Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming 9781442686106

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature
2. Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder: Artistic Depiction from the Late Middle Ages to Rembrandt
3. Susanna’s Voice
4. The Ends of Love: (Meta)physical Desire in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
5. Troilus in the Gutter
6. The Suicide of the Legend of Good Women
7. Sacred Commerce: Chaucer, Friars, and the Spirit of Money
8. How (Not) to Preach: Thomas Waleys and Chaucer’s Pardoner
9. The Radical, Yet Orthodox, Margery Kempe
10. Preface to Fleming
Bibliography of the Scholarship of John V. Fleming
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming

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Edited by Robert Epstein and William Robins

Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo  London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo  London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4081-8

 rinted on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with P vegetable-based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sacred and profane in Chaucer and late medieval literature : essays in honour of John V. Fleming / edited by Robert Epstein and William Robins. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4081-8 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 – Criticism and interpretation.  2. English literature – Middle English, 1100–1500 – History and criticism.  3. Holy, The, in literature. 4. Secularism in literature. I. Fleming, John V.  II. Epstein, Robert W. (Robert William), 1964– III. Robins, William Randolph, 1964– PR1933.R4S33 2010   8219.1  C2010-903925-4 University of Toronto Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto, in the publication of this book. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments  viii 1 Introduction: The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  3 william robins and robert epstein 2 Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder: Artistic Depiction from the Late Middle Ages to Rembrandt  30 david lyle jeffrey 3 Susanna’s Voice  46 lynn staley





4 The Ends of Love: (Meta)physical Desire in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde  68 jamie c. fumo 5 Troilus in the Gutter  91 william robins 6 The Suicide of the Legend of Good Women  113 julia marvin 7 Sacred Commerce: Chaucer, Friars, and the Spirit of Money  129 robert epstein 8 How (Not) to Preach: Thomas Waleys and Chaucer’s Pardoner  146 martin camargo

vi Contents

Appendix: Thomas Waleys, ‘On the Quality of the Preacher’: Chapter 1 of On the Method for Composing Sermons  164 translated by martin camargo   9 The Radical, Yet Orthodox, Margery Kempe  179 fiona tolhurst 10  Preface to Fleming  205 steven justice 11 Bibliography of the Scholarship of John V. Fleming  221 Contributors  227 Index  229

Acknowledgments

This collection and many of the essays in it grew out of a symposium held at Princeton University in June 2006: ‘“Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche”: A Celebration of John Fleming’s Scholarship and Teaching in Honor of His Retirement.’ The symposium was sponsored by the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton, and we would like to thank those departments as well as the organizers of the symposium, Vance Smith and Lynn Staley. Publication of this volume was made possible by a generous grant from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. We are grateful as well to Jennifer Koniecszy, our research assistant, and to the editors and staff at the University of Toronto Press, particularly Suzanne Rancourt, who patiently and expeditiously shepherded the collection toward publication. All of the contributors to this volume have been unfailingly patient and accommodating throughout the many stages of its development. Finally, we express our thanks to John V. Fleming, whose generous spirit as a scholar, teacher, and colleague is the true inspiration for this book.

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Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming

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1 Introduction: The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature william robins and robert epstein

Sacred and Profane, Religious and Secular In his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Emile Durkheim proposed that the social study of religion take as its starting point a fundamental distinction between the sacred and the profane. All human cultures, indeed every human mind, according to Durkheim, made a distinction between these two domains, and all forms of religious life were built upon differentiations between these categories. Constituting the most basic, universal feature of ‘religion,’ this distinction would allow comparative anthropologists to explain how individual cultures varied in their particular ways of establishing relationships between sacred objects, activities, and realms of thought on the one hand and profane ones on the other: Whether simple or complex, all known religious beliefs display a common feature: They presuppose a classification of the real or ideal things that men conceive of into two classes – two opposite genera – that are widely designated, by two distinct terms, which the words profane and sacred translate fairly well. The division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred, and another all that is profane – such is the distinctive trait of religious thought.1

Nearly a century has passed since the 1912 publication of Durk­heim’s book, which helped establish the study of religion as an academic field, and whose distinction between sacred and profane still shapes many research programs and scholarly debates. In the meantime, the distinction between the sacred and the profane was also given

4  William Robins and Robert Epstein

new significance by twentieth-century phenomenologists interested in delimiting the nature of religious experience. The most influential of these contributions was Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. Extending Rudolf Otto’s idea of ‘the Holy’ as the numinous experience of something that is ‘wholly other,’ Eliade contended that religious man dwells in a world that is always capable of becoming sacred: ‘Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane.’2 For Eliade, this categorical distinction is above all something experienced by members of religiously oriented societies, yet it also, in the second instance, enables Eliade to differentiate between the existential conditions of homo religiosus on the one hand and modern man, living in a desacralized world, on the other. Whether appearing in sociological or phenomenological guise, the dichotomy implies a universalizing perspective that has received trenchant criticism from many quarters. Early on, many anthropologists, such as E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Edmund Leach, pointed out that the incredible variety of human religions could not be mapped upon a spectrum between these two poles without gross distortions, and that in numerous cultures such a distinction would be thoroughly meaningless. In the last few decades criticism has become even more focused, with scholars pointing out that defining religion in terms of the separation of the sacred is not universally applicable at all, but is rather profoundly dependent upon the framework of European religious traditions, especially Christianity. Defining all religion as essentially a negotiation between the two domains of the sacred and the profane is a by-product of Christian and subsequently post-Christian European intellectual culture; applying that definition to other cultures constitutes nothing less than an act of ‘metaphysical aggression.’3 In other words, the distinction between the sacred and the profane has a history. Such historicity renders suspect the concept of ‘religion’ as a tool of anthropological analysis, yet it simultaneously opens up another, important area of inquiry, namely, the dissemination, transformation, and implications of the concept of ‘religion’ in the history of the West and beyond. Projects such as Talal Asad’s Genealogies of Religion and Daniel Dubuisson’s The Western Construction of Religion tackle some of the implications of seeing the very concept of religion as a culturally specific idea that has emerged over time.4 Our modern conception of religion is traceable to late antiquity, when the metaphysical presuppositions of Greek philosophy, biblical theophany, and Roman cult were

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  5

hammered into a new synthesis, such that ‘religion’ (religio) was powerfully reconceived as designating a sacred domain crucially set apart from the things of this world. The late antique grammarian Macrobius, for example, judges ‘that the word religio implies the removal and detachment of something from us by reason of some inherent sanctity, as if the word religio were derived from relinquendo [“setting aside”].’5 In the Middle Ages, monastic discipline, ecclesiastical practices, and sacramental rites such as confession established models of Christian life premised upon the notion of religion as a distinct domain concerned with transcendent truths, and ensured that those models would spread widely. The Enlightenment’s interest in Natural Religion developed this tendency further, finding in ‘religion’ a lens through which to view the habits of other cultures. Christian ontological premises have gradually become displaced so as to become basic categories of Western intellectual thought, and these categories have received further cachet in the wake of the influence of Durkheim, Eliade, and others. Of course, not only have Western notions of the ‘religious’ changed over time, but so have Western notions of the ‘non-religious.’ Given a paradigm in which a distinction between these domains matters so much, the history of one term will necessarily entail a history of its complementary opposite as well. The story of Western modernity has often been told as the triumphalist history of how a secular, rationalized society emerged out of a world that had previously been dominated by religious imperatives; in other words, the tale has often been recounted as if the meanings of the words ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ are relatively uncomplicated, and as if the secular modernity of the West is more or less a rational state of affairs toward which society has naturally progressed. Such versions of the story usually belong to a type that Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, calls ‘subtraction stories’: I mean by this stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge. What emerges from this process – modernity or secularity – is to be understood in terms of underlying features of human nature which were there all along, but had been impeded by what is now set aside.6

Against such ‘subtraction stories’ (which can take many forms, whether idealist or materialist), we have also been given historical nar-

6  William Robins and Robert Epstein

ratives in which the emergence of the secular, modern world is not seen as coming about because of forces external to, and in opposition to, religion, but rather because the desacralizing potential in Christian religion itself developed over time in specific ways that opened up the possibility of construing the visible world as a secular realm. The most decisive formulation of this type of narrative was put forward by Max Weber early in the twentieth century; for Weber the increasing ‘disenchantment’ of the world comes about, at least initially, through the effects of rationalization occurring within religious systems and according to the logic of religious practice. Medieval monasticism on the one hand and Protestant asceticism on the other constitute Weber’s prime examples of how the logic of renouncing the world generated practices in which the orderly organization of the things of this world took on an important spiritual meaning; spurred by such religious aims, forms of bureaucracy, commerce, and self-discipline were created through which attention to the things of this world were legitimized and eventually became second-nature.7 Other modulations of this story have been put forward by Hans Blumenberg, Louis Dumont, Marcel Gauchet, and Charles Taylor.8 Each of these thinkers focuses upon a different dimension of modern secularity, tracing its emergence within the practices or ideological assumptions of the Christian religion as it developed in the late medieval and early modern periods. For Gauchet, for example, the secularized political realm of modernity is unthinkable without the particular way in which European Christianity increasingly insisted upon a distinction between the absolute realm of divine transcendence and the structures at work in the temporal world; Jesus’ injunction to ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’ (Matt. 22:21, AV), is emblematic of this gap as theorized by Christianity, a gap which, after thousands of years of historical effects, eventually resulted in the modern affirmation of the secular realm as describable on its own terms without reference to religious ideals. In Gauchet’s version of the story, Christianity appears as ‘the religion for departing from religion.’9 Our histories of disenchantment, then, trace the changing pattern of connections and disconnections between the Christian religion and secularity. But where does that leave us with respect to that other categorical pair, ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’? Within the study of the medieval and modern West, are the histories of the sacred and the profane to be contained within a history of secularization? Or, in contrast, might the categorical distinction of sacred/profane not be so easily

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  7

mappable onto the distinction of religious/secular? Perhaps the profane has a story that is not entirely encompassed by any such narratives of disenchantment. The Profane The adjective ‘profane’ carries two different principal meanings, as a glance through the dictionaries of modern European languages attests. As the Oxford English Dictionary has it, a first set of meanings puts the profane in active tension with the sacred, designating that which is irreligious and desecratory: 1. Of persons and things: unholy, or desecrating what is holy or sacred; unhallowed; ritually unclean or polluted; (esp. of religious rites) heathen, pagan.

From this sense derive related uses of the word that signify irreverence toward anything that ought to command respect, whether religious or not (this sense of contemptuous indecency is listed by the Oxford English Dictionary as a third sense of the term, ‘now the most common’). A second definition, however, is more or less coterminous with ‘secular,’ designating a value-neutral domain distinct from that of religion: 2.a. In neutral sense. Not relating or devoted to what is sacred or biblical; unconsecrated; secular, lay; civil, as distinguished from ecclesiastical; as profane history, profane literature, etc. Freq. contrasted with sacred. 2.b. Of persons: not initiated into religious rites or sacred mysteries; (in extended use) not participating or admitted to some esoteric knowledge or society; excluded, uninitiate, ‘lay.’10

The word, then, can mean either something unholy, irreligious, and anti-sacred, or else something secular, non-religious, and not consecrated. These two definitions are already clearly demarcated in Latin dictionaries from the late Middle Ages, for example in Johannes Balbus’s Catholicon, which attaches each definition to an approximate etymology: a pro et fanum componitur profanus na num id est execratus sacrilegus quasi procul a fano. profanum eciam dicitur quod non est sacrum. vnde et profani dicuntur omnes laici et illiterati quasi procul a fano prophecie.11

8  William Robins and Robert Epstein [Profanus -na -num is compounded of pro and fanum, and it means desecratory or sacrilegious, as if ‘far from the shrine.’ Profanus is also used to indicate what is not sacred, such that all lay and unlettered persons are called profani, as if ‘far from the shrine of prophecy.’]

This ambivalence that Balbus etymologically locates in the polysemous nature of the nominal root fanum is traced by ancient and modern scholars to the problematic nature of the prepositional prefix pro-. That which is ‘profane’ is pro-fanum, ‘before the shrine,’ which can indicate, on the one hand, something that has nothing to do with the consecrated site of the holy, or, on the other hand, something that presents itself at the very threshold of a sacred space, threatening to expose the sacred where it ought not to be seen or to introduce pollution into the space dedicated to the sacred alone. The spatial implications of the Latin prefix pro- are here inherently ambiguous, akin to the duality at work in the Greek prefix para- (to which it is linguistically related) about which modern literary theorists have had much to say: ‘Para’ is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximity and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exteriority, something inside a domestic economy and at the same time outside it, something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it, equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiary, submissive, as of guest to host, slave to master. A thing in ‘para,’ moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary between inside and out. It is also the boundary itself, the screen which is a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside. It confuses them with one another, allowing the outside in, making the inside out, dividing them and joining them.12

This ambivalence invests the Latin term profanus as far back as we can trace it, not only in the earliest uses of the word in relatively archaic texts but also in the definitions offered by ancient grammarians like Varro: Hinc fana nominata, quod pontifices in sacrando fati sint finem; hinc profanum, quod est ante fanum coniunctum fano.13 [From effari (to utter), the fana (sanctuaries) are named, because the pontiffs in consecrating them have fati (uttered) their boundary; from this

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  9 derives profanum, which applies to something that is ‘in front of a sanctuary’ or ‘joined to a sanctuary.’]

By the age of Augustus, the juxtaposition of ‘profane’ with ‘sacred,’ or ‘consecrated,’ or ‘holy,’ was already common, found, for example, in Plautus, Sallust, and Cicero, not to mention Horace’s Ars poetica: ‘fuit haec sapientia quondam, / publica privatis secernere, sacra profanis’ (This was the wisdom of song in days gone by: / To know how to tell the difference between / Public and private, the sacred and the profane).14 This categorical opposition was ready to hand for the translators of the biblical scriptures, as in Jerome’s Vulgate: ‘ut habeatis scientiam discernendi inter sanctum et profanum, inter pollutum et mundum’ (that you may have knowledge to discern between holy and unholy, between unclean and clean [Lev. 10:10; Douay-Rheims translation]). After the antipagan polemics of early Christianity, medieval Latin writers, following the church fathers, gravitated easily toward the use of profanus to mean ‘irreligious’ and ‘desecratory,’ frequently ‘pagan’ or ‘heretical,’ and sometimes simply ‘evil.’ By the sixteenth century, the classical juxtaposition of sacred and profane regained currency as a common way of indicating two distinct but legitimate domains (sacred and profane histories, sacred and profane music, etc.). In English, both meanings have existed side by side; ‘profanation’ is the usual nominal form attached to the sense of the irreligious (or ‘profanity,’ especially when blasphemy is involved), while ‘profaneness’ adumbrates the sense of the non-religious, neutral, or secular sphere. ‘Profaneness’ may be more or less synonymous with ‘secularity.’ ‘Profanation’ is a different matter altogether. Disentangling these two notions is something upon which Giorgio Agamben has recently insisted. Under capitalism, the process by which the sphere of secular consumption has been created is taken to be identical to a thorough-going profanation and demystification of the very notion of sacred privilege. As a consequence, the sphere of consumption is taken to be unprofanable. For Agamben, this ideological ruse is part of capitalism’s way of denying that objects have a use-value other than their exchange value. Agamben holds that deactivating this ideology of consumption will require the ‘profanation of the unprofanable.’15 In this sense we must distinguish between secularization and profanation. Secularization is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus the political

10  William Robins and Robert Epstein secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy onto an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact … Profanation, however, neutralizes what it profanes. Once profaned, that which was unavailable and separate [e.g., the sacred; the commodified object; etc.] loses its aura and is returned to use. Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized.16

Profanation, in its deactivation of structures of power, is not necessarily opposed to the sacred in all of its manifestations, for the sacred, too, can open up spaces where the logic of temporal power is subject to severe criticism and deactivation. For Agamben, as for Benjamin before him, the empty, historical time of secularity is potentially countered, in Judaeo-Christian traditions, by the possibility of a ‘messianic time,’ in which the present moment is experienced as a fullness not because of its collocation with structures of power but because of its transfiguration of temporality itself; the deactivation of the operations of worldly power that results makes it imaginable that the world can be seen according to the light of a different necessity, the necessity of bare life and simple use in the moment of the now.17 In this respect, moments of messianic time are akin to moments of profanation, which helps account for the way that the sacred and the profane are so often indissolubly tied up with each other. Crossing the threshold of the shrine can constitute an act either of consecration or of pollution. (In Balbus’s dictionary, mentioned above, the verb profanare, can mean either ‘to desecrate’ or ‘to venerate.’)18 The sacred and the profane are mutually constitutive not only with respect to their categorical difference but also in their overlapping: there is ‘something like a residue of profanity in every consecrated thing and a remnant of sacredness in every profaned object.’19 Profanatory Moments If the sacred and the profane are obverses of each other, they are so in the way that two sides of a Moebius strip are obverses: strictly opposed to each other yet occupying the same space, they also turn into each other. Instances in lived life, in personal habits, and in collective selfdefinition during which the demarcation line between the sacred and the profane is put to the test may be spoken of as ‘profanatory

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  11

moments.’ Profanatory moments have been of constitutive importance in the logic of Western religions: such tests are central to the faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (the figure of Abraham crucially exemplifying a righteousness that reinstates the claims of religious faith). Different kinds of profanatory tests were at work in Roman religion as well. Christianity has established the normativity of a certain type of ethical narrative structured around such moments: a seeker encounters limit-situations, works through phases of confusion about the respective claims of the sacred and the profane, and emerges with a renewed understanding of how to orient his or her life around religious values. Of central significance in such profanatory moments is the duality that inheres in the definition of ‘the profane.’ On the one hand, the profane sphere is a legitimately constituted realm, recognized by Western religions as the neutral, social space of this world: the believer is called upon to ‘render unto Caesar,’ that is, to acknowledge the relevance of a social world that is neither denied nor illuminated by the transcendent absolute. On the other hand, the profane is an intrusion of the worldly into the sphere of religion, a temptation to violate the bounds of the sacred, and it must be combated at all costs. From this vantage, the ethical construction of the soul is predicated upon resisting the temptations of this world: ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out’ (Mark 9:47). Augustine tackled the nub of the problem when he distinguished between using (uti) the things of this world (a legitimate undertaking) and taking delight (frui) in them (an illegitimate one);20 he diagnosed human concupiscibility, through which things for use become objects of desire, as an urge most threatening to the soul’s orientation around the sacred. Few believers have matched Augustine’s ability to distinguish so starkly between using and enjoying, and in fact normative Christianity, which resolutely opposed any dualisms that would pit divine goodness against worldly evil, ensured that the problem of ‘the good of this world’ would remain a difficult issue at all times. Of foundational importance for Western autobiography and fiction has been this narrative model whereby faith is explored through encounters with the problematic, tempting, and confusing domain of the profane, a domain where tolerable profaneness and intolerable profanation both overlap and separate. John Bunyan, for one, openly recognizes the archetypal, ‘ancient’ character of this pattern when, in Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrim Christian arrives at Vanity Fair (a market not only for the evil accoutrements of lust and greed, but also for such morally defensible things as houses, marriage, and souls):

12  William Robins and Robert Epstein This Fair is no new erected business, but a thing of ancient standing … Almost five thousand years agone, there were Pilgrims, walking to the Celestial City as these two honest persons are; and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their Companions, perceiving by the Path that the Pilgrims made, that their way to the City lay through this Town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a Fair; a Fair wherein should be sold of all sorts of Vanity, and that it should last all the year long. Therefore at this Fair are all such Merchandise sold, as Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles, Countries, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures, and Delights of all sorts, as Whores, Bawds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters, Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls, precious Stones, and what not … and he that will go to the [Celestial] City and yet not go through this Town must needs go out of the World.21

A narrative model based on navigating between legitimate and illegitimate aspects of the profane subsequently underlay the structure of the Bildungsroman and other, secularized, forms of storytelling. At times, as with Augustine and Bunyan, such narratives aim to achieve a culminating perspective on the proper distinctions among these spheres. In other contexts, exploration tends toward a fascination, even a celebration, of indistinction and paradox. Carolyn Bynum has suggested, for example, that many medieval women, so associated by their culture with the profane realm of the flesh, expressed religious desires and fears through symbolic syntheses of spirituality and carnality, forms of understanding which ‘were not finally symbolic reversals but, rather, a transfiguring and becoming of what the female symbolized: the fleshly, the nurturing, the suffering, the human.’22 Even when not captured by narrative teleologies (and expressed, say, in moments of lyric effusion) significant encounters with the profane have been taken to be typical of the life of the Christian, and have been profoundly caught up in the practices of confession and repentance that figure centrally in the development of modern subjectivities. Narrative and lyric representations of profanatory moments performed a double duty. Most explicitly, they helped believers think through the claims that religion made upon them, and thus explore tensions between the sacred and the profane. Secondly, and perhaps less obviously, they also involved a continual teasing out of the relationship between the two different species of the profane, the legitimate neutrality of the secular, on the one hand, and the polluting taint of the desecratory, on the other. Profanatory moments, whether encountered

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  13

in narrative form or as unconnected moments punctuating lived life, provided mechanisms for narratively, psychically, and even theologically integrating not only the rival claims of the sacred and the profane, but also the rival claims of profanation and profaneness. Late Medieval Texts The late Middle Ages occupy an important place in the transformation of notions of the sacred and profane. One might point to the investiture controversy of the eleventh century as a watershed moment in reconfiguring the kinds of power wielded by church and state. For the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one might point to the inauguration of scholastic models of intellectual engagement (which would redefine such central concepts as those of free will and divine omnipotence) as well as legal models of institutional self-definition (which would help to describe the interanimation of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction). Phenomena as diverse as the growth of cities, the spread of literacy, and the self-assertion of the feudal aristocracy have all been tied to the emergence of lay religious movements and even heretical movements that introduced new modes of individual and collective self-consciousness. The rise of the mendicant orders, for instance, challenged previous understandings of how persons dedicated to a religious life were to be separated from the cares of this world. Nor was Christianity undergoing transformations solely along its own ideological and credal faultlines: the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, and of Christianity to Islam, became increasingly tense in the era of the Crusades. The changing relation between the sacred and the profane was perhaps most powerfully represented by the roles played by the sacraments, the ritual actions where the invisible world of the sacred and the visible world of the profane directly interacted. In this respect, the Lateran Council of 1215 marks a decisive turning point for its stipulation that every Christian undertake the sacrament of confession on at least an annual basis. Much of the religious history of the next few centuries can rightfully be seen as the unfolding of the implications of this dictate, one of the major effects of which was the emergence of confessional subjectivities. By the end of the Middle Ages, the sacrament of the Eucharist had become the most fraught issue around which European persons, and European nations, fought about the border separating the sacred and the profane. To modern students it is almost inconceivable that nations went to war over the definition of the Eucharist; yet dis-

14  William Robins and Robert Epstein

turbances in the practice of this central Christian sacrament threatened the very core of individual and collective self-definition. The period between the Lateran Council and the Reformation (to use the markers familiar to historians of religion), between the crisis of confession and the crisis of communion, saw innumerable kinds of experiments in reestablishing the interaction between religious and secular domains. With our retrospective concerns we tend to look for those experiments which anticipate the emergence of the modern secular sphere, but of course there was no such historical necessity at work. A proliferation of all sorts of developments, each one contingent as much on local circumstances as on the central tensions of Christian belief, mark this period as one that was highly unsettled; as a period, in fact, where the relation between the sacred and the profane gave rise to numerous intellectual questions, political struggles, and personal anxieties. During this period, texts took on greater and greater importance as sites for individual and collective self-examination, especially with regard to religious matters. Since antiquity, Christianity’s central preoccupation with writing, with scriptura, had given rise to distinct textual practices, including ecclesiastical liturgical structures as well as monastic habits of lectio divina. Late medieval Christianity nurtured even more opportunities for reading and writing. With the rise of scholastic philosophy and canon law, new institutions of textual interpretation tackled crucial questions of divine transcendence, free will, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy. Personally owned copies of texts, such as psalters and books of hours, played important new roles in devotional practices not only among clerics and monks but increasingly among laypersons as well. It would be misleading to overlook the degree to which religious habits of self-definition also pervaded texts of education, of professional expertise, of personal letter-writing and of administrative scrutiny. Many factors contributed to the increased literacy of the period, one of the most potent being the burgeoning of new religious practices within lay cultures. In this environment, texts that we tend to think of as literary texts did not pretend to autonomy; they, too, were self-consciously engaged with specific habits of attention and practices of self-definition, for which religious exigencies are often paramount. Writings apparently quite removed from the actual enforcement of religious or secular discipline nevertheless ‘do the ideological work of their polity,’ as Peter Haidu has put it, ‘in exploring and constituting subjectivity by providing performative models of human comportment.’23 In part because of their

