation given in the text of Julian’s more heterodox approach to sin, an approach to which the exemplum of the Lord and Servant gives fuller shape. But the phrase itself is difficult to parse. “Sinne is behovely,” Julian says, not “sin is good,” or “beneficial,” or even “necessary.” The exact meaning of behovely is obviously at the crux of the debate over Julian’s meaning, but this definition is also difficult to determine precisely. Watson and Jenkins indicate that this is the sole adjectival use in Julian’s corpus, so there are not other usages in the text to which we can appeal. They also suggest that the statement “may echo the words from the Easter liturgy, where the Fall is invoked in words of paradoxical joy: ‘O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam!’ If so, ‘behovely’ might be considered a translation of both felix and necessarium.”181 The suggestion that “behovely” somehow invokes both happiness, even luckiness, and necessity simultaneously seems very much in the spirit of “seemliness.” Both terms are suggestive of paradox. The way in which Julian connects these two clauses also seems significant also suggests that they stand in some sort of tension with one another.182 Using “but” rather than “and” or “for” suggests tension of one sort or another between the two clauses. Behovely and its various forms have a range of meanings in Middle English; MED entries include “(a) Useful, profitable,

181

Watson and Jenkins, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, 208. In the Short Text, Julian does include the phrase “Sinne is behovely,” but she does not have the following “alle shall be wele” clause. 182

153

beneficial, good (for sth. or sb.); (b) suitable, fit; proper, appropriate; (c) requisite, necessary.”183 If we take behovely as definition (a), then the “but” doesn’t make sense; the two clauses would share a similarly optimistic mood. While (c) might provide the greatest sense of contrast between Julian’s two assertions, thus explaining the contrastive “but.” Definition (b), however, does provide some sense of contrast, and given the frequency of this sense in Middle English and across the word’s various forms, I think that it makes the most sense here. Denys Turner argues that the concept of seemliness, or conveniens in Latin, is precisely what Julian is also getting at when she says “sin is behovely” (27.9-10). While Turner reiterates the point that we do not and cannot know what Julian read, with which medieval theological authorities she was familiar, he argues that her use of “behovely” is simpatico with a medieval mode of thinking that eschewed understanding causality in absolute terms, as necessary or contingent. In Turner’s words, “For the medieval thinker, conveniens appears to bear meanings that fall between our notions of the necessary and its correlative term of contrast, the contingent, as they are construed in much contemporary philosophy.”184 Turner himself suggests that we might translate “sin is behovely” as saying that sin “fits,” or is “just so.” And the logic of conveniens, of the behovely, he insists, is narratival. Something cannot “fit” without a context, a narrative. Fitness, just so-ness thus requires a narrative, and that narrative will have its own internal logic of contingency and necessity. Turner’s point is that when we try to abstract these philosophical categories from any narratival context, we actually cease talking about anything meaningful. Sin can only be behovely in the very specific story of humanity’s creation. “[T]hat sin is behovely means that sin is needed as part of the plot—or, if you like, that the plot needs sin 183

The notion of either “necessity” or “suitability” is shared across the range of behovely’s adjectival and adverbial forms in the MED. Unlike the noun or verb forms of the word (bihove, bihoven), which date much earlier, all the examples of behovely as an adjective or adverb come from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 184 Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 38. 154

in the way that plots do—contingently indeed, but all the same just so.”185 Sin, we might say, is semely. In both the thirteenth vision and the parable of the Lord and the Servant, then, Julian confronts the tension between church dogma and her own revelation of divine love. The reality of sin and the declaration of God’s unalterable love for humanity are resolved in the paradoxes Julian expresses in chapters 27 and 51. What connects these two moments in the text is their “seemliness,” their paradoxical harmonization of seemingly oppositional tenets.

Time to Think We see in Julian’s treatment of the parable of the Lord and the Servant a particularly focused example of her method of reflection and interpretation. “Method” is not quite the right word here, because Julian’s text is, in her estimation, a result of ongoing God’s revelations and her meditation on them. This method takes time—initially Julian appears to be somewhat confused by her visions, as when she indicates that she understood the servant to be Adam, but also perceived that that particular identification of the literal servant did not make sense of everything she had seen: I sawe many diverse properteys that might by no manner be derecte to single Adam. And thus in that time I stode mekille in unknowing. For the full understanding of this mervelouse example was not geven me in that time, in which misty example of the privites of the revelation be yet mekille hid. And not withstanding this, I sawe and understode that every shewing is full of privites. (51.57-62, emphasis mine) [I saw many diverse properties that could not be contained in a single Adam. And thus at that time, I remained in unknowing. For at that time the full understanding of this marvelous example was not given to me, and in the obscure example the mysteries of the 185

Ibid., 51. 155

revelation were still hidden. Notwithstanding this, I saw and understood that every revelation is full of mysteries.] The repetition of “in that time” drives home the fact that her interpretation, the ongoing revelation as to the meaning of her original vision, expands. Initially she did not understand; specifically she did not understand the Servant’s “many diverse properteys.” The “privites” of the revelation do come to be understood, but this process takes time. The parable of the Lord and the Servant appears to have been part of the initial revelation, but Julian was so mystified by it that she did not include it in her initial record, the Short Text; in fact Julian states that she reflected on what she was shown and had “teching inwardly” for “twenty yere after the time of the shewing, save thre monthes” after her initial vision (51.73-74). Julian’s ongoing understanding of her vision sets her apart from many other mystics and visionaries in the Middle Ages. Typically, the purpose of visions was thought to be the establishment of certainty. As a sort of “revelation,” visions are knowledge producing, even if that knowledge seems solely for the benefit of the visionary. But in no other case that I can recall is the visionary so befuddled by what he has seen, nor does it take such a long time and considerable intellectual effort to understand the vision. Julian’s text is also punctuated by questions—she explicitly acknowledges her own confusion.186 Other mystical texts include similar moments on the part of the author, but, again, no visionary text registers such deeply theological impasses and such searching persistence as Julian’s. For Julian, receiving visions from God does not immediately result in complete clarity, but rather inaugurates a (at minimum)

186

Examples include, “What may this be?” (5.9), “What is synne?” (11.4), “How might alle be wele for the grete harme that is come by sinne to thy creatures?” (29.2-3), “How may this be?” (50.9), “How shall I be esede?” (50.31). 156

twenty-year journey of theological deliberation.187 The process of reflecting on her visions (both the time she took to do so and the interpretive principles with which she approached the vision) is crucial to the meaning at which Julian finally arrived. Julian’s “three properties” are also intimately connected to the passing of time.188 I will quote her again in order to emphasize the role of time: “The furst is the beginning of teching that I understode therin in the same time. The secunde is the inward lerning that I have understonde therin sithen. The third is alle the hole revelation, fro the beginning to the ende, which oure lorde God of his goodness bringeth oftimes frely to the sight of my understanding” [The first is the start of the teaching that I understood at that time. The second is the inward teaching I have received since then. The third is the whole revelation, from the beginning to the end, which our Lord God of his goodness often brings freely to my mind’s eye] (51.64-67, italics mine). Julian carefully includes a phrase in her description of each property that situates the property in the unfolding timeline of her reception of, reflection on, and presentation of her vision. She constructs something like a timeline for her own evolving understanding, and then marks this timeline with hermeneutic moments. So she receives the vision and understands some parts of it at that time (“in that same time”). Then she has a deepening understanding that seems ongoing (“sithen”) as she reflects on the vision. And finally she finds even more understanding when she looks back on the entirety of her shewings, which she does, she tells, often (“oftimes”). This final 187

Visionary texts, as records of experience, are typically recorded soon after the experience. But the twenty-yearlong stretch when Julian worked through the significance and interconnectedness of her sixteen visions evinces a precision and depth of thought that is a feature of systematic theologians. Denys Turner has argued persuasively for the need to classify Julian as a theologian and to take seriously her rigorous contributions to some of the central theological debates of the fourteenth century. Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian. 188 With the exception of Watson, who focuses on “autobiographical time,” when scholars talk about time in the Revelation, they argue for how Julian strives to put the reader outside of time, rather than examining how crucial time is to the work of interpretation. J.P.H. Clark argues that Julian’s claims about sin and salvation can only be reconciled when seen from the position of God’s timelessness. Clark, “Time and Eternity in Julian of Norwich.” Masson argues that the term “point” Julian uses is a point in both space and time, which collapses time by containing multiple moments, multiple experiences. Masson, “The Point of Coincidence,” 162–66. 157

property is a sort of retrospective—“alle the hole revelation” seen in its entirety, from the perspective of its completion. So Julian figures her revelation as begun, ended, and maintained by discrete moments of interpretation. But she also forecloses the possibility that the time of interpretation has ended. Julian repeatedly insists elsewhere in her text that our knowledge now, on earth, is limited and incomplete, and that only in the life to come will we fully understand.189 While time is thus central to her interpretive efforts as they stretch across the writing of two texts and many years of reflection, the time involved in the unfolding meaning of her vision and the truths contained therein does not stop with the Long Text. Rather Julian insists that the time needed to truly absorb and understand her vision stretches even further, out beyond her own experiences, her own thoughts, and her own text, into the life of every Christian and into the life to come. The third property also situates any one part of Julian’s shewings, including the example of the Lord and the Servant, in the context of the whole revelation, a perspective only gained after a considerable amount of time (either Julian’s or her reader’s) is spent reflecting on the revelations. When her vision of the Lord and the Servant ends (not her deepening understanding, but her description of her initial experience), Julian writes that “oure good lorde ledde forth my understanding in sight and in shewing of the revelation to the ende” [our good Lord led forth my understanding in seeing the revelation through to the end[ (51.52-53). At the end of this particular revelation, that is, she pans out in order to “see” the whole of her shewings. And in 189

Julian’s view on the revelation of God’s privites is understandably complicated. In chapter 30, she asserts that Christians should be like the saints in heaven, desiring to know nothing more than what God has chosen to reveal. Here, then, she suggests that even in the life to come some of God’s privite will remain unknown. In chapter 34, however, Julian identifies two types of privite: the type that God has revealed to her in her shewings, the other a “gret previte…he wille we know thus hid into the time that he wille clerly shew…to us” (34.1-3). It seems, then, that there are perhaps three types of privite for Julian: privites God revealed to her in her visions, privites God will reveal in the life to come (these in particular seem to pertain to the seeming contradiction between human sin and God’s view of humanity as blameless), and then an undefined (because totally unknown) category of privite that will never be revealed. 158

chapter 44, Julian steps back from her fourteenth vision to reflect on what “God shewed in all the revelations.” In this section of the Long Text, then, we can see Julian’s third property at work— this particular part of the vision (the exemplum) is part of whole, and for any of the parts to be properly understood, the whole must also be kept in mind. But “notwithstanding all this forthleding, the marveyling of the example went never fro me, for methought it was geven me for answere to my desyer” [notwithstanding all this ushering on, the wonder at this example never left me because I thought it was given to me in response to my desire] (51.54-55). Julian’s third property locates her understanding of the Lord and the Servant exemplum within the breadth of the entirety of her shewings—she suggests that the parts can only be truly known when the whole is seen and understood.190 I take the combination of the “three properties” (which are related to the metaphoric interpretation of the “literal vision”) and their “onyng” to make a point about how meaning emerges both for Julian (and her readers) and from metaphor more generally. The full understanding or interpretation of a metaphor can take time, but once the vehicle of a given metaphor comes to be understood metaphorically, once the meaning of the tenor is added, it would be impossible to undo this conflation. This is another way of understanding Julian’s claim that the three properties are “oned,” and that the third is “alle the hole revelation.” While it is possible to parse out the parts of metaphor in retrospect, and while the experience of arriving at a metaphor’s meaning may take time, once a metaphor’s meaning has been decided, fixed in the mind, then the process of arriving at that meaning is cognitively elided, the metaphor is 190

That fact that Julian makes this claim within the fifty-first chapter is significant. At times, readers of Julian have been drawn to this exemplum in order to make a case that Julian believed in universal salvation or that she refused to acknowledge God’s judgment or wrath. But her own insistence that her visions be understood “fro beginning to ende” (and that her own understanding of these shewings is shaped by “the hole revelation”) forces us to read this exemplum alongside other moments in the text, including her repeated insistence on the reality of sin and its effects, and on the church’s teaching regarding hell and damnation. 159

understood as a whole. Julian makes legible the process of arriving at metaphor’s meaning, whereas critics have tended to view the perspective of the final decision, the “fixing” of her visions’ meaning. By metaphor’s wholeness, I also don’t mean fixity—the “wholeness” of metaphor actually includes the indeterminacy and proliferation of its meaning. Most understandings/ interpretations of figurative language fix meaning by shutting down this proliferation, by determining which meaning is “correct.” Julian’s text both shows the process of arriving at meaning, but she shows how metaphor’s indeterminacy reflects the generative possibilities of divine visions.

Exemplum and Parable I end this chapter by turning attention briefly to the genres of the story of the Lord and the Servant. Examining both Julian’s own terminology and the language used by scholars to describe this moment reveals some of the key features of Julian’s style and approach. Julian refers to the narrative of the Lord and the Servant in chapter 51 as an “example,” identifying it as an exemplum, a medieval genre with which Julian would have undoubtedly been familiar because of its immense popularity in sermons. Exemplum is in fact narrative genre of which Julian appears quite fond. She uses the word example sixteen times in the Long Text. Eight of these instances appear in chapter 51 (and in the instance in chapter 46, Julian is pointing ahead to chapter 51). But in two other cases she uses the word example in association with a short narrative involving a Lord and a Servant.191 In chapter 7, God shows her what she calls both an “open example” (7.27) and a “bodely exsample” (7.34)—a narrative clearly meant to clarify what she is seeing. In this exemplum, she writes that “It is the most wurship that a solempne king or a gret lorde may 191

Nuth points out that these other examples are also additions to the long text. Joan M. Nuth, Wisdom’s Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 31. 160

do to a pore servant if he wille be homely with him” [it is the greatest honor that a royal kind or a great lord may do to a poor servant—to be familiar with him] and goes on to elaborate the example for several more lines (7.27-29). In chapter 14, she is shown an extremely brief example, which helps illumine one of the three degrees of bliss God is showing her: “this exsample was shewd: a king, if he thanke his subjettes, it is a gret wurshippe to them” [this example was shown: if a king thanks his subjects, it is a great honor to them] (14.19-20). And in two other instances an example is shown pertaining to “creatures”: in chapter 25 the example demonstrates God’s love for the Virgin as the highest of God’s creatures, and in chapter 68, “a creature that is led to se grete noblinesse and kingdoms longing to a lorde” [a creature that is allowed to see the great nobility and the kingdoms belonging to a lord] (68.20-21). These latter two, while not explicitly using the characters of Lord and Servant, invoke the same relationship between God and his creations. In sum, then, in six out of the eight chapters in which Julian uses the term example (and sometimes the term is used multiple times in a chapter), the example is about a relationship of lordship to servanthood or creatureship.192 Julian, while she depends somewhat often on the genre of exemplum, really only has one exemplum that she uses six separate times. Exempla were, on the one hand, supposed to provide unambiguous instruction, so unlike the biblical parables or medieval allegoresis, their meaning was meant to be plain. As Watkins and Jenkins put it, “Significance is generated not by the gap between vehicle and tenor, story and meaning…but by their contiguity. [In Julian’s exemplum], the result is as close to algebra as a narrative mode can be.”193 Utilized in part for lay audiences that were considered ill equipped to handle the exegetical rigors of allegory, exempla in popular sermons were meant to be plain and 192

In chapters 8 and 73 the terms is used much more generically, without the weight of the generic exemplum reference. 193 Watkins and Jenkins, The Writings of Julian of Norwich, 272. 161

to provide direction. Through sermon exempla, Larry Scanlon asserts, “the Church attempted to establish its ideological authority among subordinate classes.”194 The authoritative tenor of the genres allows Julian in turn to assert her own authority and the authoritative nature of her visions, as Lynn Staley notes: “Since ‘example’ was frequently used synomously with ‘parable’ and with ‘exemplum’ and was freighted with association of authority, she [Julian] at once situates the tale generically in a way that directs attention to her critical apparatus and underlines its status within her work. In other words, the term directs us to the tale’s allegory even before we read it and hence to the possibility of understanding its higher meaning.”195 But this ideological and authoritative function does not make exempla straightforwardly simple. Scanlon notes several other features of sermon exempla that help frame Julian’s own use of the genre. The exempla that circulated in collections for preachers in the later Middle Ages (popularized by itinerant Dominicans and Franciscans) present the clergy and the laity as entirely distinct groups while still maintaining the Church as “the institutional focus of lay devotion.”196 When they do appear in sermon exempla, clergy are present as the locus of Church power and ritual efficacy. By far the largest number of sermon exempla deal with Church ritual—the Eucharist, the sign of the Cross, Confession, and other ritual practices. Julian’s exemplum is thus, in certain regards, a radically different specimen. The Church has no role at all in her narrative, and in fact the example can be seen as undermining the Church’s authority in certain respects. Julian’s emphasis throughout her text on “evencristen” ignores any distinction between clergy and laity, and in chapter 51, she reiterates this lack of distinction by reminding reader that

194

Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 58. 195 Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, 161. 196 Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 70. See 65-80 for Scanlon’s analysis of how sermon exempla functioned in the later Middle Ages. 162

the servant, who signifies Adam, encompasses all men insofar as his sin affects them all.197 So not only is the Church entirely missing from the exemplum, but Julian makes no distinction between clergy and laity—all are her evencristen in need of Christ’s redemption. Sermon exempla were often designed to be unambiguous and didactic; they were not typically figurative. The terms exemplum, parable, and similitude or likeness appear to have been interchangeable; the third of the MED’s definitions of exaumple is “a story which teaches a lesson; a nature fable or parable; an instructive instance or narrative from Scripture, history, or the classics.” But the tendency of scholars to refer to Julian’s example as a parable seems rooted in the fact that the narrative is metaphoric while many, if not most, sermon exempla were not. The genre of exemplum is related to the biblical parable, in which Jesus used familiar, concrete images to make a point about spiritual realities, but it appears that medieval exegetes, despite their love of classification, did not have hard-and-fast rules for distinguishing parables, exempla, and other types of figurative speech.198 The Vulgate uses parabola or parabole (itself a loan word for the Greek parabolē) for a wide range of figurative expressions in both the Old and New Testament, and parabola and exemplum are used somewhat interchangeably in the Gospels.199 Stephen Wailes has also shown how the rhetorical tradition which the Middle Ages both inherited and expanded seems to have understood parables as both part of a larger category of examples, and as a sort of figurative language. Aristotle classed parable as a type of exempla, and the Ad Herennium translates the Aristotelian parabolē as similitudo. According to Wailes, 197

Denise Baker points out that Julian’s focus on her evencristen separates her from her contemporaries Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, and the anonymous Cloud-author. It is perhaps surprising, but a sign of Julian’s confidence in the laity, that she does not simplify the Lord and the Servant narrative. Denise N. Baker, “Julian of Norwich and the Varieties of Middle English Mystical Discourse,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, CT: Brewer, 2008), 53–63. 198 This observation comes compliments of Vivien Zelazny, who provided me with an immensely helpful overview of how parables and exempla were understood in the Middle Ages, as well as pointing me towards the pertinent scholarship. 199 Stephen L. Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 3–4. 163

both in the Vulgate and in medieval exegetical materials, parabola and similitudo are nearly synonymous. 200 Furthermore, medieval exegetes and theologians had to deal with the shocking assertion in Mark 4 and Matthew 13 that Jesus was teaching in parables in order to confound his audience.201 Patristic fathers and medieval theologians alike found ways to assert that parables were meant to instruct, even if that instruction was intended for a select few, rather than for the multitude contained in the gospel audiences. Both Gregory the Great and Albert the Great emphasized that parables are useful for instruction because they use what is known to teach about what is unknown. As a tool for instruction relying on similarity, then, parables and exempla are closely related.202 Scholars’ proclivity for the term parable to describe what Julian repeatedly terms an example is thus due, I think, to the figurative nature of the narrative, and hence to its indeterminacy (as opposed to the fixity of meaning assumed in exempla). Julian’s exemplum is figurative in part because it is describing the divine—as I discussed in my Introduction, almost

200

Wailes notes that both the Aristotelian and the Ciceronian traditions (the latter including the falsely attributed Ad Herennium) deeply shaped how rhetoric was classified and conceived in the Middle Ages, the former through its influence on classical Latin rhetoricians, whose texts and tradition survived even though Aristotle’s writings did not. He traces a line identifying parables as similitudes from Aristotle down to Isidor of Seville. Stephen Wailes, “Why Did Jesus Teach in Parables? The Medieval Discussion,” Medievalia et Humanistica 13 (1985): 48–49. 201 Mark 4:10- 12 (NRSV): “When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’” Matthew 13:10-13 (NRSV): “Then the disciples came and asked him, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’” 202 This similarity (between parables and exempla) is even stronger in the monastic tradition. As Scanlon points out, monastic exempla were designed to foster the reader’s identification with the individuals depicted—the monastic reader “can, by emulating the exempla the exemplarist offers, achieve the exemplarist’s position.” Scanlon goes on to show, as I have already mentioned, that this is not the case with sermon exempla, where such identification is discouraged. Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power, 70. Gregory the Great was interested in both parables and exempla—he compiled one of the first collections of exempla. 164

all language about God is metaphoric, and Julian herself reminds readers of the metaphoricity of the exemplum at points in chapter 51. She steps out of her interpretation of the vision itself to write that “what time that [God] of his goodnesse wil shew him to man, he sheweth him homely, as man. Notwithstanding that, I saw sothly we ought to know and beleve that the fader is not man” [when God of his goodness shows himself to humans, he shows himself unceremoniously, as a man. Notwithstanding that, I saw truly that we should know and believe that the father is not a man] (51.121-23). God’s homeliness indicates his willingness to take on metaphor, to reveal himself by way of analogy. But Julian is careful to warn readers against an overly literal interpretation. God the Father is not a man, even though in her example, he is shown as a lord. Here Julian reasserts the difference inherent in the example she is providing, warning her readers against taking her descriptions literally and reminding us that even the clearest examples, particularly when they include representations of God, are still figurative. Furthermore, because the Servant is “doubled,” he also must be read metaphorically on multiple levels. There is, as Watson and Jenkins point out, a one-to-one, algebraic correspondence in Julian narrative, but her own reading of the exemplum also reveals a complicated interpretive effort. Julian toggles back and forth between multiple metaphoric readings of the parable of the Lord and the Servant, as well as relying on the techniques of medieval scriptural exegesis, which approach biblical text as full of multilayered, figurative and allegorical meanings. Julian’s approach to her own vision thus demonstrates the need to accept what we might call the “parabolic” nature of the exemplum, its use of the bodily showing and the material text to gesture towards the infinity of God’s love.

Conclusion

165

In writing down the version of her revelations that we know as the Long Text, Julian is completely forthright, striving for clarity for both herself and her reader, and yet her text remains challenging, difficult to understand in its uneven meditation, oddly compressed at certain moments, lingering in a protracted way over others. This tension within the text is due, I have argued, to the way in which Julian formalizes the role time plays in the evolving understanding of her revelations. Approaching Julian’s visions as she does, as a type of figurative language, can allow us to see more clearly both Julian’s own method and the unique contribution her visions make to the milieu of English visionary literature. As a “fluid metaphor,” her revelations shift and expand in a variety of ways, including the “oning” of Julian’s original vision and theological reflections, the doubleness of the servant in the parable, and the significance of the particular, material details of her visions. In each of these characteristics, Julian’s role as exegete, as interpreter of her own visions, is essential. And as an interpreter, Julian required time. It took her at least twenty years to get from the Short Text to the Long Text, possibly longer. The beauty of her prose and the boldness of her claims reflect the years she dedicated to the project.

166

CHAPTER 4 PIERS PLOWMAN AND THE INDETERMINACY OF ALLEGORY

In other chapters of this dissertation, I have examined the mystical potential of metaphor. Some Middle English authors, such as Julian of Norwich and the Pearl-poet, exploit the potential of figurative language to multiply meanings, allowing metaphors to expand beyond their initial significance. The authors I examine also draw attention to the duplicity or paradox of metaphor. Every metaphor has a literal and a metaphoric referent, and hence each metaphor says two things at once, and as the mystical texts and dream visions highlight the enigma present in metaphor, they also linger on the materiality of metaphor’s literal referents. The pearl, the cloud, the lord and the servant—in each text I analyze, the physicality and specificity of each of these objects gives shape to the transcendent goal towards which each of these texts gestures. This chapter turns to Piers Plowman, another late fourteenth-century English dream vision. In addition to being a dream vision, Piers Plowman is also an allegory—the fictive narrator, Will, through a series of successive dreams, meets personified vices, virtues, and faculties of the soul, and is instructed in the nature of truth—truth about self, society, and the church. The poem seems a less likely candidate to be considered mystical, preoccupied as it is with issues of social order, communal sin, and individual psychology (i.e., its resolute emphasis on reforming this world seems to preclude any mystical interest). But Langland’s sprawling allegory, with its expansive and constantly shifting cast, is surprisingly similar to the other texts this dissertation examines. Like the dream vision and the mystical texts of the preceding chapters, Piers Plowman draws the reader’s attention to the literality and materiality of its figurative language. An examination of the more complex relationship between the literal and

167

figurative levels of meaning in an allegory reveals a fluidity and multiplicity like that seen in metaphor. Piers Plowman thus reveals shared structures between different types of figurative language. But it also is a limit case for my argument about mysticism and metaphor. If metaphor can, within language itself, embody the infinite, then Piers Plowman reveals how allegory, while still revealing the restless movement and linguistic materiality of figurative language, nevertheless does not prove to be the site of the ineffable. While Piers Plowman is allegorical, allegory, at least as it is deployed by Langland, is crucially different from metaphor. Allegory is often described as an “extended metaphor,” metaphor stretched out over a narrative. But the introduction of narrative time to the poetry disrupts the ability of a single metaphor to enact the ineffable. To return to the psychoanalytic understandings of figurative language, allegory disrupts the condensation of meaning that takes place in a single metaphor. Instead what we see is a displacement of meaning as the figures of allegory are spread across narrative time. Displacement is in fact a fitting way to describe how Piers Plowman works on multiple levels. The text’s poetic form, the alliterative long line, is a type of formal metonymy, each repetition of sound replacing the other within the line itself.203 The poem’s structure and composition—the dreamer’s successive visions, and the author’s successive revisions—also suggest a sort of restless movement, one thing always replacing another. Furthermore, allegory in Piers Plowman seems always to spawn more allegory—the cast and the landscape of the poem keep expanding in a restless attempt to provide an answer to

203

The alliterative long line form, unlike rhymed verse, doesn’t wrap up a line or a stanza; it does not provide closure. Alliteration drives a line forward, and ties each individual line together through the repetition of sound, but it does not tie separate lines together. There is a metonymic displacement in each line from one alliterated word to the next, and whereas rhymes often provide an end point to an idea. In alliterative verse, individual lines stand apart from one another, while the “idea” of each line is pushed beyond the end of the line without a clear destination or connection. Formally, the displacement of alliterative long line creates the sense of a straight line pointing onward into the distance, reading each line of poetry is like staring down a line whose end point can’t be seen. The alliterative long line defers, where rhyme condenses and repeats. 168

the poem’s quest for truth. The principle of substitution, or perhaps revision, rather than the condensation of meaning that takes place in metaphor, structures this poem, suggesting on the level of form that the poem is never complete. While it shares the key features of metaphor that this dissertation has examined (particularly in how the literal and figurative meanings relate to one another), the metonymic Piers Plowman is not a text that reveals the mysticism of language. This chapter thus points to the limits of metaphor in mystical discourse; it is both another example of the larger point I am making about figurative language and a counterexample of the point about mysticism. The language of the poem, however, does highlight the capacity of a different type of figurative language to gesture at the infinite. As a form of metonymy, the poem’s language initiates a movement that the poem itself cannot complete or fulfill, pointing beyond itself, beyond its alliterated lines and sprawling allegory, to ineffable reality. Piers Plowman thus provides a limit case for my argument—a form of figurative language that draws attention to language’s materiality and figuration’s fluidity, but points towards the infinite and ineffable, rather than instantiating them within language itself.

Personification Allegory While personification is often considered a single type of metaphor, personification allegory is crucially different from metaphor. Personification shares metaphor’s “bi-directionality” (the literal and figurative meanings both shape one another), and Langland’s personifications show a deep investment in materiality. However, the materiality of these personifications does not become a site of transcendence, as it does in the metaphors of the other texts I examine. Instead, the materiality of Langland’s personifications is pointed towards reform of the immanent,

169

material world. Furthermore, the question of what is literal and what figurative in personification allegory is much more vexed than in a single metaphor. The “literal” level of a personification allegory consists of the narrative action carried out by the personified characters. These personifications do not on the surface appear to be characters at all, but common nouns, abstractions, institutions (“king,” “greed”) which have been turned into characters. The actions and interactions of these personifications, the literal level of allegory, in turn has metaphoric significance. To consider an example from Piers, Mede, who is the personification of “payment” or “reward,” has a series of actions and interactions that expose the range of possible definitions of mede (good and bad). These actions are in turn meant to be interpreted, they reveal something about Mede the character and mede the concept. So when Mede rides a sheriff to London, the reader can interpret this action as revelatory of the ways in which money corrupts and comes to control law enforcement. Alternately Simpson glosses this process of interpretation well: “[A]ny narrative action that uses personified concepts of its nature invites the reader to translate the action back into direct statements, to make statements out of the words from which the action originally sprang.” Simpson provides other examples from the first vision, pointing out what we learn from the narrative of personification allegory: that the conscience is dependent on reason (because Conscience seeks out Reason’s advice on what to do with Mede); that reason requires conscience’s counsel to act morally (without Conscience, Reason is won over by Mede’s compelling, if unethical, arguments); and that ‘wisdom’ and ‘wit’ are actually equivocal words that have “pejorative senses,” rather than signaling unequivocal goods (because Wisdom and Wit suggest that Mede be accepted at Court).204 In my analysis of The Cloud of Unknowing, I discussed the “bi-directionality” of metaphor, the way in which literal and metaphoric referents actually inform one another (rather 204

James Simpson, Piers Plowman: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Exeter: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 39. 170

than, as we sometimes assume, the metaphoric referent simply drawing meaning from the literal). Personification allegory exhibits its own form of this bi-directionality, since the reader constantly reinterprets the significance of the personified word or concept based on her interpretation of the narrative’s metaphoric significance. There are thus three distinct “levels” of meaning at work in personification allegory, connected by a feedback loop. 1) The literal action of the allegorical narrative (Mede comes to London riding on a sheriff;…) 2) The metaphoric or allegorical interpretation of that action (Mede corrupts law enforcement…) 3) The reader’s own understanding of the personified concept, which is revised in light of the metaphoric interpretation (mede is not fair compensation, but is instead unjust reward that distorts social relations). Before the literal action of the narrative, however, we find the concept itself, the common noun. The complications of allegory’s figurative mode thus become clear: a personified concept drives the action of the narrative by delimiting or at least suggesting what actions that character should engage in. The concept of mede, the word’s possible meanings, its usage in common parlance, precede the literal narrative, shaping the range of possibilities available. James Simpson points out that personifications are limited in their action by the semantic range of the personified noun—the range of actions available extends only as far as the term’s semantic ambiguity.205 But while the semantic ambiguity of a personification limits the range of action in which a character can engage, it also dislocates the reader’s sense of comprehension, surprising her with unsuspected valences of meaning. In the first vision of the poem, when the ambiguity of the term mede is precisely what’s animating the narrative, and the reader is finding his preconceived definition of the term called into question, both the literal definition and the metaphoric significance are up for grabs. In Simpson’s account, personification works bidirectionally; the narrative action that is the result of personification in turn reveals something 205

Ibid., 37–39. 171

about the concept that is personified, which is the concept that animates the characters in the narrative (and so on). This bi-directional movement of personification allegory creates a feedback loop, which creates a constant revision of both literal and allegorical meanings. The only fixed point is the most material form of the language—the word on the page, the continual reappearance of a four letter word mede in the poem. The exact nature of that word on the page, the personified concept, is much debated. Stephen Barney refers to personification as “labeling of a figure in a fiction with an abstract name,” placing the emphasis on the role of the personification as a character in a narrative.206 Lavinia Griffiths defines personification as “the grammatical transformation of a noun or other part of speech into a proper name.” 207 This definition both accounts for the very limited role some of Langland’s personifications have in the narrative, but also focuses on the odd change that personification enacts, making an agent out of something that was not. Placing this much weight on the operations of personification, in conjunction with the reader’s constant revision of the personified concept, destabilizes any clear sense of what the personification is or does. Does the personification mede or sloth or king draw its meaning from an abstract, Platonic category of real “reward,” “laziness,” or “kingship”? Or does the word enter the allegory creating meaning as it goes through its actions in the narrative?208 My point in asking these questions is to point out how difficult it is to know how the personified word makes 206

Stephen A. Barney, Allegories of History, Allegories of Love (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979), 20. Lavinia Griffiths, Personification in Piers Plowman (Cambridge UK: D.S. Brewer, 1985), 5. 208 As is perhaps apparent, these questions get at whether Langland was a “realist” or a “nominalist” (both intellectually viable positions in fourteenth-century England). Some scholars who work on allegory have made strong cases for Piers being a realist text—see Lawrence M. Clopper, Ann W. Astell, and James J. Paxson, “Langland and Allegory: A Proposition,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 35–59; Jill Mann, “Allegory and Piers Plowman,” in The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, ed. Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 65–82. For a suggestion of Langland’s possible nominalism, see James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). I invoke this distinction not to adjudicate it, but because I think the debate exposes how challenging it is to determine how personification works. 207

172

meaning. Rather than adjudicating the debate about what, exactly, a personification is, I would instead simply like to point out that, however personification is understood to operate, at its most concrete, the personified word appears repeatedly on the page in the position of the subject. In personification allegory the presence of the word itself becomes extremely important, since, as Maureen Quilligan points out that the literal level is actually the “letteral” level. The truly literal meaning of ‘literal’ is, in fact, not ‘actual,’ ‘real,’ or ‘lifelike,’ but ‘letteral’—having to do with letters, and with the reading of letters grouped into words (as in the sense of ‘literate’). When a reader is reading the ‘literal level’ (in traditional parlance), he is actually reading the ‘metaphorical’ level—that is, he watches the imaginary action in his mind’s eye.209 Once readers attend to the level of the narrative, once they are following personified characters who engage in the action of the plot, they have already moved beyond the level of the letter, the ‘letteral,’ as one sort of literality. The “literal” as the most fundamental level of meaning in allegory is the words on the page—words that rhyme, repeat, alliterate, words that are in the original manuscripts, almost never distinguished by capitalization, words that evoke an aesthetic response as well as an understanding of the narrative action. The materiality of language comes to the foreground in Piers Plowman, as it does in Pearl, through the poetry, in particular through alliteration and puns. At the letteral level, we recognize the agency of the letter, the ability of linguistic materiality to create meaning that is distinct from the meaning created at the level of plot or allegoresis. What I have thus far been calling the “literal” in Piers, as Qulligan points out, is actually the level of the plot, not the level of the word, and has to do with characters, landscapes, and events. When we speak of allegory as a mode of figurative language, then, we 209

Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 67. 173

must acknowledge that the literal is more complex than it is in the mode of metaphor. In metaphor, the literal referent is, rather directly, the material object, the “vehicle” used to convey the metaphorical meaning. But in allegory, what we think of as the literal must be split into two—the letteral words, with their own agency and materiality, and the literal narrative, which involves the named personifications moving about and interacting with one another. From this point on, I will use Quilligan’s term letteral to denote the most literal level of allegory, while continuing to use literal to refer to the level of plot and character. While everything else is going on (destabilized literal and metaphoric meanings, redefinitions of the personified concept), the word on the page appears again and again, asking the reader to invest it with some kind of meaning in order for the narrative to move on. Identifying the letteral level of allegory also reintroduces the importance of the feedback loop. In personification allegory, we simultaneously cope with all three levels, the personification (the letteral), the narrative action (the literal), and finally the metaphoric significance of that narrative action (the allegorical). Personification allegory thus inserts an additional step into the construction of figurative meaning.210 The reader’s relationship with the letteral level of meaning is significant, but operates distinctly for the operations of allegory. The abstraction cues readerly associations and definitions that will set up her reception of the personified character. The range of meanings a word contains, the semantic ambiguity which fuels the narrative action in personification allegory, also interacts with the reader’s preconceived definitions. There are times when this ambiguity can be surprising, forcing the reader to see aspects of a concept, such 210

In non-personification allegories, the “level of the word” matters differently. The allegorical characters appear initially simply as characters in a narrative, though upon further inspection their names are often deeply meaningful. Etymology is extremely important in Spenser, for example, and if all the characters would only be unerring philologists, then they would never run into problems. But the way that the names of allegorical characters in, say, The Faerie Queene yield up meaning is different than in personification allegory. It takes the progression of the narrative for the reader to understand the significance of Redcross’s or Una’s names, though a thoughtful first encounter will certainly point the reader in the right direction. 174

as Mede, that he hadn’t noticed before. The term is thus open to having its definition expanded by the action of the personification. A reader’s understanding of the category sloth can be altered by reading about what the character of Sloth does. The reader’s expectations are aroused by the word on the page, which shape how the reader understands the personification, but the action of the personification will also come to shape the reader’s understanding.211 The emphasis on the level of the word is also important when we consider the role modern editorial practices play in shaping our interpretations. As scholars have pointed out, all of the capitalization which so helpfully allows the reader to identify quickly which words are personifications is the result of modern editing. Each capitalization, each identification of a noun as proper, rather than common, is an act of interpretation. Some of these are easy decisions with which no one would argue (Mede, for example), but a good number of them are hard calls, and readers would do well to keep the editorial decision-making in mind. Jill Mann points out the penchant of certain editors to expand or delimit the personified cast of characters, pointing out that Skeat’s early edition of Piers Plowman was hesitant in its identification of personified characters, while Schmidt seems to swing to the opposite extreme, making many more common nouns into personifications.212 If we can imagine reading the text without any handy distinguishing of proper and common nouns, as the medieval reader would have, then the poem presents us with a bewildering collection of nouns which the reader must identify (on a case-bycase and line-by-line basis, since sometimes at one moment a noun is personified and in another it is not) as common or proper. If we imagine ourselves in this situation, we find ourselves “on 211

The possibility of a discrepancy between the word on the page and the concept activated in the reader’s mind seems to be greater the higher the degree of abstraction. So “Sloth” might present more possibilities for the reader’s notions of the term to vary from that which is elucidated by the allegorical narrative, whereas an institution like Holi Chirche or Kyng will be less likely to depart in surprising ways from the reader’s understanding. 212 Jill Mann, “Langland and Allegory,” in The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures, 1989-2005, ed. Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, and Nicholas Watson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 2010), 33. 175

the level of the word,” noticing a word’s repetition and having to decide how that word is functioning in the narrative. The alliteration heightens our attention to the level of the word through the repetition of sounds, and often the alliterated sound will be that of the noun whose personified status is in question. Determining whether a given noun is a personification is thus part of the complicated process of finding allegorical significance and perhaps reinterpreting the letteral word itself. Personification allegory is thus similar to metaphor in that the literal and figurative valences of meaning are mutually influential, but this more complicated tripartite relationship also involves the reader in a more active, ongoing process of revising meanings. The Materiality of Langland’s Allegory Like Pearl, another dream vision, Piers Plowman’s operations at the level of the word do not obviate a significant investment in materiality and cultural specificity. Rather, the poems’ extremely precise linguistic work coexists with a high degree of interest in specific material concerns. In the case of Piers Plowman, the abstract concepts of personification allegory are given shape through extreme specificity—materiality becomes crucial to the operations of this allegory. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins in Passus V, as I will go on to show. But Piers Plowman’s materiality, even as it emphasizes the operations of figurative language, remains resolutely this-wordly. In Pearl, materiality, both cultural and linguistic, is presented in excess, such that the reader is ultimately frustrated, dislocated, but in such a way that the infinite core of metaphor is recognized. In Piers, this frustration never occurs—the specificity and materiality of the figurative language instead aims at the reformation of the immanent, material world. The figurative language perhaps accomplishes this reformation through its deployment of specificity and materiality, but it is reformation, not transcendence, that is the goal.