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  15

rhetorical and narrative craft, in part because of their engagement with issues of representation and symbolic suggestion, and in part because of the potential they have for attending self-reflectively to these issues, such ‘literary’ texts are some of the most resonant documents we have for viewing the discursive webs within which medieval society and medieval individuals were entangled. Many different discourses and many different values are in play in these texts, in some ways contained by structures of coherence and yet in some ways risking incoherence through energies of dispersal: ‘textual values cannot but draw on equivalences established in the social body. Yet some texts transform these equivalences into critiques or reversals. Texts are microlaboratories of society, in which experiments with form and structure can produce new formulations of meaning.’24 The openings provided by textual complexity allow many late medieval narrative and poetic texts to stage profanatory moments, where the pressures of religion, of profanation, and of the saeculum are directly or indirectly implicated. To a notable degree, the emergence of cohesive lay cultures in the late Middle Ages went hand in hand with the vernacular adaptation of longstanding Latin textual habits, especially those pertaining to spiritual edification and institutional administration. We are not talking here about the emergence of the vernacular per se (since vernacular languages were the common ground of oral discourse for almost all walks of life) but rather about the emergence of vernacular textualities. On the one hand, the vernacularizing tendencies of the late Middle Ages can be seen as ecclesiastical outreach, bringing clerical discourses to bear ever more strongly on the lives of all persons, through confessional literature, sermons, and prayers. On the other hand, the same tendencies helped consolidate interpretive communities that enjoyed a degree of autonomy from the control of the church. The presence of written vernacular texts encouraged other forms of speech that had previously coursed through oral channels of communication, including all sorts of ‘profane’ voices, to lay claim to the power and fixity of writing. The effect was that burning questions about the nature of the sacred, and about the sacred’s relation to profane domains of life, were discussed in more varied contexts than previously. As Nicholas Watson has shown, changes to the kind of language in which these questions could be posed entailed subtle but significant shifts in the answers that were given, and indeed sometimes in the very questions that were being asked: ‘There thus emerged, in vernacular texts themselves, an increasingly overt sense that what they were doing in presenting an

16  William Robins and Robert Epstein

ever wider array of theological concerns to an ever larger and less clearly defined group of readers needed justifying. It is in this situation … that I would locate the beginnings of the late fourteenth- and earlyfifteenth-century argument over the vernacular as a vehicle for theology.’25 Even narrative and poetic vernacular works that held religious questions in suspension as other imaginative priorities were pursued, even these reveal the effects of such vernacular theology in the very way in which texts are used to think through issues of personal identity and collective practices. The dichotomy of Latinity and vernacularity can in no way be mapped onto the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane, and yet it is undeniable that new energies both for profanation and for secularization were heightened by the various problematics that vernacular textuality unleashed. Medieval Literary Criticism Two overlapping models of accounting for the relationship between the sacred and the profane have animated medievalist literary criticism since the middle of the twentieth century. One of these is the model of complementarity, in which the domain of religion and the domain of the profane are construed as relatively separate, each with its own structures of authority and allegiance, structures that were juxtaposed with each other in the lives and ambitions of most medieval persons without either domain taking clear precedence. The church itself clearly distinguished between two spheres, that of ‘religious’ men and women, such as clerics, monks, and nuns, who lived under determined religious vows, and that of ‘secular’ men and women of the laity. In the realm of politics, a similar kind of complementarity was established, especially in the wake of the detente between the papal church and nascent territorial states after the investiture controversy. A dual allegiance to two differently constituted domains has also been seen at work within artistic and textual productions of the period. C.S. Lewis’s literary criticism set out the argument for grasping the complementarity of religion and the secular, as in his discussion of amorous love and religion in Andreas Capellanus: But when Andreas talks of the bonum in saeculo he means what he says. He means the really good things, in a human sense, as contrasted with the really bad things: courage and courtesy and generosity, as against baseness. But, rising like a sheer cliff above and behind this humane or

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  17 secular scale of values, he has another which is not to be reconciled with it, another by whose standard there is very little to choose between the ‘worldly’ good and the ‘worldly’ bad. That very element of parodied or, at least, of imitated religion which we find in the courtly code, and which looks so blasphemous, is rather an expression of the divorce between the two. They are so completely two that analogies naturally arise between them: hence comes a strange reduplication of experience. It is a kind of proportion sum. Love is, in saeculo, as God is in eternity.26

Considerable research since Lewis’s day has clarified the operations of medieval institutions, medieval cultural categories, and medieval subjectivities that underlay forms of textual expression. In such work, the model of complementarity continues to be adduced frequently, as, for example, in Alastair Minnis’s 2003 address to the New Chaucer Society: A greater respect for secular culture in fourteenth-century literature holds out new possibilities for reading poems by Chaucer, Gower, and their French contemporaries in terms of a secularity that is allowed its own space and special valence, even as its relationship with (or disjunction from) religious interests is brought into sharp focus. And so, we should learn to listen more carefully when Chaucer cum suis speaks ‘of folk in seculer estaat.’ Let the search for vernacular secularity begin in earnest.27

Against a view of complementarity that would reiterate modern liberal assumptions about culture and religion, a rather different model for assessing the claims of the sacred and the profane emphasizes a hierarchical relationship between these categories, rather than a simply complementary one. A hierarchical model that privileges the domain of the religious over that of the profane (not so much in terms of social power as in terms of a differential in their foundational truthfulness) is seen by many scholars to have been operative in several zones of medieval society. On the presumption that this hierarchical relationship mattered a great deal to actual historical agents in the period, D.W. Robertson challenged the modern tendency to read medieval literature primarily through models of non-hierarchical complementarity and tension: It will suffice here for purposes of illustration to contrast a dominant medieval convention, the tendency to think in terms of symmetrical patterns, characteristically arranged with reference to an abstract hierarchy, with a dominant modern convention, the tendency to think in terms of

18  William Robins and Robert Epstein opposites whose dynamic interaction leads to a synthesis. These are best described as tendencies; for not all medieval thought necessarily displays an hierarchical pattern, and not all modern thought necessarily involves dynamically opposed contraries. Nevertheless, when we superimpose dynamically interacting opposites upon medieval hierarchies – and there is plenty of evidence to show that we have wished to do this – the result is inevitably a distortion.28

The primary medieval hierarchy that Robertson excavates is one in which the sphere of religious truths is privileged over worldly temptations, or, expressed in Augustinian terms regarding the motivations of individual persons, where acts of caritas (love of God) are privileged over acts of cupiditas (concupiscence). While Robertson and Lewis were equally committed to a historicized reading of medieval literature, their critical works pull in opposite directions, and this is because in establishing a historically appropriate structure for thinking through the relation between profane and sacred domains these scholars took such divergent paths: for Lewis, fin’amors is a species of profaneness, for Robertson it crosses over into the zone of profanation. A very different way of assessing medieval hierarchies is to attend to transgressions of hierarchical norms, and so to the operations of power that kept such norms in play. Marxist and feminist critics have, from the 1980s on, insisted that we see medieval hierarchies as doing powerful ideological work, especially hierarchies that saw the profane world as of lesser truthfulness than the sacred. One of the ideas that differentiates this new generation of criticism from Robertson’s work is the sense that medieval culture had no single, stable hierarchy of religious and secular domains, but was affected by numerous, competing discourses of power. David Aers, for example, insists on the need to understand the fierce debates that were waged about the status of religious claims in the late Middle Ages: ‘the period we consider is one in which the terms, images, rituals, and ideas of holiness became the object of unprecedented public and vernacular contestation in England.’ A second crucial point of distinction is the intention to critique medieval hierarchies by laying bare the operations of power they depended upon; otherwise ‘the attempt to reproduce the terms of the past culture of discourse, including the terms in which Christ was imagined, can very easily naturalize that discourse, and familiarize it so as to make it seem inevitable.’29 Throughout the medieval period, the tendency to fix meanings in relation to the stable, transcendent signified of the Chris-

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  19

tian deity was incredibly strong, but it also took on multifarious different shapes and gave rise to various forms of questioning and resistance. The place of the sacred in this hierarchy was maintained through all sorts of historically contingent forces of political and discursive authority, with numerous different cultural configurations operative at local levels and registered in unique ways in specific texts. These two general models within medievalist literary criticism – complementarity and hierarchy – are only occasionally encountered in pure form. In so far as the two models can be teased apart, we might say that they are homologous with the application of the two different meanings of ‘the profane’ traced above. Construing ‘the profane’ as ‘profaneness,’ that is, as a realm of activity that is autonomous from the dictates of religion, brings the profane into synonymy with secularity; attending to the way this autonomy was worked out in the Middle Ages goes hand in hand with understanding the interaction between sacred and profane as primarily governed by principles of complementarity. Furthermore, medieval profaneness becomes recognizable as akin to the modern sphere of the secular, indeed as an important harbinger of it; as a consequence there is a general affinity between the model of complementarity, as applied to medieval phenomena, and the ‘subtraction theories’ that see modern secularity emerging as the sphere of the religious wanes. By contrast, considering ‘the profane’ as ‘profanation’ attends to liminal situations that are meaningful precisely because of the kind of aggression they sustain with the domain of the sacred; activities that diverge from the proper modalities of sacred contact are registered as polluting or desecrating, and they are policed and contained according to a hierarchy of cultural categories that privileges the sacred. According to this model, to view such activities as exempt from religious determination would be to miss what makes them so highly charged, and to read them retrospectively through the lens of modern secularity would be an act of historical misprision. As we have suggested above, one of the qualities of late medieval cultural expression that makes it so fascinating is that so often the sacred is in tension with both of these notions of the profane, giving rise, in texts and artistic productions, to scenes where the energies of complementarity and the energies of hierarchy both exert their force. If we sense a tension, in our own critical enterprises, between a mode of analysis that stresses complementarity and a mode of analysis that stresses hierarchy, this may very well be because this was one of the problems faced by the medieval agents themselves. In a particular narrative and cultural con-

20  William Robins and Robert Epstein

text, is a specific ‘profane’ action legitimate or illegitimate, or perhaps even both legitimate and illegitimate at the same time? In assessing such ‘profanatory moments,’ we may wish for a subtle deployment of these models that goes well beyond the either/or quality of scholarly prises de position. The relation between complementarity and hierarchy was one of the main questions that writers of medieval texts were addressing. Medieval literary texts often elaborate sophisticated strategies of representation in order to let concerns of this kind come to the fore, sometimes to make a strong stand or sometimes to let the implications of different possible configurations of ethical action resonate in suggestive ways. Highly crafted texts, especially those in which we seem to recognize something akin to our own notions of literariness, seem especially permeable to a variety of discourses about religion and its limits; through their symbolic potentialities, their linguistic suggestiveness, and their narrative ethics, many of the great writings of the period are highly charged with the kinds of tensions and real moral and social concerns that such complicated issues continually gave rise to. John V. Fleming The essays in this collection all home in on these themes of holiness and religion, of profanation and secularity, as manifest in specific works of medieval literature. Yet they also share another terrain as well, an intellectual terrain shaped by the fact that their authors all claim John V. Fleming as a teacher, and, more than that, that they all recognize his role in guiding them in the serious study of medieval religion, history, and literature.30 It could be said that John’s primary lesson, whether teaching or leading by scholarly example, was to attend as forcefully as possible to the hermeneutical issues raised by the imbrication of ethical and religious discourse within medieval strategies of textual representation. The hermeneutical issues at stake are not only those faced by the modern critic, but also those that would have been faced by medieval writers and readers themselves, and indeed the continuities and discontinuities between modern and medieval horizons of expectations constituted one of the main concerns that his work addresses. What kind of modern hermeneutical attention can do justice to the medieval hermeneutical issues around which literary texts were organized? It would have to be an attention that did not discount the centrality of religious discourse, and in fact it would have to tackle head on the overwhelming ethical and social importance of Christian hierarchies of religious value in the Middle Ages. The concern with the way in

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  21

which religious idioms course through medieval poetry has been a central focus for John, from his fundamental essay on the Dream of the Rood published in 1966 (written while still a graduate student) to his 2003 presidential address to the Medieval Academy of America, ‘The Muses of the Monastery,’ and beyond.31 His books on the Romance of the Rose, Franciscan literature, Giovanni Bellini, and Geoffrey Chaucer have tackled the habits of thought and the means of representation through which the hierarchies of sacred and profane values were elaborated, made problematic, and negotiated by writers, artists, and historical agents of late medieval Europe.32 Characteristic of his work is a deeply learned assessment of the intertextual alignments through which medieval texts signalled their purposes, including not only textual allusion and reference (such as the antifraternal satire in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale or the classicism of Jean de Meun) but also the visual iconography and the interdiscursive materials with which artists worked to forge their new creations and through which medieval agents understood their world (as in the cases of Bellini’s painting, Saint Francis in the Desert, and the ‘mystical signature’ of Christopher Columbus).33 In his courses, John encouraged understanding the documents and actions of the past as condensations of the thought processes through which historical agents in the medieval period conceived of their world and made sense of their lives. In this task, John was fond of invoking R.G. Collingwood’s Idea of History. According to Collingwood: The historian, investigating any event in the past, makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements: the passage of Caesar, accompanied by certain men, across a river called the Rubicon at one date, or the spilling of his blood on the floor of the senate-house at another. By the inside of the event I mean that in it which can only be described in terms of thought: Caesar’s defiance of republican law, or the clash of constitutional policy between himself and his assassins. The historian is never concerned with either of these to the exclusion of the other … His work may begin by discovering the outside of an event, but it can never end there; he must always remember that the event was an action, and that his main task is to think himself into this action, to discern the thought of its agent.34

Throughout John’s work and his teaching, documents and events are approached as ‘artifacts of human intellection,’ requiring seriously

22  William Robins and Robert Epstein

thoughtful interpretation. The implications of his commitment are addressed in an early methodological essay, ‘Historians and the Evidence of Literature,’ where he advocates a kind of archaeology of the intellectual problems that confronted the agents of past cultures: Questions of intentionality, of the interaction of mental energies with materials and technological données – that is the very substance of history … To study the context and structure of human minds in history is to bring to the vortex of historical investigation those immediate artifacts of human intellection, including literary ones, which have so often been left aside.35

This kind of work requires considerable creativity in the exercise of the historical imagination: ‘Clio is a muse, not a methodology; and the perception and analysis of stylistic modes and mental structures not necessarily our own can only be a creative act involving something of the agony of the artist.’36 The comparison of historical investigation to the ‘agony of the artist’ refracts Collingwoods’s insistence upon the a priori imagination of the modern historian, comparable though not identical to that of the artist or novelist. For historians of literature and art, the phrase ‘agony of the artist’ also refers to the difficult moral and emotional processes that went into the production of those medieval works that are now the object of study, the agony of those artists. And it is not insignificant that this phrase, used by a scholar attentive to the currents of religious language in literary discourse, carries an inevitable biblical echo of the ‘agony’ of Jesus in Gethsemane: And he was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, saying, Father, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground. (Luke 22:41–4, AV)

This episode of agony is one of the most important textualizations of a ‘profanatory moment’ in the Christian canon, when even the son of God seems to question divine providence. In the resonance of such an echo, we can see the agony of the medieval artist pictured as an activity of potential spiritual import, in which the interrelationships among

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  23

divinity, profanation, and secularity are continually renegotiated. One way or another, a modern historian of medieval culture is called upon to engage with this through his own creative acts, as John so often has done with wit and erudition. Essays on the Sacred and Profane The essays that follow are diverse in their subjects and their methods. All the authors, however, study the depiction by Chaucer and his contemporaries of the profane – in the general sense of the non-sacred, frequently in the sense of the irreligious, and quite often in the more particular sense of the obscene. And despite the variety of their perspectives, all ultimately challenge the preconception of the profane as the quintessentially secular and the opposite of the sacred. Rather, in these essays the profane is revealed as the point at which the sacred and the secular converge, as a place of mediation between various currents of discourse, where the domain of the sacred might be seen in either a hierarchical or a complementary relationship to the things of this world, and where corporeality and carnality might be seen as legitimate aspects of human life in the saeculum and/or as troubling occasions for forsaking sacred truth in the enjoyment of inferior desires or even in the pollution of the unclean. It is an appropriate coincidence, therefore, that the first two essays in this collection investigate the two best-known instances of scriptural voyeurism. David Jeffrey studies literary and artistic representations of Bathsheba, the object of King David’s illicit gaze and adulterous desire. Jeffrey begins in a manner familiar from exegetical criticism, bringing traditions of biblical exegesis to bear upon an iconographic exemplum. As he follows the image into the Renaissance, however, and ultimately to two versions of Bathsheba at Her Bath by Rembrandt, Jeffrey finds the motif evincing a profoundly humanistic vision and meaning, one that complicates the moral position of the viewer of the painting while revealing great sympathy for the perspective of Bathsheba herself. Lynn Staley’s subject is Susanna, spied in her bath by ‘the elders’ in the apocryphal thirteenth chapter of the book of Daniel. Staley’s comparative approach, following Susanna through art and literature from the ninth to the seventeenth centuries, at first resembles Jeffrey’s. But in focusing on the voice of the accused woman in the literary treatments, Staley’s analysis leads her less toward the morality and aesthetics of voyeurism and more toward the tale’s persistent power as a legal and

24  William Robins and Robert Epstein

political allegory. Works like the fourteenth-century alliterative Pistel of Susan, Staley shows, allow poets to dramatize, long before the Enlightenment, incipient concepts of individual rights, free speech, and due process of the law. The next three essays focus on the pre–Canterbury Tales works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Jamie Fumo’s study of Troilus and Criseyde breaks radically from traditional interpretations of the heroine. Criseyde’s disavowal of romantic love, Fumo argues, should be understood neither as ironically limited nor as the pragmatic and non-philosophical recourse of a woman restricted by patriarchal expectations and masculinist discourse. Rather, in her rejection of the tale’s theology of love, Criseyde articulates a philosophically serious form of atheism, which stands in opposition to Troilus’s romantic faith. Both of these philosophies represent autonomous and logical but partial understandings of what the epilogue ultimately reveals as Christian truth. William Robins, too, proceeds from an understanding of Troilus’s love as in some sense idolatrous, and Robins also traces the poem’s philosophico-theological concepts from the profane images to sacred meanings. The images that Robins focuses on, however, are ‘profane’ in the sense of ‘obscene’ as well as ‘sacrilegious.’ Applying the methods of literary ‘archaeology,’ Robins excavates the toilets of Troy. His essay builds on the influential reading offered by John V. Fleming in Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde,’ which linked Troilus’s love for Criseyde to the Homeric tradition of Trojan idolatrous veneration of the Palladium. Robins extends and amplifies this argument by showing that Troilus’s route to his assignation with Criseyde – ‘thorough a goter, by a pryve wente’ – is both an accurate depiction of medieval understandings of ancient plumbing and a symbolically appropriate imitation of the method the Greeks used to steal the Palladium. The ‘suicide’ of the Legend of Good Women that Julia Marvin figures in her title refers not to the most literal and profane sort – the desperate act of spiritual hopelessness – but rather to the way the text destroys itself as a kind of ‘self-consuming artifact.’ Marvin’s reading focuses on the work’s central metaphor of profane (secular) love. Marvin offers a close reading of the Legend of Good Women that shows it to be a poem about reading. As a dramatization of the reader’s experience and of the necessity of the active participation of the reader to complete literary meaning, the poem, Marvin argues, challenges the notion of texts as repositories of the authority of ‘olde stories.’

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  25

Two essays on the Canterbury Tales focus on friars and pardoners, the two most debased clerical types in Chaucer’s work and the two that most clearly embody the compounding of the sacred and the profane. Robert Epstein studies the representation of money in the Summoner’s Tale from the perspectives of early Franciscan tracts on religious poverty, fourteenth-century economics, and twentieth-century social theory. In all of these contexts, money is most significant because it is an immaterial and potent symbolic system. The ‘unexpected gift’ of the fart that Thomas gives to the friar is the most appropriate metonym for money, therefore, not because it is material filth, but on the contrary because it is abstract and infinitely divisible. Through the ruminations of the tale’s lord and squire, Chaucer seriously considers the social and even scientific significance of economic thought. Martin Camargo approaches Chaucer’s Pardoner from the perspective of fourteenth-century preaching manuals. In the first chapter of one ars praedicandi, the English Dominican Thomas Waleys addresses at length issues of style and presentation in public, oral performance. While other explicators of the Pardoner, including those who make note of the tradition of preaching manuals, emphasize the character’s moral condition, Camargo’s close analysis of Waleys’s text demonstrates the degree to which the satirical elements of the portrait depend on conventions of rhetoric, and how systematically the Pardoner violates dicta for the public performance of preachers. In addition, to allow a wider audience of medievalists to discover the import of this text, Camargo appends to his essay his own translation of chapter 1, ‘On the Quality of the Preacher,’ of Waleys’s On the Method for Composing Sermons. While most of these essays aim to point out the presence of the profane in the seemingly sacred, Fiona Tolhurst takes an opposite approach. Margery Kempe is a writer who has often been approached as heterodox and subversive – by the amanuenses reluctant to record her story, by printers who declined to publish her book in full, and by many modern critics who have championed her Book. Tolhurst, drawing on, yet also contesting, recent scholarship, emphasizes the degree to which Kempe’s idiosyncrasies are not part of a particularly unorthodox or radical program, but align her with mainstream religious practices of her day. Finally, Steven Justice offers a thorough reappraisal of the contributions of John V. Fleming. Though Fleming, as the student and successor of Robertson at Princeton University, has always been associated with the ‘exegetical’ school, Justice shows that his scholarship was anything

26  William Robins and Robert Epstein

but tendentious and his method and philosophy resisted all schools of criticism, not only the Robertsonian school but also the later trends of post-modernism and New Historicism. Indeed, in Fleming’s profound and nuanced understanding of history Justice finds a vision that could guide medieval literary criticism in its ‘post-Historicist’ moment. Fleming’s is a historicism that sees civilizations always constructing themselves through the problematic reception, reconsideration, and assimilation of the past; it is a historicism that does not seek to instruct the past on what it does not understand about itself. John Fleming’s historicism recognizes the central importance that textual authority held for medieval literature, while also recognizing that reception, imitation and allusion of biblical and classical texts are always acts of engagement and negotiation that profoundly challenge and transform ancient authority. His work encapsulates the idea that medieval literature, as it both defers to and defies the past, is always simultaneously sacred and profane, as well as the idea that the literature and its criticism are richest when these modes are considered not as oppositional but as complexly intertwined. A bibliography of his scholarly publications concludes this volume. Notes 1 Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 34. 2 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 11. 3 Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge and Ideology, trans. William Sayers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 167. 4 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion. 5 ‘Servius Sulpicius religionem esse dictam tradidit quae propter sanctitatem aliquam remota ac seposita a nobis sit, quasi a reliquendo dicta.’ Macrobius, Saturnalia 3.3.8, ed. James Willis (Leipzig: Teubner, 1970), 168. Other, more ancient etymologies proposed for ‘religio’ were from religare, ‘to bind’ (advanced also by Servius and Augustine) and from relegere, ‘to gather together’ (Cicero and Isidore).