176

It is unsurprising that these sins are the most “colorful” of the personifications seen in Piers Plowman so far. It is one of the perennial problems of any depiction of personified virtue and vice that the vices are much more lively and amusing than the virtues. The materiality of a personification allegory, at least of this personification allegory, is unabashedly reliant on highly material descriptions in its scatological, humorous, and “worldly” forms. Even if the allegory seeks to turn readers from their sins to salvation, the materialities presented are those from which the reader or character must turn away. Like medieval confessional manuals, Langland finds himself describing in detail all that is wrong with the world before he can point the way to redemption. The highly material description of some of the Deadly Sins points out the role of materiality in personification allegory more generally. In personification allegory, the most literal level of meaning (the letteral) is typically an abstraction, such as Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, or Repentance. Whereas in metaphor, the literal referent is highly material (a pearl, a cloud, a rose), in allegory the abstraction lacks all but linguistic materiality. It is on the literal level of the narrative action that this letteral abstraction gains specificity and materiality—the personifications’ appearances and attire are described, their attitudes, professions, and relationships. The specific qualities ascribed to any one of these personifications are inspired/produced by the nature of the abstraction, but the addition of these material realities is a necessary component of the allegory. When interpreted, these specificities yield metaphoric significance—Envy is described as pale and lean, looking “as a leek hadde yleye longe in the sonne” [like a leek that had laid a long time in the sun] and he appears to have the palsy as he compulsively bites his lips and shakes his fist (V.77-84), while Sloth is “bislabered with two slymed eighen” [beslobbered with two slimy eyes] (386); these descriptions in turn suggest that

177

Sloth is too lazy to clean himself up and Envy’s discontent is eating away at him.213 Within the tripartite movement of allegory, then (letteral, literal, allegorical), materiality is a required part of the middle movement, both specifying the shape that a given abstraction will take while also suggesting metaphoric possibilities. Langland’s highly specific, material descriptions provide even more opportunities for interpretation. Whereas in the first vision, the personifications were revealed and understood primarily through their narrative action (through Reason’s attempts to define Mede, for example, or Peace’s willingness to accept unjust arrangements), here the vices’ natures are revealed through their physical appearances and through their confessions. Consider the description of Coveitise (Greed): And thanne cam Coveitise, I kan hym naght discryve— So hungrily and holwe Sire Hervy214 hym loked. He was bitelbrowed and baberlipped, with two blered eighen, And as a letheren purs lolled hise chekes— Wel sidder than his chyn thei chyveled for elde; And as a bondeman of his bacon his berd was bidraveled; With an hood on his heed, a lousy hat above, In a [torn] tabard of twelf wynter age; But if a lous couthe lepe, [leve I], the better. She ne sholde noght wa[ndr]e on that Welche, so was it thredbare!

(V.186-95)

213

All Middle English quotations are taken from William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt (London: Everyman, 1995), citations are to Passus and line number. Translations are from William Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd (New York: Norton, 2006). 214 This name, “Sir(e) Harvey,” gives Coveitise a proper name, like Pernele Proud-herte before him, and suggests that this vice is represented as being of some rank. But such a social station is not compatible with his worn clothing later in the description, nor with his rapacious desire for goods, and he is later described as a tradesman, so this name seems like more of moniker. 178

[Then came Covetousness; I can’t describe him,/ So hungrily and hollow Sire Harvey looked./ He was beetle-browed and blubber-lipped with two bleary eyes;/ And like a leather purse lolled his cheeks/ Over his chops beneath his chin—they churned from age./ Unless a louse could really leap, believe you me,/ She wouldn’t go walking on that weave; it was so threadbare.] While none of the vices are attractive characters, the details of their unattractive faces and bodies are, of course, significant. Greed has a sullen appearance, with heavy eyebrows, thick lips, inflamed eyes, and cheeks that hang down (indicative of old age), all of which suggest his great discontent. He is also messy—his beard is covered in grease (which we might expect of Gluttony or Sloth, but which the narrator identifies as being a sign of his non-noble class), and his clothing is threadbare. The poverty suggested in Greed’s appearance might seem to explain his avarice (he does need a new coat!), but perhaps more significantly communicates the empty, grasping nature of the vice itself. Greed’s hunger and poverty will never be satiated, and his desire is endless. Through the heightened materiality of this personification’s description, we can see these metaphoric meanings take shape. Greed’s confession is also one of the longest. First he confesses to dishonesty in his mercantile activities. Along with his wife, “Rose the Regrater,” he explains several dishonest systems of measurement and techniques for selling goods that are less than they appear to be (such as watered-down beer). Like a good confessor, Repentance prompts him to make the fullest confession possible by asking whether he has practiced usury, and Greed outlines the several ways in which he has charged interest or entered into financial contracts with false intentions. All of these versions of his eponymous sin involve information that is particular and culturally specific. (Passus V is a great resource for those who might want to learn more about contemporary mercantile practices, for example.) Greed is thus a composite figure—no one covetous individual would do all of the actions to which the personified vice confesses. Like the

179

literal “pearl,” which produces many metaphoric meanings, the letteral referent “greed” takes on multiple material forms. In Passus V, we see key features that allegory has in common with metaphor. In examining the personifications of this passus, the centrality of materiality in communicating meaning, as well as the operations of the “feedback loop” are made clear. But in this particular moment of the poem, we also see that these features of figurative language are aimed, not at transcendence, but at the reformation of the very materiality they bring to the foreground. Emily Steiner resituates the materiality of the Deadly Sins in relation to salvation by arguing that the role of the body in the personification of the vices allows them to “participate in ritual community despite themselves,” because personification…calls attention to that which the body is capable of communicating through gesture, voice, or narrative, and, most importantly, the response that one body elicits from others through ritual participation. It is what the body communicates and the responses that it provokes that constitute the penitential community. In this way, a confessional narrative, even where it does not express a sincere desire to reform, nevertheless has the power to be redemptive.215 While not mystical, in Steiner’s reading of the sins, their very bodiliness, the thickness of their materiality, can prove redemptive for the reader and his community. Steiner’s reading, however, attends directly to the materiality of the personifications without examining how the figurative language of allegory both mediates and is itself involved in this materiality. She reads the redemption Passus V induces in terms only of the text’s content, rather than looking to the effect the form has. The community can only participate in penitence as prompted by the representation

215

Emily Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 74. 180

of Passus V through the complicated work of personification allegory, and the language of this allegory carries out its own work, engages the reader in its own dynamics. The redemption Steiner identifies as the end goal of Passus V can be synonymously described as reformation. Reformation points us, etymologically, to form, and thus to the role that form takes in this-wordly reformations.216 Reformation posits a reworking of existing structures and materials, rather than a new beginning, which suggests another reason why the deep materiality of the personified sins is important. The incredibly specific forms that Gluttony, Avarice, and Greed take point both to the corruptibility of the material world, but also the possibility of its material redemption. In providing material personifications, Langland also points the way for material reformations. The feedback loop of personification allegory heightens this operation. As the allegory progresses, the reader’s understanding of the personified abstraction (“Sloth”) is revised in light of the material shape the abstraction takes in the narrative, and the translation of the narrative action into statements about the personification. The very process of understanding a personification allegory thus aims at a reformation of the reader’s understanding. Also significant is the homology between the form of the poetry and the interest in material reformation that Steiner explores. The alliterative long line, in its metonymic operations, works on the principle of “repetition with a difference.” The alliterated consonant repeats within a given line, linking together by the repetition of sound words that are nevertheless discrete. Reformation for Langland thus operates first on the level of language and form, and then on the level of content.217 216

For an analysis of the relationship between form and reform in the fifteenth century, see Gayk and Tonry, Form and Reform. 217 This reading of alliteration only accounts for the broadest possible use of the form as a structuring principle. Other scholars have undertaken much more detailed analysis of Langland’s use of the alliterative long line form, focusing on how in the case of individual lines, Langland uses a variety of alliterative patterns to create a disruption of meaning within a single line, or to tie multiple lines together. For a more thorough overview of the varity of 181

I will examine briefly one other personification, which further illuminates Langland’s use of specificity and materiality in personification allegory. Unlike some of the other vices, Gluttony’s “confession” does not involve him relaying to Repentance all of the particular shades of gluttony in which he indulges; rather it consists in an amusing and not inconsiderable narration of how he gets waylaid on his way to confession. On his way to the church, “Beton the Brewestere” convinces him to have a try of her ale, and once inside the tavern he finds Cesse the Souteresse sat on the benche, Watte the Warner and his wif bothe, Tymme the Tynkere and tweyne of his [knaves], Hikke the Hakeneymen and Hugh the Nedlere, Clarice of Cokkeslane and the Clerk of the chirche, Sire Piers of Pridie and Pernele of Flandres Dawe the Dykere, and a dozeyne othere— A Ribibour, a Ratoner, a Rakiere of Chepe, A Ropere, a Redyngkyng, and Rose the Dysshere, Godefray of Garlekithe and Griffyth the Walshe

(V.308-17)

[Cissy the seamstress was sitting on the bench,/ Wat the warren-keeper and his wife too,/ Tim the tinker and two of his servants,/ Hick the hackneyman and Hugh the needleseller,/ Clarice of Cock’s Lane and the clerk of the church,/ Sir Piers of Pridie and Parnel of Flanders,/ Dave the ditch-digger and a dozen others,/ A rebeck-player, a rat-catcher, a street-raker of Cheapside,/ A rope-maker, a redingking and Rose the dish vendor,/ Godfrey of Garlickhithe and Griffin the Welshman….]

alliterative lines Langland uses, see Stephen A. Barney, “Langland’s Mighty Line,” in William Langland’s Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays, ed. Kathleen Hewett-Smith (New York: Routledge, 2001), 103–17; Macklin Smith, “Langland’s Alliterative Line(s),” Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 163–216. For a more general overview of alliterative poetry in English, including Piers Plowman and Pearl, see Ralph III Hanna, “Defining Midde English Alliterative Poetry,” in The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff, ed. Teresa Tavormina and R.F. Yeager (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995), 43–64. 182

Gluttony joins them in drinking, trading, and singing, and passes the whole day in the tavern. What is interesting about this description is that we don’t get a careful parsing of all of the ways in which one might be gluttonous. Rather, we get a list (and more names are included throughout the passage) of all the townsfolk hanging out in the tavern, indulging in the same sinful behaviors as Gluttony. Furthermore, Beton the Brewestere’s invitation to Gluttony, to come in and drink, reveals the communal nature of vice, the ability of fellow Christians to tempt one another and to sustain one another’s sinful habits. The communal shape of sin is also revealed in the informal trades going on in the tavern, as when “Clement the Cobelere” trades his cloak for “Hikke the Hostiler’s” hood, but only after some merchants evaluate the worth of each item and “Robyn the Ropere” gets involved to referee the exchange.218 All the while “Gloton…yglubbed a gallon and a gille” [Glutton had gulped down a gallon and a gill] (V.340). Langland depicts the tavern as a social hub, a gathering place, and the sinful indulgences of gluttony emerge out of this sociality. In a different way, then, the description of Gluttony situates the vice in a highly particular and material fourteenth-century context, emphasizing the material relations that make up a medieval community. The many personal names included in the narration of Gluton’s time in the tavern also serve as a particular kind of materiality, significant for the purposes of personification allegory. Sixteen proper names are mentioned in the narration about Gluton, as well as six others identified only by their professions (“a Ribibour, a Ratoner, a Rakiere of Chepe”). Proper names show up occasionally in the other vices’ confessions, but this is by far the highest concentration. And in addition to the names themselves, we have the coupling of these names with places— “Godefray of Garlekithe” and “Clarice of Cokkeslane.” (Cokkeslane was one of the red light 218

This seems to be a depiction of a game that involved trading personal items—see Robertson and Shepherd’s gloss on these lines. Langland, Piers Plowman, 81. 183

districts in London, so Clarice is undoubtedly meant to be a prostitute. Her presence in the tavern reiterates the seedy nature of this particular establishment, and the fact that “the Clerk of the chirche” is also present, and listed in the same line as Clarice, suggests how far some contemporary members of the clergy had fallen below the priestly ideal.) Then in the middle of “Clarice of Cokkeslane” and “Pernele of Flandres,” both real places, we find “Sire Piers of Pridie,” pride here being an allegorical place, akin to the “erldom of Envye,” “countee of Coveitise,” and lordshipe of Leccherie” from Passus II (84, 86, 89). In these allegorized places, vices come to be identifying markers, signaling which Piers is meant, as place names so often do (Piers from Southwark, not Piers from Tyburn). The allegorical potential of the vices is thus deeply flexible, including not only strict personifications (“Wrath”) and persons identified by only the vice (“Lechour”), but also marking out one particular individual from others by way of giving to him this marker of identity. In personification allegory, these abstractions can thus be transformed into characters, actants in the narrative, but also into places. “Sire Piers of Pridie” is thus distinguishable from Piers the Plowman. (It is interesting to note that in Passus II there is also “Piers the Pardoner” (II.109). We see the important function of one’s profession as an identifying feature. There are at least three Pierses in the poem—we need to know which one is which!) Emily Steiner’s trenchant overview and analysis of late medieval naming practices points out that “medieval naming identifies people descriptively and improperly….As such, it portrays distinctiveness as a provisional, rather than absolute quality: it gives a sense of particularity without necessarily insisting upon an individual historical identity.” 219 These names describe where an individual is from, or what his trade is, but they don’t identify a particular individual. Steiner’s analysis of historical documents demonstrates that insofar as medieval 219

Emily Steiner, “Naming and Allegory in Late Medieval England,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106, no. 2 (2007): 257–58. 184

naming conventions did identify individuals, this identification had to be situated in a local context. (“Piers the Plowman” could refer to any number of men named Piers who worked as farmers, but in any one local community, there was probably only one, so the name could identify an individual within a localized context.) I’ll discuss Steiner’s argument about how such naming practices affected literary form later, but her claims allow us to see again both the communal and particular nature of Langland’s allegory. The material specificities (place, occupation) of medieval life repeatedly come into view in this decided non-abstract narrative. In the movement of personification allegory, abstractions gain form through specificities such as these. The combination of strict personifications with the use of personal names extends even to the sins themselves. The first sin introduced in Passus V, “Pernele Proud-herte,” is given a name that combines a proper name with a personification, while the next sin, Lechour, suggests a lustful man, rather than Lechery itself. The same is true for Gloton (not Gluttony), but Envye, Wrathe, Coveitise, and Sloth are all typical personifications, the abstraction becoming the proper name of a character. This range of characters, some personifications in the strictest sense (personifications of abstract qualities), some identifying a person whose existence has been taken over by that vice, and one a combination of a proper name and the vice, exposes something about the nature of personification allegory. As I will go on to show later in this chapter, we see in Langland a spectrum of personified and allegorical characters. But this particular variety blurs the line between an abstraction that becomes personified as an actant in the narrative, and an individual for whom one vice becomes so dominant that we might describe him or her as “a glutton.” When does “a lustful man” become Lust, become reduced to the personification? When

185

does the vice take over, become the controlling feature? The alternation of names here exposes the slippery division between these two different types of personification.

Confusion of Allegorical and Literal The spectrum of personifications we see in Passus V, from prideful and lecherous characters, to Sloth and Greed as personified abstractions, also turns our attention to the difficulty of determining with any ease whether a character is literal or allegorical. In Pearl, I discussed how the proliferation of pearls creates an aesthetic confusion—the reader loses track of whether the pearl is a material object or a metaphor, and, if it is the latter, which metaphorical meaning is operative. In Piers Plowman, we find a similar confusion that is nevertheless distinct since the poem is an allegory. Part of the confusion is due to the letteral level of meaning. Personifications are, letterally, abstractions, categories, common nouns. It is difficult to know, then, when a word has letteral, literal, and allegorical significance. At multiple points, the literal and allegorical significance of the poem are also blurred; it becomes difficult or impossible to tell on which level a given action signifies. This blurring is part of the indeterminacy and fluidity of figurative language, but unlike Pearl or Julian’s Revelation of Divine Love, in Langland’s text it does not produce a type of transcendence through its own infinite movement, but rather forces the reader to engage fully in the process of determining how and where to find meaning in the poem. The action of the Passus V has, thus far, been clearly allegorical—the personified sins have made their confessions, and Repentance has preached his sermon. Readers are at this point acclimated to the allegorical nature of the action. And then, after Repentance’s sermon, we see a non-personified “thousand men” who are so deeply moved by Repentance’s sermon that they pray “to have grace to go [to] Truthe…Ac there was wight noon so wys, the wey thider kouthe,/

186

But blustreden forth as beestes over ba[ch]es and hilles” [to have grace to go to Truth…./ But there was no one so wise as to know the way thither,/ But they blundered forth like beasts over banks and hills] (V.512-14). These people are themselves something of an odd intrusion into a passus whose narrative has been entirely dominated by personifications. And as well-intentioned as they are, they themselves confuse figurative and literal action. They are looking for St. Truth but they wander about as if they think Truth can be found in an actual place. They first encounter a “professional pilgrim,” who also seems not to be a personification (though he is certainly satirical). Then Piers comes along—though readers of the poem, either from long familiarity or from helpful introductory and editorial apparatus are aware that he has allegorical significance, at the point in the narrative, at the moment of his first appearance, his allegorical status is not clear. His is identified first by his profession, and then shortly after by a proper name, which certainly does not encourage readers to see him as a personification or as having allegorical significance. But when he tells the confused mass of people that he can direct them to Truth, he then directs them to make their pilgrimage through an allegorical landscape, a journey that is meant to culminate in their arrival at Truth’s castle. At the end of the Passus, a few unsavory characters (a cutpurse, ape-keeper, wafer-seller, pardoner, and prostitute) leave the group because they don’t like Piers’ instructions. They leave, it appears, because they read Piers’ instruction overly literally. He tells them that the “seven sustren that serven Truth” [seven sisters who serve Truth] which are the Seven Virtues corresponding to the Seven Sins earlier in the Passus, are porters in Truth’s castle, and that who is sib to thise sevene, so me God helpe, He is wonderly welcome and faire underfongen. And but is ye be sibbe to some of thise sevene,

187

It is ful hard, by myn heed, any of yow alle To geten ingong at any gate but grace be the moore!

(V.625-29)

[whoever is sibling to these sisters, so God help me,/ Is wonderfully welcomed and warmly received./ Unless you can claim kinship with some of these seven/ It’s very hard, by my head, for any of you all/ To get admission at any gate unless grace prevails.] Those who leave the group Piers is leading do so because they do not think that they have any kin in this castle (and the prostitute in fact tells the pardoner “Thow shalt seye I am thi suster [You shall say that I am your sister] (642)!). It is not entirely clear whether they mean this literally or allegorically. Perhaps they are continuing with Piers’ allegorical treatment, and simply owning up to their own moral shortcomings. They “have no kyn there” [have no kin there] (V.630) because they are entirely corrupt. But it seems equally possible that they do not understand what Piers is saying, and they expect they would need actual blood relations to live in Truth’s castle in order to be admitted. They are, in other words, overly literal in their interpretation of Truth. The reader can recognize both their misplaced literalism, and the indictment the allegorical action offers (these characters are lacking the virtue that would mean, figuratively speaking, that they have kin in Truth’s castle). At this point, the confusion of literal and allegorical this proves productive, suggesting, as it does, that the inability to parse levels of meaning is in fact a problem both for those who are trapped in sin and that one of sin’s effects is an inability to see figurative meanings. (Similar concerns emerge in The Cloud of Unknowing.) But we can also see the difficulty that inheres in determining what is literal and what is figurative—these “levels” of meaning are not discrete, but instead bleed into one another throughout the narrative. The allegorical action seems to be disrupted and reinforced alternately throughout this vision, as when “Roberd the robbere” appears after the confession of the Seven Sins. Roberd 188

appears immediately following Sloth’s confession, mourning his sins and his inability to make restitution (Reddere) (V.462-71). He is not a personified sin, nor fully a non-allegorical character. He has a “combination name,” like Pernele Proud-herte (part personal name— Robert—and part personification—Robber). He is perhaps to stand in for any sinner; as a “robber” he signals any sinful person’s “robbing” of what is due to God.220 He cannot make restitution, but then again no one can make full restitution to God. He also perhaps represents the individual response to God which is required. “Roberd the robbere” is still a personification in some sense; he is still situated within the allegorical action. But his name allows him to stand in for the individual human response to repentance, which none of the personified sins are able to do. And even if Roberd is a sort of “everyman” figure at this point in the narrative, his allegorical status is somewhat different from that of the sins. His significance does not seem limited purely to the literal level of the narrative, he does have some allegorical significance, but he is not a personification in the same way that “Lechour” or “Greed” are. After Piers shows up and reinstitutes the seemingly allegorical action, then we find him instructing the people to plow the Half Acre at the start of Passus VI, a seemingly non-allegorical action. We as readers come to understand this as allegorical; the plowing becomes the pilgrimage, but just as Piers did not initially seem to be a personification, this task’s narrative function is not immediately clear. And in fact the narrative never explicitly identifies the plowing as a substitute for pilgrimage—it simply silently takes the place of pilgrimage. Piers says that “Hadde I eryed this half acre and sowen it after/ I wolde wende with yow and the wey teche” [If I had plowed this half-acre and afterwards sowed it/ I would walk along with you and show you the way to go] (VI.5-6). It appears like he is first going to plow the field, and then he will lead them on pilgrimage. But of course the plowing takes over the narrative in Passūs VI and VII, and 220

Schmidt’s reading of Robert. Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, 428. 189

it becomes clear through Langland’s narration and Piers’ discussion that faithfully inhabiting one social estate becomes the greatest spiritual discipline. Truth gives the pardon in response to Piers’ agrarian labor. Throughout Passūs 5-6, then, the reader’s sense of the allegory’s continuity is thus continually challenged—a scene that begins on the literal level may quickly turn allegorical, while allegorical significance is at times replaced by literal narration. The personification allegory is split between personified abstraction and characters who seem to be individuals reduced to a single controlling trait. Characters within the allegory read figurative language literally, and other characters appear as purely literal and then gradually gain figurative significance. Like the group who leaves Piers’ company at the end of Passus V, it is easy for the reader to find himself reading literally (only on the level of the narrative) what upon further investigation has allegorical significance. There are moments when we are perhaps most encouraged to identify with the narration (Repentance’s sermon and the people’s response to it) which are certainly not terribly allegorical. And when we begin reading literally, we find ourselves in the midst of allegorical action whose significance is difficult to determine. Jill Mann points out this tendency of Langland’s, which she calls the “mixed mode of allegory.” The effect of this mode “is to make it impossible to distinguish, as one so easily could in many other medieval allegories, between a material world which constitutes the vehicle of the allegorical metaphor, and the spiritual world which constitutes its meaning.”221 Mann thus points us back to the role of materiality in the figurative mode of allegory; Langland, through the oscillation between, and hence sometimes the confusion of, literal and allegorical, continually marks the place of the material world. When, as Mann points out, it is “impossible to distinguish” between the material and the allegorical, between the literal and the spiritual, we cease understanding one 221

Mann, “Langland and Allegory,” 30. 190

level of meaning as the “vehicle” and the other as the “tenor”—the literal meaning is not a solely utilitarian method, an empty container, designed to assist in communicating the more important content or meaning. This oscillation returns us to the significance of the feedback loop, to the mutually constitutive levels of meaning which draw together material and spiritual significance in the service of reforming that material world. Pilgrimage as Metaphor, Metaphor as Sacrament Langland’s use and criticism of the practice of pilgrimage also makes clear the relationship between literal and allegorical levels of meaning. Just as the “professional pilgrim” demonstrates the abuses and possible meaninglessness of the practice, Piers uses the idea of pilgrimage to give spiritual meaning to the labor of plowing. Piers promises to direct the people to Saint Truth (of whom the “professional pilgrim” has never heard). But in doing so, he marks out pilgrimage as a spiritual as opposed to a physical undertaking, taking them through the allegorical landscape constructed around the Ten Commandments. When the crowd, in response to Repentance’s sermon in Passus V, sets out to find St. Truth, they want to locate him physically, but Piers, the only one who knows where to find Truth, instead sends them on a clearly allegorical journey. He instructs the pilgrims to travel by a brook called “Beth-buxom-of-speche” [Be-Modest-ofSpeech] (564) and a field called “Coveite-noght-mennes-catel-ne-hire-wyves-Ne-noon-of-hireservauntes-that-noyen-hem-myghte” [Covet-Not-Men’s-Cattle-Nor-Their-Wives-And-None-OfYour-Neighbor’s-Serving-Men-So-As-To-Harm-Them] (573-74), and to pass between two stumps, “Stele-noght” and “Sle-noght” [Steal-Not and Slay-Not] (577). The instructions thus point the pilgrims to the spiritual significance of the quest by using a very heavy-handed set of allegorical instructions—Piers leaves no room for confusion.

191

Langland’s reconfiguration of pilgrimage is often commented on. Instead of going abroad (which was expensive and, by the later Middle Ages, actually quite an exalted practice), he has the people stay at home and do the work appropriate to their estates. As Simpson points out, in this vision Langland is concerned with reforming certain ecclesiastical practices, particularly pilgrimage and pardon, both of which were wrapped up in the sacrament of confession and its concomitant requirement of penance.222 In both Langland’s critique of pilgrimage, however, as well as in his proffering of an alternative (faithfully laboring according to one’s estate), Langland hones in on the relationship between physical action and spiritual meaning, and hence also on the operations of figurative language, as I will go on to show.223 As the narrative of Passus V progresses, it appears that plowing, imagined as an endeavor requiring the support and involvement of all members of the community, is replacing the practice of pilgrimage. The group searches for Saint Truth plowing the half acre instead of going on pilgrimage, and Piers’ concern over supplying all the necessary labor and disciplining the laborers takes over Passus VI. Pilgrimage is thus transformed into plowing, just as Piers the Plowman replaces the useless “professional pilgrim” as the authoritative figure in the group of Truth-seekers. This reading is in some tension with the lines where Piers seems to suggest that he will lead them to Saint Truth after he plows his half acre (“Hadde I eryed this half acre and sowen it after/ I wolde wende with yow and the wey teche” (VI.5-6)). But the narrative’s replacement of the action of pilgrimage with that of plowing, along with Piers’ description of his

222

Simpson, Piers Plowman, 56–57. Jennifer Garrison discusses Langland’s treatment of material and spiritual referents in light of medieval Eucharistic theology. The Eucharist is the ultimate joining together of material and spiritual signification in its union of substance and accidence, but it also links together Christ’s literal body with the corpus mysticum of the church. Garrison argues that Langland’s ultimate depiction of the failure of the church is due to the fact that Will, and the others in the Barn of Unity in Passus XX, fail to acknowledge their own communal participation in this spiritual sign. Jennifer Garrison, “Failed Signification: Corpus Christi and Corpus Mysticum in Piers Plowman,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 97–123. 223

192

own agricultural labor as being in the service of Truth (V.540-50), and the oddly conditional construction of the line “hadde I eryed…I wolde” (not “if/when I plow, I will go with you”) all suggest that one action is replacing another. Jill Mann usefully points out, however, that pilgrimage and plowing are both material enactions of the abstract “search for Saint Truth,” and as such, both are metaphors, which “is not the same as saying that the plowing is the meaning of pilgrimage; rather, it is the search for Treuthe which is the meaning that unites plowing and pilgrimage.”224 Pilgrimage and plowing are both the physical forms of an abstract spiritual quest.225 Langland “stacks” these metaphors, one on top of the other. At first, he corrects the pilgrims’ overly literal zeal to find Saint Truth on a pilgrimage by providing allegorical instructions, thus “spiritualizing” pilgrimage, but this metaphor gives way to another, plowing, as the narrative progresses. In replacing one metaphor with another, however, the narrative also comes to point out the gap between the literal and figurative significance of each. Pilgrimage, as a physical practice, seems to be the material form of spiritual devotion. But when Langland displaces pilgrimage with plowing, he destabilizes this relationship.226 A spiritual reality requires a physical action, and Langland appears to be searching for the most appropriate, most seemly 224

Mann, “Langland and Allegory,” 28. Elizabeth Kirk comments on the surprising nature of plowing, and the figure of the plowman, as metaphors for faithful Christian living. She points out that the shepherd was traditionally the laboring figure associated with faithfulness, while the plowman was associated with the Mark of Cain in medieval texts and iconography. Langland thus shows his ability to use metaphors in new and surprising ways. Elizabeth D. Kirk, “Langland’s Plowman and the Recreation of Fourteenth-Century Religious Metaphor,” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988): 1–21. 226 The nature of Langland’s social or political agenda has been much debated. On the one hand, the emphasis on class-based labor, especially in light of the unrest surrounding labor and remuneration in the 1380s, seems particularly conservative. On the other hand, the poem repeatedly suggests the need for wealthy Christians to care for the poor and treat them with charity. Rather than discussing the political significance of Langland’s treatment of plowing, I want to explore what it says about figurative language, about the relationship between spiritual and literal meanings. The secondary literature on Piers Plowman and issues of class and labor is enormous. For good overviews and significant recent interventions, see Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Kellie Robertson, The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 225

193

action. While this movement through metaphors can be seen as unidirectional—pilgrimage did not adequately reflect the abstract “quest for truth,” so Langland instead turned to plowing (an activity that emphasizes the significance of the physical action even more strongly). An alternative understanding, however, might suggest that these physical imaginations of the abstract spiritual quest shape the spiritual reality itself, and Langland is searching for the literal action that will most effectively shape the spiritual reality he desires to see. Metaphorically imagining the search for Truth as pilgrimage or as plowing suggests different possibilities—the latter, for example, might evoke the undertaking of some new, and drastic quest, giving up or leaving one’s home. Imagining the quest for truth as plowing emphasizes stability—staying put, a connection to class-based labor, and the role of hard work as a form of penance. These are two different “imaginaries” for the faithful Christian life, and it is perhaps telling that Langland seems to prefer the latter. More importantly, without all of these physical incarnations of the spiritual quest, we see that the quest for Truth itself might be meaningless. In Langland’s reforming narration, Simpson writes, “the essential idea of pilgrimage is retained, but its spiritual force is highlighted and the actual practice is condemned.”227 In highlighting the “spiritual force” of pilgrimage, however, Langland must necessarily retain something of the actual practice, hence Piers’ description of the allegorical landscape (the pilgrims have to travel through something, even if the travel is metaphorical). If the entire idea of pilgrimage is done away with, then it can’t be used as a reference point any longer, then even its “spiritual force” would have to be discarded.228 Langland does not simply disregard the practice,

227

Simpson, Piers Plowman, 60–61. There is a long tradition of using pilgrimage as a metaphor for the interior quest to find God. The most famous medieval example is Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, which, while not an allegory like the later Pilgrim’s Progress, still uses the image of a journey to explain how the soul draws near to God. 228

194

exposing its misuses and then discarding it.229 And in retaining, or recovering, the spiritual force of pilgrimage, the sacramental association between the physical and the spiritual, the earthly and the heavenly, must be also be invoked. Pilgrimage, although not itself a sacrament, is sacramental in that is uses the physical reality to effect grace. Teaching about practices like pilgrimage has always acknowledged the possibility that they could be carried out in an unworthy manner. Furthermore, like confession, which was and is dependent upon the penitent’s true contrition and intention to carry out the penance, the spiritual benefits that accrue to one through pilgrimage are dependent on the state of mind with which the pilgrim undertakes his or her journey. If one goes on pilgrimage simply because doing so is a status symbol, or because it looks rather like a vacation, then no matter how carefully the pilgrim follows the proscribed itinerary, the trip will be spiritually meaningless.230 Langland’s redefinition of pilgrimage—a “staycation” where everyone works according to their social station—is spiritually more significant only because it, too, presupposes a particular interior state, a serene acquiescence on the part of all involved to the eternal righteousness of the social order and an ethical commitment to play one’s part in that social order. Passūs V-VI do not just document the failures of contemporary practices; they also explore how and why these failures occur. When the people set out, after Repentance’s sermon, to find “Saint Truth,” Langland is offering a critique of both pilgrimage and devotion to the saints. After all, if these pilgrims are looking for Truth’s shrine, what are most other pilgrims 229

This is what Simpson seems to suggest, both in his Introduction to the poem, and in an earlier article, James Simpson, “Spiritual and Earthly Nobility in Piers Plowman,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86, no. 4 (1985): 467– 81. Lawrence Warner similarly agrees in his discussion of Langland’s use of Becket—Warner argues Langland turns to Becket to find an anti-fraternal model of pastoral care, but he still undermines the literal practice of pilgrimage. Lawrence Warner, “Becket and the Hopping Bishops,” Yearbook of Langland Studies 17 (2003): 109– 110. 230 For a good overview of the theology surrounding and literary treatments of the practice, see Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700-1500, Revised edition (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S.Brewer, 2005). Dyas treats Langland’s representation of pilgrimage in particular, pp 145-70. 195

looking for? And if pilgrimage is really just doing one’s part to plow the half-acre, than what are most pilgrimages about? But a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, or to Thomas Becket’s shrine, can be about truth, if approached correctly. In fact, the entire point of pilgrimage is that the exterior journey one is taking can heighten the spiritual and interior devotion. Christian thought has always acknowledged the danger of the “empty” letter, the law that kills, the merely external ritual performance. Personification allegory highlights the shaping force of “the letter” insofar as it splits the category of the literal into two, drawing attention to operations of language, rather than to a literal level of meaning. The letteral level, which emphasizes language’s materiality, carries out its own work, and it is this level that is, at times, the most effective at affecting the reader. But there are also other possibilities for considering the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, possibilities which radically reclaim the value and significance of the letter, by exploring how meaning emerges, not from the letter in a way that then dispenses with literality and materiality, but in the relationship between the letter and the spirit. I have explored in other chapters how the material and the spiritual inform one another, how truth emerges only when the spiritual is interpreted in light of the physical and vice versa. In Piers Plowman’s use of figurative language, we see the implications of the metaphor’s bi-directionality played out in the spiritual practices Langland critiques. One’s state of mind in going on pilgrimage, or in plowing a field, directly impacts the spiritual meaning of either endeavor; one’s state of mind in fact determines whether the activity will become the material en-action of the abstract “search for truth.” But the material activity itself also has the ability to affect an individual’s state of mind; we can imagine how the experience of a pilgrimage, undertaken for the wrong reasons, might actually create the very spiritual significance that is assumed by pilgrimages motivated by

196

personal devotion. Physical action and spiritual meaning both can and do influence one another’s meaning. Langland’s clearest depiction of the new, allegorized pilgrimage is his instruction to the pilgrims to seek out St. Truth by way of a “croft hatte Coveite-noght-mennes-catel-ne-hirewyves-Ne-noon-of-hire-servaunts-that-noyen-hem myghts” (V.572-73) and “a bergh, Bere-nofals-witnesse” [Bear-No-False-Witness] (580). Piers maps the Ten Commandments onto a hypothetical geography, as I mentioned briefly earlier. We don’t actually see Piers or the pilgrims travel past these mile markers, as we do in Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress; Langland does not provide us narratives of the pilgrims submission to each of these commands in turn. The names themselves are cumbersome, unlike “the tower of Truth,” and in particular, the longer names—“Coveite-noght,” or the last signpost given before the pilgrims arrive, “Seye-sooth-so-itbe-to-doone-In-no-manere-ellis-noght-for-no-mannes-biddyng” [Speak-The-Truth-So-It-MustBe-Done-And-Not-In-Any-Other-Way-Not-For-Any-Man’s-Asking]. And there is no discernable reason why certain tenors (“Sle-noght”) get particular vehicles (a stump). These names are almost purely letteral level, the language itself takes over, especially in modern editions, which include hyphenation between words and capitalization, while the literal level is hard to locate. So much information is provided that the names become almost purely descriptive, names empty of any referent, saved only for allegory by their configuration in the narrative. The allegorical meaning of Piers’ instructions are also fairly clear—he is instructing this group of people about how to obey God and achieve salvation (the allegorical significance of pilgrimage). These allegorical places, then, emphasize again the level of the word in the poem; they elucidate, in an odd way, the barest workings of allegory, which relies on the workings of the letteral level to create its allegorical or figurative meanings. But because of the oddly

197

compound nature of these places names, the literal level of the narrative action is almost incoherent. In pressing for the spiritual significance of pilgrimage, Langland comes close at times to evacuating the literal practice of any real meaning, but it is precisely at these moments when the letteral significance of the allegory takes over. Like the Cloud-author, then, Langland can never entirely dispense with the physical, material fact of pilgrimage, even as he wants to redefine completely its physical form (plowing, not an actual trip) by way of emphasizing its spiritual reality. The idea of pilgrimage as a physical journey pervades the second vision, and despite Langland’s attempt at redefinition and allegorization, this physical fact can never be completely removed. And as even plowing, Langland’s ideal form of physical labor, can fail to instantiate the correct spiritual state in those who participate, we see the fraught relationship between physical action and spiritual reality.