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  27 6 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22. 7 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (New York: Bedminster, 1968); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001). 8 Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Taylor, Secular Age. 9 Gauchet, Disenchantment of the World, 4. 10 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. ‘profane, adj. and n.’ 11 Johannes Balbus, Catholicon (1460; facsimile reprint Westmead, UK: Gregg, 1971), 570. 12 J. Hillis Miller, ‘The Critic as Host,’ in Deconstruction and Criticism, by Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Continuum, 1979), 219. 13 Varro, On the Latin Language, 4.54, ed. and trans. Roland G. Kent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 1:220–1; the translation is my own. 14 Horace, The Epistles of Horace, 2.3.396–7, trans. David Ferry (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 180–1. 15 Giorgio Agamben, ‘In Praise of Profanation,’ in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 73–92 at 92. 16 Ibid., 77. 17 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255–66. 18 Balbus, Catholicon, 507. 19 Agamben, ‘In Praise of Profanation,’ 78. 20 See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.3–5, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 9–10. 21 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Richard Pooley (London: Penguin, 2008), 91–2. 22 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 289.

28  William Robins and Robert Epstein 23 Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5. 24 Ibid., 351. 25 Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,’ Speculum 70 (1995): 822–64 at 836. 26 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), 42. 27 Alastair Minnis, ‘“I speke of folk in seculer estaat”: Vernacularity and Secularity in the Age of Chaucer,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 27 (2005): 25–58 at 58. 28 D.W. Robertson, Jr, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 6. 29 David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 4, 18. 30 There is, besides the current volume, another collection of essays in honour of John V. Fleming, emerging out of a 2006 conference celebrating his contributions to the study of medieval Franciscan texts: Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life: Essays in Honor of John V. Fleming, ed. Michael Cusato and Guy Geltner (Leiden: Brill, 2009). 31 John V. Fleming, ‘The Dream of the Rood and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism,’ Traditio 22 (1966): 43–72; John V. Fleming, ‘Muses of the Monastery,’ Speculum 78 (2003): 1071–106. 32 John V. Fleming, The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977); From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton: Prince­ton University Press, 1982); Reason and the Lover (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1990). 33 John V. Fleming, ‘Anti-Clerical Satire as Theological Essay: Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,’ Thalia 6 (1983): 5–22; John V. Fleming, ‘Jean de Meun and the Ancient Poets,’ in Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 81–100; John V. Fleming, ‘The “Mystical Signature” of Christopher Columbus,’ in Iconography at the Crossroads: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23 – 24 March, ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton: Index of Christian Art, Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993), 197–213.

The Sacred, the Profane, and Late Medieval Literature  29 34 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dusen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 213. 35 John V. Fleming, ‘Historians and the Evidence of Literature,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1973): 95–105 at 102, 104. 36 Ibid., 105.

2 Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder: Artistic Depiction from the Late Middle Ages to Rembrandt david lyle jeffrey

The story of Bathsheba and King David remains perhaps the best-known exemplum of voyeurism and its consequences in biblical tradition. The focus in exegesis and literary paraphrase has been overwhelmingly on King David: his lust, abuse of power, murder of Bathsheba’s noble husband, Uriah, his later exposure by Nathan the prophet and abject repentance, captured in the magnificent biblical poem ‘Misere mei domine’ (Ps. 51). But the manuscript illustrators, print makers, and painters have tended to linger over the first scene, unable to turn the eyes of their imagination, perhaps, from the fair Bathsheba herself: In the mean time it happened that David arose from his bed after noon, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and he saw from the roof of his house a woman washing herself, over against him: and the woman was very beautiful. (2 Sam. 11:2, Douay-Rheims translation 2 Kings 11:2)

It is as though they see the story from the tempted David’s point of view rather than that of Nathan the prophet, or the narrator, the chronicler, or later commentators; to these artists the repentance of David is of less interest than its occasion. The disposition to focus on Bathsheba involves, of course, artistic licence – even a certain imposition upon the biblical narrative. The case is far from unusual. Biblical narrative may even be said to invite such interpolations.1 But traditionally, any such imaginative ‘filling of the gaps’ is typically to some degree constrained, forced back to the original text for credible warrant. In regard to any imagined character development in literary or artistic treatment, there must be some plausible occasion or at least kernel of suggestion in the original biblical account.

Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder  31

To wit: in our example, a possible question arises as to whether Bathsheba was, in her own way, seeking the attention which came to her. On this matter, the text, typically cryptic, leaves much to the reader’s imagination. Subsequent aspects of the narrative development being what they are, imagination has not been wanting, even from the first, to gratify a variety of desires for amplitude. In early etymologies given for her name there are already hints: ‘bat – sheba’ suggests ‘daughter of fullness’ or ‘well-endowed daughter,’ and while later commentaries soften this somewhat, suggesting the meaning is ‘a fine quality of figs’ (Sanhedrin 107a), erotic overtones still clearly linger. In the Chronicles, a later text, where she is to be remembered chiefly as the mother of four sons of David, her name is given as ‘Bath-shua’ (1 Chron. 3:5), more narrowly ‘daughter of opulence,’ a suggestion that, in the light of the history of the kings of Israel, there is need for turning the focus away from her seduction by David to her royal role as mother of Solomon. This shift in focus is more emphatically expressed when she is cited in later Jewish commentary: Bathsheba is one of the ‘twenty-two virtuous women’ and regarded as possibly the wise woman celebrated in the last chapter of Proverbs as ‘the mother of Lemuel,’ or Solomon (Sanhedrin 70b; Mishle 30, 107–8; 31, 112). This characterization fails to carry over into early or medieval Christian commentary. There Bathsheba is remembered only minimally as the occasion of a great sin by an otherwise largely noble king through whom the Messiah descends. Despite her own indispensable role in that descent there is already a hint of embarrassment in Matthew’s genealogy, where her name disappears and she becomes (discreetly) ‘her that was wife to Uriah’ (Matt. 1:6). Here the grievousness of David’s sin is not entirely elided, but the focus has shifted somewhat, away from his act of adultery to his murder of Bathsheba’s first husband. Saving Appearances This embarrassment relates in a later recension to the requirements of typology: the early commentators cannot avoid seeing David as a type of Christ. Accordingly, various forms of exculpation of David, different in strategy but not in purpose from those in Haggadic commentary, are employed either to downplay the Bathsheba incident or to allegorize it.2 St Augustine is representative of the first stratagem in his De doctrina christiana, in which he excuses David as not lustful, though he fell into

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adultery.3 Sometimes the diminished focus on Bathsheba shifts almost entirely toward her later life, when her intervention secures Solomon’s ascendancy to the throne (1 Kings 1:11–31), permitting the Middle English Cursor Mundi, for example, to minimize the seduction scene and develop her character rather more positively and certainly far more extensively in terms of her display of rhetorical skills as a king-maker in pleading for Solomon over Adonijah.4 More simply, St Bonaventure, in his Collationes in Hexaemeron, or Collation on the Six Days, just overlooks David’s lapsus calumni altogether.5 A minimalist approach may have seemed to some a kind of charity. Gregory the Great exemplifies, perhaps even originates, the more demanding allegorical strategy for exculpation in his remarkable account in the Moralia in Iob: An action is sometimes in the performance of the action a ground for condemnation, but in the writing a prophecy of merit … For who that hears of it does not utterly loathe this, that David, walking upon his solarium, lusted after Beersheba, the wife of Uriah? … But of whom does David walking upon the terrace prefigure, other than that One of Whom it is written, ‘He has set his tabernacle in the sun?’ [Ps. 19:4]. And what else is it to draw Beersheba to himself, but to join to Himself by a spiritual meaning the Law of the formal letter, which had been united to a carnal people?6

Gregory goes on to etymologize ‘Beersheba,’ his unexplained substitute for her name, as ‘the seventh well’ (cf. Gen. 21:28–30, 26:32–3), which alias lets him slide on to allegories about the yielding of the knowledge of the law to spiritual wisdom. These moves, however awkward, presage tradition: Gregory’s purloined etymology becomes the ‘seven-fold well’ in the Glossa ordinaria where it contributes to the iconography of Bathsheba’s bathing scene and the resulting temptation of King David, allowing for a loose conflation with Jesus’ discourse with the Samaritan woman by the well and the superposition of more modest iconography, as we shall see, appropriate to the New Testament episode (John 4:6–39). Also in the Glossa ordinaria, St Eucherius and St Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae are invoked to represent Bathsheba as a type of the Law, and her seduction and later marriage to David as a liberation from the carnal letter and marriage to the spirit.7 What is notable here is the strength of Gregory the Great’s influence: his typological associations form the basis of subsequent convention

Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder  33

in allegory, despite their rough disjunction with the story at its literal level. Thus, in the Aurora or Biblia versificata of Peter Riga, Bathsheba is seen as the ‘nuda lex’ (denuded law), divested of its legalistic encumbrances, and hence that ‘candida scriptorum’ that Christ loves. 8 Riga’s language is nonetheless actually quite salacious, and may also be reflective of another passage in Augustine which in its tropological (moral) appropriation was unable to dispense with the literal level of the narrative. Those who are susceptible to the lust of the eye, Augustine had suggested, should be warned by this story to raise not complying eyes to strange balconies, to strange terraces. For from afar David saw her with whom he was captivated. Woman afar, lust near … Carnal pleasure, especially if directed toward unlawful and strange objects, is to be bridled, not let loose; by governance to be tamed, not set up as a principle of governance.9

Now what is perhaps surprising, and yet of primary interest in our present context, is that this tropological reading of the story, in which Bathsheba figures as an irresistible temptation to carnal appetite, receives much less attention in medieval literature than it does in medieval art. Subsequently, the temptation scene and its moral dimension are accented both in commentary and book illustration in the period immediately following the Reformation. Martin Luther still regards the incident of David’s adultery typologically, and, at the literal level, in a matter-of-fact fashion, as something not to pause much over. Though the problem presented by the text may have seemed to some readers primarily David’s predatory adultery with Bathsheba, in Luther’s reading there may be a certain unconscious conflation of issues; like his disciple Phillip Melancthon, who recommended a second wife to Henry VIII among others, Luther was inclined to be untroubled by polygamy in general, let alone among the kings and patriarchs.10 John Calvin is neither tolerant of David’s miscreance nor much interested in Bathsheba’s predicament one way or the other. For him, distinctively, the illicit liaison is just one more indication that the sovereign purposes of God in salvation history are not dependent on the virtues of any human protagonists. His view of David’s sexual misadventure is that it offered a warning which should have been heeded by the Jews collectively: so, ‘this human misconduct … [an] ugly episode at the start of the kingdom, should have stopped the Jews from glorying in the flesh. But God wished to testify that … he

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gave no weight to human merits.’11 Yet despite Luther’s apparent lack of surprise at David’s ‘bold sin,’ and Calvin’s dismissive generalization regarding metanarrative theological principles, Protestant artistic treatment of this story, as we shall see, becomes at least as interesting as the depiction by Catholic artists, and, in the work of Rembrandt, it eventually produces something both novel and compelling. Bathsheba’s Beauty The biblical narrative is, again, typically cryptic where description is concerned: from his rooftop garden, David looks down into the courtyard of a nearby house to see ‘a woman washing herself, over against him: and the woman was very beautiful’ (2 Sam. 11:2; Douay-Rheims translation 2 Kings 11:2). This follows, naturally, the confirmations of comeliness suggested by her name, but also introduces a problem. She is married. From the biblical narrative we do not know to what degree she was unclothed while bathing, but if we are to assume that her bathing was ritual purification (following menstruation), then perhaps her drapery was minimal to non-existent.12 But in early medieval illustration this probability is distinctly muted, as in an illustration in a Peter Comestor manuscript in which she appears merely to be combing out her wet hair.13 Manuscripts of the Bible moralisée can be more explicit, but not much. Books of hours of the early sixteenth century are occasionally a bit more risqué: in the penitential psalms of a book of hours from about 1524 found in the Museum Meermanno Westreenianum in the Hague Bathsheba stands erect in the fountain, breasts partially exposed to the prurient gaze of the king, while her buttocks are partially exposed to the viewer.14 This follows an earlier (1510) miniature for the same text, Psalm 51, in which the viewer sees a near frontal full exposure of Bathsheba standing in a pool while David views her back only,15 a stratagem perhaps imitative of Hans Memling’s better-known oil on wood Bathsheba of a few years earlier (1485). In these representations the viewer is allowed to see what David cannot quite see, and thus is more directly than even the king himself, so to speak, enticed as voyeur. Early Lutheran book illustration follows this approach to varying degrees, as notably in Martin Luther’s printed commentary on the seven penitential psalms of 1525.16 But there is equally apparent, among the flood of Bathsheba representations of the sixteenth century, a more modest mien emerging. For example, the new German catechism of 1531, the Deütsch Catechismus (see fig. 2.1), follows closely the depic-

Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder  35

Image Not Available

Figure 2.1 David and Bathsheba. Woodcut from Martin Luther, Deütsch Catechismus (Augsburg, 1531), fol. E4. Courtesy of the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection, Pitts Theological Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

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tion of Lutheran painter Lucas Cranach in his 1526 oil-on-wood painting, showing David and a group of courtiers looking down upon an elegantly attired Bathsheba among her ladies-in-waiting, one of whom makes as if to wash her extended foot.17 Learned knowledge of the Hebrew euphemism ‘feet’ (regel) for genitalia (see Deut 28:57; 2 Kings 18:27; Ezek 16:25) is doubtless behind the iconography; a post-menstrual ritual purification would seem quite possibly to be intended. But this iconographic turn to modesty, which appears in illustrations also for the Swiss German dialect translation, Die gantze bibel (1536), sometimes called the Zurich Bible, is found as well in Michael Helding’s Brevis institutio Christianum pietatem (1548; repr. 1557), also known as the Helding Catholic Catechism. After mid-century, Protestant illustrations especially seem quickly to revert to more frankly erotic depiction of partial to full female nudity. One sees this in editions of Luther’s translation of the Bible, but also in a work attributed variously to Philip Melancthon and Johannes Cogler, essentially catechetical, entitled the Imagines elegantissimae (1558).18 In this work, the Bathsheba scene illustrates the sixth commandment against adultery (see fig. 2.2). In the same period, catechisms for children may, however, display a Bathsheba mostly clothed, with little more than legs bare to mid-thigh, while David leers over the balcony, strumming his harp.19 There is evidently in Calvinist catechetical literature a more overt concern regarding all such visual indulgence, as in Jan David’s Christeliicken Waerseggher (1603), which offers a diagram of the human skull showing the eyes as portals to sin, elaborating a warning against any ‘unconscious gaze’ which may allow the eyes to become a gateway for temptation. This is an old motif indeed, traceable at least to St Augustine’s De sermone Domini in monte,20 and in Jan David’s book it is illustrated by articulated mechanical notions of the operation of the phantasm, entering through the eyes, and firing the imagination. Nevertheless, such warnings seem not to have been much heeded by the illustrators and painters who subsequently were attracted to Bathsheba. Moreover, there is in some of their work evident syncretism with classical stories of temptation and seduction, as in the recollection of the myth of Venus and Adonis, such as in the David and Bathsheba (1562) of Jan Massys (see fig. 2.3). Massys, a son of Quentin Massys, had been banished for heretical (not necessarily Protestant) opinions in 1543, and had returned from a sojourn in Italy much affected by the depiction of classical subjects, particularly from Ovid. In this lush oil painting sexual iconography predominates: the emissary courtier for David

Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder  37

Image Not Available

Figure 2.2 David and Bathsheba. Woodcut from Johannes Cogler, Imagines elegantissimae (Wittenberg, 1558), fol. E4. Courtesy of the Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection, Pitts Theological Library, Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

greets a nearly nude Bathsheba, bowing as he does so with extended leg, simultaneously pointing aloft to his waiting master. The courtier is accompanied by a hunting hound of the sort one might associate with Adonis; it evidently starts up Bathsheba’s spaniel, which for its own part responds rather more playfully than in any convincing show of resistance. In this painting Bathsheba’s response is coquettish bemusement, while that of her attendants is a sympathetic titillation. After this period the lady’s spaniel is increasingly present in the iconography of David’s immodest proposal. In medieval iconography of a heroine of amour courtois such a canine might have been a reminder of the virtue

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Image Not Available

Figure 2.3  Jan Massys, David and Bathsheba (1562). Louvre, Paris. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

of fidelity (fides, hence the name Fido); here this traditional purpose is invoked – perhaps somewhat in the fashion of the sleeping dog in Titian’s Danae or his Venus of Urbino – only to reveal any such fides as a losing proposition. In Peter Paul Rubens’s more famous Bathsheba at the Fountain (1635) this general development achieves its apogee (see fig. 2.4). That is, those features of the iconographic tradition for Bathsheba’s toilette (which invite the viewer of the art to experience vicariously the temptation to which King David succumbed, while allowing to David himself a prospect on Bathsheba’s nudity only from behind) are once again executed in the manner of Hans Memling’s Bathsheba and Luther’s Penitential Psalms. Both breasts are entirely exposed to the viewer. Ruben’s Bathsheba at the Fountain was painted almost simultaneously with his Susanna and the Elders (1635), likewise employing a fountain with the motif of

Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder  39

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Figure 2.4  Peter Paul Rubens, Bathsheba at the Fountain (1635). Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Photo Credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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a cupid and a dolphin; the Susanna story from the apocryphal Daniel 13 had by this time become another biblical subject explicitly associated with predatory voyeurism and similarly exploitative of the impulse to voyeurism in the viewer. It has been thought that both paintings may have been inspired to some degree by Rubens’s infatuation with his second wife, Helene Fourment, whom he had married five years earlier when he was fifty-three and she sixteen. Whatever the merit of this theory in respect to his choice of a model, the depiction in his Bathsheba at the Fountain is frankly sensual and cheerfully erotic, without a hint of any interest either in typology or moral instruction. Rubens’s father had been a persecuted Protestant who fled from Antwerp to Germany with his family; after his father’s death his mother returned the family to Antwerp, and Rubens was raised as a Catholic. This Catholic education provided a deep, religious iconography in many of his works.21 This painting is, in effect, transparently a secular work of art. We see Bathsheba seated, provocatively semi-draped, after her bath, having her hair combed by her young maidservant. Her aspect is coquettish and casual; looped loosely around her left arm, where it rests against the fountain, is an unclasped string of pearls, iconographically suggesting her availability. A black servant boy presents her with a note from the king, who, like the lecherous elders in many a Susanna painting, leers down from the middle distance of his palace balcony. Bathsheba herself is presented as nubile but very young, and she has an enticed (more than enticing) smile for the messenger. Oblivious to the agitated barking of her appropriately protective spaniel, she seems far more alert, in every sense, to a new opportunity. Rubens paints her quite precisely as though she had been expecting the message all along. This is a reading of the biblical narrative in which Bathsheba is at the least complicitous in the affair. But it quite deliberately also occasions a certain complicity in the viewer of the painting. Rembrandt’s Imaginative Interpolation In Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), by contrast, there occurs an artistic breakthrough of the entire set of conventions to which Rubens was the optimal heir, and in particular a rejection of the focus of centuries of biblical commentary and Christian catechesis. Rembrandt shows himself in many paintings to be as uninterested in the typical didacticism of Protestant catechisms or the patristic and medieval allegory which served primarily to exculpate David as was Rubens, but for different reasons. Rembrandt considers this story (as he does many other nar-

Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder  41

ratives) from the viewpoint of the character who in most other treatments is in fact simply a ‘fair object,’ or occasion of temptation, and reflects on her as one rather who suffers indignity, alienation, and loss.22 While his first Bathsheba at Her Bath (1643) had been still to some degree within the older iconographic tradition, in design as well as iconography, it evidently left him unsatisfied. In his second effort (Bathsheba at Her Bath, 1654) he is so focused on Bathsheba alone that he strips away most of the other figures from his canvas altogether (see fig. 2.5). There is no messenger; from the crumbling of the paper in her right hand we may gather that Bathsheba has already read the letter many times. Her hair has already been coiffed for her assignation; only the pedicure, dimly recollecting the iconographic washing of the ‘feet,’ remains to be completed, and now by a much older, partially obscured attendant. All sense of adventure has disappeared. Weighed down in somber reflection, her flesh textured and toned so as to suggest premature aging, this Bathsheba is torn in anguish between fidelity to her husband and what she must have seen as inescapable acquiescence to the king’s imperious lust. There is in Rembrandt’s more attuned psychological perspective no need for a barking Fido. Moreover, though Bathsheba is, as in many earlier treatments, presented almost frontally and completely nude, no comparable voyeurism is invited. Indeed, unlike Rubens’s version, this painting has an almost countererotic force. Rembrandt’s chiaroscuro, like his dramatic exclusion from the scene of all elements except her own personal crisis and weighty sadness, underscores the ethical dimension of the biblical narrative not from David’s or the voyeur’s point of view, but from Bathsheba’s point of view. He thus both reinterprets and repositions the story in the biblical reader’s mind. Rembrandt’s masterpiece is that of one who reads the biblical story with an eye for narrative rather than catechesis, which is to say, not toward justification or exculpation or even repentance but in compassionate identification with the victim, her betrayal by a tyranny of lust and power. (We see this identification plainly also in his painting, David and Uriah, where he turns the viewer’s attention to the plight – and thoughts – of the doomed Uriah.) But this particular painting of the incipient sexual conquest, perhaps as Bathsheba herself might have seen it, is especially metonymic for Rembrandt’s great overall artistic breakthrough. It offers a freshness in approach to the traditional topos made possible by turning away from catechesis and traditional typology without, as in Rubens, a loss of the subject’s religious dimension. What seems to make this counterintuitive success possible is a meditative and reflectively sympathetic reading of the Bible as participatory,

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Image Not Available

Figure 2.5 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Bathsheba at Her Bath (1654). Louvre, Paris. Photo Credit: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY.

imagined narrative.23 Though not exclusively a Protestant achievement (in painting he is anticipated by Caravaggio in particular), Rembrandt’s realization of the potential of the terse, biblical narrative for a dramatic realization of inner character becomes a tour de force of biblical interpretation in this work, and at the same time a subversion of the voyeurism which had characterized much of the earlier depictions of Bathsheba as subject. His 1654 Bathsheba at Her Bath is, I think, a watershed painting, his own revisitation of the affectual breakthrough in representing biblical narrative first achieved three centuries earlier in the frescoes of Giotto.

Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder  43 Notes 1 See, for example, Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 12, 36–7, 114–29. 2 See Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, trans. Henrietta Szold, 7 vols (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1911–69), esp. 4:103, 117–18; 6:260–5, 281. 3 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3.21, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 97–8. 4 Cursor Mundi, 7880–92, 8331–434, ed. Richard Morris, 3 vols, EETS (London: Oxford University Press, 1875; repr. 1966), 2:455, 481–7. 5 Bonaventure, Collations on the Six Days, 5.19, vol. 5 of The Works of Bonaventure: Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, Saint, trans, José de Vinck (Patterson, NJ: St Anthony Guild Press, 1984), 84 and n. 6 Gregory I, Moralia in Iob, 3.55 (supra Job 2:13); Morals on the Book of Job, trans. by James Bliss, 3 vols in 4, Library of the Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church (Oxford: J. H. Parker and J.G.F and J. Rivington, 1844–50), 1:165–6, translation modified. 7 Glossa ordinaria, PL 113.571–2. 8 ‘Designat Christum Dauid, Vrias synagogam, / Bethsabee legem, si bene queque notes. / Nuda placet regi species, in corpore nudo, / Non in uestito regius heret amor: / Nuda placet Christo lex, non uestita figuris; / Candida scriptorum lilia Christus amat.’ Aurora: Petri Rigae Biblia versificata, ‘Liber secundus regum’ vv. 195–200, ed. Paul E. Beichner, 2 vols (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), 1:278. 9 Augustine, Ennarationes in Psalmos, 51.3 (supra Ps. 51:2–4); Expositions on the Book of Psalms, ed. and trans. A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 8 of A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1888),190, translation modified. 10 Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage, vol. 36 of Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan et al. (St Louis: Concordia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1957), 26. 11 John Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. A.W. Morrison, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, 3 vols, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries 1–3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1972), 1:59. 12 See Lev. 15–17; cf. Deut. 23:11. 13 Petrus Comestor, Bible historial, trans. Guyar des Moulins, MS 10 B 23, fol. 145r, Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, The Hague (dated about 1372; miniature by Jean Bondol). The image is available through the website of

44 David Lyle Jeffrey the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, http://www.kb.nl/manuscripts/index .html. In some medieval manuscripts the scene is simply omitted altogether, as, for example, in Jean de Colombe’s minature in the Très riches heures du Jean, Duc de Berry, MS 65, fol. 67v, Bibliothèque du Château, Chantilly; see The Très riches heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, ed. Raymond Cazelles, 2 vols (Lucerne: Faksimile-Verlag, 1984). 14 Book of Hours, MS 10 F 33, fol. 74r, Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, The Hague. Image available at Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts. 15 Book of Hours, MS 129 G 2, fol. 56v, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Image available at Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts. 16 Martin Luther, Die Siben Buosz Psalmen, mit ainer kurtzen Auszlegung ([Augsburg: H. Steiner],1525), 2. Image available at Pitts Theological Library, Digital Image Archive, http://www.pitts.emory.edu/dia/ woodcuts.htm. 17 Martin Luther, Deütsch Catechismus ([Augsburg: H. Steiner],1531). 18 Johannes Cogler, Imagines elegantissimae, quae multum lucis ad intelligendus doctrinae christianae locos adferre possunt, collectae, partim ex praelectionibus Domini Philippi Melanthonis, partim ex scriptis patrum (Wittenberg: [Johannes Crato], 1558). 19 Andreas Osiander, Catechismus oder kinder predig (Nürnberg: Johann van Berg and Ulrich Neuber, 1548). Image available at Pitts Theological Library, Digital Image Archive. 20 Augustine, De sermone Domini in monte, 1.12.33–6 (supra Matt. 5:28), PL 34.1246–7. 21 Roger Adolf d’Hulst and M. Vandenven, Rubens: The Old Testament, trans. P.S. Falla, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard 3 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 24. It is interesting that renditions of the subject in verse drama were also popular in the sixteenth century. In France the tendency was to follow the exculpation motif fairly closely, even in Richard Belleau’s, Les amours de David et Bathsabee (1572), and narrowly so in A. Montchréstien’s David, ou l’adulterie (1595) and A. Pape’s David, victus et victor (1602). But in Hans Sachs’s Comedi David mit Bathsheba (1556), and George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1599), one sees a much more prominent interest in sexual intrigue. Peele’s Bathsheba rather coyly opens the play, in her bath, singing a song which recalls the ‘too much protesting’ topos and the ablutions of Diana; she immediately after lets herself be dried by the breezy Zephirus with his ‘delicate perfumes,’ only later rather languidly to drape herself with ‘loose delightsome robes’;

Bathsheba in the Eye of the Beholder  45 George Peele, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, Malone Society Reprints (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), vv. 28–52. 22 Cf. Rembrandt’s Jeremiah. Though his model for the 1654 Bathsheba was clearly Hendrikje, his second wife, it is clear enough that Hélène Cixous is on the mark in saying that ‘it isn’t with the appetite of desire that Rembrandt paints Bathsheba’; Hélène Cixous, ‘Bathsheba or the Interior Bible,’ trans. Catherine A.F. MacGillivray, New Literary History 24 (1993): 820–37 at 831. Rather, as Simon Schama has it, Rembrandt ‘makes the most beautiful nude of his career, in fact, the last nude painting of his career, a vessel of pure tragedy’; Rembrandt’s Eyes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 551. 23 Though Rembrandt would not likely have known it, the Hebrew of the 2 Samuel narrative supports his reading. David is the subject of all the verbs in 11:1–5: he arose, he walked, he saw, he sent and enquired, he sent messengers, he took her, and he lay with her. Walter Brueggemann draws attention to this swift and unequivocal display of royal power: ‘the entire narrative happens between qum and shuv: David “arose” and Bathsheba “returned.”’ But verse 5, he adds, takes the affair outside the administrative control of the king: ‘the woman conceived.’ In Brueggemann’s apt analysis, ‘There is no speech in the midst of the seizure, no consent, no resistance. The narrative is carefully crafted to get to this point. She says only two words, “I’m pregnant” … The world is changed.’ Walter Brueggemann David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 50–1; similarly, Stephen McKenzie, King David, A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 157–8. I am indebted to my colleague Mikeal Parsons for drawing this recent exegesis to my attention.

3 Susanna’s Voice lynn staley

Susanna’s story, which can be found in the thirteenth chapter of the book of Daniel, snakes its way through medieval and early modern texts.1 It might be more accurate to refer to Susanna’s stories, since there are a number of ways of using her and, consequently, of providing her with a voice. The story itself is a disturbing one, transgressing ideas of female inviolability, of the sanctity of the household, of civil justice. Susanna is the chaste wife of a wealthy man, Joachim. While bathing in her own garden, she is spied upon and accosted by two judges of Israel and invited to satisfy both of them or suffer the penalty for a charge of adultery, which they will bring against her. On trial before the people, her veil is removed so she is visible to everyone. There is one final detail to the story: Susanna and Joachim are Jews living in Babylon during the Captivity. Or perhaps two final details: Susanna has been educated in the Law of Moses. As can be expected, Susanna is used as an example of chastity, interpretations to be found in Ambrose, Tertullian, Augustine, and Abelard, who addresses his treatment of Susanna to the nuns of the Paraclete.2 (The story of Susanna sometimes can be found in manuscripts associated with nuns, such as BL MS Additional 10596, which Mary C. Erler has discussed.)3 Daniel 13 is the text for the Saturday of the third week in Lent, where Susanna is linked with the woman taken in adultery, both illustrations of God’s just and humane judgment.4 These same two examples are also linked to the Annunciation and questions about Mary’s virginity. Many commentators associate her with Joseph, also falsely accused of and unjustly persecuted for sexual crimes.5 Hildegard of Bingen compares herself to Susanna as one whom God has liberated from false testimony.6 Even Henry VIII likened himself to Susanna

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when seeking to emphasize his fidelity to his conscience in the matter of divorcing Catherine, his dead brother’s wife.7 Ambrose and others praise Susanna for her silence and thus her faith and trust in heavenly justice (here, she can become a type of Christ), and some praise her for calling out in a loud voice, first in outrage, then to God. However, as Genevra Kornbluth notes in her study of the Susanna Crystal, now in the British Museum, there are several ninth-century treatments of Daniel 13 that are focused not exclusively on Susanna’s piety or God’s justice but on the evils of unjust judgment and upon legal processes.8 Kornbluth argues that Lothar II employed such interpretations to laud himself as a patron of justice and to justify his less than just treatment of his wife in his quest for divorce. Philippe Buc notes a similarly regal attempt to control Susanna’s story in the Postilla litteralis of Nicholas of Lyra. Since Nicholas can be placed close to French ruling circles, his attempts to conceptualize power must be considered when contemplating Valois kingship.9 The focus here is upon the relationship between the king of Babylon and his Jewish subjects, whose judicial power was delegated to them by the king and thus derived from him. On the other hand, Sir John Fortescue emphasizes due process, saying that the case of Susanna underlines the dangers when law allows proof only by witnesses: ‘Who, then, can live secure of himself or his own under such a law – a law that offers assistance to anyone hostile to him?’10 Fortescue, of course, survived well into print culture. While there is not a tremendous number of late medieval Susanna moments, there are enough to warrant looking at her and at the uses to which she is put within political systems where ideas about the nature of power are being debated. For example, by focusing only upon Susanna’s modesty, authors can preclude more dangerous questions about false authority that are embedded in her story. The authors of The Knight of Tour Landry and Le Menagier de Paris both employ Susanna as an example of chastity and thus as a model for wifely behaviour, a concept that has a particular political resonance in the France of Charles V, with its pronounced emphasis upon stable marriage and patriarchal control.11 The Knight of Tour Landry prefaces his account of Susanna with the caption, ‘De Suzanne, la femme Joachim.’12 He ends the chapter, wherein Susanna is saved by the miraculous intervention of the five-year-old Daniel, with the moral, ‘And thus by cause of her bounte god saued bothe her body and sowle. And therfor euery good lady ought to haue her trust in god and for his loue to kepe trewely her maryage and also absteyne her of synne.’13 Though Susanna is praised for her chastity and faith,

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neither she nor Daniel is granted much agency in this version of Daniel 13. God causes Daniel to cry out that innocent blood should not be shed, admonishing the judges to examine each of the elders alone. The author of Le Menagier de Paris situates Susanna within a chapter warning his own wife to live chastely.14 His account is more elaborate than that of the Knight of Tour Landry, paying great attention to Susanna as a good wife, beloved of her husband, parents, and friends, and faithful to the law of Moses, but the details are similar. He ends his account by praising Susanna for preferring death to the physical defilement of adultery. Philippe de Mèziéres does not tell her story in Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage though it would have fit nicely with his emphasis upon wifely submission, especially if he, like many commentators, were to regard her as both chaste and silent.15 Pierre Bersuire, also close to Valois circles, allegorizes Susanna as the soul, the water as a fountain of devotion, Daniel as a priest, and the old men as the world and the devil. The moment Susanna sends away her maids for soaps and unguents, she is vulnerable because she is alone and hence without attendant virtues. Daniel ‘liberates her’ from the dangers of solitude.16 Boccaccio links her story to an account of the chaste Dido, instructing women to remain silent, modest, and faithful because God will rescue them: ‘Lower your eyes to the ground, close your ears, and like a rock hurl back the oncoming waves; be still and let the winds blow. You will be saved.’17 In The Book of the City of Ladies, Rectitude uses Susanna as an example of chastity. Christine de Pizan, however, removes anything controversial from this account. Susanna is relaxing, not bathing, in her garden, and Daniel is, again, a child in arms, who cries out at the sight of Susanna being led away unjustly and whose voice prompts a reexamination of the evidence against her.18 Susanna occupies a subtly different range of meanings in English texts, possibly because of the challenge to patriarchal control offered by heterodoxy and of the different English attitude toward law itself. In challenging ecclesiastical authority and the doctrine of transubstantiation, John Wyclif had implicitly raised the broader and more dangerous issue of civil authority. Though Wyclif himself averred the necessity of disendowing the church’s wealth and the transfer of worldly power to the secular realm, nonetheless his emphasis upon moral worthiness as concomitant with true authority opened the possibility of challenges to more than priestly power.19 Moreover, English regal power had been and was tested, scrutinized, and demythologized by baronial forces in ways that French regal power had not.20 In fact, during the reign of

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King John, Alan of Melsa, a Yorkshire Cistercian, had written a poem using the story of Susanna as a lens through which to focus questions about proper and improper legal authority. That poem, the Tractatus metricus de Susanna, can be linked with the later fourteenth-century Pistel of Susan, likewise from Yorkshire and affiliated with the Cistercian house of Bordesley in Worcestershire, where it was copied into the important Vernon and Simeon manuscripts.21 The Pistel of Susan is not the only late Middle English use of Susanna as a voice questioning the morality of civil or ecclesiastical power. Chaucer’s two explicit references to her present her story as at once simple and problematic. Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale prays to God in Susanna’s name when she lacks a champion to defend her from false charges of murder, ‘She sette hire doun on knees, and thus she sayde: / “Immortal God, that savedest Susanne …”’ (II.638–9).22 Custance so moves King Alla that he calls for a ‘Britoun book, written with Evaungiles’ (II.666), a sign of England’s prior Christianity, upon which the false knight can swear. When he perjures himself, a hand smites him down and a voice is heard to say, ‘Thou hast desclaundred, giltelees, / The doghter of hooly chirche in heigh presence’ (II.674–5). Kathy Lavezzo has argued that this event reorients pagan Anglo-Saxon justice to conform to Christian (and hence English) justice.23 On the other hand, though justice is done, like his passive heroine, Custance, the Man of Law’s Susanna is beauty wronged and rescued by divine aid.24 Neither she, nor, by extension, Susanna, nor even Daniel the lawyer, has a voice within the juridical system; instead, God both acts and speaks. Law, such as it is, is dependent upon the king’s pity for a beautiful and pious plaintiff. The Parson is blunter, citing Susanna under false witnessing, which is a subset of avarice, since it is her good name that was taken from her: Of Avarice comen eek lesynges, thefte, fals witnesse, and false othes … Fals witnesse is in word and eek in dede. In word, as for to bireve thy neighebores goode name by thy fals witnessyng, or bireven hym his catel or his heritage by thy false witnessyng … Ware yow, questemongeres and notaries! Certes, for fals witnessyng was Susanna in ful gret sorwe and peyne, and many another mo. (X.794–6)

The Parson here locates Susanna within a worldly (and potentially false) system of justice upon which the English community rests. Fundamental to that system is a procedure for elucidating the truth of a

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situation by calling and deposing witnesses; when our ‘neighebores,’ for whatever self-serving reasons, speak against us, community itself is in jeopardy. Where the Man of Law offers a miraculous event, the Parson suggests the murkiness of our world, where abound theft, false witness, and false oaths, all present in the Man of Law’s Tale but unpunished by any except higher powers. Indeed, within the Parson’s Tale there appears no established process by which the truth might be ascertained. Though the Parson admits the possibility of falsity, he rests his account of the Seven Deadly Sins within the realities of the English community, a community that may not be perfect but whose institutions attempt to uphold the common good. Though it is impossible to say whether or not Chaucer knew the alliterative Pistel of Susan, the most extended treatment in Middle English of Susanna’s story, the poem certainly offers a rich and complex use of her story that Chaucer would have appreciated.25 As I have suggested elsewhere, the poem presents what is a sharp critique of civil injustice in recognizably English space, where Susan is thrown into a dungeon (174), brought before justices at the bench (183), and brought back to the guildhall (293) for Daniel’s examination of the elders, who are here referred to as judges and excoriated as corrupt judges by Daniel.26 While this may be a poem of female chastity and faith, it is also a sharp critique of a legal and social system where false witnesses can malign and doom the vulnerable. Nor does the poet allow any grounds for antifeminist criticism of her behaviour: she is not described as bathing in her garden; all she takes off is her head covering. The poet has expanded the biblical story in ways that locate it within a secular world of violated households, of precarious prosperity, and of uncertain justice. Moreover, unlike so many treatments of Susanna, the Pistel of Susan is not a poem that lauds regal power or wifely submission. Susan is articulate in her own defence. The poet describes her as ‘brouʒt … to the barre’ (189), where the false judges lay familiar, ‘homliche’ (200) hands on her head and accuse her of adultery with a large, bold young man. Surrounded and supported by her ‘kynred and cosyn’ (238), as well as by her husband, Susan is not silent. The poet’s handling of her voice is far more nuanced than that of the author of the biblical account, for he breaks up her speech into three distinct addresses. In public, to the community, and to her extended family, she says, ‘I am sakeles of syn …

Susanna’s Voice  51 Grete God of his grace þis gomes forgeue Þat doþ me derfliche be ded and don out of dawen      Wiþ dere.     Wolde God þat I miht     Speke wiþ Joachim a niht.    And siþen to deþ me be diht      I charge hit not a pere.’

(240–7)

She asserts that she is guiltless of sin, while also signifying her charity by asking God to forgive those who wish with evil intent to deprive her of day’s light. She then asks to speak to her husband, Joachim. Her meeting with Joachim at once evinces the conventions of marital hierarchy, in that she falls down before him, and the companionate and almost egalitarian nature of their marriage: Heo fel doun flat in þe flore, hir feere whon heo fand, Carped to him kyndeli as heo ful wel couþe: ‘Iwis I wraþþed þe neuere, at my witand, Neiþer in word ne in werk, in elde ne in ʒouþe.’ Heo keuered vp on hir kneos and cussed his hand: ‘For I am dampned, I ne dar disparage þi mouþ.’

(248–53)

The first two lines suggest both her submissive approach to her husband (‘feere’) and her normally natural and loving way with her husband (‘as she ful well knew how’). Her statement that she has never angered him either in word nor in work seems to look forward to Walter’s demand that Griselda and/or his people neither ‘grucche’ nor ‘stryve’ against him in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale (IV.169–76, 351–7). Susan thus presents herself as a good subject, but at the same time she signals her normally familiar conversation with him. Though she rises to her knees and kisses his hand, her final sentence, again, suggests her wanted intimacy with him: damned, she dare not kiss his mouth, implicitly, as she is used to doing. While this is a scene between husband and wrongly accused wife, it is also a scene between a figure of sovereignty and his falsely accused subject.27 Joachim is far less articulate than his wife and less powerful than the false judges. He can only kiss her, presumably on the mouth, and say, ‘“In oþer world schul we mete”’; the poet adds, ‘Seide he no mare’ (259–60). Whereas Susanna is often praised for her silence and faith, here, Joachim is silent and faithful, Susan outspoken.

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Her third speech, which is to God, again demonstrates her complex awareness of the nuances of publicly private address: ‘Þou Maker of Middelert þat most art of miht, Boþe þe sonne and þe see þou sette vppon seuene. Alle my werkes þou wost, þe wrong and þe riht; Hit is nedful nou þi names to neuene. Seþþe I am deolfolich dampned and to deþ diht, Lord hertelich tak hede and herkne my steuene        So fre. Seþþe þou maiʒt not be sene Wiþ no fleschliche eyene, Þou wost wel I am clene.     Haue merci on me.’

(263–73)

Her prayer elaborates upon that in Daniel 13:42–3: ‘“Lord God, without bigynnyng and ende, that art knowere of hid thingis, that knowist alle thingis bifore that tho ben don; thou wost, that thei han bore fals witnessyng aʒens me, And lo! Y dye, whanne Y haue not do ony of these thingis, whiche these men han maad maliciously aʒens me”’ (Wycliffite translation).28 Where in the book of Daniel Susanna’s speech captures the necessary dignity with which one addresses God, in the Pistel of Susan, Susan prays to a God who is both majestic and intimate. God is above all and has made all and knows all her works, but she knows God’s seven names. She not only acknowledges her innocence, as she does in the book of Daniel, but asks God to listen to her, states that since he cannot be seen with the eye, he must see that she is pure, and asks not for justice but for mercy. Again, this is the approach of an obedient and loving subject to a sovereign power. It is respectful, but it also gives evidence of a previously familiar and loving relationship between them. If it is a model for faith, it also, as does her speech to Joachim, provides a model for political relationships and discourse between lords and subjects. However, that relationship and discourse depend upon a credible legal system whose checks and balances protect the individual, whose vulnerability is well figured in the virtuous Susanna. Possibly for this reason, the author of A Pistel of Susan devotes a good deal of space to Daniel, not as a prophetic child, but as an able lawyer, whose skills are related to proper deposition of witnesses. Those anxieties about false witnessing that can be seen in both the Parson’s Tale and Fortescue’s

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De laudibus legum Angliae invigorate the last section of A Pistel of Susan, where Daniel predominates. Hence, though God certainly plays a part in the action, there is no sense of miraculous salvation as there is in some other medieval treatments of the tale. As she is led forth to death, Grete God of his grace, of gyftes vngnede, Help with þe Holi Gost and herde hir preyere. He directed þis dom and þis derf dede To Danyel þe prophete, of dedes so dere; Such ʒiftes God him ʒaf in his ʒouþehede. ʒit failed him of fourten fullich a ʒere,      Nouht to layne.    Þo criede þat freoly foode:    ‘Whi spille ʒe innocens blode?’

(276–84)

These lines are subtly balanced between fidelity to the more conventional treatments of Susanna and a more nuanced reading of Daniel as having God-given gifts that he uses wisely. The chain of events the poet adumbrates links Susan’s voice and faith to a bounteous God who hears Susan’s prayer and directs this terrible judgment to Daniel, who has received God’s gifts in his youth, though he is not yet fourteen. Though young, Daniel is not the five-year-old he is in The Knight of Tour Landry or the ‘petit enfant’ he is in Le Menagier de Paris or even the ‘ʒonge child’ of the Wycliffite Bible.29 Miracle is downplayed in favour of faith, intelligence, and due process. His cry, ‘Why do you spill innocent blood?’ sets a legal inquiry into motion. Though the latter part of Daniel 13 certainly outlines such a legal inquiry, the author of A Pistel of Susan is among the few medieval authors to give it such emphasis.30 In A Pistel of Susan Daniel’s complaint against the false judges takes the form of a complaint against the unjust use of power. First, these ‘maisterful men’ (289) cry out against him. Daniel then calls them fiends, saying, ‘Vmbiloke ʒou, lordes, such lawes ben leiþ, / Me þinkeþ ʒor dedes vnduwe such domes to dele’ (291–2). Daniel’s accusation seems doubly directed: first, at the foulness of laws by which an innocent woman can be put to death for an uncommitted crime and, second, at judges whose own deeds render them unworthy to bestow such judgments. He then calls for a return to the ‘guildhall,’ where he will ‘be proces apert disproue þis apele’ (296). His wording here is precise in its attention to legality – by proper legal procedure he will disprove this appeal. He then goes on to do exactly that, providing a model for the

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proper deposition of witnesses and the workings of true (and popular) justice. If Susan seems to disappear, the processes of the law by which the community is upheld take her place. In fact, the final lines of the poem describe not her restoration to house and home but the punishment of the false judges, who are referred to as ‘traitors’ (356), who are first dragged through the city before being put to death. The author of A Pistel of Susan is certainly not unfaithful here to the last section of Daniel 13, but, in privileging legal process over divine intervention, the poet shifts the focus of the story from the picture of silent female chastity to a more provocative interest in civil proceedings and the moral worthiness of figures of judicial authority. The poem was copied into five manuscripts dating from the early 1390s to the first third of the fifteenth century, so it clearly spoke to its audience in ways that go beyond the Man of Law’s simple tale of meekness and miraculous intervention.31 Though the poem itself predates English Wycliffite treatises, and the manuscripts into which A Pistel of Susan was copied are not associated with Lollardy, the poem, as David Lyle Jeffrey has pointed out, seems to beg for a Lollard pedigree, or least, an affinity.32 However, it is Susanna herself who, when appearing in English texts, speaks for the rights of the individual under the law. The words she says when she is first propositioned by the elders are: ‘Angwischis ben to me on ech side’ (Dan. 13:22, Wycliffite translation). In The Testimony of William Thorpe (ca. 1407), Thorpe repeats those words when Archbishop Arundel demands that he abjure his Wycliffite beliefs, forsake his former associates, and silence his preaching and speaking voice: ‘And I heerynge þese wordis þouʒte in myn herte þat þis was an vnleeful askynge, and I demed mysilf cursid of God if I consentid herto; and I þouʒte how Susanne seide “Angwysschis ben to me on euery side,” and forþi þat I stood stille musynge and spak not’ (367).33 Like Susanna, he claims to fall silent in anguish. Except he does not. This reference comes early in Thorpe’s Testimony and serves as a preface to a long argument that ultimately questions Arundel’s spiritual or civil authority. Directly after Thorpe quotes Susanna’s words to the false elders, the archbishop orders that he respond to his demand that he recant. Thorpe again echoes Susanna who follows up her statement of anguish with one of personal integrity: ‘But it is betere for me to falle in to ʒoure handis without werk, than to do synne in the siʒt of the Lord.’ Thus Thorpe: Sere, if I consentid to do þus as ʒe haue here rehersid to me, I schulde

Susanna’s Voice  55 become apelour, eiþir euery bischopis aspie or sumnour of þis lond … I schulde hereinne be cause of þe deeþ boþe of men and of wymmen, ʒhe, boþe bodili and as I gesse goostli … But sire, I fynde nouʒwhere in holi writ þat þis office þat ʒe wolden enfeffen me now herewiþ acordiþ to ony preest of Cristis sect, neiþer to ony oþer cristen man; þerfor to do þus it were to me a ful noyous bonde to be tied wiþ, an ouer greuous charge. (370–89)