The Allegorical Spectrum Indeterminate Personification (The Case of Truth) In addition to confusion within Piers Plowman whether a given action is allegorical or literal, there is also confusion over which nouns function as personifications. The neatness with which modern editions identify for the reader which characters are personifications (a process that is undoubtedly not neat for the editor, who must puzzle over each decision) belies the fact that each capitalization is in fact an act of interpretation. There is also inconsistency in which characters are identified as personifications (both within a single edition and among editions). Consider an example from Conscience’s denouncement of Mede in Passus III of Schmidt’s edition of the Btext: “Barons and burgeis she bryngeth in sorwe/ And al the comune in care that coveiten lyve in truthe/ For clergie and coveitise she couples togidres” [Barons and burgesses she brings into

198

sorrow/ And all the commons into care that crave to live in truth./ Clergy and covetousness she couples together] (III.163-65). “Clergie” has already appeared as an allegorical character in the Prologue, where he consults with Kyng, Knyghthod, and Commune. We might actually expect “Coveitise” to be a personification of the vice (as it will in fact be in Passus V). And Mede joining the two together seems to be just the sort of allegorically rich action that we have already seen repeated in the opening vision. Mede as the facilitator of a union between Clergie and Covetousness says something about all three characters—when the desire for reward is a motivation, the clergy are encouraged to become greedy. But Schmidt does not mark these as personifications, inclined though he is, among Piers Plowman editors, to identify nouns as personifications frequently.231 The stakes of these decisions become clear when we consider that whether or not the reader identifies a given noun as a personification will significantly impact the likelihood that she will consider the narrative action to be allegorical. The sentence discussed above is thus unmarked as allegorical, perhaps because it is such a brief mention of “clergie,” “comune,” and “coveitise.” Other characters, like Liere and Gile, however, make only slightly longer appearances in Passus III, and seem clearly to be personifications. Truth (alternately “Soothness”) is another example of a possible personification whose allegorical status is difficult to determine. At the start of Passus I, Holy Church tells the dreamer that ‘The tour up the toft…Truthe is therinne, And wolde that ye wroghte as his word techeth. For he is fader of faith, formed yow alle Both with fed and with face and yaf yow fyve wittes For to worshipe hym therwith the while that ye ben here. 231

Robertson and Shepherd follow the same pattern in their more recent edition of the B-text. 199

And therefore he highte the erthe to help yow echone … And comaunded of his curteisie in commune three thynges…

(I.11-16, 20)

[“The tower on the hill-top…Truth is within it,/ And he would have you behave as his words teach./ For he is father of faith, formed you all/ Both with skin and with skull, and assigned you give senses/ To worship him with while you are here….And of his kindness [he] declared three things to you all….] Here Truth is clearly a personification who in fact dwells in the allegorical landscape of the first vision. However, one of the key moments of Passus I also uses “truth” in what appears to be a non-allegorical way. When the dreamer asks Holy Church how he can save his soul, she replies “Whan alle tresors arn tried…treuthe is the best” [When all treasures are tried…truth is the best] (I.85); a line she repeats exactly at the end of the passus, but with an alternative capitalization: “When alle tresors ben tried, Treuthe is the beste” (I.207). (Robertson and Shepherd capitalize both instances, thus consistently identifying Truth as a personification.) The first appearance of Truth in the passage is clearly a personification because of the agency Holy Church ascribes to him (he desires, commands), but in the “truth-as-treasure” lines, the presence of personification is less clear. The personified Truth could be the treasure, but it could be simply “truth,” the common noun. Then in Passus II, the character of “Soothnesse” appears in only one line “But Soothnesse wolde noght so” [But Soothness would not have it so] (II.24) (would not have it that Mede is so intimate in the papal palace). Soothnesse and treuth are synonyms in Middle English, so it seems safe to assume that this is perhaps just another name for Truth, probably chosen for the purposes of alliteration (Schmidt glosses the word as “Truth(fullness)”). But, again, why capitalize the word? The meaning of the line would be unchanged if “soothnesse wolde noght so,” which would not mark the word as a personification. When Truth is personified, the constrained nature of his actions also seem to be made particularly, perhaps even redundantly, 200

apparent. Consider, for example, “Truth woot the sothe” [Truth knows the truth] (II.122), and “witty is Truthe/ And Conscience is of his conseil” [Truth is wise and discerning/ And Conscience is of his council] (II.138-39), or Sothnesse seigh hem wel, and seide but litel And priked his palfrey and passed hem alle, And com to the Kynges court and Conscience it tolde, And Conscience to the Kyng carped it after.

(II.189-92)

[Soothness saw them well and said but little,/ And pressed on ahead on his palfrey and passed them all/ And came to the King’s court and told Conscience about it,/ And Conscience recounted it to the King afterward.] The first two examples reveal the tautological, almost redundant nature of Truth as an allegorical character. Of course Truth knows the truth—what else could he know? And Conscience takes advice from Truth, of course. As far as personification allegories go, there is very little Truth can do to advance the plot, because his actions are so tightly constrained. All he can do for the plot, as in the third quotation, is to report to the Kyng and Conscience what Mede and her route are doing. He does not even confront them directly (this is Conscience and Reason’s job), but simply relays their actions. Truth’s lack of agency is linked to his/its ambiguous status as a personification. As an often passive character, Truth’s status as a personification is less clear than nouns which are more active (such as Liere and Gile). Truth does seem to be personified most of the time in the first vision, as in Conscience’s invective against Mede, where Conscience situates Mede’s interactions with Truth in the context of her actions with other personified characters. Mede is, according to Conscience, “favourable to Fals and fouleth Truthe ofte” (III.154). In other places where Truth is personified, however, it would not seem to make any difference, as when Conscience says “But after the dede that is

201

doon oon doom shal rewarde/ Mercy or no mercy as Truthe [moot] acorde” (III.318-19). Part of the fuzziness and the redundancy regarding Truth’s personification is simply the problem of personification allegory more generally. Personifications can do very little, since they are the ultimate “flat” characters. But when a narrative contains a personification like Truth, or Mede, (words that appear often in common usage), then it becomes very difficult to declare precisely whether or not a noun is personified. It is difficult to know, in the opening vision at least, where to see personification and where not. For Jill Mann, this confusion over what is allegorical is a symptom of Langland’s approach to language more generally. Mann links this confusion to the spectrum along which abstractions come to have increasing degrees of agency. The abstracta agentia of sentences such as “Justice was served,” where justice, an abstract concept, somehow receives an action, will eventually become a personification if it is given more and more agency. But for Mann, the possibility of an abstraction to become animated, to begin participating in allegorical action, is part of Langland’s theological use of language. “The power latent in the role of the abstraction in the sentence is for Langland, I think, an index of the latent power it has in life; it is in language that its role can be grasped. So it is the language itself which becomes the stuff of Langland’s imagined world, the reality out of which it is made.”232 The moments where we puzzle, then, over whether a given noun is a personification, are exactly the moments when we see Langland’s interest in the range of possibilities inherent in language’s work in the world. Mann has written persuasively and definitively on many of the issues this chapter takes up regarding allegory in Piers Plowman.233 She discusses the intense cultural specificity of Langland’s allegory, the movement between literal and allegorical levels of meaning, 232 233

Mann, “Langland and Allegory,” 33. In addition to “Langland and Allegory,” see Mann, “Allegory and Piers Plowman.” 202

personification allegory, and the centrality of language itself to allegory. But her interest in the “agency of language,” which she identifies as the source of personification, approaches figurative language as natural product of language’s own “liveliness,” its capacity to constitute (and be constituted by) the physical world. My interests in figurative language and materiality are somewhat different, though the analytical pay off for a given text is often the same. In examining how figurative language draws together without synthesizing literal and figurative meanings, and hence relations of similarity and difference, I am instead interested in the potential for figurative language not to constitute a textual world (as it does in Langland’s allegory), but to find within its materiality and literality the space of the infinite and transcendent. Although I am arguing that Piers Plowman becomes the limit case among fourteenth-century English texts, my approach to figurative language thus differs from Mann in my attention to how the poem’s language gestures towards the infinite. The Varieties of Personification In addition to the indeterminacy regarding which nouns are personified and which are not, we also find in Piers Plowman a variety of types of personification. In the Prologue, for example, we find ourselves introduced to several allegorical characters. Kyng, Knyghthod, Clergie, and Commune are introduced quickly after the description of the “feeld ful of folk” and before the Rat Parliament. These characters are given little by way of introduction or description, relying strongly on the reader’s ability to recognize the personification. This recognition grows partly from the fact that “Kyng” is not an abstraction in the same way that “Wrath” or even “Kynde Wit” is. There are individuals who are kings, and the allegorical character “Kyng” represents the category to which all these individuals belong. “Kynde Wit,” however, or “Wrath,” are abstractions, who are known to the reader not through a specific example of a type, but through

203

specific enact-ions of the type (an individual exhibits wrathful behavior, or utilizes the intellectual faculty of native intelligence). Kyng is a different type of personification, not least because an individual either is or is not a king (as opposed to an individual who acts wrathful).234 The distinction is externally imposed, and is complete—one cannot be a king and a plebeian, as one could be wrathful and slothful, nor can the identity of king be countered by the existence of another identity category, the way that wrath could be tempered by patience. When it comes to the personification of Wrath, of course, the identity category is complete; Wrath cannot be anything other than wrathful. But how the reader understands the personification, the understanding that is activated by the word on the page, is very different for these two types. Kyng also presumably retains those qualities which are the lowest common denominator for all kings, those features which are the sine qua non for kingship. (Which again stands in contrast to the personification of vices in Piers Plowman; each vice takes a highly particular form and even identity—Sloth is depicted as a priest—but could presumably have taken other forms or identities.) Langland is particularly interested in the ideal Christian king who rules wisely, so Kyng relies on reason and conscience to guide him; he imprisons Wrong, and promotes a judicious peace. He is also (obviously) male, and we can assume both that he has inherited his throne, and that he is ruling by divine right. His social relations are generally medieval, and particularly English, but even with these particularities, Kyng stands in for, as far as a late fourteenth-century audience would be concerned, any English king. So when Kyng first appears in the narrative, he is led in by Knyghthod who, together with Clergie, determine how best to protect and provide for Commune. (Commune seems at points to refer to the third estate, and at other points possibly 234

Kyng is also a category like butcher or baker; these professions show up in abundance throughout the first vision. Later Mede’s retinue will contain personifications that are both medieval professions and vices. 204

personifies the parliamentary body that was supposed to represent this estate). Furthermore, as Simpson points out, during Mede’s trial, Kyng and his advisors function just as the actual King’s Council would have in England during the time of Langland’s composition. As a personification, then, Kyng represents the entire category “king,” but he also represents the particular situation of English kings at the close of the fourteenth century. If Kyng, Clergie, Knyghthod, and Commune are the personification of identity categories, distinct from the personification of abstract qualities, then other personifications, such as Kynde Wit and Holi Churche function differently. Midway between the personification of qualities, such as Wrath or Pride, and identity categories/social institutions, such as Kyng or Clergie, Kynde Wit, Reson, and Conscience are based on intellectual faculties that all people were supposed to share in the Middle Ages. Thus their narrative action may activate certain memories or experiences common to almost all people, or they may work prescriptively, suggesting how people should experience or use these faculties. (Holi Church, along with Cyvylle (Civil Law) is an institution, perhaps akin to Knyghthod and Clergie in the medieval imagination—while contemporary readers might distinguish between the Church as divinely ordained for all people and all times and particular social structures that change over time, medieval readers would have accepted all of these categories as equally divine in origin.) Personified virtues and vices also appear in the first vision, although the personifications all center around Mede. So Fals and Favel (Deceit) appear first with Mede, because the entire problem with Mede is that her very existence summons these vices. Fals is at first identified as Mede’s father—the type of reward that Mede represents is birthed by falseness—but Fals is then proposed as Mede’s husband under the name “Fals Fikel-tongue” (II.41)—Mede is linked with deceitful speech. This match is also thus incestuous, suggesting both the self-generating nature of

205

sin and the perversion of desire that Mede activates.235 Other vices make brief appearances, such as Liere and Gile, who play little part in the plot. The primary purpose of these vices is to point out Mede’s deleterious effects. The proliferation of allegorical characters, including vices, professions, and institutions is part of the point Langland seems to be making about her effects— Mede creates deep and complicated networks. (The proliferation of allegorical characters also seems to be a feature of Langland’s allegory.) Allegorical characters appear, then, following the logic of perverted relationship. Liere and Gile follow Mede because the desire for (easy) money is precisely the thing that provokes lying and guile. A friar shows up when Mede is brought to court because the mendicant lifestyle was prone to an abuse of the religious office in the pursuit of pecuniary reward. The network of people, professions, vices, and institutions that surround Mede is organized only according to the desires that Mede herself provokes. There is nothing of the systematic effect of vices and virtues in this vision that we see in Prudentius or even in Gower.236 The personifications that appear in this first vision are not arranged categorically, in a neat hierarchy, but instead reflect the complicated and organic organization of fourteenth-century English social life. The Specificity of Personifications The “fuzziness” of the allegory (indeterminacy of which characters are personifications and which aren’t) also extends to Langland’s expansive cast of late-medieval “folk.” The “feeld of folk” of the first vision contains a sweeping overview of all the varieties of occupation available in the later Middle Ages. Much more detailed than a straightforward depiction of “Nobility,” 235

Fals and Fals Fikel-tongue might appear to be slightly different personifications, but when Holi Chirche first describes Mede, she says that “Fals was hire fader that hath a fikel tonge” (II.25), so the two characters do appear to be the same. 236 Holi Chirche mentions other virtues, among them Leautee, Soothnesse, and Mercy, but none of these become important actants in these passūs. Prudentius’ Psychomachia depicts systematically seven virtues fighting with, and eventually defeating, corresponding vices. John Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme, a text contemporaneous with Piers Plowman, depicts a similar battle. 206

“Clergy,” and “Laborers,” Langland’s descriptions reveal the more nuanced variation in social life. He puts to use the tendency of the alliterative long line form to produce lists, repeatedly throughout the first vision listing the types of occupation that exist in the second and third estates. Barons and burgeis and bondemen also I seigh in this assemblee, as ye shul here after; Baksteres and brewsteres and bochiers manye, Wollen webbesters and weberes of lynnen, Taillours and tynkers and tollers in markettes, Masons and mynours and many othere craftes: Of alle lybbynge laborers and lopen forth somme— As dykeres and delveres that doon hire dedes ille And dryveth forth the longe day with ‘Dieu vous save Dame Emme!’ Cokes and hire knaves cryden, ‘Hote pies, hote!’

(Pro.217-224)

[Barons and burgesses and bondmen also/ I saw in this assemblage, as you shall hear later;/ Bakers and brewers and butchers aplenty,/ Weavers of wool and weavers of linen,/ Tailors and tinkers, tax-collectors in markets,/ Masons, miners, many other craftsmen./ Of all living laborers there leapt forth some,/ Such as diggers of ditches that do their jobs badly,/ And dawdle away the long day with “Dieu sace dame Emme.”/ Cooks and their kitchen-boys kept crying, “Hot pies, hot!”] These lists don’t present us with personifications per se, but they are also not entirely set apart from Langland’s allegorical narrative. The description above is of the “feeld ful of folk,” and the field, pace Mann, has allegorical significance, set as it is between the tower of Truth and the dungeon of Wrong.237 An allegorical place peopled with this ten-line survey of medieval

237

Jill Mann argues that “The strongholds of Treuthe and Wrong are metaphorical buildings, but the Field Full of Folk is simply fourteenth-century England, seen in a single synoptic vision.” Mann, “Langland and Allegory,” 27. I 207

occupations suggests that these “barons and burgeis and bondemen” are meant to stand in for an entire collective (all barons and all burgesses and all serfs). The list also marks the allegory as specifically fourteenth-century and English, moving quickly from a panoramic overview to the particular cries of laborers and cooks trying to see their pastries. This is not just any “feeld of folk.” In the Prologue, we also see characters such as Kyng and Clergie, or even the friar who comes to Mede in Passus IV, who are also personified professions or social identities and are clearly meant to be part of the allegory. But at other moments, lists of professions shade more towards personification, taking on particular identities which seem more allegorical and interacting with one other. In describing the proposed marriage between Mede and Fals, for example, we find In witnesse of which thyng Wrong was the firste And Piers the Pardoner of Paulynes doctrine, Bette the Bedel of Bokynghamshire, Reynald the Reve of Rutland Sokene, Munde the Miller—and many moo there. ‘In the date of the devel this dede is asseled By syghte of Sire Symonie and Cyvyles leeve.’

(II.108-114)

[To witness which thing Wrong was the first,/ And Piers the pardoner of Pauline doctrine,/ Bart the beadle of Buckinghamshire,/ Reynold the reeve of Rutland district,/ Mund the miller and many more besides./ “In the date of the Devil this deed is sealed/ In sight of Sir Simony and with Civil’s approval.”] In this passage we see both the tendency to allegorize occupations and the tendency to localize this allegory. Two of the names listed are attached to specific locations—Buckinghamshire and Rutland. The giving of personal names to these characters somewhat paradoxically heightens am suggesting that the “field of folk” does have allegorical significance; in fact, its very association with fourteenthcentury England, in light of Langland’s use of cultural specificity, heightens its allegoricity. 208

their allegorical status.238 Rather than attaching a personal identity to these professions, “Piers the Pardoner” and “Bette the Bedel” simply heighten the generic identity of these characters. Proper names don’t communicate singularity here (the alliteration helps to establish this point), but rather denote a type; in Emily Steiner’s terms, these names describe, but don’t identify.239 These names, in others words, describe a pardoner named Piers, or a beadle named Bette, but they don’t identify an individual. Their descriptions depend on local contexts and relationships to do the work of identification. Pardoners, Beadles, Reeves, and Millers stand to benefit from Mede and Fals’ potential marriage, and these allegorical characters represent the interest that some in these occupations might have in such a joining, and thus take the side of Wrong by standing in witness to the marriage charter Simony and Civil Law have drawn up. Furthermore, the naming of characters such as “Bette the Beadle” and “Munde the Miller” also follows the same trajectory as the personification of abstractions. Abstract concepts, such as Mede, are given specific form—appearance, clothing, relationships, speech—while the professions surveyed so often throughout the poem are at moments given specific names. The allegorical tendency is always to specify, to embody, a more abstract concept or category. These “compound names,” names alliteratively combining a personal name with an occupation, also produce poem’s eponymous character. Piers the Plowman is the opposite of “Piers the Pardoner of Paulynes doctrine.” Piers Plowman embraces “true religion,” while Piers the Pardoner represents the corruption of religion. (Langland always depicts pardoners as fraudulent, and Piers the Pardoner’s assent to the marriage of Mede and Fals certainly seems to reiterate the association of pardoners with greed—consider Chaucer’s Pardoner with his sermon on cupiditas radix malorum est.) 238 239

This phenomenon also happens frequently in Passus V, as I have already discussed, in the confession of the Sins. Steiner, “Naming and Allegory in Late Medieval England,” 248. 209

In other moments, Langland uses given names to similar effect. In Peace’s complaint to the king, for example, he says that Wrong has “ravysshede Rose, Reginaldes love/ And Margaret of hir maydenhede maugree hire chekes” (IV.49-50). Here these personal names do not identify particular persons, but instead sharpen the offenses of the personified character Wrong. Rose, Reginald, and Margaret are personified victims, if you will; their names simply given to give shape to those who are the objects of Wrong’s assaults. By giving them personal names, names familiar to Langland’s readers (who probably would know a Rose or a Margaret), Wrong’s crimes are given a sharper point. A bit later in Passus IV, Langland again mingles a personal name with both an allegorical personification and with a list of occupations. ‘Reed me noght,’ quod Reson, ‘no ruthe to have Til lordes and ladies loven alle truthe And haten alle harlotrie, to heren it or to mouthen it; Til Pernelles purfill be put in her hucche, And children cherissynge be chastised with yerdes And harlottes holynesse be holden for an hyne; Til clerkene coveitise be to clothe the povere and fede…

(IV.113-19)

[“Don’t speak to me,” said Reason, “of showing any pity/ Till lords and ladies all love truth/ And scorn all scurrility, to speak it or hear it;/ Till Parnel’s proud finery is put away in her chest,/ And cherishing of children is chastised with rods,/ And scoundrels’ sanctity is considered of no value;/ Till clerkly covetousness is to clothe and feed the poor….] Reason here provides a list of changes he would like to see, addressing various occupations and estates (lords and ladies, children, harlots, clerks). In the middle of this list, however, we get one

210

personal name, Pernelle.240 Personal names thus seem interchangeable with occupations, and all are equally subject, as types, as categories, to Reason’s wishes for reform. Personifications also seem to breed more personifications. Personifications spring up around certain key figures, such as Mede or Anima, revealing new aspects of that figure. Truth’s Seven Sisters (who are the porters in the castle of Christendom in Passus V), or Conscience’s five sons (Se-wel, Sey-wel, Here-wel, Werch-wel-with-thyn-hand, Godefray Go-wel), who protect Anima in Passus IX, exhibit no agency of their own, but serve only to provide more detailed information about something else (the vulnerability of Anima and the need for constant vigilance in Passus IX, or the nature of Christian identify in Passus V). The proliferation of personified characters reveals in another way the limitation of personification allegory. Because the personified character is rather limited in its range of action, yet more personifications are called in to provide a fuller picture. In the example given from Passus IX above, Conscience’s five sons, who play no role in the narrative, and whose significance is entirely tied to this single mention of their names, all exhibit features of the conscientiously ordered soul. These personifications truly are their names—since they are involved in no action, the only thing we know about them are their names, and these names all point back to Anima. These personifications, in other words, are almost entirely letteral; their significance stems, not from their involvement in the plot, but rather from the level of the word, from their names themselves. Like the allegorical landscape Piers outlines in Passus V, these moments expose the odd shape of allegory, which requires narrative, but whose significance both precedes and supersedes that narrative. At the moments when we see allegory proliferate, it produces more names, more words on the page, not necessarily more plot. The letteral associations that are instituted here do 240

Langland also tends to reuse certain personal names throughout the poem. Pernelle Proud-herte becomes the personification of pride in Passus V. 211

allow us to make interpretive allegorical statements—Conscience engenders in the individual a commitment to doing good in all aspects of life, and these good deeds in turn keep the soul from sin. But the elision of the literal level returns us to the significance of the letteral in making allegorical meaning. Similarly problematic are the personifications which Langland has crafted from entire syntactic units—Conscience’s servant and horse, “Tomme Trewe-tonge tel-me-no-tales-nelesynge-to-laughen-of-for-I-loved-hem-nevere” and “Suffre-til-I-se-my-tyme,” for example, or Piers’ wife, “Dame Werch-whan-tyme-is” [Dame Work While There Is Time] and sons “Doright-so-or-thi-dame-shal-thee-bete” [Do Right Or Your Dame Shall Beat You] and “Suffre-thiSovereyns-have-hir-wille” [Suffer Your Sovereigns To Have Their Will]. These figures have no real agency of their own; they don’t do anything in the narrative other than express some further aspect of the characters to whom they are related (Conscience and Piers in these cases). For Lavinia Griffiths, these names highlight a feature of personification allegory itself: “Personifications are not sustained as actants, and their readiness to revert to discourse undermines the completeness of the represented world.”241 In other words, the incompleteness of personifications comes to highlight the slipperiness of language more generally. The lack of agency of these most letteral personifications reveals yet another facet of the spectrum of personification that exists. And it would appear, in the case of “syntactic unit personification,” that the more specific the personification is, the less agency it has, reinforcing Simpson’s claims that a personification’s action is sustained by the ambiguity surrounding its meaning. A personification like “Dame Werch-whan-tyme-is” has even less agency, and thus less of a chance of advancing the plot than a character like Peace. In relation to the plot, in fact, these personifications have no agency at all; they don’t actually do anything (although they are, in both 241

Griffiths, Personification in Piers Plowman, 9. 212

the case of Truth’s sons and Piers’ family, embedded in a network of social relationships). Their agency exists in their status as letteral. The agency of these figures is tied to the level of the word, not to the level of the plot. The spectrum of agency we see afforded to allegorical characters is significant in that it shows a range of personifications exist in Piers Plowman—not all personified characters share the same amount of agency and depth of character. Some, in fact, seem to achieve personification in only the briefest outlines. Some personifications play complicated roles in the plot, becoming enmeshed in complicated networks of relationship and causing readers to spend a considerable amount of time puzzling over the metaphoric significance of their actions. Others, like Do-right-so-or-thi-dame-shal-thee-bete, which are almost entirely letteral, have no literal agency, though their allegorical significance seems clear. (In this case, Do-right-so demonstrates the good order Piers keeps in his home, as well as the reality and efficacy of corporal punishment, and thus metaphorically, that obedience to one’s superiors and hard work are the natural issue of the righteous laborer, Piers.) At one end of the spectrum, the most letteral personifications seem to reveal the agency at the level of the word, though they lack agency in the plot. The allegorical characters which have proper names seem to work inversely to the personifications. If personifications are created by taking a (typically abstract) common noun and making it into a character, names like “Munde the Miller” and “Pernele Proud-herte” take proper names and evacuate them of their deictic content. While there were probably millers named Munde, the point of this name is not to single out a particular miller, but rather to signal more evocatively the category “miller.” “Munde the Miller” thus takes a proper name and signals a type, rather than an individual, conjuring all the collective associations this profession would have had for a medieval reader. Like the syntactic unit personifications, then, the agency of these

213

names seems to be letteral, as the figures have a limited role to play in the plot. These most specific cases of personification thus reveal both the versatility and flexibility of allegory, as well as reminding us that all allegory constantly returns us to the most literal, the level of the word.

Personified Characters: Haukyn and Piers The figures of Haukyn and Piers Plowman provide interesting case studies for Langland’s use of allegory. Both have proper names, and a great deal of specific information is given about each. They both obviously have allegorical significance, though the line between the two is typically blurred. These characters, then, contain within themselves some of the allegorical spectrum that exists in the poem as a whole. Piers has received a great deal of scholarly attention, while Haukyn has received very little.242 What has gone almost entirely unnoticed is how much the two characters share in common.243 Haukyn the Actif Man Haukyn is another example of Langland’s interestingly “mixed” allegory. He appears after a scene of allegorical brilliance, the Banquet of Conscience, where Langland blends personification allegory with social critique, while also incorporating his thorough knowledge of theology and clerical culture. Conscience and Patience eventually leave the banquet together, dressed as pilgrims (again challenging a thorough rejection of pilgrimage), and they immediately run into a person Will describes as “a mynstral, as me tho thought” [a minstrel as it seemed to me then] (XIII.222). After Patience questions him, the man answers “I am a mynstrall…my name is 242

Almost all of the attention Haukyn has gotten has had to do either with what his character can tell us about medieval practices of labor and economy as they pertain to the availability and preparation of food, or with how Will’s exchanges with Haukyn continue Will’s journey of education and self-awareness. 243 This fact is noted by Britton Harwood, who argues that Haukyn is Piers at a “larval stage,” not yet fully subject to the sanctifying operations of Conscience. While there are clearly thematic links between the two figures, I am also interested in how they work similarly as allegorical characters. Britton J. Harwood, Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 99. 214

Activa Vita/ Al ydel ich hatie, for of Actif is my name/ A wafrer, wol ye wite, and serve manye lordes” [“I am a minstrel,” said that man, “my name is Activa Vita [the Active Life]/ I hate everything idle, for from ‘active’ is my name./ A wafer-seller, if you want to know, and I work for many lords”] (XIII.225-27). It is not until almost fifty lines later that this figure is given a proper name, and even then it is the narrator (Will) who does so: “I took greet kepe, by Crist, and Conscience bothe/ Of Haukyn the Actif Man, and how he was yclothed” [I took close heed, by Christ, and Conscience did too,/ Of Hawkin the Active Man and how he was dressed”] (272-73). In the fifty or so lines while he is only identified as “Actif,” we get a rather positive impression of this character. In keeping with the representations in the Banquet of Conscience, Actif complains that he is not rewarded for bringing bread as other minstrels are. “I have no goode giftes of thise grete lordes/ For no breed that I brynge forth” [I have no good gifts from these great lords,/ For any bread I bring forth] (235-36). This criticism of Actif’s mirrors Langland’s in the Banquet of Conscience, and his more overt criticisms of lords later in the Passus. But it also highlights Actif’s contribution. Unlike minstrels, whose only purpose is to amuse, Actif is supplying a vital good: bread. “Al Londoun,” he says, “liketh wel my wafres/ And louren whan thei lakken hem” [All London, I believe, like my wafers well] (264-65); “Beggeris and bidderis of my breed craven/ Faitours and frères and folk with brode crounes” [Beggars and beadsmen crave bread from me,/ Fakers and friars and folk with shaven heads] (243-44). (The reference to London calls to mind the riots that happened periodically when the city ran short on bread.) Actif also repeats twice that he is opposed to idleness (226, 239), and he aligns himself with Piers and the pardon he was given for all who work truly. Actif states that he feeds “alle trewe travaillours and tiliers of the erthe” [all true toilers and tillers of the earth] (240), thus fulfilling the terms of the pardon: “alle that holpen hym [Piers] to erye, to sette, or to

215

sowe…Pardon with Piers the Plowman Truthe hath ygraunted” [And anyone who helped him plow or sow…Pardon with Piers Plowman Truth has granted] (VII.6, 8). Yet Actif finds himself without sufficient material remuneration from the lords he feeds, as well as without sufficient spiritual consolation. He states that he feeds the Pope “and…his palfrey” (the latter hinting at the material luxuries that high-ranking clerics enjoy) but receives no “provendre ne personage” [prebendary nor parsonage] in payment. What he receives instead is “a pardon with a peis of leed and two polles amyddes” [a pardon with a piece of lead and pair of heads in the middle]244 (24546), but Actif considers this to be useless!245 The description of the pardon as physical object returns us to the concerns raised in the second vision. As a piece of paper, a pardon has no real spiritual efficacy, which is highlighted by Actif’s expressed preference for a pardon (a “bille”) that would cure the plague (that is, for a piece of paper that would be materially efficacious). Actif goes on to say that, if he had such a pardon, he would “be prest to the peple, paast for to make…founde I that his pardoun mighte lechen a man” [be a priest to the people to prepare pastries…if I found that his pardon might cure a man] (XIII.251-53). These lines seem to suggest that Actif is fundamentally misunderstanding spiritual realities. He suggests that supplying the people with food would make him a priest, and he wants a pardon that heals people physically. But pardons, understood in the way the church carefully defined them, made claims only to spiritual healing; in fact, the entire work of the

244

In stating that he does not receive a clerical position (prebendary or parsonage), Haukyn is also pointing out practices of simony common in the medieval church. Clerical offices were not supposed to be given as payment at all, though, of course, they were frequently (one of the ecclesiastical practices Langland has in his sights). The pardon with its lead seal imprinted with two heads is the official papal seal, stamped with the heads of Peter and Paul. 245 In one of the most thorough scholarly treatments of Haukyn, Lynn Staley argues that Langland contrasts the salvation found internally, through faculties such as Conscience and virtues such as Patience, with salvation found externally, through engagement with the church. She also places Haukyn in a network of fourteenth-century English texts that represent the sinful man as wearing dirty clothes. Lynn Staley, “The Man in Foul Clothes and a Late Fourteenth-Century Conversation about Sin,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 1–47. 216

church is the spiritual reconciliation of God and humanity; any physical or material advantage is purely supplemental to this spiritual goal. Langland goes on to blur the lines between material and spiritual efficacy, however. Actif’s suggestion that he would be a priest through his provision of bread evokes both the priest’s consecration of the Eucharist (the only element in which many lay people would partake), and Jesus’ command to Peter to “feed my sheep” in the Gospel of John. Both evocations associate Actif with Piers (and with priests) as a figure who might mediate between the people and God. This last association is heightened because Actif is criticizing the Pope, both for not paying him for his labor, and because he implicitly suggests that, since the Pope has the power of Peter, he could heal the sick if he so desired. This implied criticism is immediately qualified and hence neutralized, however, by Actif’s entirely orthodox explanation of why people might not experience miraculous healing: “it is for men ben noght worthi/ To have the grace of God, and no gilt of the Pope/ For may no blessynge doon us boote but if we wile amende” [it’s because people are not worthy/ To have the grace of God, and no guilt of the pope./ For no blessing may benefit us unless we better our lives] (256-58). Here Actif both emphasizes the need for the sinner to “amend himself” by way, it seems, of congruent merit, and he exculpates the Pope (and by extension other clergy).246 So in the first fifty lines in which we meet Actif, he seems to be a fairly upright figure. He works hard, participating in the still-agriculturally focused economy, aligns himself with Piers and his pardon, and hints at a criticism of both the clergy and questionable spiritual practices like the giving of pardons. His description takes a sharp turn, however, when he becomes “Haukyn the Actif Man.” At this point, Will describes him in this way 246

Simpson evokes two types of merit to explain the sense in which the pardon can be operative in Passus VII: “Condign merit is an absolute, strict merit, whereby man can be said to merit the reward of salvation absolutely and justly. Congruent merit, on the other hand, is relative and conditional, whereby man receives reward from God out of God’s generosity.” Simpson, Piers Plowman, 79. 217

He hadde a cote of Cristendom as Holy Kirke bileveth; Ac it was moled in many places with manye sondry plottes— Or pride here a plot, and there a plot of unbuxom speche, Or scorning and of scoffyng and of unskillful berynge; As in apparaill and in porte proud amonges the peple; Otherwise than he hath with herte or sighte shewynge; Forwhy he bosteth and braggeth with manye bolde othes…. (XIII.274-78). [He had a coat of Christendom, as Holy Kirk [Church] believes,/ But it was soiled with many spots in sundry places,/ Here a spot of insolent speech, and there a spot of pride,/ Or scorning and of scoffing and unsuitable behavior;/ As in apparel and deportment proud among the people;/ Presenging himself as something more than he seems or is;/ Wishing all men would think him what he is not;/ And so he boasts and brags with many bold oaths….] Here Haukyn (as I will now begin calling him, since the text shifts in its identification) appears to be an Everyman figure, since he wears a “coat of Christendom.” The “spots” on his coat signify that his active life leaves much to be desired. The coat in fact becomes the allegorical representation of both his identity as a Christian and of his sinful life; it literally makes visible Haukyn’s sins. Like much allegory, the coat externalizes an interior reality, gives a specific, physical shape to an abstract quality, such as lechery or pride. The narrative then goes on to give shape to these abstract qualities by presenting in detail the ways in which Haukyn indulged in each of these sins. The sins (“Greed,” “Sloth”) appear first on the coat, and then we hear how they emerge in Haukyn’s life. The coat is a fitting figure for these sins. Clothing stands at the boundary of the self and the world; it is external to the self, but also intimate, worn next to the skin, and it conveys something about one’s identity, though it can also be taken off and changed.

218

At the start of Passus XIV, Haukyn’s coat in fact reminds readers again of his sympathetic qualities. He protests to Patience, “I have but oon hater…I am the lasse to blame Though it be soiled and selde clene—I slepe therinne o nyghtes; And also I have an houswif, hewen and children— Uxorem duxi, et ideo non possum venire— That wollen bymolen it many tyme, maugree my chekes. It hath be laved in Lente and out of Lente bothe With the sope of siknesse, that seketh wonder depe, And with the losse of catel, that [me was] looth forto agulte God or any good [gome], by aught that I wiste; And was shryven of the preest, that [for my synnes gaf me] To penaunce, pacience, and povere men to fede, Al for coveitise of my Cristendom in clennesse to kepen it. And kouthe I nevere, by Crist! kepen it clene an houre, That I ne soiled it with sighte or som ydel speche, Or thorugh werk or thorugh word, or wille of myn herte, That I ne flobre it foule fro morwe til even.” (XIV.1-15) [“I have only one whole outfit,” said Hawkin. “I am the less to blame/ Though it is soiled and seldom clean: I sleep in it at night;/ And also I have a housewife, hired help, and children—I have taken a wife and therefore I cannot come—Who will often spill on it and spoil it despite anything I do./ It’s been laundered in Lent and out of Lent as well/ With the soap of sickness that searches very deep,/ And lathered with the loss of property till I was loath at hear/ To aggrieve God or good man in any way I knew,/ And so was shriven by the priest, who for my sins assigned me/ Patience as my penance, and to feed poor men/ All to take care of my Christendom, to keep it in cleanliness./ And I could never, by Christ, keep it clean an hour,/ That I didn’t soil it with sight or with some idle

219

speech,/ Or by work or by word or by will of my heart--/ That I don’t make it all messy from morning till evening.] A coat is meant to provide protection, and Haukyn’s coat is perhaps soiled precisely because he is “Actif.” Haukyn’s dirty coat is, to some degree, unavoidable, since he must live and work in the world.247 His speech here reasserts the complications, and hence temptations, inherent in the active life. A wife, children, and a household do introduce additional responsibilities and potential obstacles into the active life. (And Haukyn does not have the advantage of being married to “Dame Werch-whan-tyme-is,” as Piers does.) Haukyn emphasizes the “hard use” his coat gets—he only has one, after all, and he sleeps in it! It was been washed with the soap of sickness and the loss of material goods. Patience will in fact go on later to praise the longsuffering endurance of such hardships, which have exactly the penitential effect that Haukyn claims here. These are the things that have removed the stains, or sins, from his coat. The coat gains further significance when we realize that it is actually the grammatical subject of the verb “shryven” in line 9. The coat has been washed and confessed. The coat is a representation of Haukyn’s faith, of his identity as a Christian, and Haukyn is himself both a personification (Actif) and an Everyman. So this allegorical figure is wearing a coat that is itself an allegorical representation of this Everyman’s religious identity. The piling on of allegorical layers, and the confusion of allegorical characters, makes it difficult to understand the dynamics of personification at work here. Will and Patience observe the “plots” on Haukyn’s coat, from which they are able to extrapolate a detailed understanding of his sins; these observations are then elaborated with Haukyn’s own first-person confession. The next one hundred lines thus harken back to the confession of the Seven Deadly Sins in Passus V, as Haukyn both directly and indirectly 247

Coats were apparently often given as gifts to minstrels. Ibid., 139. 220

(through the narration) recounts his many sins in great detail. Haukyn in fact describes (or is described) committing each of the seven sins. He desires to be thought well of, and will lie in order to achieve this goal (pride 288-307); he is greedy and will steal from his neighbors to increase his own wealth (355-84); he indulges in sexual licentiousness with “ech a maide that he mette” [every maid that he met] (343-54); his wrath and jealousy lead him to slander others and avenge himself if he does not have “maistrie” [mastery] (321-42); his sloth keeps him from making efforts to reconcile himself to God and thus leads him to despair (384-99, 407-408). Haukyn’s confession covers each of seven sins except gluttony, but at the end Will remarks that “that glotoun with grete othes his garnement hadde soiled/ And foule beflobered it, as with fals speche” [the glutton’s garment was soiled with great oaths,/ And sloppily beslobbered, as with speaking falsely], and then goes on to note briefly that he also “moore mete eet and dronk than kynde myghte defie” [ate and drank more at meals than nature might digest] (400-401, 404). Like the recounting in Passus V, we see that Haukyn’s sins are deeply social; they unfold in a communal context. And they are very “worldly” sins. Haukyn is not greedy for knowledge, for example, or proud because he is considered spiritually superior. He desires wealth, he is jealous of his neighbors’ material gain, and he lies in order that those around him will think that he is handsome, skillful, and generous. Haukyn exhibits so many sins, all in great detail, that it seems as though the descriptions from the Seven Sins in Passus V have all been combined into one character—an everyman. As a personification, Actif becomes Haukyn—whose personal name suggests specificity. But the personification itself had a high degree of specificity—with a defined occupation, a baker whose labor is essential. Actif’s personal identity is stressed repeatedly. When he is first introduced, he tells Will and Patience his occupation (“wafrer”), which is in fact only one of the