Thorpe here superimposes the language of legal process – ‘apelour’ (accuser), ‘enfeffen’ (legally bind), ‘bonde,’ and ‘charge’ – upon that of the individual conscience. Were he to accept Arundel’s charge, he would not only place the physical safety of others in jeopardy, but their spiritual safety. He explains that the terrors of confinement and persecution could cause those who ‘stonden now in truþe’ (377) to abjure that truth, linking his sense of personal truth with his vision of a community of like-minded Christians. He ends by implying that Arundel seeks to seduce him, implicitly, like one of the false elders: ‘Forþi, ser, if I consentid to ʒou to do herinne ʒoure wille … I deme in my consience þat I were worþi to be cursid of God and so of all seyntis’ (395–8). Similarly, Susanna argues that to do the elders’ will would mean spiritual death to her. This interchange comes early in the Testimony, which comprises over 2,000 lines of text, and leads into a careful examination of the basis for the authority of the church. Each of the topics about which Thorpe is questioned concerns the relationship between individual belief and communal practice. The archbishop asks Thorpe about preaching to the people regarding the nature of the sacrament and the use of images, about pilgrimage, about tithes and the authority of a possibly unworthy priest to curse those who do not pay tithes, about the swearing of oaths when ordered to do so, and about auricular confession. Each of these issues is, of course, central to the theological struggle between orthodox practice and the Wycliffite challenge to it. Moreover, in each set of questions, Arundel is described as focusing upon Thorpe’s preaching, upon his ability to or intention of influencing the community. Like Susanna, Thorpe ends in prison, a prison in which he thanks God for keeping him from his adversaries and from despair. It is from prison that he says he writes. Near the end of his Testimony he returns to the picture of himself as a silent victim of injustice: And þanne I was rebukid and scorned and manassid on ech side. And ʒit

56  Lynn Staley after þis dyuerse persoones crieden vpon me to knele doun to submytte me. But I stood stille and spak no word. And þanne þere weren spoke of me and to me many greete wordis; and I stood and herde hem curse and manasse and scorne me, but I seide no þing. (2224–8)

The obvious reference here is to the trial of Christ.34 Typologically, that New Testament trial provides a reference for the Old Testament trial of Susanna, whose silence under menace had been described as Christ-like by St Ambrose. However, though Thorpe’s examination by Arundel (or Arundel’s examination by Thorpe) is framed by references to Susanna and her silent faith, Thorpe has, in effect, given Susanna the articulate voice with which the author of the Pistel of Susan also endows her. Thorpe uses that voice to speak to his adversaries and to an English community he perceives as silenced by the powers of the institutions of church and state. Thorpe’s reference to and use of Daniel 13 may owe something to two previous references to Susanna: the written testimony of Walter Brut, the erudite layman called before the bishop of Hereford in 1391 for his heterodox views, and Thomas Wimbledon’s Paul’s Cross Sermon of 1388.35 As Thorpe does in the Testimony, both Brut and Wimbledon locate the faithful individual within a nation whose injustice undermines its security. Brut’s text is a carefully coded use of Susanna, presented not as the silent and suffering victim, but as the articulate accuser of false systems of power. It teases, begs for a quotation from or reference to Daniel 13. Instead, Brut employs the book of Daniel apocalyptically as an index of the state of temporal institutions. He begins the Latin defence he was required to write in answer to the charges against him, first, by stating who he is (a layman, a Briton, Latinate) and, second, by claiming scripture as his authority. He then provides a credal statement of his faith, specifying the nature of Christ, which closely follows the Nicene Creed in its doctrinal purity. Moving directly from the pristine orthodoxy of credal statement, which signals his oneness with the body of believers, Brut refers to the papacy and the idolatry residing in the temple of God, citing the book of Daniel as evidence for the abomination and desolation of the present age (287).36 In comparing Rome to the Whore of Babylon, Brut quotes from Daniel 12:11. He returns in a more apocalyptic way to the trope of Babylon, quoting from both Revelation and Isaiah (288–9). He employs Nebuchadnezzar’s questioning of Daniel to suggest the necessary relationship between power and prophetic wisdom in times that seem to augur the imminence of Antichrist (291–2).

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In illustrating the lack of true mercy to be found in the pope or in canon law, he recounts the story from John 8 of the woman taken in adultery (317), the text with which Daniel 13 is paired during the season of Lent, and follows it by recalling Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue whose head is gold, chest and arms silver, stomach and thighs iron, and feet part iron and part clay (Daniel 2:31–45). This dream was commonly used to diagnose historical devolution, and, about the same time as Brut’s trial, was described by John Gower in the Prologue to the Confessio Amantis. After what is a long and frankly apocalyptic warning to his nation, Brut ends by reinserting himself into the role of the submissive plaintiff, assuring his accusers of his simplicity, plain style, and obedience to a church whose authority his testimony constantly questions (358). Though he does not explicitly cite the story of Susanna, he cites around it in such a way that the explicit reference seems almost unnecessary. Like her, he is a citizen of the true Israel living within Babylon, falsely accused by members of his own nation, but faithful to his beliefs and assured that the laws of God supersede those of man. The analogy he continually draws between Babylon and the present age leads Brut to stress the special, and chosen, status of Britain itself. He locates this in the nation’s conversion during the time of Lucius, king of Britain, who, hearing of a new faith, believed and sent to Rome, to Pope Eleutherius, for men who could inform him of it. When they came and taught him about Christianity, ‘he rejoiced at their arrival, and was baptized with all his kingdom’ (in quorum adventum gavisus et baptizatus est cum toto regno suo [294]). Brut goes on to note, as does Bede, that, after accepting this faith, the kingdom never deserted it. Hence, their elect status: ‘so it seems to me that among all other peoples the Britons have been specially called and converted to the faith, as if by God’s election’ (sic videtur michi Britones inter omnes alias gentes quasi ex Dei eleccione specialiter fuisse ad fidem vocatos et conversos [294]). Thus, among all other people, the Britons seem elected by God, called and converted, implicitly a second Israel living in the midst of a Babylonian Captivity, that of the Roman Church. In tracing Britain’s faith, not to Pope Gregory’s decision to send missionaries to convert the ‘angels’ he saw in the Roman marketplace, but to Lucius’s willingness to listen to the rumour of the new faith being preached in Rome (294), to believe in it, and to send for Christian teachers, Brut severs British Christianity from Roman or papal power and locates it in the heart of a king of Britain.37 Thomas Wimbledon uses Susanna within an argument about the defi-

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ciencies of his own age that is, to some degree, consistent with Brut’s implied analogy between England and Babylon. This sermon has a long history in both manuscript and print. There are fifteen extant manuscripts in which it is included; their contents are mainly devotional, and some are clearly of Wycliffite provenance. The sermon was also carried over into Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, as well as being printed separately and included in both Anglican and Puritan collections.38 Wimbledon, tellingly, begins the sermon with the Parable of the Vineyard from Matthew 20, which he describes as the story of a ‘householdere’ (14).39 Though Wimbledon follows exegetical tradition in linking the household to the church, his use of it is focused upon the English household, the community, and the skewed values that he perceives there. He puts forward several related and schematic ways of conceiving of this realm: he categorizes the labourers in the vineyard as having different offices, priesthood, knighthood, and labourer (38–9); as estates into which men are called by God, servant, bondman, merchant, justice, priest; or as three ‘bailifs,’ spiritual lords, temporal lords, and every Christian man who shall answer to three questions (140–4). The questions themselves link personal intentionality with the realities of public office: how have you entered into your position? how have you ruled? and how have you lived? These will be the questions each must answer before entering into heaven. He castigates fathers who send sons to study law or to the king’s court in order that they may ‘make hem grete in þe world’ (192), and mothers who attend to the bodies of their children and not their souls (196–7), as well as churchmen who have adopted the mercantilism of the secular world. He devotes great attention to judicial inequities, asking those who rule how they have treated the poor: ‘Þou þat hast ben a juge in causis of pore men, how hast þou keped þis hest of God?’ (349–50), complaining ‘O Lord God, what abusioun is þer among officeres of here boþe lawes nowadayes’ (356–7). Here Wimbledon says that a poor man cannot bring a case against a rich man, that shire-reeves and bailiffs ‘wolleþ retorne pore mennes writis wiþ tarde venit but þey felen mede in her handes’ (364–5).40 Wimbledon cites Susanna when he comes to the final question those in civil authority shall answer on their last day: ‘How hast þou liued, þou þat demest and punysschist oþer men for her trespas?’ (373–4). He quotes St Gregory from the Moralia in Iob, who says that he who cannot govern himself should not govern others: ‘He schal not take gouernayl of oþere þat cannot go byfore hem in good

Susanna’s Voice  59 lyuynge.’ And whan any man stant byfore hym in dom, he most take hede tofore what Juge he shal stonde hymself to take his dom aftir his dedis.  But it is to drede þat many fareþ as þe tweye false prestis þat wolde haue dampned to deþ holy Susanne, for sche nolde nouʒt assente to here lecherie. Of whiche it is writen: ‘Þe turneden awey here eiʒen, for þey wolde not se heuene ne haue mynde of ryʒtful dom.’ (381–90)41

Here Wimbledon securely anchors the quotidian processes of civil justice to the awesome realities of heavenly judgment. As Brut does a few years later, Wimbledon holds his own time up to the day of doom, to the coming of Antichrist, suggesting like Brut that the righteous few are still citizens of Babylon. Wimbledon sees his own age as dominated by covetousness, which has infected society in ways that enervate efforts at reform.42 Foxe’s handling of these three medieval figures is telling.43 Thorpe’s testimony occurs in all editions of the Acts and Monuments; Brut’s is added with the 1570 edition. Wimbledon’s sermon, which was printed independently during the sixteenth century, occurs in all editions. However, in the 1563 edition Foxe added a paragraph to the beginning of the second part, in which he exploits Wimbledon’s reference to the ‘householder’: ‘How haste thou gouerned thy wife, thy children, and seruants? haste thou brought them vp after the laues of God, and continued them there in, as much as lyeth in thy pouer?’44 Foxe here offers a reading of Wimbledon’s late fourteenth-century sermon as addressed to the household of the realm, in which the father and husband, the figure of civil and spiritual authority, shall answer for the godliness of those in his charge. It is this question that is, within the narratives of Protestant England, increasingly attached to the story of Susanna, who cannot be separated from the household, whose sanctity is violated and safety nullified. While there are certainly many later references to Susanna as an example of chastity and faith, there are those that are likewise intended to undermine or to examine the powers of church or state. In A Spiritual Consolation written … to hys sister Elizabeth (1578), written when he awaited his own death in the tower, John Fisher used Susanna as an example of someone wrongly accused by those in power. (Here, ironically, Fisher, supporting the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church against a still-Catholic but determined king, assumes the stance of heterodoxy, a position he had formerly and vigorously persecuted when those dissenters were Protestants. His defence of both his own con-

60  Lynn Staley

science and Christian doctrine is as staunch as any Wycliffite’s defence of Christ’s law.) On the other hand, in An Account of a Disputation at Oxford, anno dom. 1554, with A Treatise of the Blessed Sacrament (1685), Nicholas Ridley cited the elders as false witnesses, comparing them to those who insist on the truth of transubstantiation. Thomas Bilney, the Norwich martyr credited with converting Hugh Latimer, likened the courtroom proceedings against him to those against Susanna.45 In The English Mirror (1586), George Whetstone raised the provocative issue of magistrates, saying that law was needed to ‘bridle’ unjust magistrates, referring to the false justices in Daniel 13, as did Jeremy Taylor much later.46 Sir Walter Raleigh in his own defence invoked Susanna by way of Fortescue when arguing about proof and the dangers of miscarriage of justice.47 Each of these references concerns the workings of English justice as it affects the safety of members of England’s household. The immediacy with which the story of Susanna could be used to provide a domestic lens through which to focus broader communal judicial concerns is even more apparent in three late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century treatments of her narrative, by Thomas Garter (1578), Robert Roche (1599), and Robert Aylett (1622).48 Each of these is careful to establish the Babylonian provenance for the drama, as Handel does in his oratorio Susanna.49 God’s people are thus exiles distinguished by their particular understanding of the law as reflecting divine justice.50 Joachim also receives special treatment as a good judge and governor. More important is the common emphasis upon Susanna as industrious, learned, and godly. In effect, she rules over her household like a Protestant wife and mother. M. Lindsay Kaplan has suggested that Garter’s handling of Susanna’s exemplary virtue and vulnerability to slander should be seen in relation to contemporary concerns for and depictions of Elizabeth I, the learned and godly head of England’s own beleaguered Protestant household.51 In his Eustathia, Roche draws an analogy between Susanna and the ideal of the Protestant woman by expanding upon the biblical references to her education. He writes that her mother has taught her the precepts of the law, and her father the history of Jerusalem’s decay, that a people’s disobedience to God kindles divine wrath; he goes on to warn: ‘Woe to that place, where law is turn’d to lust. / Woe to that land, where rulers fall to sin. / Woe to that State, where might doth say I must.’52 Roche invents a triumphal ending for the narrative by depicting Susanna in old age passing on her pious precepts to her children, admonishing them to distrust apparently safe situations.

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Aylett describes Susanna’s house as an academy of virtue, where the whole family has prayers.53 In all three texts Susanna is submissive to her husband, but also learned in sacred lore, protective of her (and, by extension, her husband’s) reputation, virtuous, a signifier of all that can be lost to flattery, corruption, and greed. Aside from the De claris mulieribus tradition of praising her for her chastity, or the typological convention of reading her as a type of Christ, Susanna appears in court, as a way into questions about the function of the law. What is more, she always appears to be a prosperous gentlewoman, as she is in Daniel. Her station and her virtue are inseparable from the orderly and beautiful household that Joachim has built and Susanna has maintained and nurtured. It is at this point that the texts I have discussed become most interesting, for Susanna’s story is about more than slander. It concerns the false practices of a legal system that threaten her household as they accost her, and, hence, when Susanna’s name is invoked it is usually in regard to legality, to the nature of the judicial and moral authority one person has over another. Those writing in the traditions of heterodoxy tend to emphasize the moral laxities of their accusers and the apocalyptic relevance of the narrative. The anonymous author of A Pistel of Susan focuses upon the very processes by which justice can be effected; it is to the guildhall that Daniel sends the participants in this communal drama, and in the guildhall where justice is finally done. The poem makes it clear it is God’s justice, but it is also civil justice, set in motion by a plaintiff’s own clear voice and worked out according to a rational method of deposition. Susanna can certainly be used to warn of the evils of Babylonian Captivity and to herald the Last Days, but she can also be employed to articulate an idea about civil relations where ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ kiss on the mouth, speak frankly to one another, and depend upon the rightly applied law of the land to protect them and their holdings. Notes 1 For the story of Susanna, as well as discussion about its addition to the story of Daniel, see The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 3rd ed., ed. Michael D. Coogan, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), Apocrypha 194–7. 2 Tertullian, ‘De Corona,’ PL 2.81. Ambrose, ‘De Joseph,’ PL 14.652; ‘De Tobia,’ PL 14. 789; ‘De Viduis,’ PL 16.242. Augustine, ‘Sermo CCCXLIII: De Susanna et Joseph, cum exhortatione ad castitatem,’ PL 39.1505–10.

62  Lynn Staley Abelard, ‘Sermo XXIX: De Sancta Susanna, ad hortationem virginum,’ PL 178.555–64. 3 The British Library’s MS Additional 10596, a fifteenth-century English manuscript owned by Matilde Hoyle, a nun of Barking, contains a separate recension of the later Wycliffite biblical translation, entitled ‘A Pistle of Holy Susanna, danyell xiii c.’ For discussion of this manuscript, see Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4. For another poem about Susanna, possibly of English provenance, see Jane Stevenson, Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 130–7. This poem was written by an ‘abbess Wiltrudis,’ possibly either an eleventh-century German nun or a twelfth-century English nun from Wilton. For important uses of Susanna in thirteenth-century manuscript culture, see Claire Donovan, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 24, 25, 116–21. See also Marie-Louise Fabre, Susanne ou les avatars d’un motif biblique (Paris: L’Harmatton, 2000). 4 See also Bernard of Clairvaux, In festo annuntiationis Beatae Mariae Virginis, Sermo III: ‘De muliere adultera, de Susanna, de B. Maria,’ PL 183.393–8. 5 See Augustine, ‘Sermo CCCXLIII: De Susanna et Joseph, cum exhortatione ad castitatem,’ PL 39.1505–10. 6 See ‘Vita sanctae Hildegardis,’ PL 197.113. 7 James P. Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives (London: The British Library, 2004), 123. 8 Genevra Kornbluth, Engraved Gems of the Carolingian Empire (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 43–8. 9 Philippe Buc, ‘The Book of Kings: Nicholas of Lyra’s Mirror of Princes,’ in Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, ed. Philip Krey and Lesley Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 89. 10 John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 30. 11 See my Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), chapter 4. 12 Anatole de Montaiglon, ed., Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry (Paris: Jannet, 1854), 191. Caxton’s rubric reads: ‘How god taketh in his kepynge them that haue fyaunce and truste in hym.’ See M.Y. Offord, ed., The Book of the Knight of the Tower, trans. William Caxton (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 130. 13 The Book of the Knight of the Tower, 131. Caxton here is slightly less emphatic than the Knight of Tour Landry, who offers an even greater focus upon

Susanna’s Voice  63 marriage as a bond like that between the soul and God: ‘Et pour ce toute bonne femme doit tousjours espérer en Dieu, et, pour l’amour de lui et l’amour de son mariage, soy garder de perilz et ne de pechier si grandement ne si vilment comme enffraindre son serement et sa bonne loy’ (192–3). 14 Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier, eds, Le Menagier de Paris (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 47–51. 15 For this text, see, Joan B. Williamson, ed., Philippe de Mézières. Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993). I have discussed this work in Languages of Power, 282–5. 16 Pierre Bersuire, Reductorium morale super totam bibliam (Venice, 1633), 206. 17 Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, 42.17, ed. and trans. Virginia Brown (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 177. 18 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, 2.37.1, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 155–6. 19 See Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 139–41; David Aers, Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 53–66; Staley, Languages of Power, 95–101. 20 See The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. 350–c. 1450, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. J. Canning, ‘Law, Sovereignity and Corporation Theory, 1300–1450’ (454–76), and Jean Dunbabin, ‘Government’ (477–519). See also Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961), chapter 4; H.G. Richardson, ‘The Coronation in Medieval England: The Evolution of the Office and the Oath,’ Traditio 16 (1960): 111–203; W.L. Warren, King John (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961), 174–240; and Staley, Languages of Power, 81–95 21 In Lynn Staley, ‘Susanna and English Communities,’ Traditio 62 (2007): 25–58, I discuss the early thirteenth-century poem in relation to the later fourteenth century and argue that the author of A Pistel of Susan knew Alan’s poem. 22 All quotations from the Canterbury Tales, cited in the text by fragment and line number, are taken from Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987). 23 For a reading of the Man of Law’s Tale as epitomizing the narrator’s concern with an English (as opposed to Roman) juridical identity, see Kathy

64  Lynn Staley Lavezzo, Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000–1534 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 98–106. 24 Winthrop Wetherbee has studied both Chaucer’s and Gower’s versions of the story of Constance and offers a trenchant reading of the Man of Law’s Tale in terms of its passive heroine, its controlling narrator, its cultural context, and its evidence of social distress and dislocation; see Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower,’ in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R.F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 65–94. For studies linking Custance to alterity through her gender, see David Raybin, ‘Custance and History: Woman as Outsider in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 65–84; Susan Schibanoff, ‘Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale,’ Exemplaria 8 (1996): 59–96; and Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 181–238. V.A. Kolve, in Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984), 297–358, has considered the Man of Law’s Tale in terms of the broader cultural context evoked in the account as a tale of conversion and its heroine as exemplary. 25 All references to the Pistel of Susan, cited in the text by line number, are drawn from Thorlac Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry of the Later Middle Ages: An Anthology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 120–39. For suggestions that Chaucer knew the poem, see Alfred Kellogg, ‘Susannah and the Merchant’s Tale,’ Speculum 35 (1960): 275–9, who argues that the Merchant employs a reference to the Pistel of Susan to expose the ‘moral distortion’ of January. 26 Languages of Power, 317–18, 340–5. 27 For an extended treatment of the political implications of late medieval texts dealing with marriage and the household, see chapter 4 of Staley, Languages of Power. 28 The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and the New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850; repr. New York; AMS Press, 1982). 29 In The Book of the City of Ladies, Daniel is a young child in his mother’s arms. In Wicliffe’s Apology, Daniel ‘ʒet a barne, jugid þe prestis’; see An Apology for Lollard Doctrines, ed. James Henthorn Todd (London: Camden Society, 1842; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1968), 2. See Turville-Petre’s note to line 281, noting the patristic opinion that Daniel was twelve; Alliterative Poetry, 136.

Susanna’s Voice  65 30 In Staley, ‘Susanna and English Communities,’ I argue that the poet found such an emphasis in Alan of Melsa’s Tractatus … de Susanna. 31 See Alice Miskimin, ed., Susannah: An Alliterative Poem of the Fourteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 20–41; Russell A. Peck, introduction to The Pistel of Swete Susan, in Heroic Women of the Old Testament in Middle English Verse, ed. Russell A. Peck (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 73–81, esp. 77–9; and Turville-Petre, Alliterative Poetry, 120–1. 32 David Lyle Jeffrey, ‘False Witness and the Just Use of Evidence in the Wycliffite Pistel of Swete Susan,’ in The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and Witness, ed. Ellen Spolsky (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), 57–71. For discussion of the dating of A Pistel of Susan, which Ralph Hanna feels is probably two decades before the earliest copy of it, see Staley, ‘Susanna and English Communities,’ 45, and Languages of Power, 340. Thus, though I disagree with Jeffrey’s argument that A Pistel of Susan is a Wycliffite poem, there are indications that the Wycliffites found Susanna a compelling example. In particular, see Jeffrey’s discussion of the sermon, ‘Of Prelates,’ in The Testimony of William Thorpe (which I also discuss below), and the ‘Apology of Wycliffe,’ which is focused upon Daniel as the spokesman for true law. See Apology for Lollard Doctrines, ed. Todd, 63–7, which describes Daniel’s castigation of the false priests. 33 Quotations of Thorpe’s Testimony, given in the text by line number, are drawn from Anne Hudson, ed., Two Wycliffite Texts: The Sermon of William Taylor 1406, The Testimony of William Thorpe 1407, EETS 301 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); for dating, see xlv–liii. 34 See Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380–1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 57, 59. On the relationship between Thorpe’s Testimony and Margery Kempe’s trials, see Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 139. Jeffrey, ‘False Witness,’ 66, also notes the association between Thorpe’s silence and that of Christ. In the Wyclifitte sermon, ‘Of Prelates,’ Susanna is similarly linked to Christ through silence and false testimony; see The English Works of Wyclif, ed. F.D. Matthew, EETS 74 (London: Trübner & Co., 1880), 74–5. Jeffrey, ‘False Witness,’ 66, also discusses this reference. 35 For Walter Brut, see Registrum Johannis Trefnant, Episcopi Herefordensis, A.D. 1349–1404, ed. William W. Capes (London: Canterbury and York Society, 1916), 278–359. For Thomas Wimbledon, see Wimbledon’s Sermon ‘Redde Rationem Villicationis Tue’: A Middle English Sermon of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Ione Kemp Knight (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967);

66  Lynn Staley and Nancy H. Owen, ‘Thomas Wimbledon’s Sermon: “Redde racionem villicacionis tue,”’ Medieval Studies 28 (1966): 176–97. In The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1988), Anne Hudson notes that in 1392 the Lollard John Belgrave ‘posted a pamphlet on the doors of St Martin’s Church in Leicester comparing the archdeacon’s official who was due to hold court there the following day with the elders who condemned Susannah, and called him vn jugge de deable de iniquite’ (153–4). For recent work on Brut and on the texts associated with him, see Fiona Somerset, ‘Eciam Mulier: Women in Lollardy and the Problem of Sources,’ and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ‘Eciam Lollardi: Some Further Thoughts on Fiona Somerset’s “Eciam Mulier: Women in Lollardy and the Problem of Sources,”’ in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 245–60, 261–78. 36 William Brut’s testimony is cited in the text by page number from Capes, Registrum Johannis Trefnant (see note 35). 37 John Foxe will tackle the same question of origins in Book 2 of the Acts and Monuments, where he acknowledges the story of King Lucius and Pope Eleutherius and of Pope Gregory I and Augustine of Canterbury, but chooses, instead, either Joseph of Arimathea or one of the apostles, thus predating any Roman foundation. See The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. George Townsend, 8 vols (London: Seeley, Burnside and Seeley, 1843–9; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965), 1:305–7. 38 See Knight, Wimbledon’s Sermon, 3–26; and Hudson, Premature Reformation, 424. 39 Quotations from Wimbledon, cited in the text by line number, are drawn from Knight, Wimbledon’s Sermon (see note 35) 40 Knight, Wimbledon’s Sermon, 131 nn. 356–68, notes of this section that it echoes Isidore of Seville’s castigation of corrupt judges who demand rewards and that one manuscript containing Wimbledon’s sermon quotes Isidore. 41 The final sentence is a quotation from Dan. 13:9. 42 Wimbledon’s apocalypticism is apparent in his references in the second part of the sermon to Joachim of Fiore (837) and to Hildegard of Bingen (841) and their prophecies of the end of the world; he also cites the prophet Daniel (880, 884) and John’s account of the opening of the seals (910ff). 43 For recent work on the making of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, see John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 44 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, 3:300; this paragraph was

Susanna’s Voice  67 removed from subsequent editions. For notes regarding Foxe’s handling of Wimbledon’s sermon, see 3:292 n. 1. 45 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. Townsend, 4:631. 46 See Jeremy Taylor, Ductor dubitantium, or The Rule of Conscience in all her General Measures (London: Richard Royston, 1660), chapter 2, rule 8. 47 Walter Raleigh, The Arraignment and Conviction of Sr Walter Rawleigh at the Kings Bench-Barre at Winchester, on 17 November 1603 (London: A. Roper, 1648). 48 Thomas Garter, The Commody of the Moste Vertuous and Godlye Susana (London: Hugh Jackson, 1578); Robert Roche, Eustathia, or the Constancie of Susanna (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1599); and Robert Aylett, Susanna: or the Araignment of the two unjust Elders (London: John Tegue, 1622). 49 This begins with a chorus of Israelites singing, ‘How long, O Lord, shall Israel groan / In slavery and pain?’ 50 Aylett goes so far as to explain the legal status of the Hebrews, the fact that they own their own dwellings and have their own laws and elders. 51 M. Lindsay Kaplan, ‘Sexual Slander and the Politics of the Erotic in Garter’s Susanna,’ in Spolsky, The Judgment of Susanna, 73–83. 52 Roche, Eustathia, fols B3r, D4r 53 Aylett, Susanna, 10.