221

many possible vocations those in the active life could have. The properly named figure Haukyn then becomes allegorical again as an everyman whose sins exceed the particular possibilities of any given individual. The phrase “Haukyn the Actif Man” (XIII.273) is repeated exactly three times (XIII.458, XIV.24, 320), emphasizes the blending of personal and personification. Early in Passus XIV his occupation is also mentioned in proximity to his personal and allegorical names: “Haukyn…the wafrer, which is Activa Vita” [Hawkin…the wafer-seller, who is Activa Vita] (28). No other character in Piers Plowman exhibits this explicit blending of personal and allegorical status. The allegorical characters are never given additional personal names, or such specific occupations, while Piers, perhaps Haukyn’s closest analogue, is not identified as a personification. And the many personal names that are listed briefly throughout the poem are never developed; they function only as quick and evocative types. The confession that we see at the end of Passus XIII would be fitting for Actif, as a type representing all those in the active life. But for one named man, with a single occupation, it does not fit. This character does, however, reveal a fundamental tension in the Active Life, the difficulty inherent in the task Piers set out in Passūs VI-VII, of meriting salvation, even in congruent terms, through faithfully laboring in the world. Haukyn seems to be both literal and allegorical, a blend of a Langlandian with Spenserian personification. Reading his character returns us to the challenges of determining which level of meaning we are reading on, as well as the use of extremely specific and material description to give shape to what might seem to be abstraction. Piers the Ploughman Like Haukyn, Piers Plowman is another figure who blends both a specific and personal identity with a deeply allegorical significance. Much scholarly ink has been spilled over the role Piers plays in Passūs VI-VII, followed by discussions of his appearances in Passūs XVI-XVII. I would

222

like to start my discussion at Piers’ final appearance, in Passus XIX. Here we see Piers return to his ploughing, but at this late point in the poem, the labor is purely spiritual. When he ploughs the half acre in Passus VI, the physical labor has a distinctly spiritual import, but the material action is still indispensable. Laboring faithfully in the way that one’s estate requires is seen to have spiritual merit precisely because physical work is necessary for the life of the community. The group of people whom Piers instructs plough (or contribute to the work of ploughing) instead of going on pilgrimage. But in Passus XIX, Piers’ ploughing is entirely allegorized. Grace gives him a team of oxen which are Luke, Mark, Matthew, and John (the gospel authors), as well as another team made up of the Latin Fathers—Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory, and Jerome (263-65, 269-70). The grains Piers sows are the cardinal virtues, and the field is in fact the human soul (274-75). The Old and New Testaments are allegorized as harrows (tools used to cultivate the soil) that both the Fathers and Piers use (309-10). This allegorical moment turns to invoke explicitly the parable of the sower, where weeds, which are vices, grow up and choke out the seeds that Piers has sown. (The parable of the sower in Matthew 13 is followed by Jesus’ intimation, in response to the disciples’ request, that he speaks in parables in order to confound people.) The clear link to the biblical parable heightens the purely allegorical nature of this ploughing—Jesus’ gloss of his own parable establishes sowing and reaping (i.e. ploughing) as deeply allegorical action.248 Piers no longer directs the physical labor of a mini-society, but his allegorical ploughing now places him at the head of Langland’s ideal church. This movement, from physical to spiritual labor, seems to pull against the “material element” of figurative language. As he did with pilgrimage in Passūs V-VI, Langland appears to be undermining the 248

Simpson points out the ways in which Passus XIX does not abandon physical labor, but in fact recasts it to reflect more accurately the urban and mercantile aspects of fourteenth-century English economy. Grace’s distribution of gifts, which include many vocations that have highly material components (craftsmen and merchants, agricultural laborers) emphasizes the ongoing presence of culturally specific material concerns. But Piers’ labor has become entirely spiritualized. Ibid., 198–99. 223

literal, physical practice of ploughing (which is, nonetheless, remains present in the use of the metaphor). The “allegorical tension” is thus displaced from pilgrimage to ploughing here. Pilgrimage has dropped away over the course of the poem, but at the end of the poem Langland perhaps finally represents purely spiritualized labor. This shift, from physical to spiritual ploughing, also reflects the shifting and evolving identity of Piers himself. When we first meet Piers, he is quickly established as a spiritual authority. He knows the way to St. Truth, and he is presented as an alternative to the “professional pilgrim,” who cannot actually help the earnest group find what they are looking for. Piers remains a ploughman—he defers to the knight and even, in a way, to the priest in Passus VII when he cannot read the Latin of his pardon. But he instructs people in all estates, and his is the authoritative voice driving the action of Passūs VI and VII. When he reappears later in the poem, his role as an essential mediator of salvation becomes clear. Anima states that, without Piers’ help, Will will never be able to see charity, and that Piers sees “what is the wille,” which suggests both his insight into the faculty of the will, and this particular character, Will (XV.195-200). In Passus XV the association of Piers with both Christ and Peter is made clear—“Piers the Plowman—Petrus, id est, Christus” [Piers the Plowman—Peter, that is, Christ] (XV.212). The wording of this line relies on an odd combination of simple apposition and a more specific, exegetical mode to conflate all three characters.249 The line is made up of the juxtaposed two names connected only by the “id est” (a meaningless connection to readers who did not know Latin). When read quickly, the line can be summed up as “Piers—Petrus—Christus,” where the dashes are really meant to communicate identification (Piers=Petrus=Christus). The exact nature of this 249

“Id est” was typically used to make typological associations between the Old and New Testaments. Both here and in the citation of 1 Corinthians 13, the macaronic text heightens the attention to the presence of figuration. In quoting the Latin biblical texts, Langland invokes all the medieval assumptions about the figurative meanings contained in Scripture. 224

identification isn’t spelled out. Piers is somehow Peter is somehow Christ. The second half of the line also is not exactly clear. It seems to conflate Matthew 16:18 (“you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”) and 1 Corinthians 10:4 (“they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ”). The latter verse clearly equates Christ and petrus (“rock”), but the identification between Piers and Petrus, in light of Piers’ spiritual authority on earth, strongly associates Piers and Peter. None of these identifications are exact; all contain similarities and differences. (Peter is like Christ in this way, but not in that.) In this way, these relationships work “figuratively,” like metaphors, presenting us with paradoxical associations.250 Given this particular line’s placement in the poem, a paradoxical mode of signification is not surprising. The line comes just after Anima and Will’s discussion of charity, which suggests that charity is both in the self (“I seigh hym nevere smoothly but as myself in mirour/ Hic in enigmate, tunc facie ad faciem” [I never saw him surely except as myself in a mirror/ Here darkly, then face to face] (162)) and references 1 Corinthians 13:12 (“Now we see darkly/ enigmatically in a glass, then we will see face to face”). Charity is an “enigma”—enigma being another good word for figurative language.251 And in light of Will’s claim that he finds it only in himself, charity becomes conflated with Christ. Even at this earlier moment in Passus XV, we have a sort of conflation of identities: charity—Will—Christ. But this is, as Will himself says, an enigma that only figurative language can explain. Piers’ identifications with Peter and Christ become central to Langland’s allegorical representation of salvation. When Piers is Grace’s ploughman in Passus XIX, he is a Petrine figure, as he is in the tree of charity passage (where he cannot be Christ, because Christ is one of 250

Simpson suggests that all the typological figures in the fifth vision (Abraham, Moses, the Samaritan, and Piers) work like this. “All figural allegory plays with the idea of equations that are not, in fact, wholly equations.” Simpson, Piers Plowman, 169. 251 Curtis Gruenler, “Piers Plowman and the Medieval Uses of Enigma” (PhD Diss, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998). 225

the three pillars that props up the tree of charity). But in Passūs XVII-XVIII, Piers and Christ are strongly associated. When Anima mentions Piers’ name at the start of Passus XVI, Will swoons—this strong, emotional reaction to a mere name is suggestive of the almost charm-like power of Jesus’ name in saints’ lives and other religious literature. And then comes one of the most compelling allegorical figurations in the poem, which unite Piers and Christ through an incarnational logic: This Jesus of his gentries wol juste in Piers armes, In his helm and in his haubergeon, humana natura. That Crist be noght biknowe here for consummatus Deus In Piers paltok the Plowman this prikiere shal ryde; For no dynt shal hym dere as in deitate Patris.

(XVIII.22-26)

[This Jesus for his gentleness will joust in Piers’ arms,/ In his helmet and hauberk, humana natura [human nature],/ So that Christ be not disclosed here as consummatus Deus [consummated/perfect God]./ In the plate armor of Piers the Plowman this jouster will ride,/ For no dint will do him injury as in deitate Patris [in the godhead of the Father].] “Jesus jousts in Piers’ arms”—a wonderful figuration of the Incarnation that engages the metaphor (recurrent in the last visions of the poem) of Christ as a knight. In the first line, the alliteration strongly links Jesus with the words that mark him as noble, “gentries” and “juste.” Three of the lines have Latin phrases in the second stave (humana natura, consummatus Deus, in deitate Patris), and these phrases all alliterate. (Not all Latin half-lines in the poem alliterate, and the concentration of Latin lines is notable.) Furthermore, the language change reiterates the point that is made in line 24, that “Christ is not known here.” Though these phrases might be recognizable to those who are only familiar with the mass, the effect is one of obscuring meaning.

226

In these lines, Piers, or, more precisely, Piers’ “arms,” come to represent Christ’s human nature. This metaphor utilizes the significance of the material object (armor) to great effect. Armor was used protectively, which in these lines exposes the paradox that, in taking on human nature, Christ in fact became radically vulnerable and, furthermore, that Christ’s humanity in fact cloaked his far more powerful and divine identity. “Piers armes”—as actual defensive armor— are not efficacious in the least. “Arms,” however, could also refer to the heraldic devices by which noble families could be identified. Christ comes to Jerusalem identifying himself as human, not as divine, and this identification takes the form of heraldic affiliation. Having a coat of arms and wearing armor were both marks of class and identification of family (heraldic iconography even extended to the distinction of fathers from sons, and of brothers from one another), and the legal repercussions for wearing arms to which one was not entitled were severe. Jesus jousting in Piers arms is thus a proud and deeply meaningful affiliation. (Christ’s humanity is also emphasized by way of an affiliation with Piers at the start of Passus XVIII when he rides into Jerusalem looking “semblable to the Samaritan, and somdeel to Piers the Plowman” [resembling the Samaritan and somewhat Piers the Plowman] (10).) The idea of Christ “wearing” his human nature is a common one.252 Julian of Norwich uses the metaphor of clothing repeatedly in her Revelation of Divine Love. In her vision of the Lord and the Servant, she describes the servant, who is Christ, as wearing “Adam’s kirtel,” and she goes on to interpret the kirtel allegorically. As I mentioned earlier in this chapter, clothing has deep associations with identity, and it is thus a rich and fitting image for the Incarnation.

252

This metaphor of the Incarnation as clothing can smack of Docetism (the second-century heresy that held that Christ only appeared to be human). One wonders what the otherwise-orthodox Langland or Julian might say if pressed with this charge, but I think this concern underscores the theological necessity and complication of metaphor. All metaphors are successes and failures. 227

In Passus XVIII, Piers represents Christ’s human nature. In Passus XIX, however, he returns to being a Petrine figure; Grace makes him “my procurator and my reve….My prowor and my plowman…on erthe” [my proxy and my reeve…my purveyor and my plowman…on earth]. Furthermore, Grace makes him “registrer to receive Redde quod debes” [registrar to receive redde quod debes] (260-62). This Latin phrase, “redde quod debes” (‘pay what you owe’) takes us back to the pardon in Passus VII, and poem’s preoccupation with the efficacy or necessity of human efforts in relation to salvation. The pardon that Piers rips up simply states “Do wel and have wel, and God shal have thi soule…Do yvel and have yvel and…the devel shal have thi soule” [Do well, and have well, and God will have your soul…Do evil, and have evil, and…the Devil will have your soul] (VII.112-14). Salvation here seems premised on the strictest notion of justice (of just desserts!). The poem begins to elucidate the means by which God allows Christians to merit salvation provisionally, by participating in the system for redemption that God himself has set up through the work of the atonement. In becoming the “registrar,” the one who receives the “what is owed” (redde quod debes), Piers is the mediator in this new system. He is, that is, both the representative and head of the church. (He allegorically builds the church in Passus XIX, out of the timber of the cross and the mortar of Christ’s blood.) If Piers Plowman takes up questions of salvation and redemption thematically, however, the poem succeeds in these representations through its form. In the figure of Piers, who is ploughman, priest (Peter), and king (Christ), the reader finds redemption through her engagement with the figurative language of the text. Redemption is enacted through Piers’ allegorical transformations, in the way in which he is transmuted from a human ploughman to Christ’s human nature, to the head of the church. The figurative language is what actually produces the movement of redemption in the poem, and it is the reader’s process of struggling

228

through these allegorical shifts that allows her to participate in her own redemption. This redemptive movement remains always fixed in the materiality of the physical world. And though Piers’ labor may be spiritualized by the end of the poem, his identity as a ploughman still gives shape to these labors. Redemption is enacted through language itself, and through language’s reliance on and preservation of its own materiality.

Conclusion: The Return to Personification Passus XX returns the poem to a form of personification allegory that the later visions have abandoned. Personified virtues and vices populate the passus, in addition to intellectual faculties, stages of life, and some new personifications, such as Hende Speche, that seem inspired by the Roman de la Rose. Along with this expansive allegorical cast, we also see a more combative form of action akin to that seen in Prudentius. In Passus XX, the personifications are literally fighting—the vices have besieged the Barn of Unity, were Conscience tries to mobilize both the virtues and personifications such as Elde and Death to motivate the people’s defense. Piers disappears in this passus, though he is sorely needed. Conscience tries to maintain the Barn of Unity and to draw people into it. He enlists the aid of Clergy and Contrition, but the death knell sounds when these personifications are unable to help. The very moment when the Barn is truly doomed is when a “Friar-flatterere,” one “Sire Penetrans-Domos,” is allowed in. After this point, Clergy can no longer offer protection. The friar assigns Contrition an extremely light penance, and “Contricion…clene foryeten to crye and to wepe/ And wake for his wikked werkes as he was wont to doone” [Contrition had clean forgotten to cry and to week/ And wake for his wicked works as he was wont to do] (XX.370-71). Unlike, Mede, whose linguistic ambiguity is part of what drives the action of the first vision, contrition is not a particularly

229

ambiguous word. So when he “leaves himself” through following the friar’s guidance, it is not because the allegorical action is exploiting a linguistic ambiguity, but rather because Contrition has stopped being himself, has “forgotten to cry and to guard against wicked works.” In this act of forgetting, the narrative itself comes to a stop. Langland’s words, that Contrition “for confort of his confessour, contricion he lafte” [because of the comfort his confessor gave he abandoned contrition] (372), echo Jesus in Matthew 5: “If the salt loses its saltiness, how shall it be made salty again?”. This moment introduces a linguistic and allegorical impossibility. How can Contrition leave contrition? This moment captures the cataclysmic, apocalyptic ending to the poem. When the Barn of Unity is swamped, overrun by friars, and when the people, despite the assaults of death, need, old age, and illness refuse to be guided by Conscience and Holiness, then the impossibility of a personification becoming what it is not is realized. At this moment the poem must end. The integrity of the allegory is lost (to great poetic effect), but the poem, as an allegory, cannot proceed. Language itself is disintegrating here, ceasing to mean what it says, just as the church is falling apart, ceasing to be what it is. When Contrition leaves contrition, the letteral, literal, and allegorical come apart. The letteral meaning ceases to signify, and hence can no longer drive the literal action. One final allegorical statement about the collapse of the allegory itself might be made, but such interpretations can no longer contribute to a revised understanding of the personified concept, since the letteral has been evacuated of meaning. The allegorical “feedback loop” has broken down, but without any productive gesture at a transcendent beyond. Instead, the (literal) narrative simply stops. If the poem ends when the relationship between allegory’s three levels breaks down, it also ends reminding us of the centrality of figurative language to the entire text. After the vices overtake the Barn of Unity, Conscience leaves, crying after Grace and saying, “I wil

230

become a pilgryme,/ And walken as wyde as al the worlde lasteth/ To seke Piers the Plowman” [I will become a pilgrim,/ And walk as wide as the world reaches/ To seek Piers the Plowman] (XX.380-82). Conscience sets off on pilgrimage, wandering, as it were, away from the poem, which can no longer continue, and mirroring the formal impetus of the alliterative long line itself, gesturing towards what the text cannot itself contain. But the return of pilgrimage reiterates how important this metaphor is to the poem. Pilgrimage regains the significance its literal practice might seem to lose in the first vision, as Conscience undertakes to wander the world looking for the enigmatic Piers Plowman.

231

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aers, David. “Christianity for Courtly Subjects: Reflections on the Gawain-Poet.” In A Companion to the Gawain Poet, eds Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson:91–101. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ———. “The Self Mourning: Reflections on Pearl.” Speculum 68, no. 1 (January 1993): 54–73. Aers, David, and Lynn Staley. Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Anderson, Wendy Love. The Discernment of Spirits: Assessing Visions and Visionaries in the Late Middle Ages. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011. Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron, eds. Poems of the Pearl Manuscript. 3rd ed. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1996. Astell, Ann W. The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. On Christian Teaching. Translated by R. P. H. Green. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Baker, Denise N. “Julian of Norwich and the Varieties of Middle English Mystical Discourse.” In A Companion to Julian of Norwich, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy, 53–63. Woodbridge, CT: Brewer, 2008. ———. “The Structure of the Soul and the ‘Godly Wylle’ in Julian of Norwich’s Showings.” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England Exeter Symposium VII (2004): 37–49. Barbetti, Claire. Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Barney, Stephen A. Allegories of History, Allegories of Love. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979. ———. “Langland’s Mighty Line.” In William Langland’s Piers Plowman: A Book of Essays, edited by Kathleen Hewett-Smith, 103–17. New York: Routledge, 2001. Barratt, Alexandra. “‘No Such Sitting’: Julian Tropes the Trinity.” In A Companion to Julian of Norwich, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy, 42–52. Woodbridge, CT: Brewer, 2008. Barr, Helen. “Pearl; Or, ‘The Jeweller’s Tale’.” Medium Ævum 69, no. 1 (2000): 59–79. 232

Barr, Jessica. Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010. Beaston, Lawrence. “The Pearl-Poet and the Pelagians.” Religion and Literature 36 (2004): 15– 38. Bennett, Michael. “The Court of Richard II and the Promotion of Literature.” In Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, edited by Barbara Hannawalt, 3–20. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Bloomfield, Josephine. “Aristotelian Luminescence, Thomistic Charity: Vision, Reflection, and Self-Love in Pearl.” Studies in Philology 108, no. 2 (2011): 165–88. Boenig, Robert. “Pseudo-Dionysius and the Via towards England.” In Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, edited by William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig, 21–37. Cambridge, U.K.: D.S. Brewer, 1997. Bogdanos, Theodore. Pearl, Image of the Ineffable: A Study in Medieval Poetic Symbolism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983. Bowers, John M. The Politics of Pearl: Court Poetry in the Age of Richard II. Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2001. Brown, Peter. “Middle English Dream Visions.” In Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, edited by Peter Brown, 22–50. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Burrow, J. A. “Fantasy and Language in The Cloud of Unknowing.” Essays in Criticism XXVII, no. 4 (1977): 283–98. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books, 2011. ———. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Cervone, Cristina Maria. Poetics of the Incarnation: Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Chartrand-Burke, Tony. “Against the Proud Scholars of the Devil: Anti-Intellectual Rhetoric in The Cloud of Unknowing.” Mystics Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1997): 115–36. Cicero. De Oratore I-III. Edited by A. S. Wilkins. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2002. Clark, John P. H., ed. Richard Methley: Divina Caligo Ignorancie: A Latin Glossed Version of 233

The Cloud of Unknowing. Analecta Cartusiana 119:3. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 2009. ———. The Cloud of Unknowing: An Introduction. 3 vols. Analecta Cartusiana 119. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1995. ———. , ed. The Latin Versions of the Cloud of Unknowing. 2 vols. Analecta Cartusiana 119. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1989. Clark, J.P.H. “Nature, Grace, and the Trinity in Julian of Norwich.” Downside Review 100 (1982): 203–20. ———. “Sources and Theology in The Cloud of Unknowing.” Downside Review 98 (1980): 83– 109. ———. “Time and Eternity in Julian of Norwich.” Downside Review 109 (1991): 259–76. Clopper, Lawrence M., Ann W. Astell, and James J. Paxson. “Langland and Allegory: A Proposition.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 15 (2001): 35–59. Condren, Edward I. The Numerical Universe of the Gawain-Pearl Poet: Beyond Phi. Gainesvillle: University Press of Florida, 2002. Davenport, Tony. “Jewels and Jewellers in Pearl.” Review of English Studies 59 (2008): 508–20. Donner, Morton. “A Grammatical Perspective on Word Play in Pearl.” The Chaucer Review 22, no. 4 (1988): 322–31. Dyas, Dee. Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700-1500. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2005. Earl, James W. “Saint Margaret and the Pearl Maiden.” Modern Philology 70 (1972): 1–8. Edmondson, George. “Pearl: The Shadow of the Object, the Shape of the Law.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 30–31. Elliott, Dyan. Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Emery, Kent, Jr. “The Cloud of Unknowing and Mystica Theologia.” In The Roots of the Modern Christian Tradition, edited by E. Rozanne Elder, 46–70. Spirituality of Western Christendom 2. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984. Furey, Constance M. “Sexuality.” In The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, edited by Amy Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman, 328–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 234

Gallacher, Patrick J, ed. The Cloud of Unknowing. TEAMS Middle English Texts. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1997. Garrison, Jennifer. “Failed Signification: Corpus Christi and Corpus Mysticum in Piers Plowman.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 97–123. ———. “Liturgy and Loss: Pearl and the Ritual Reform of the Aristocratic Subject.” Chaucer Review 44, no. 3 (2010): 294–322. Gayk, Shannon, and Kathleen Tonry, eds. Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Ghosh, Kantik, and Vincent Gillespie, eds. After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. Gillespie, Vincent. “‘[S]he Do the Police in Different Voices’: Pastiche, Ventriloquism and Parody in Julian of Norwich.” In A Companion to Julian of Norwich, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy, 192–207. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2008. Gillespie, Vincent, and Maggie Ross. “The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of Norwich.” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England V (1992): 53–77. Glasscoe, Marion. English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith. London: Longman, 1993. Gordon, E.V., ed. Pearl. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. Gregory of Nyssa. The Life of Moses. Translated by Abraham Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. Griffiths, Lavinia. Personification in Piers Plowman. Cambridge UK: D.S. Brewer, 1985. Gruenler, Curtis. “Piers Plowman and the Medieval Uses of Enigma.” PhD Diss, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998. Hägg, Henny Fiska. Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Apophaticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hanna, Ralph III. “Defining Midde English Alliterative Poetry.” In The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff, edited by Teresa Tavormina and R.F. Yeager, 43–64. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995. Harper, Elizabeth. “Pearl in the Context of Fourteenth-Century Gift Economies.” Chaucer Review 44, no. 4 (2010): 421–39. Harwood, Britton J. “Pearl As Diptych.” In Text and Matter: New Critical Perspectives of the 235

Pearl-Poet, edited by Robert J. Blanch, Mirian Youngerman Miller, and Julian N. Wasserman, 61–78. Troy, NY: The Whitston Publishing Company, 1991. ———. Piers Plowman and the Problem of Belief. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Hodgson, Phyllis, ed. Deonise Hid Diuinite, and Other Treatises on Contemplative Prayer Related to The Cloud of Unknowing. Early English Text Society, No. 231. London: Oxford University Press, 1955. ———. , ed. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling. Early English Text Society. Original Series, No. 218. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2002. Hollywood, Amy M. Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Hussey, S.S. “The Audience for the Middle English Mystics.” In De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, edited by Michael G. Sargent, 109–12. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1989. Jenkins, Ena. “Julian’s Revelation of Love: A Web of Metaphor.” In A Companion to Julian of Norwich, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy, 181–91. Woodbridge, CT: Brewer, 2008. Johnson, Eleanor. Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Julian of Norwich. The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and a Revelation of Love. Edited by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Justice, Steven. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Kay, Sarah. Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Kirk, Elizabeth D. “Langland’s Plowman and the Recreation of Fourteenth-Century Religious Metaphor.” The Yearbook of Langland Studies 2 (1988): 1–21. Knepper, Timothy D. Negating Negation: Against the Apophatic Abandonment of the Dionysian Corpus. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013. Knowles, David. The English Mystical Tradition. New York: Harper, 1961.

236

Kruger, Steven F. Dreaming in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2007. Lagerholm, Annika Sylén. Pearl and Contemplative Writing. Lund Studies in English. Lund: Lund University, Dept. of English, 2005. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Langland, William. Piers Plowman. Edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Stephen H. A. Shepherd. New York: Norton, 2006. ———. The Vision of Piers Plowman. Edited by A.V.C. Schmidt. London: Everyman, 1995. Leclercq, Jean. The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture. 3rd edition. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982. Lees, Rosemary Ann. The Negative Language of the Dionysian School of Mystical Theology: An Approach to the Cloud of Unknowing. 2 vols. Analecta Cartusiana 107. Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1983. Levine, Caroline. “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies.” Victorian Studies 48, no. 4 (2006): 625–57. Levinson, Marjorie. “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 558–69. Lichtmann, Maria R. “‘I Desyrede a Bodylye Syght’: Julian of Norwich and the Body.” Mystics Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1991): 12–19. Lochrie, Karma. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Lynch, Kathryn L. The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy, and Literary Form. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988. Mann, Jill. “Allegory and Piers Plowman.” In The Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, edited by Andrew Cole and Andrew Galloway, 65–82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. “Langland and Allegory.” In The Morton W. Bloomfield Lectures, 1989-2005, edited by Daniel Donoghue, James Simpson, and Nicholas Watson, 20–41. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University, 2010. ———. “Satisfaction and Payment in Middle English Literature.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 5 (1983): 17–48. 237

Masson, Cynthea. “The Point of Coincidence: Rhetoric and the Apophatic in Julian of Norwich’s Showings.” In Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, edited by Sandra J. McEntire, 151–81. New York: Garland, 1998. McAvoy, Liz Herbert. “‘For We Be Doubel of God’s Making’: Writing, Gender, and the Body in Julian of Norwich.” In A Companion to Julian of Norwich, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy, 166– 80. Woodbridge, CT: D.W. Brewer, 2008. McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. McGinn, Bernard. The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism: 12001350. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998. ———. The Foundations of Mysticism (Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism Vol. 1). New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004. ———. The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism: 1350-1550. New York: Crossroad, 2012. Miles, Laura Saetveit. “Richard Methley and the Translation of Vernacular Religious Writing into Latin.” In After Arundel, edited by Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh, 450–66. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011. ———. “Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love.” In A Companion to Julian of Norwich, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy, 154–65. Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2008. Minnis, A.J. “Affection and Imagination in ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and Hilton’s ‘Scale of Perfection’.” Traditio 39 (1983): 323–66. Mitchell, J. Allan. “The Middle English ‘Pearl’: Figuring the Unfigurable.” The Chaucer Review 35 (2000): 86–111. Morgan, David. The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. ———. The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Mueller, Janel M. The Native Tongue and the Word: Developments in English Prose Style, 13801580. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Newhauser, Richard. Sin: Essays on the Moral Tradition in the Western Middle Ages. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.

238

Nuth, Joan M. Wisdom’s Daughter: The Theology of Julian of Norwich. New York: Crossroad, 1991. Paxson, James J. The Poetics of Personification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Prior, Sandra Pierson. The Fayre Formez of the Pearl Poet. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996. Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Translated by Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1988. Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Rhodes, Jim. “The Dreamer Redeemed: Exile and the Kingdom in the Middle English Pearl.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 119–42. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981. Riddy, Felicity. “Jewels in Pearl.” In A Companion to the Gawain Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, 143–55. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ———. “Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization.” In Editing Women, edited by Ann M. Hutchison, 101–24. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Riehle, Wolfgang. The Middle English Mystics. Translated by Bernard Standring. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Ritchey, Sara. Holy Matter: Changing Perceptions of the Material World in Late Medieval Christianity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. Robertson, D.W. “The Pearl as a Symbol.” In The Middle English Pearl, Ed. John Conley., 18– 26. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. Robertson, Elizabeth. “Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings.” In Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, edited by Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, 142–67. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Robertson, Kellie. The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Ross, Arthur G. “The Day of Judgment Is Now: A Johannine Pattern in the Middle English Pearl.” American Benedictine Review 38 (1987): 227–42.

239

Rovang, Paul R. “Demythologizing Metaphor in the Cloud of Unknowing.” Mystics Quarterly 18, no. 4 (1992): 131–37. Scanlon, Larry. Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Schotter, Anne Howland. “Vernacular Style and the Word of God: The Incarnational Art of Pearl.” In Ineffability, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter, 23–34. New York: AMS Press, 1984. Simpson, James. Piers Plowman: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Exeter: Liverpool University Press, 2007. ———. “Spiritual and Earthly Nobility in Piers Plowman.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 86, no. 4 (1985): 467–81. Smith, Macklin. “Langland’s Alliterative Line(s).” Yearbook of Langland Studies 23 (2009): 163–216. Spearing, A. C. “Language and Its Limits: The Cloud of Unknowing and Pearl.” In Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, edited by Roger Ellis and Dee Dyas, 75–86. Rochester NY: D.S. Brewer, 2005. ———. Medieval Dream-Poetry. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Staley, Lynn. “Pearl and the Contingencies of Love and Piety.” In Medieval Literature and Historical Inqiury, edited by David Aers, 83–114. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 2000. ———. “The Man in Foul Clothes and a Late Fourteenth-Century Conversation about Sin.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 24 (2002): 1–47. Stanbury, Sarah, ed. Pearl. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001. ———. “The Body and the City in Pearl.” Representations 48 (1994): 30–47. Steiner, Emily. “Naming and Allegory in Late Medieval England.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106, no. 2 (2007): 248–75. ———. Reading Piers Plowman. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Synan, Edward. “The Four ‘Senses’ and Four Exegetes.” In With Reverence for the Word: Medieval Scriptural Exegesis in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, edited by Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Barry D. Walfish, and Joseph W. Goering, 225–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Taylor, Cheryl. “Paradox upon Parodox: Using and Abusing Language in The Cloud of 240

Unknowing and Related Texts.” Parergon 22, no. 2 (2005): 31–51. ———. “The Cloud-Author’s Remaking of the Pseudo-Dionysius’ Mystical Theology.” Medium Ævum 75, no. 2 (2006): 202–18. Thorpe, Douglas. A New Earth: The Labor of Language in Pearl, Herbert’s Temple, and Blake’s Jerusalem. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. Tixier, Rene. “‘Good Gamesumly Pley’: Games of Love in The Cloud of Unknowing.” The Downside Review 108 (1990): 235–53. Tomasch, Sylvia. “A Pearl Punnology.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 88 (1989): 1–20. Travis, Peter W. “Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor.” Speculum 72, no. 2 (1997): 399–427. Turner, Denys. Julian of Norwich, Theologian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. ———. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Vance, Eugene. “Pearl: Love and the Poetics of Participation.” In Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature, edited by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, 131–47. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991. Wailes, Stephen. “Why Did Jesus Teach in Parables? The Medieval Discussion.” Medievalia et Humanistica 13 (1985): 43–65. Wailes, Stephen L. Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Warner, Lawrence. “Becket and the Hopping Bishops.” Yearbook of Langland Studies 17 (2003): 107–34. Watson, Nicholas. “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409.” Speculum 70, no. 4 (October 1, 1995): 822–64. ———. “Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God.” New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 85–124. ———. “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love.” Speculum 68, no. 3 (1993): 637–83. 241

———. “The Gawain-Poet as Vernacular Theologian.” In A Companion to the Gawain Poet, edited by Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ———. “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love.” In Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, edited by Sandra J. McEntire, 61–90. New York: Garland, 1998. Williams, Charles. The Figure of Beatrice. Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2005. Williams, Charles, and C. S. Lewis. Taliessin through Logres, The Region of the Summer Stars, and Arthurian Torso. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1974. Windeatt, B. A., ed. English Mystics of the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Wolfson, Elliot R. A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination. New York: Zone Books, 2011.

242

KERILYN HARKAWAY-KRIEGER Department of English • Indiana University Ballantine Hall 422 • 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave. • Bloomington, IN 47405 734-276-8000 • [email protected] EDUCATION

Ph.D. English, January 2015, Indiana University Ph.D. Religious Studies, January 2015, Indiana University M.A. English, 2007, The Ohio State University B.A. English, 2004, Hope College

DISSERTATION

Mysticism and Metaphor: Visionary Literature in Fourteenth-Century England Committee: Patricia Clare Ingham (co-chair, English); Constance Furey (co-chair, Religious Studies); Karma Lochrie (English); Shaul Magid (Religious Studies) “Mysticism and Metaphor” examines the formal features of mystical visions and the literary genre of dream vision, highlighting how metaphor becomes the site of the ineffable. The materiality of poetic language in these texts reveals the simultaneity of metaphor, its ability to hold together similarity and difference without lapsing into synthesis

PUBLICATIONS

“Mysticism and Materiality: Pearl and the Theology of Metaphor,” Exemplaria 28.3 (2016): forthcoming. Book review, Willing to Know God: Dreamers and Visionaries in the Later Middle Ages, by Jessica Barr, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 38.2 (2012): 233-37.

AWARDS & HONORS

NEH Summer Seminar, “Art, Architecture, and Devotional Interaction, 1200-1600,” York, UK, June 9 – July 4, 2014. College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation-Year Fellowship, Indiana University, 2013-14. College Arts and Humanities Institute Travel Award, Indiana University, 2014. Ashton Prize, Indiana University, Department of English (for a graduate student in English with a record of excellence), 2013. Graduate Student Essay Award, Indiana University, Department of Religious Studies (for best essay by a graduate student), 2011.

Medieval Studies Institute E. Talbot Donaldson Fellowship, Indiana University, 2007-08. Qualifying Exams in English (September 2010) and Religious Studies (May 2011), Dissertation Prospectus Defense (November 2011), all passed with honors. New Chaucer Society, Donald Howard Travel Grant, 2010 and 2012. Medieval Studies Institute, Indiana University, Clifford Flannigan Travel Grant, 2010, 2012, 2013. First-Year Writing Program Teaching Commendation, The Ohio State University, Fall 2006. PRESENTATIONS “The Time of the Vision: Julian of Norwich’s Slow Revelation,” American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, & November 22 – 25, 2014. LECTURES “The Medievalist Mother,” Roundtable participant, International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2014. “On the Apophatic in Piers Plowman,” International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2013 (on the panel Langland, Language, and Theology, co-organized with Curtis Gruenler). “Ambiguous Consent: Teaching Chaucer in an Age of ‘Legitimate’ Rape,” Roundtable participant, Medieval Studies Institute Symposium, Indiana University, April 2013. “Poetic Failures: Mysticism and Metaphor in The Cloud of Unknowing,” The New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress, Portland, OR, July 2012. “Pearl and Mysticism,” Invited Lecture, Hope College, Holland, MI, February 2012. “The Apophatic Image and the Pearl of Greatest Price,” The New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress, Siena, Italy, July 2010. “Pearl as a Mystical Text,” Vagantes, The University of New Mexico, March 2010. “Medieval Mysticisms; Or, the Meaninglessness of the Word ‘Sex,’” Midwest American Academy of Religion, Augustana College, Rock

Island, IL, February 2010. “ ‘For Haukyns love the actif man’: Physical Labor and Spiritual Toil in Piers Plowman,” Vagantes, The Ohio State University, March 2008. “ ‘Questions haue I asked diuerse’: St. Barbara’s Orthodox Dissent,” The Ohio State University, English Department Colloquium, May 2007. TEACHING

Indiana University, Associate Instructor of English, 2008-2014 Introduction to Fiction :“The Literary Fantastic and the Problem of Evil” Course examined how texts use “fantastic” plot elements to address twentieth-century evils. Students acquired a basic vocabulary for the study of fiction. (Instructor of Record, 1 section, 2014) Chaucer Students gained familiarity with Chaucer's works, especially the Canterbury Tales; acquired reading fluency in Middle English; obtained knowledge of medieval literature and culture. (Teaching Assistant, 1 section, 2012) Introduction to Argumentative Writing: “Why Harry Potter Might Be Better than Batman” A self-designed composition course that investigated the massive popularity of child heroes among a wide range of audiences today. (Instructor of Record, 3 sections, 2011 – 2012) Children’s Literature The course provided an historical introduction to children’s literature from the late nineteenth century through to the present day, including an examination of the cultural associations surrounding childhood.( Teaching Assistant, 1 section, 2011) Introduction to the Humanities: “Power, Politics, and Piety: The Struggle for the Holy Land” The course provided students with an overview of the ongoing struggle in the Holy Land, including historical background and a brief introduction to Judaism and Islam. (Teaching Assistant, 1 section, 2010) Elementary Composition: Basic Writing An alternative to the standard freshmen composition course, this class offers instruction in the fundamentals for students who are struggling writers. (Instructor of Record, 6 sections, 2008-2010) Introduction to College Composition This course is taught in a six-week, intensive summer term that prepares

students from disadvantaged backgrounds for the college classroom. (Instructor of Record, 2 sections, 2009 – 2011) Elementary Composition Designed as part of Indiana’s core curriculum, this course offers students various ways to approach analytic writing. (Instructor of Record, 1 section, 2010) The Ohio State University, Graduate Assistant, 2005-2007 First-Year Composition This course was designed to introduce students to the basic skills of composition in the shortened space of the quarter system. I taught three sections of the course in a computer classroom, utilizing the resources of digital pedagogy. (Instructor of Record, 6 sections, 2005 – 2007) SERVICE

Early English Literature and Culture, Graduate Student Committee, Indiana University, 2011 – 2013. Medieval Studies Institute Symposium, Organizing Committee, 2008 – 2010. Vagantes Board of Directors (a graduate student organization affiliated with the Medieval Academy of America), 2008 – 2011; Chair 2009 – 2011. Medieval Studies Institute, Graduate Student Activities Committee President, 2010. Teaching Mentor, 2006 – 2007.

PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT

Editorial Assistant to Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (Professor, Chair of Religious Studies, Indiana University), 2012 – present. Editorial Assistant to Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University), 2014. Editorial Assistant to Kirsten Sword (Assistant Professor of History, Indiana University), 2010 – 2013.

AFFILIATIONS

American Academy of Religion (2014) Medieval Academy of America (2009 – present) Modern Languages Association (2014) New Chaucer Society (2010 – present) Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (2013 – present)

LANGUAGES

Latin, reading French, reading Old English, reading

REFERENCES

Patricia Clare Ingham, Professor of English, Indiana University ([email protected]) Constance Furey, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University ([email protected]) Karma Lochrie, Professor of English, Indiana University ([email protected]) Shaul Magid, Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University ([email protected]) Curtis Gruenler, Professor of English, Hope College ([email protected]) Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, Indiana University ([email protected])

DOSSIER

Bev Hankins English Department Ballantine Hall 442 Indiana University 1020 E. Kirkwood Ave. Bloomington, IN 47405-7103