4 The Ends of Love: (Meta)physical Desire in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde jamie c. fumo

Endeth than love in wo? Ye, or men lieth, And alle worldly blisse, as thynketh me. The ende of blisse ay sorwe it occupieth.

(Tr. 4.834–6)1

In the view of a medieval Christian reader, Criseyde no doubt speaks a great truth. Placed as it is in Book Four, the book of Fortune’s transmutations, the passage above evokes an appropriately Boethian sentiment, recalling one of the few explicit comments on the dangers of sensual love in the Consolation of Philosophy: the ‘delyces of body’ (corporis uoluptatibus) whose ‘desirynges ben ful of anguyssch, and the fulfillynges … ben ful of penance’ (appetentia quidem plena est anxietatis, satietas uero paenitentiae [3.pr.7.1–4]).2 As with all false goods, ‘the issues of delices ben sorweful and sorye’ (tristes uero esse uoluptatum exitus [3.pr.7.12]). Criseyde’s words are also, of course, precociously Christian in tone (note the vaguely didactic drift of ‘worldly blisse’), easily matched by the language of the most conventional of vernacular religious lyrics: Worldes blis ne last no throwe, it went and wit a-wey anon; þe langer þat ics it knowe     þe lasse ics finde pris þar-on, for al it is imeind [mingled] mid care … al þe blis þis her and þare     bilocth [encompasses] at ende wep and mon.3

This is not the first time that Criseyde, the woman who would rather

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‘rede on holy seyntes lyves’ (Tr. 2.118) – or at least the Roman de Thèbes – has established herself as an observer with extensive view of the vanity of human wishes. In a protracted scene that one might have expected to be among the lovers’ happiest, the night of the affair’s first consummation, Criseyde’s tears and terror in reaction to Pandarus’s disturbingly counterproductive fiction concerning ‘oon hatte Horaste’ (3.797) set the mood for an eventual lovemaking that is sweeter (if frailer) for its brush with sorrow: ‘O God,’ quod she, ‘so worldly selynesse, Which clerkes callen fals felicitee, Imedled is with many a bitternesse!’

(3.813–15)

Concluding that ‘ther is no verray weele in this world heere’ (3.836) – a sentiment, alien as it may be to the intoxicating world of the bedroom, that is fully endorsed by the narrator in the poem’s final stanzas – Criseyde is as concerned about the motives and intentions (‘the fyn of … entente’ [3.125, my emphasis]) of those who entreat her to love as she is cognizant of the painful habit of love, as a hard-bought way of life and form of identity, to come to an end (fyn, in a different sense).4 Remarkable in Criseyde’s passing Boethian moments is her establishment by Chaucer as one so thoroughly prepared for love’s end that her very concerns vex, even haunt, the affair’s beginning and points of transition. In a similar way, the poem’s self-definition as tragedy in the first stanza delimits the narrative’s capacity for innocent hope.5 Granted, the fact of Criseyde’s widowhood helps us understand her circumspection – even if Chaucer helps us not at all to appreciate the lingering effects of her former life, and reminds us of it only once, damningly, as if to alienate us from her (5.975–8). Ironically, however, for all of Criseyde’s hypersensitive protestations about the brittleness of earthly felicity, her love affair with Troilus does not end until she chooses to end it; it merely changes, and changes setting. And, of course, Criseyde too changes; ‘thus goth the world,’ says the narrator with unusual and significant brusqueness, and perhaps a note of emotional exhaustion (5.1434). In fact, in the very motion of ending her love with Troilus – although she can never really admit this is what she is doing, as her final letter painfully attests – Criseyde defies and defers the end of love as a category of identity by transferring her affection to Diomede, a sexual entrepreneur and megalomaniac who is, for all intents and purposes, incapable of love as it has been defined and valued throughout the poem. When, in

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the poem’s most wrenching moment, Criseyde vows that ‘to Diomede algate I wol be trewe’ (5.1071), she aims to convince the generations of future readers who would judge her that her ability at least to be true to someone (if we indeed have any reason to take her word here) mitigates her association with falsity and thus redeems her by showing her powers of affectionate devotion to be constant, even if the object of that devotion has changed.6 In this way, Criseyde avoids confronting the end of love she had so feared by taking control over that end, denying it reality, and reinventing it as a new beginning – as Troilus puts it, a ‘kalendes of chaunge’ (5.1634). Crisyede is keenly aware of the limitations of her world, but she also limits it, and is herself an image of its limitations. In order to evaluate this fraught triangulation of Criseyde’s subjectivity, we must take her seriously – as criticism, for the most part, has not – as a metaphysically defined creature, one whose volitional engagement with complex issues of belief and epistemology surrounding the discourse of love parallels, and also departs from, that of Troilus. Criseyde’s ultimate inability to love deeply and lastingly, I will argue, is not a function of her social predicament, or her exploitation by men, or her passive adherence to literary expectation, or the conflicted demands of masculinist ideology, or even the inadequacies of her pagan world. Rather, it is a mark of her particular epistemological contribution to what various critics have recognized as Chaucer’s central concern in the poem: quite simply, love, sub specie aeternitatis, particularly ‘the comparison … between different modes of human love,’7 articulated by means of a ‘searching anatomy of love itself.’8 Criseyde, the most lovable woman in English literature,9 cannot love another person enduringly because she does not believe in love. Quite possibly, she does not believe at all. I aim in this essay to demonstrate that Chaucer approached the characters of Troilus and Criseyde with a deep interest in the ways in which different forms of knowing and believing shape his protagonists’ participation in love and define the extent to which they gain enlightenment in this world. Chaucer represents love in Troilus and Criseyde, we shall see, as a problem of quasi-theological belief in more specific and extensive ways than have generally been acknowledged. In the pro­ cess, Chaucer provocatively echoes fourteenth-century scholastic controversies over actual theological issues, such as the nature of being and the existence of God, problematically reanimated in the context of a Petrarchan psychology of enamourment. In contemplating and executing the ideology of love, Troilus and Criseyde are cast at various

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important moments in the poem as speculative philosophers with radically differently approaches to a centrally pressing existential question: does love exist? Their irreconcilable answers to this question serve not only to deepen and particularize their respective characterizations, but also to provide a context for their ultimate incompatibility as lovers, as well as a way of conceptualizing the proximity – and tragic distance – between the epistemological mechanisms of paganism and the metaphysical structure of Christian belief. Chaucer’s sustained analogy of the so-called religion of love with the Christian vocabulary of sacred ritual has been much studied in the decades since T.P. Dunning claimed that the ‘sincere natural religion’ centred upon the pseudo-theological experience of love in Troilus and Criseyde serves to ‘bring [Chaucer’s] characters nearer to himself and his contemporaries, to represent them as in many respects people who think and feel as they do.’10 Put simply, debate has centred upon whether this theological eroticism ‘affirm[s] a “celestial” potential in amorous love’ and thus ennobles those who subject themselves to its power, or whether it parodically exposes the spiritual cost of an illicit religion that takes ‘seduction and idolatry for its means and goal.’11 John V. Fleming and A.J. Minnis have, in different ways, substantially complicated this critical binary by illuminating particular historical contexts of pagan worship (as perceived by medieval Christian intellectuals) that establish a horizon of expectations for the degree of enlightenment available to Chaucer’s Trojans and their engagement with standards of virtue as defined within the moral philosophical tradition of paganism itself.12 Most recently, the ‘religiosity’ of Troilus’s and Criseyde’s respective conversions to love has been shown to be modelled with some precision on the archetypal personal transformations of St Paul and St Augustine: the one ‘characterized by revelation … abrupt, radical, and complete,’ the other gradual, retrospective, and bound up in psychological processes and conflicts of will.13 With a few exceptions, earlier generations’ fascination with the moral complexion of Chaucer’s characters within a poetic cosmology of love has largely been eclipsed in the past two decades by what David Aers posited in his seminal sociopolitical defence of Criseyde as the ‘inextricable links between objective social factors and the individual psyche.’14 According to Aers, Troilus and Criseyde’s metaphysical vocabulary (which encompasses the idealization of love’s rituals as well as its Boethian texture) acts as a ‘mystifying concealment of human practices,’ a fiction by which the social (as opposed to destinal or willed)

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formation of circumstance is occluded. Criseyde’s inconstancy in love, by this reading, can be understood as a character flaw only in so far as her ‘character’ is socially constructed and defined, rather than intrinsically coherent; social forces thus induce ‘human moral and spiritual failure.’15 Although such approaches bracket the spiritual and metaphysical concerns of the poem as misdirected abstractions, they unintentionally augment the relevance of those concerns by attributing a deterministic force to social conditioning as a power that trumps free will, claiming repeatedly (in language not so far from Troilus’s muddled Boethianism in the temple scene in Book Four) that Criseyde’s infidelity was inevitable given the pressures of her social formation.16 One suspects that Criseyde herself would be the first to be convinced by such arguments, for the same reason that she shuffles awkwardly in her final speech between an acknowledgment that she ‘dide amys’ and a self-dramatization as victim of Fortune: ‘Allas, that swich a cas me sholde falle!’ (5.1067, 1064). However, as Derek Pearsall rightly observes, Criseyde’s exercise of free agency is stressed throughout the poem, especially in those moments in which she contemplates a choice while convincing herself that she is actually acting under the compulsion of outside forces.17 That the claustrophobic pressures of political menace and social conditioning upon the individual actions of Chaucer’s Trojan protagonists have been overstated, as Pearsall implies, is no doubt true; this does not mean, however, that these pressures are without function in Chaucer’s poetic design. As we shall see, Chaucer’s close attention to defining and distinguishing the metaphysical ‘complexions’ of Troilus and Criseyde through their respective understandings of the theology and metaphysics of love ultimately serves to illustrate not that social factors delimit or extenuate the praxis of the individual psyche (pace Aers) but that the individual psyche, as shaped by ‘dignity of agency and freely willed moral choice,’18 expresses its self-definition – and reveals its limits – most profoundly on a social stage, on which it must react both to unpredictable circumstance and to the ethical challenges that define human relations. When a stunned Troilus retreats from the temple festivities to the privacy of his bedroom early in Book One, his first sustained reflection upon the experience of love is the celebrated ‘Canticus Troili’: If no love is, O God, what fele I so? And if love is, what thing and which is he? If love be good, from whennes cometh my woo?

The Ends of Love  73 If it be wikke, a wonder thynketh me, When every torment and adversite That cometh of hym may to me savory thinke, For ay thurst I, the more that ich it drynke. And if that at myn owen lust I brenne, From whennes cometh my waillynge and my pleynte? If harm agree me, wherto pleyne I thenne? I noot, ne whi unwery that I feynte. O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte, How may of the in me swich quantite, But if that I consente that it be? And if that I consente, I wrongfully Compleyne, iwis. Thus possed to and fro, Al sterelees withinne a boot am I Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, That in contrarie stonden evere mo. Allas, what is this wondre maladie? For hote of cold, for cold of hote, I dye.

(1.400–20)

Troilus’s song, paradoxically, is both spontaneous and formal: untaught in its searching articulation of confusing emotions not yet fully understood, yet almost rigid in its Petrarchan ‘theatricality’ 19 and its theoretical interrogation of ‘the being and causality of love … its psychology and ethics.’20 The ‘Canticus Troili’ rewrites Sonnet 132 of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in metaphysical terms, ‘abstract[ing] from Petrarch’s abstractions,’ as one critic has put it,21 and thus forms the first of several extended passages in the poem in which Troilus struggles with difficult questions of free will and the place of the individual in the cosmic order. In the view of D.W. Robertson, Troilus’s song dramatizes the lover’s rejection of reason and abandonment of duty in the name of the ‘perverse doctrines’ of a false religion that glorifies erotic love.22 The close attention paid by critics to Chaucer’s techniques in translating Petrarch’s sonnet confirms Robertson’s assertion that Chaucer is particularly interested in the potential of Troilus’s song to evoke a pseudo-religious vocabulary of contemplation.23 Two deviations from Petrarch’s sonnet in the first two lines of the ‘Canticus Troili,’ taken by Ernest H. Wilkins and Patricia Thomson as ‘misunderstandings’ on Chaucer’s part, seem virtually intentional in this light, programmatically removing the subject of the

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poem from the realm of individual experience to that of existential reality and theological absolutes.24 Petrarch’s sonnet begins, ‘S’amor non è, che dunque è quel ch’io sento? / ma s’egli è amor, per Dio, che cosa et quale?’ In the ‘Canticus Troili,’ Petrarch’s worldly ‘S’amor non è’ (If it is not love), a surmise that implies prior experience of love, becomes an agnostic’s vacillation over the reality of love itself: ‘If no love is.’ In a more subtle way, ‘che cosa et quale?’ (what kind of thing is it?), reframed as ‘what thing and which is he,’ projects Troilus’s emotional crisis away from the self and toward a personified force – a ‘he’ as opposed to an ‘it’ – from which, for all sentient beings, sensation derives. 25 As Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr, has observed, the speculative flavour of the ‘Canticus Troili’ in the first two lines in particular subtly reveals its philosophical pedigree, which includes a similar formulation in Chaucer’s translation of Boethius, in a passage in which the unenlightened Boethius questions the order of the world: ‘Yif God is, whennes comen wikkide thyngis? And yif God ne is, whennes comen gode thyngis?’ (Si quidem deus … est, unde mala? bona uero unde, si non est? [1.pr.4.198– 201, my emphases]). Not only the language but the sentiment of these Boethian lines parallel, in ‘straight’ theological terms, Chaucer’s translation of Petrarch’s meditation on the unknown quantities of amatory experience, and may well explain Chaucer’s attraction to this particular Petrarchan sonnet.26 The Boethian passage invites treatment not simply as an index of Chaucer’s reflexes as a translator but as an intertext for the Petrarchan lyric as Chaucer reimagines it. It enables us to recognize, that is, what was already implicit in Troilus’s song: love is God here (the identification is rendered wittily in the outcry ‘O God’ which follows quickly upon the word ‘love’ in the first line, differently positioned in Petrarch). Troilus’s speculation centres upon the problem of whether this new, strange ‘god’ really exists, exploring the implications of this theological situation for human action and volition.27 Such a strikingly metaphysical rendering of the discourse of erotic love cannot simply be dismissed as ‘perverse doctrine’ – or, at the other extreme, admired merely for its decorative contribution to the poem’s ‘religion of love.’ Instead, Chaucer challenges us to recognize, in the very motion of defining what from a medieval Christian perspective must be understood as a flawed religious system (which identifies carnal love with the greatest good), that Troilus’s struggle at this point is essentially one of belief situated in the language of theodicy. As such, it is a struggle shared by Christians, who similarly identify the central mysteries of their religion with the expression of love incarnate (com-

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pare lines 5.1842–4) in a fourteenth-century climate of philosophical ferment abetted by metaphysical scepticism and the radical questioning of the hierarchies on which the universe had been thought to be based.28 The broadest context of Troilus’s song is the nature not of love but of belief: it records the discovery of a formerly unself-conscious man that the self is in part controlled by forces larger than it, at the same time that it experiences and consents to a particular manifestation of the universal principle of love. Further Boethian resonances inform Troilus’s confused consent to that which tortures him, the paradoxical sweet pain of love, thus accentuating the importance of the philosophical vocabulary of free will to this definition of love. Early in Lady Philosophy’s demonstration of the freedom of the will in the face of God’s providence – a matter that Troilus will, of course, confront explicitly and imperfectly in Book Four – she states that humans freely choose to divert their attention from the immortality of reason to worldly things, and that by consenting to destructive ‘affectibus’ they become, in effect, captives of their own freedom: they ‘[helpen] and encrecen the servage whiche thei han joyned to hemself; and in this manere thei ben caytifs fro hir propre liberte’ (accedendo consentiendoque quam inuexere sibi adiuuant seruitutem et sunt quodam modo propria libertate captiuae [5.pr.2.40–3]). Troilus’s recognition of his free consent – ‘And if that I consente, I wrongfully / Compleyne, iwis’ (1.414) – thus takes on added meaning in this Boethian context, though Chaucer will do all he can to problematize the easy moral that could be drawn from this intertext: i.e., that Criseyde is a worldly thing and Troilus misdirects his powers of reason in imagining her to be the greatest good. Chaucer’s alterations of Petrarch’s sonnet also highlight the logical – specifically inductive – nature of Troilus’s inquiry into love’s reality.29 Troilus first proceeds from sensory data (what he feels) to infer the existence of a higher principle (love): ‘If no love is, O God, what fele I so?’ Philosophically speaking, Troilus’s epistemological position is classically that of the realist, evocative of the Thomist principle that the existence of God can be demonstrated through natural philosophy (the realm of experiential knowledge and pagan science) and that reason and faith are thus harmonious.30 Troilus’s logic follows the inductive path of Aquinas’s proofs regarding the implications of God’s effects in the natural world: just as motion, for Aquinas, implies a prime mover, contingent beings presume a necessary being, and the order of the universe requires a supreme orderer, so does that which Troilus ‘fele[s]’ imply a fons et origo of feeling itself.31 In the second and third stanzas of

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the ‘Canticus Troili,’ Troilus recognizes love as a contractual intersection of the wilful self (his ‘consente’) and a providential force beyond the self – a certainty that he later loses when his fortune sours – and thus further evokes the position of Aquinas, who argued that infused grace (a divine gift) requires activation through the free exercise of grace within the individual.32 Of course, Troilus lacks the philosophical maturity at this early stage to resolve these questions, or to shift them from an erotic to a genuinely spiritual level of experience, but I would suggest that what critics have recognized as the increased obsession with death and the infinity of emotive experience in Chaucer’s version of Petrarch’s sonnet serves not so much to darken the status of love as to existentialize it: to grant it status as a metaphysical subject and to establish Troilus as a pagan character capable of profound (if misdirected) belief in a deific power.33 As a believer, Troilus confronts absolute verities quite differently from the unfeeling, if correct, endorsement of the divine plan by the poem’s only other ostensibly religious characters, the prophets Calkas and Cassandra, both of whom demonstrate a distinct lack of charity (the one in his rash abandonment of his daughter, the other in her supercilious delectation in her own knowledge). If Troilus’s song ‘renders him a mystery to himself’ and constitutes ‘Troilus’s point farthest from himself,’34 then, it does so appropriately in so far as it opens up to Troilus a disorienting world of absolutes by means of which he must fundamentally reconceive his experience of particulars and, by implication, contemplate the surrender of self that is, in a different world, called faith. Unlike Troilus, Criseyde is granted no lyrical interlude in the parallel scene in Book Two in which she, alone with her thoughts, contemplates reciprocating Troilus’s love. As Maureen Fries observes, Crisyede’s only lyrical utterance in the poem, in which Troilus has several, is her half of the lovers’ aubade in Book Three; the lyrical counterpart of Troilus’s song that we might expect of Criseyde in Book Two is delivered by Antigone instead.35 Instead of lyric, Criseyde’s psychological process is associated (depending on the critic) with ‘thoughtful soliloquy,’ pragmatic debate, worldly calculation, or the ‘dialectic of enamorment’ conventional to romance.36 Eugene Slaughter represents the view of most scholars in claiming that Criseyde’s conversion reflects ‘the psychology rather than the religion of love.’37 However, Dabney Anderson Bankert’s recent identification of Criseyde’s ‘proces’ of falling in love with the Augustinian model of conversion – following upon which Criseyde is eventually shown to have the ‘weak faith’ of an apostate – draws

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attention to the religious context of this scene as, in many ways, the counterpart of Troilus’s metaphysical discovery.38 In the course of analysing more closely the language of religious speculation in this scene, I will argue against the view that Troilus is the resident existentialist of the poem, as well as the suggestion that Criseyde is either functionally more mature or philosophically more enlightened.39 Instead, I propose that Chaucer associates Criseyde as early as Book Two with what John V. Fleming has called ‘philosophical atheism,’40 an epistemological stance that positions her failure to love lastingly not as a weakness of character or even of soul but of her self-defined capacity for faith in love as an inherently knowable category of existence. The rationality with which Criseyde contemplates love, reflected in the dialectical form of her meditations (from the quaestio – whether she should love Troilus – to the pro’s and con’s, drawn from traditional authorities and proverbial wisdom, to the conclusion, diffused through her reaction to Antigone’s song and her dream of the eagle) impresses the modern reader as more dramatically believable than Troilus’s sudden intuition. As a creature of worldly predicament who sensibly resists the lure of easy idealism, Criseyde as she weighs the advantages and disadvantages of love is in many ways ‘like us.’ One of the most sensitive critics of Troilus and Criseyde, Winthrop Wetherbee, finds support in this scene for a conversion of his own, from his earlier position in Chaucer and the Poets that Criseyde’s good intentions are marred by her ‘chronic worldliness’ to his recent reappraisal of Criseyde as a character who ‘possesses a maturity … lacking in Troilus,’ which is visible in her powers of deliberation and awareness of ‘the difficulty of moral choice and the tenuousness of human felicity.’41 In Wetherbee’s view, this ‘mature seriousness’ renders Criseyde a kind of unrecognized Boethian hero in the poem. To another sympathetic critic, Criseyde’s apparent faults are neutralized by the ‘perceptual and cognitive wholeness’ reflected in her status as a philosophical voluntarist ‘who accepts the darkness in which the universe of the knowable is bound.’ Exerting her own good intentions toward trust in ‘divine grace to perfect and guide her will as she does what is within her’ (facienti quod in se est), Criseyde resigns herself to the divine will when her individual will can be exercised no further, thereby emerging, mutatis mutandis, less a fickle woman than a virtuous pagan.42 Unfortunately, Chaucer’s poem is not nearly as generous toward Criseyde as are many recent critics. For at the same time that Chaucer complicates the narrative he inherits by drawing our attention to

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the various social pressures that demarcate and condition Criseyde’s performance as lover of Troilus, he accentuates her status as an intellectual and volitional being by showing that she, like Troilus, attempts a metaphysical definition of love that individualizes her and thus provides a frame of reference for her actions in the course of the love affair. Criseyde’s perspective can be called Boethian only in so far as a despair of life’s meaning and a recognition of the limitations of worldly forms of happiness can be said to reflect one stage in Boethius’s journey of understanding; Criseyde goes no further than this. She most certainly shows no signs of faith, in Book Two or elsewhere, in a higher power to guide her will when her wits fail her; quite the contrary, the genial sparkle of her character derives in large part from a (Pandaran) confidence in the power of human cleverness to shape, or perhaps charm, circumstance (as her penchant for planning ways to return to Troy in Book Four proves). The echoic revision of Troilus’s empirical account of the paradoxes of love in Criseyde’s private disputation concerning love in Book Two is one of several places in which Chaucer takes care to differentiate their characters and their metaphysical trajectories, beginning with the implicit contrast between Troilus’s lyric position ‘Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two’ (1.417) and Criseyde’s ‘Now hoot, now cold; but thus, bitwixen tweye’ (2.811). For Troilus, such paradoxical emotions bespeak the totality of love itself, whereas for Criseyde, the very rationality of her process – in which she falls in and out of love, rather than experiencing the contrasting effects of love itself – sounds suspiciously like fickleness.43 The narrator defends Criseyde’s gradual, cumulative process of falling in love as a sign of her love’s strength, though the idea of sudden love as unreliable clearly contrasts with the strength of Troilus’s sudden love in the previous book. In fact, it is this very cumulative way of thinking that ultimately enables Criseyde to talk herself out of love for Troilus:44 Retornyng in hire soule ay up and down The wordes of this sodeyn Diomede, His grete estat, and perel of the town, And that she was allone and hadde nede Of frendes help.

(5.1023–7)

The most significant parallel between Criseyde’s deliberations and Troilus’s song is to be found in her metaphysical interrogation of love at 2.785–98. Here, she, like Troilus, asks whether love is worthy of her

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faith, but unlike Troilus, her conclusion is negative and quickly degenerates into largely pragmatic concerns. To paraphrase Criseyde in these two crucial stanzas: Because of the perils of gossip and the fickleness of men, love is finite (‘So cesseth love’ [2.788]), despite its apparent initial strength. Treachery against women is legion. Such love is insubstantial; it evaporates into thin air: To what fyn is swich love I kan nat see, Or wher bycometh it, whan that it is ago. Ther is no wight that woot, I trowe so, Where it bycometh. Lo, no wight on it sporneth; That erst was nothing, into nought it torneth.

(2.794–8)

If Troilus imagines the deified Love as an omnipotent force that both guides individual experience and is intelligible through it, Criseyde conceives of love as something unstable and unknowable. As Criseyde defines it, love is a force that is impermanent, fickle, inconvenient, dangerous, time-consuming, and painful. If Troilus’s god is that of a realist, Criseyde’s is that of a nominalist: like the God of Ockham and his more radical followers, a deity defined by a potentia absoluta of staggering possibilities, Criseyde’s Love behaves (from the human perspective) irrationally, arbitrarily, even cruelly. Like Ockham’s God, whose world is one in which universals lack ontological reality, and in which natural reason cannot bridge the mysteries of faith,45 Criseyde’s Love is inscrutable to mankind, while the world of particulars is a ‘mooste stormy lyf’ of radical contingency (2.778). But Criseyde goes further than mere scepticism: she concludes, as no medieval theologian would dare, that love (in its status as deity) is not only unpredictable or unverifiable, but ontologically unreal. For she concludes, in effect, with the premise that Troilus refutes in the first line of his song – ‘If no love is’ – when she states, ‘That erst was nothing, into nought it torneth’ (2.798). Criseyde has been inquiring not only into the nature of love, but into whether a force that comes and goes without reason really exists at all. Criseyde is not an agnostic, but an atheist; it is the same Criseyde who later dismisses the validity of her own father’s profession as soothsayer with the Capanean blasphemy ‘Drede fond first goddes’ (4.1408) who fails the test of faith in love here in Book Two. Startling as the pessimism of Criseyde’s ‘That erst was nothing, into nought it torneth’ may be, it is important to recognize that the terms in which she formulates the negativity of love’s existence are creatively

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shaped by – and therefore could be said to pervert – similar language in medieval discussions of creation ex nihilo and in metaphysical proofs of God’s existence or his providence. The section of Duns Scotus’s Treatise on God as First Principle devoted to the question of God’s existence, for example, states that there must be a prior cause external to the chain of being – that which ‘makes all possible things possible’ – because something cannot come from nothing.46 In the nonsubstantialist views of the deity held by Gregory of Nyssa, pseudo-Dionysius, and John Scot Eriugena, which influenced late medieval mysticism, ‘nothingness’ is a property essential to the nature of God himself. Eriugena’s Periphyseon, for example, holds that God’s transcendence of being, his superexistence, is a kind of ‘nothingness’; his creation of the world ex nihilo is therefore a paradoxical transmutation of his own ‘nothingness’ into ‘somethingness.’47 In Book Five of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy – the same book that stands behind Troilus’s wilful captivity in his song – Lady Philosophy uses the truism ‘nothing comes from nothing’ – in Chaucer’s translation, ‘no thing hath his beynge of naught’ (nihil ex nihilo exsistere [5.pr.1.43–4]) – to prove that what appears to us as random chance in fact emanates from God’s providence. However, Criseyde’s use of the adage differs importantly from all of these precedents. Rather than moving inductively, like Troilus, from existence to its prior cause, Criseyde assumes a foundational nothing, and thus turns the formulation on its head to read: ‘Nothing produces nothing, and so nothing returns to nothing.’ When Criseyde swings back into optimism two stanzas later, she reprises her formulation pragmatically: ‘He which that nothing undertaketh, / Nothyng n’acheveth’ (2.807–8). But even if this proverb were not later discoloured by our knowledge of Diomede’s use of it in resolving to seduce Criseyde (5.784),48 the meta­ physical context of Criseyde’s deliberations in these stanzas would render suspect her reduction of a misconstrued spiritual principle to a rule of action. One suspects that Antigone’s paean to love, which immediately follows, impresses Criseyde less with its celebration of love’s transcendent existence than with its promise of the practical pleasures of security, stability, and freedom to those who love. By the time that Criseyde, once again alone with her thoughts in a very different set of circumstances, pledges that ‘To Diomede algate I wol be trewe’ (5.1071), everything and yet nothing has changed. Criseyde’s last speech in the poem is a farewell to Troilus, directed, paradoxically, not so much at him as at an audience of future readers and writers, whose imagined metatextual power over Criseyde’s destiny (to

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‘shende’ her, to roll her indefinitely on unknown tongues – a contrapasso of sorts for her promiscuous indulgence of one who is ‘of tonge large’ [5.1060, 804]) – has supplanted any soteriological vocabulary she may have entertained in Book Two, thus resituating the poem’s metaphysical concerns in the realm of literary tradition.49 In this speech, Criseyde vows, for the record, never to hate Troilus but always to extend toward him ‘frendes love’ and her ‘good word,’ and always to be ‘sory’ to see him in adversity (5.1079–83). Acknowledging that Troilus is guiltless (although, significantly, the adjective is ambiguously placed in such a way that it could apply just as well to Criseyde herself),50 she concludes, ‘But al shal passe; and thus take I my leve’ (5.1084–5). Criseyde has recently been said in this stanza to speak genuinely, charitably, and, in the line just quoted, with ‘an almost motherly solicitude toward Troilus in his misery.’51 I cannot agree; in my view, this is Criseyde’s point farthest from herself in the poem, and the distance is one of alienation from, rather than transcendence of, self. Hollow sentiment verging upon sanctimoniousness suffuses the stanza, the merit of her ‘good word’ no more impressive than her melodramatic and perfectly irrelevant gesture never to hate the man she once loved. Far from constituting charitable solace, the supposed reassurance of ‘al shal passe’ is directed at herself, not at Troilus. Poised between world-weariness and despair, these words express Criseyde’s conviction of the essential meaningless of life: as before, ‘That erst was nothing, into nought it torneth.’ The best that can be said of Criseyde’s final words is that they are the words of a survivor, one who adapts by changing;52 the worst is that they reveal that it is Criseyde’s own failure of imagination that dooms her to the realm of literary stereotype. In their respective conceptions of love as a deific force, Troilus and Criseyde grasp different, incomplete parts of what will be presented in the epilogue as a Christian truth: Troilus proves himself capable of love and belief, though directed toward the wrong ends, while Criseyde appreciates the danger and impermanence, the ontological unreality and instability, of the very earthly love she will come to represent. The philosophical union of these ideas typifies a Christian truth beyond both characters’ historical reach. Criseyde’s concerns about the fyn of love, its cessation and breakage, resound in the epilogue’s pronouncement, ‘Swich fyn hath, lo, this Troilus for love!’ (5.1828), and indeed in the very atmosphere of the poem, which is above all concerned with the inevitability of love’s ending. But it is also a poem about love’s ends: its motives, destinations, and targets. It takes as its subject both the

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end Troilus suffers for love, and how he sees love as an end in itself. It looks ahead to a love that cannot end. This unending love is tragically balanced, as well as shadily prefigured, by Troilus’s words to the absent Criseyde shortly before his death: ‘I ne kan nor may, / For al this world, withinne myn herte fynde / To unloven yow a quarter of a day!’ (5.1696–8). To some the nadir of idolatry and to others an affirmation of caritas, Troilus’s vow never to ‘unloven’ Criseyde – which mirrors, in its way, Criseyde’s distant promise never to ‘haten’ Troilus (a word that Pandarus in turn uses in regard to Criseyde) – crystallizes the poem’s profoundly complex engagement with the competing realms of the sacred and profane as they relate to love.53 Troilus’s inability to ‘unloven’ further stands in conceptual opposition to Criseyde’s penchant for negative rhetoric, both in her initial consideration of love – ‘Shal I nat love, in cas if that me leste?’ (2.758) – and in the tortured language of her submission to Diomede: ‘I say nat therfore that I wol yow love, / N’y say nat nay’ (5.1002–3).54 In contrast to the circumlocution and self-deception with which Criseyde’s multiple negatives are associated – sympathetically absorbed, perhaps, in the narrator’s periphrastic recognition that Criseyde ‘nas nought so kynde as that hire oughte be’ (5.1643) – Troilus’s striking coinage of the word ‘unloven’ carries a kind of existential urgency: to Pearsall’s sensitive ear, it evokes ‘the strong suggestion of chaos come again, of the undoing of the cosmos, if it were ever to be thought of as more than a word.’55 It is as though Troilus is so far from able to conceive of not loving that he has to invent a word (which is what Chaucer appears to have done here) to express ‘the cessation of love.’ If Criseyde’s series of self-cancelling negatives reveals her rational, casuistic approach to matters of being, Troilus’s ‘ne … unloven’ is extra-rational, forged from the lexicon of negative theology, the mystical language of apophasis, or ‘un-saying,’ associated with pseudo-Dionysius and popularized in Chaucer’s time by the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing.56 Appropriately enough, Troilus’s final (living) reference to love evokes a deity that surpasses naming, and so must be discussed through negation – before, that is, the dualism of love is redefined as the perfect symmetry of the incarnation in the epilogue: ‘And loveth hym the which that right for love / Upon a crois, oure soules for to beye, / First starf, and roos, and sit in hevene above’ (5.1842–4). Perhaps we are to regard Troilus in the hours before his death as abandoning his Thomistic attempts to rationally approach his deity and espousing instead the language of mysticism, a path toward God

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which transcends reason and is incited by the emotion of love. The ambiguity of Troilus’s state of spiritual maturity when he refuses to ‘unloven’ Criseyde is fully exemplified in the pathetic cri de coeur of the line that follows: ‘In corsed tyme I born was, weilaway’ (5.1699). On the one hand, this is Troilus the fatalist, on the brink of death, bemoaning an unfortunate existence he was ‘corsed’ to endure. On the other, it is Troilus the mystic recognizing, from a space outside of time and beyond his historical moment, the tragic limitations of the pagan condition. Both images of Troilus are genuine, and Chaucer has no wish for us to choose between them. Despite his greater capacity for belief and his instinct for spiritual surrender, Troilus, like the sceptical Criseyde, ultimately lacks the cultural vocabulary to move unambiguously toward a conception of love that sustains and rewards the existential demands he makes of it. In vivifying with such a degree of imaginative sympathy a world so remote from his own, Chaucer thus examines the multiple possibilities of his own culture’s worldview, attributing fundamentally different metaphysical outlooks to his two protagonists not in order to affirm particular theological truths but to ‘open up a space, a play world, where values are tested, new modes of thought and perception are tried out, and established ideas are transformed.’57 Given the finely tuned (if fundamentally flawed) epistemological awareness of both Troilus and Criseyde, the real tragedy, Chaucer seems to suggest, is not how far the lovers are from right belief, but how close. Notes I am grateful to David Williams and Winthrop Wetherbee for their generous comments on earlier versions of this essay. Although neither will agree with all the views expressed herein, this essay is better for its reflection on their incisive critiques and collegial encouragement. A preliminary version of this essay was presented at the Fourteenth International Congress of the New Chaucer Society at the University of Glasgow in July 2004, where it received valuable response from Alastair Minnis. 1 All quotations of Chaucer, cited in the text, are from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 2 Translations of Boethius are quoted from Chaucer’s Boece, to which line

84  Jamie C. Fumo numbers refer. The Latin text used is Boethius, Philosophiae consolatio, ed. Ludwig Bieler, CCSL 94 (Turnholt: Brepols, 1957). 3 Carleton Brown, ed., English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 80 (no. 46, version A, lines 1–5, 9–10). 4 Criseyde’s obsession with the fyn of the actions in which she is involved is lucidly treated by Thomas J. Farrell, ‘The Fyn of the Troilus,’ in Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1995), 38–53. 5 This point is consistent with Mark Lambert’s observations on the poem’s encouragement of our early identification with Criseyde’s timidity regarding love: see ‘Troilus, Books I–III: A Criseydan Reading,’ in Essays on ‘Troilus and Criseyde,’ ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979), 106–7. Cf. Barbara Newman, ‘“Feynede Loves,” Feigned Lore, and Faith in Trouthe,’ in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’: Essays in Criticism, ed. Stephen A. Barney (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980), 268. 6 As Newman observes, ‘Criseyde’s element is present, sheltering love – the substance amor, not the accident Troilus,’ in ‘“Feynede Loves,”’ 266. 7 John V. Fleming, ‘Criseyde’s Poem: The Anxieties of the Classical Tradition,’ in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Cindy L. Vitto and Marcia Smith Marzec (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2004), 283. 8 Ian Bishop, Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’: A Critical Study (Bristol: University of Bristol, 1981), 18. Bishop aptly defines the poem’s central focus as the romantic dialectic of ‘two very different personalities, of diverse origins and dissimilar destinies, who are endowed with contrasted modes of consciousness’ (11). 9 According to the irresistible claim of Gretchen Mieszkowski, ‘Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,’ Chaucer Review 26 (1991): 109. 10 T.P. Dunning, ‘God and Man in Troilus and Criseyde,’ in English and Medieval Studies: Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Norman Davis and C.L. Wrenn (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), 168, 171. 11 These opposing views, the bibliography of which is too substantial and well-rehearsed to require full representation here, are exemplified by Alcuin Blamires, ‘The “Religion of Love” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Medieval Visual Art,’ in Word and Visual Imagination: Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Karl Josef Höltgen, Peter Daly, and Wolfgang Lottes (Erlangen: Univ.-Bibliothek ErlangenNürnberg, 1988), 24–5, and Chauncey Wood, The Elements of Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), 97.

The Ends of Love  85 12 John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990); A.J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer; Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982). 13 Dabney Anderson Bankert, ‘Secularizing the Word: Conversion Models in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,’ Chaucer Review 37 (2003): 197–8. On the importance of an ‘ethos of devotion’ to Chaucer’s poem, see also Marilyn Reppa Moore, ‘Who’s Solipsistic Now? The Character of Chaucer’s Troilus,’ Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 43–59 at 52. 14 David Aers, ‘Criseyde: Woman in Medieval Society,’ Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 186. 15 Ibid., 195. 16 As Aers influentially claims, Criseyde is ‘a social individual whose bad faith was almost impossible to avoid, encouraged and prepared for by the habits and practices of the very society which would, of course, condemn such a betrayal with righteous moral indignation’; ibid., 194. Carolyn P. Collette presents this idea in explicitly deterministic terms: ‘Criseyde’s need for public identity, the female need for support and status dependent on men and their decisions, triumphs over her free choice to love Troilus’; ‘Criseyde’s Honor: Interiority and Public Identity in Chaucer’s Courtly Romance,’ in Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, 27 July–1 August 1992, ed. D. Maddox and S. Sturm-Maddox (Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 55. Cf. Donald R. Howard, ‘Experience, Language, and Consciousness: Troilus and Criseyde, II, 596–931,’ in Medieval Literature and Folklore Studies: Essays in Honor of Francis Lee Utley, ed. Jerome Mandel and Bruce A. Rosenberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 189–90; Holly A. Crocker, ‘How the Woman Makes the Man: Chaucer’s Reciprocal Fictions in Troilus and Criseyde,’ in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Vitto and Marzec, 139–64; and Winthrop Wetherbee, ‘Criseyde Alone,’ in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Vitto and Marzec, 332. Related approaches to the ‘necessity’ of Criseyde’s infidelity include Donald W. Rowe’s contention that Criseyde’s behaviour is biologically determined in O Love, O Charite! Contraries Harmonized in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), 83–4; A.J. Minnis’s claim that Criseyde cannot be expected to resist the ‘characteristically pagan failing of fear,’ in Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 91–2; and Mieszkowski’s assertion that Criseyde is passively ‘cast as an actor in another’s script,’ in ‘Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,’ 117. The most extreme formulation of these social-determinist views to

86  Jamie C. Fumo my knowledge is Peter G. Beidler’s suggestion that Criseyde’s status as a pawn in men’s games is literally a fate worse than death; see his ‘“That I was born, allas”: Criseyde’s Weary Dawn Song,’ in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Vitto and Marzec, 255–76. 17 Derek Pearsall, ‘Criseyde’s Choices,’ in Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Proceedings, No. 2, 1986 Fifth International Congress 20–23 March 1986, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ed. John V. Fleming and Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville, TN: The New Chaucer Society, 1987), 17–29. 18 The phrase is that of Fleming, ‘Criseyde’s Poem,’ 298. 19 Leonard Michael Koff, ‘Ending a Poem Before Beginning It, or The “Cas” of Troilus,’ in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’: ‘Subgit to alle Poesye’: Essays in Criticism, ed. R.A. Shoaf with the assistance of Catherine S. Cox (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1992), 174; cf. Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 66, 180. 20 Laurence Eldredge, ‘Boethian Epistemology and Chaucer’s Troilus in the Light of Fourteenth-Century Thought,’ Mediaevalia 2 (1976): 60. 21 Stephen A. Barney, ‘Troilus Bound,’ in Shoaf, ‘Subgit to alle Poesye,’ 3. 22 D.W. Robertson, Jr, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 478. 23 See, for example, Paul Beekman Taylor, ‘Chaucer’s Strategies of Translation,’ Chaucer Yearbook 4 (1997): 12–15. 24 Ernest H. Wilkins, ‘Cantus Troili,’ ELH 16 (1949): 169–70; Patricia Thomson, ‘The “Canticus Troili”: Chaucer and Petrarch,’ Comparative Literature 11 (1959): 317. 25 Text and translation of Sonnet 132 from Robert M. Durling, trans. and ed., Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime sparse’ and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 270–1. Wilkins, followed by Thomson, translates this second question as ‘what is this experience of mine?’ Wilkins’s translation is based, however, on E. Chiòrboli’s 1930 edition of the Canzoniere, which prints ‘che cosa e [for et] quale,’ resulting in Wilkins’s apparent conflation of the coordinating conjunction e with the verb è and his consequent overstatement of the difference between the Italian and Middle English versions of the sonnet. Nonetheless, the vagueness of referent in Petrarch’s open-ended ‘che cosa et quale’ is made significantly more concrete in Chaucer’s redirection of the question toward the nature of the deified love featured uniquely in his first line. I thank the editors of this volume for drawing my attention to the nuances of ‘che cosa et quale’ and its translation history.

The Ends of Love  87 26 Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr, ‘Boethian Resonance in Chaucer’s “Canticus Troili,”’ Chaucer Review 27 (1993): 219–27. 27 As Sheila Delany notes in passing, Troilus’s song poses ‘a serious philosophical question, raising not only the problem of universals but also those of cognition and will.’ The Naked Text: Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1994), 47. 28 The bibliography on Troilus and Criseyde’s engagement with contemporary philosophical vocabularies (voluntarist and determinist) is extensive, although critics have tended to focus more on the overtly philosophical moments of the poem, such as Troilus’s Boethian monologue in Book Four, than on Troilus’s and Criseyde’s initial experiences of love. The following studies are especially useful: Eldredge, ‘Boethian Epistemology’; Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 61–107; Joseph E. Grennen, ‘Aristotelian Ideas in Chaucer’s Troilus: A Preliminary Study,’ Medievalia et Humanistica ns 14 (1986): 125–38; Karl Reichl, ‘Chaucer’s Troilus: Philosophy and Language,’ in The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 135; Richard J. Utz, ‘Negotiating the Paradigm: Literary Nominalism and the Theory and Practice of Rereading Late Medieval Texts,’ in Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm, ed. Richard J. Utz, Mediaeval Studies 5 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 1–30; Helen Ruth Andretta, Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’: A Poet’s Response to Ockhamism (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); and Thomas E. Hill, ‘She, This in Blak’: Vision, Truth, and Will in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). 29 On Troilus’s association with practical reasoning (and its insufficiencies), see Nancy Ciccone, ‘Saving Chaucer’s Troilus “With Desir and Reson Twight,”’ Neophilologus 86 (2002): 641–58. 30 Some critics have detected a Thomist slant in other aspects of Troilus’s characterization, such as his submission to grace in his initial conversion to love in the temple; see Eugene E. Slaughter, ‘Love and Grace in Chaucer’s Troilus,’ in Essays in Honor of Walter Clyde Curry (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1954), 69–70; on his resistance to scepticism, see Andretta, Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde,’ 159; and on his association of Criseyde’s constancy with the validity of universal truth, see Hill, ‘She, This in Blak,’ 21–41. It is relevant that Aquinas’s position regarding the powers of reason and natural intelligence to achieve the effects of faith supported theories of the salvation of virtuous pagans: see Cindy L. Vitto, The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989), 27–8, 33; and William J. Courtenay, ‘Nominalism and Late Medieval

88  Jamie C. Fumo Religion,’ in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus with Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 58. 31 See especially part 1, question 2 of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. For discussion of Aquinas’s views on God’s existence, see Robert Pasnau and Christopher Shields, The Philosophy of Aquinas (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004), 81–120. 32 Troilus’s consideration of the agency of his ‘owen lust’ does not entail, as Eldredge contends, a hypothetical denial of love’s existence (‘Boethian Epistemology,’ 61); rather, it reflects upon his own free acceptance of love’s actions. For discussion of this aspect of Aquinas’s theory of grace, see Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. J. Patout Burns (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 41–61; and Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 31–3. 33 This point bears comparison with Wetherbee’s discussion of Troilus’s visionary qualities and instinct for reverence (Chaucer and the Poets, 63, 80–1), as well as with Farrell’s suggestion that Troilus’s tendency to conceive ‘his experience as infinite – as unfinished and potientially unfinishable’ earns him the transcendent view of the world described in the poem’s final stanzas; ‘The Fyn of the Troilus,’ 43. 34 Koff, ‘Ending a Poem,’ 176–7. 35 Maureen Fries, ‘(Almost) Without a Song: Criseyde and Lyric in Chaucer’s Troilus,’ Chaucer Yearbook 1 (1992): 47–63. See also Clare Regan Kinney, ‘“Who made this song?” The Engendering of Lyric Counterplots in Troilus and Criseyde,’ Studies in Philology 89 (1992): 272–92. 36 The case for soliloquy is made in Fries, ‘(Almost) Without a Song,’ 51; for programmatic debate in Rowe, O Love, O Charite!, 79–80; for calculation in Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 184; and for enamourment in Joan G. Haahr, ‘Criseyde’s Inner Debate: The Dialectic of Enamorment in the Filostrato and the Troilus,’ Studies in Philology 89 (1992): 257–71. 37 Slaughter, ‘Love and Grace,’ 71. 38 Bankert, ‘Secularizing the Word,’ 209–10. Compare Rowe’s statement, ‘Unlike Troilus, [Criseyde] can never quite forget herself. Love does not transform her’; O Love, O Charite! 81. 39 These views are held by, respectively, Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer, 497; Wetherbee, ‘Criseyde Alone,’ 304; and Hill, ‘She, This in Blak,’ 57–95. 40 Fleming, ‘Criseyde’s Poem,’ 280; cf. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation, 85–6.

The Ends of Love  89 41 Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 188; Wetherbee, ‘Criseyde Alone,’ 304. Wetherbee’s detection of a similar rational maturity in the ‘practical’ nature of Criseyde’s plan-making in the Book Four scene in which she and Troilus discuss her impending exchange, which understands moments like Criseyde’s vow on the river Symois as ‘beautiful’ sentiments without acknowledging their allusive association with deception, strikes me as somewhat forced; Wetherbee, ‘Criseyde Alone,’ 321–2. On the Symois allusion, see Jamie C. Fumo, ‘“Little Troilus”: Heroides 5 and Its Ovidian Contexts in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,’ Studies in Philology 100 (2003): 278–314; and Fleming, ‘Criseyde’s Poem,’ 281. 42 Hill, ‘She, This in Blak,’ 4, 59. On the association of the notion of ‘facienti quod in se est’ with fourteenth-century debate over the salvation of virtuous heathen, see Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 47–60. 43 For other comparisons of these passages, see Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 186; Thomas C. Stillinger, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 214; and Hill, ‘She, This in Blak,’ 74. 44 As observed by Rowe, O Love, O Charite! 80; and Bankert, ‘Secularizing the Word,’ 210. 45 A useful overview of Ockham’s contribution to scholasticism is Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition 400–1400 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 311–15; see also the important historicization of nominalism by Courtenay, ‘Nominalism and Late Medieval Religion,’ 27–59, and, on the concept’s pertinence to Chaucer’s works, Robert Myles, Chaucerian Realism (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), 1–32. 46 For Scotus’s proof, see John Duns Scotus: A Treatise on God as First Principle, sec. 59, ed. and trans. Allan B. Wolter (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press at Quincy University, 1965), 392–410. 47 On Eriugena’s treatment of this idea, see Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 34–62. 48 Observed by Newman, ‘“Feynede Loves,”’ 267; see also the bibliography she provides on this point at 274 n. 26. 49 Chaucer differently links spiritual and literary eschatology in the epilogue, in which the progress of Troilus’s soul is matched by the journey of Chaucer’s book through a purgatory of literary tradition (the poets on the steps, as well as the correction of Gower and Strode); on this point, see Jamie C. Fumo, ‘The God of Love and Love of God: Palinodic Exchange in the Prologue of the Legend of Good Women and the “Retraction,”’ in The Legend

90  Jamie C. Fumo of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 172. 50 As perceptively noted by Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets, 193. 51 Wetherbee, ‘Criseyde Alone,’ 324, reworking, with certain differences in implication, ideas first presented in Chaucer and the Poets, 193. 52 This view of Criseyde is ably defended by Alfred David, ‘Chaucerian Comedy and Criseyde,’ in Essays on ‘Troilus and Criseyde,’ ed. Salu, 90–104. 53 The word ‘unlove’ is in fact used in the section of the fifteenth-century Disce mori that incorporates allusion to Troilus and Criseyde (including, significantly, the first stanza of the ‘Canticus Troili’) in the course of its discussion of how to distinguish between carnal and spiritual love. The specific context is lovers’ jealousy over perceived infidelity, resulting in anger: ‘The iiii‘the’ tokene of flesshly love is hasty ire and inpacience þat þat oon lover conceyveth anoon in herte if he fynde eny poynte of unlove or straungenesse inconsuete in þat oþer, as if she ymagyne þat he loveth a noþer with hir, or sende eny tokenes to oþer, or kest his eigh goodly upon an oþer.’ In Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 126, my emphasis. Given the author’s allusions to Troilus and Criseyde elsewhere in this section of the treatise, it is legitimate to regard his use of the rare word ‘unlove’ as a direct reminiscence of Chaucer’s poem – here, however, evoking the angry reaction to infidelity that Troilus notably does not have, and applying ‘unlove’ to the lover’s breach of faith rather than (by means of a double negative) the betrayed party’s enduring fidelity. 54 On Criseyde’s negative rhetoric in these scenes, see Kara Doyle, ‘Criseyde Reading, Reading Criseyde,’ in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Vitto and Marzec, 80–1; and Mieszkowski, ‘Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,’ 128. 55 Pearsall, ‘Criseyde’s Choices,’ 28. 56 For an overview of the language of negative theology, see Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying. It may be significant that the other fourteenth-century uses of ‘unloven’ cited by the MED are by mystics, Julian of Norwich and Walter Hilton, although they use the word in a different sense from Troilus: see Middle English Dictionary, s.v. ‘unloven.’ The impressive late medieval circulation of the Cloud of Unknowing, which survives in seventeen manuscripts, supports the plausibility of this reading. 57 Jim Rhodes, Poetry Does Theology: Chaucer, Grosseteste, and the Pearl-Poet (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 7.

5 Troilus in the Gutter william robins

The interest in ancient Troy evidenced in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is so careful and thoroughgoing that we might use the adjective ‘archaeological’ to describe it. In relation to the bulk of vernacular poetry on antique themes produced in the Middle Ages, Chaucer’s Trojan poem stands out as a remarkable exercise of the historical imagination, dwelling as much on the distance that separated the ancient world from fourteenth-century England as on commonalities, borrowing elements from ancient books that emblematize cultural shifts as much as those that suggest transhistorical continuities. By combing through poems of antiquity such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Statius’s Thebaid, Chaucer practises a literary archaeology that, because it is based on the reading of texts, is qualitatively different from modern excavation-archaeology (although perhaps it is not entirely distinct: Heinrich Schliemann, after all, initiated the archaeology of ancient Troy in the 1870s only after reading a poem – Homer’s Iliad – and taking its topographic details seriously). Furthermore, Chaucer’s ‘archaeology’ was expressed not through learned commentary, but rather in an artistic recreation of the lived world of ancient Troy that engaged powerfully with the aesthetic and moral demands of his own Ricardian contemporaries (a fitting comparison might be made, not with Schliemann’s publications of his digs, but rather with the faux-antique house decorated with real and imitation ancient artefacts that Schliemann built in Athens).1 Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde movingly shows how Troilus falls madly in love with Criseyde, how their clandestine affair is brought to fruition, and then, tragically, how Criseyde is handed over to the enemy host and becomes the lover of the Greek Diomedes. By engaging with earlier works of Latin literature through the time-honoured

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strategies of inventio and imitatio, Chaucer amplified the poetic functions that various details of scene and setting could carry. The literary nature of Chaucer’s researches into the ancient world, and the recreative way in which his knowledge was put to use, have been the topic of considerable scholarship, from Lewis and Bloomfield to the present day.2 To take one important example, John Fleming’s Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ considers how Chaucer incorporated textual details concerning the rites and rituals of paganism from many classical poets in order to establish Troy as a culture historically and religiously different from his own, characterized by the problematic practice of idolatry. The theme of idolatry is poetically crucial for Troilus and Criseyde, it is suggested, because through it Chaucer could draw attention to the analogously idolatrous dimension of the lovers’ erotic passion, especially by emphasizing an association of Criseyde with Troy’s most important religious idol, the Palladium, which was kept in the temple of Athena in the highest citadel of Troy, and whose theft by the Greeks would foretell the fall of the city.3 ‘There is a remarkable parallel between the Palladium and Criseyde … The first is the idol of Great Troy, the other the idol of little Troy [Troilus]. The loss of Criseyde heralds Troilus’s destruction, just as the loss of the Palladium will herald Troy’s. Diomede, who carries off the one, will carry off the other.’4 Fleming considers this theme of idolatry as of primary importance to the poem, and to Chaucer’s literary archaeology: ‘I conclude that Chaucer’s determination to get the theme of idolatry “right” explains the fact that he so thoroughly researched ancient religious practice … Though the original brilliant invention of collating the Palladium with Criseida was Boccaccio’s, it is Chaucer alone who has made the theme of sexual idolatry radically present during all stages of the love affair, including its aftermath.’5 In this paper, I want to open up a collateral trench in our excavations of Chaucer’s literary archaeology of Troy. The site of this excavation will not be any of the grand state or religious structures that stirred Schliemann’s imagination, but one of the domestic spaces that play a crucial role in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde – the house of Troilus’s friend and Criseyde’s uncle, Pandarus. Pandarus is the go-between who orchestrates most of the secret love affair. He even uses his own house to arrange the night-time tryst when Troilus and Criseyde finally consummate their desires. Having invited Criseyde to dinner at his palace, Pandarus insists that she stay the night when a downpour of rain arrives. Troilus, unbeknownst to Criseyde, has been waiting all day in

Troilus in the Gutter  93

the house in a little side-room, or ‘stewe’ (3.601), and that night, while Criseyde’s ladies-in-waiting sleep in the hall outside the bedchamber door, Pandarus leads Troilus into the chamber through a trapdoor, or ‘trappe’ (3.741), and wakes Criseyde.6 It is not these architectural details mentioned by the narrator that are my concern here, but rather the architectural details mentioned by Pandarus in his reply to the surprised Criseyde. Criseyde, worried above all about keeping the affair secret, asks how it could be that Troilus has entered the house that night, and Pandarus answers: ‘Now stant it thus, that sith I fro yow wente, This Troilus, right platly for to seyn, Is thorough a goter, by a pryve wente, Into my chaumbre come in al this reyn, Unwist of every manere wight, certeyn, Save of my self, as wisly have I joye, And by that feith I shal Priam of Troy.’

(3.785–91)

Pandarus is assuring Criseyde that no one has seen Troilus. Whether or not his words report how Troilus actually entered, we do not know; we can be sure that Pandarus is making up at least part of this tale, for Troilus has not just arrived during the rainstorm but has been waiting in the ‘stewe’ since midnight the night before. In any event, this mode of ingress must be a plausible one – Pandarus’s house seems to come equipped with a gutter large enough for a man to crawl through. In Middle English, the word goter is used for any kind of drain or conduit. Pryve as an adjective means ‘hidden’ or ‘secret.’ Wente, a noun derived from the verb wenden, signifies a turn or passageway. So what might it mean to say that Troilus came in ‘thorough the goter, by a pryve wente’? Two different interpretations are possible: one I will call the ‘sanitized version’ and the other the ‘sanitation version.’ The sanitized version is probably the more common among current readers, preferred as it has been by several who have edited Troilus and Criseyde or written notes to accompany the passage. Root, in his 1926 edition glossed ‘thorough the goter’ as meaning ‘by help of the eavestrough.’7 The Middle English Dictionary includes verse 3.787 as an example for its definition 1a of the word went(e): ‘A path, lane, road; a passageway, an alley.’8 The notes to the passage given in the Riverside Chaucer follows these leads, and I think that for most Chaucerians who have read the poem with the help of such resources, the general understanding is that the ‘goter’

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is an eavestrough that Troilus has climbed, and the ‘pryve wente’ is a ‘hidden alleyway.’ Verses 3.786–90 could be translated: ‘Troilus, to tell it simply, has come into my chamber by means of an eavestrough, near a secret alleyway, in all this rain, unbeknownst to anybody at all besides myself.’ I call this reading ‘sanitized’ because it does all it can to keep Troilus free of the aroma that might attach to him if other significances of these words were admitted. One problem with such a reading was pointed out by Hugh Smyser in a study of the domestic spaces in Troilus and Criseyde: ‘there is reason to believe that “through” in this passage is to be taken in its commoner sense of “in at one end and out at the other” rather than instrumentally “by means of.”’9 The lexicographers at the Middle English Dictionary creatively solved this problem by creating a new definition of the word goter for which the preposition ‘through’ might be used, but for which there is no support outside of Chaucer’s works, namely definition 4: ‘A window leading into a gutter of a roof.’10 This definition is almost a stage direction: one can visualize Troilus shimmying up the eaves-trough, clambering onto the roof, and hoisting himself through the window for his secret tryst with Criseyde. The scene seems almost an anticipation of the romantic balcony episode in Romeo and Juliet. However, just as there is no mention of a balcony in Romeo and Juliet, similarly there is no mention of a roof, nor of a window, in this Chaucerian passage.11 Syntactically and lexically, the ‘sanitized version’ is not quite tidy enough. The ‘sanitation’ version of these lines is preferred by the two scholars – Smyser and Saul Brody – who have closely compared Pandarus’s house to architectural practices in late medieval London. In this reading, the ‘goter’ is literally a gutter, like one of those gutters that ran water and filth alongside the streets and lanes of medieval London. The word ‘prive’ does not mean ‘secret’ but, rather, a ‘latrine,’ or ‘privy’; as Smyser puts it: ‘perhaps prive is a noun used attributively rather than an adjective, or perhaps it is punningly both.’12 Like Smyser, Brody takes ‘wente’ to signify the opening hole or the chute of the latrine itself.13 In fact, the locution ‘prive wente’ most likely refers to a passageway communicating between the living quarters and a latrine. The grand stone houses of nobles in London seem to have been very similar in architectural form to manorial halls, where the odour of latrines was mitigated not by narrow pipes but by distant placement: ‘The term longaigne (a far-off place) is used for privy in the Old French documents. But a distant site from the chamber was not convenient. So where prac-

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ticable the garderobe was situated at the end of a passage contrived in the thickness of the wall, with access from the chamber by means of a right-angled turn.’14 Modern studies of medieval English domestic architecture present groundplans of several castles and manor houses with the same basic arrangement as Pandarus’s house (a chamber off of a grand hall), where a privy is connected to the chamber, or to the hall, or to both, by means of such a turning passageway.15 The word wente, derived as it is from the verb wenden, ‘to turn,’ is more likely to indicate such a passageway than a latrine chute. In castles and manorial halls, the latrines were often situated in separate turrets or suspended on corbels on the exterior walls, and Pandarus’s house may have had one such, reached by a passage in the walls; a house with just such ‘an alley leading to a cloaca,’ is mentioned in a London will of 1324.16 Or perhaps we might think of Pandarus’s house as being equipped with an outhouse and communicating passageway, similar to the London property of Chaucer’s contemporary William Walworth (d. 1385), who built a separate ‘waterhouse’ with a privy drained by the Thames, connected to the house by a long hautpas, or gallery.17 To get from the gutter to the passageway, Troilus, as Pandarus tells it, would still have to pass through an opening at the latrine seat, but, for a privy situated directly over a watercourse or ditch (suspended on corbels, or over arches, or over a continuously drained basement), the chute is not necessarily narrow at all. Chaucer’s verses, in such a scenario, might be translated: ‘Troilus, to tell the truth, has come into my chamber through a gutter, along a latrine passageway, in all this rain, unbeknownst to anybody at all besides myself.’ The ‘sanitation’ interpretation of these lines is preferable syntactically (for it preserves the directional meaning of ‘through’), as well as semantically (for it accords well with the realia of medieval domestic spaces and the words used to describe them). Further support for such a reading comes from the interest in ancient privies taken by Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women, where Theseus is imprisoned in a cesspit below a latrine, ‘joyninge in the wal to a foreyne’ (LGW 1962).18 The reason that editors, readers, and lexicographers have been hesitant about adopting this reading is, no doubt, because it accords ill with many readers’ sense that Troilus and Criseyde’s success lies in its delicate treatment of a story of love. That is to say, it is not immediately clear that the ‘sanitation’ version can be explained as having a legitimate poetic function. Of course, this would not be the first time that Pandarus’s words, proffered with a specific amorous end in mind, generate sec-

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ondary meanings that are noisome and offensive. Perhaps the detail of the gutter, like those other moments, complicates the texture of the poem a bit, reminding us of the quotidian reality of human life so often occluded by the filter of love-poetry. Since Smyser, many commentators have acknowledged that the phrase ‘pryve wente’ may include a punning connotation of ‘latrine,’ contributing to the suggestiveness of the poem.19 But if the ‘goter’ is not an eavestrough but a sewer, and if the word ‘pryve’ in ‘pryve wente’ has ‘latrine’ not as a punning resonance but as its primary denotation, what possible poetic purpose would that serve? To discover what it is, we have to return to Chaucer’s strategy of literary archaeology, and in fact to his sustained interest in the Trojan Palladium. Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae, a text to which Chaucer often turned when reworking the Trojan story, has the Trojan prince Antenor give a thorough account of the Palladium’s significance even as he treacherously plots with the Greek leaders: When the walls of the great temple were finished, and there was nothing left to build but the roof, a marvellous image, indeed an object of superlative power, came down from the heavens, and with a divine purpose affixed itself to the wall next to the great altar. It has remained in the same place ever since, and no one is permitted to carry it from its place except its guardians, such as the priest who is now its only guardian and who guards it with great care … The Trojans attribute this image to the blessing of the goddess Pallas, who announced that such great power is in this image that, as long as it remains in the temple or within the city walls, the Trojans would never lose the city, neither the current kings nor their heirs. The Trojans place their sure faith in it, and because of it they live with a feeling of security, fearing neither the loss nor the destruction of the town. As for the name of this sign, because it is believed that it was given by Pallas, it is referred to commonly as the Palladium.20

Guido goes on to tell of the dark night when Antenor, using bribes, lies, and persuasions, eventually convinces the guardian-priest Thoas to yield up the idol, which he in turn hands over to Ulysses, thereby ensuring the end of Pallas’s protection of the city. Other versions of the Trojan story known to Chaucer have Diomedes rather than Ulysses, or else have both of them, carry off the Palladium. The best-known mention of the Palladium from ancient literature comes in Book Two of Virgil’s Aeneid.

Troilus in the Gutter  97   The whole hope Of the Danaans, and their confidence In the war they started, rested all along In help from Pallas. Then the night came When Diomedes and that criminal, Ulysses, dared to raid her holy shrine. They killed the guards on the high citadel And ripped away the statue, the Palladium, Desecrating with bloody hands the virginal Chaplets of the goddess. After that, Danaan hopes waned and were undermined, Ebbing away, their strength in battle broken, The goddess now against them.21

The Aeneid was a main school-text throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, receiving many commentaries, including the late antique commentary by the grammarian Servius, which served as the most common and most influential gloss on the poem. Servius’s lengthy note on the Palladium, which includes much commentary on the fate of the statue after Troy’s fall, has this to say about the theft of the Palladium: PALLADIUM. When Helenus was captured by the Greeks he was forced to reveal what was fated to happen to Troy, including the role of the Palladium. For this he was thought to have merited a kingdom from Pyrrhus, and he warned Pyrrhus that he should return by land, saying all the Greeks would perish in shipwrecks, as in fact occurred. (Others say that Helenus was not captured, but that he fled to Mount Ida out of grief after the death of Paris when Helen was handed over not to himself but to Deiphebus, and from there, when Calchas prodded him, he revealed the importance of the Palladium out of spite.) Then Diomedes and Ulysses climbed up to the holy precinct – some say through tunnels and others say through sewers – and, after killing the guardians, they snatched away the statue.22

Servius recounts the details of how Diomedes and Ulysses entered Troy to steal the Palladium: they entered through tunnels, cuniculis, or through sewers, cloacis. A cuniculus is any kind of tunnel, big or small, from a mining tunnel under a besieged city’s walls to a conduit for a drain. A cloaca is a sewer, a pipe or tunnel used to channel water and waste out of a building or city; by synecdoche, in medieval Latin it can

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denote a latrine or a cesspool. In other words, Ulysses and Diomedes enter the city of Troy to steal the Palladium in exactly the same way that Troilus is said to have entered Pandarus’s house to finally possess Criseyde: ‘Then Diomedes and Ulysses climbed up to the holy precinct – some say through tunnels and others through sewers.’ The parallel is striking. Indeed, Chaucer’s line ‘thorough a goter, by a pryve wente’ may be a straightforward rendering of both of the possibilities listed by Servius: cuniculis (through gutters) and cloacis (through latrines).23 Medieval London might not have had a municipal waste system, but ancient cities often did, as medieval writers knew.24 The cloaca maxima, one of the marvels described by ancient authors, was still visible in Rome.25 Troy was assumed to have been similarly equipped. For Chaucer, the main source of information on Trojan sewers was probably Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae: And through the midst of this city ran a river, named the Xanthus, which, dividing the city into two equal parts, brought many comforts to the city’s inhabitants thanks to its never-ceasing current … Indeed this river, rushing with the required abundance through skilfully built conduits and underground chutes, cleansed the city with regular flushings, and by means of this washing the accumulated filth was purged. Following the example of this river, the Tiber in Rome was similarly equipped, which courses through the middle of Rome, dividing into two parts the city of Rome, which Aeneas built to resemble Troy.26

Guido’s description was rendered into Middle English alliterative verse around 1400 in the Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troye, where the sewers are spoken of as godardys, ‘gutters’: The water by wisshyng went vnder houses, Gosshet through Godardys & other grete vautes, And clensit by course al þe clene Cite Of filth and of feum, throughe fletyng by nethe.27

John Lydgate, writing soon after, similarly paraphrases Guido’s praise for Troy’s goteris: Þis riuer eke, of fysche ful plenteous, Devided was by werkmen corious So craftely, þoruʒ castyng souereyne,

Troilus in the Gutter  99 Þat in his course þe stremys myʒt atteyn For to areche, as Guydo doth coniecte, By archis strong his cours for to reflecte Þoruʒ condut pipis, large & wyde with-al, By certeyn meatis artificial, Þat it made a ful purgacioun Of al ordure & fylþes in þe toun, Waschyng þe stretys as þei stod a rowe, And þe goteris in þe erþe lowe, Þat in þe cite was no filþe sene; For þe canel skoured was so clene, And deuoyded in so secre wyse, Þat no man myʒt espien nor deuyse By what engyn þe filþes, fer nor ner, Wern born a-wey by cours of þe ryuer – So couertly euery þing was cured.28

For medieval readers, this waste-disposal infrastructure was one of the wonders of ancient Troy. In Chaucer’s poem, Pandarus’s Trojan house would be one of the many city buildings whose gutter was connected to this larger Trojan sewage system. (Considering that the Trojan system was flushed by recurrent surges of rushing water, perhaps Pandarus’s notice that Troilus has come through the gutter ‘in al this reyn’ is not simply a gratuitous detail, but imagines Troilus wet from working his way upstream.) In light of the nature of Trojan civic infrastructure, Pandarus’s privy and gutter are not just metaphorically like the cloaca through which Ulysses and Diomedes crawled, they are metonymically attached to the very same system.29 The resemblances between Pandarus’s description of how Troilus secretly entered his house and Servius’s account of how Ulysses and Diomedes secretly entered Troy are potent, and the historical parallel strikes me as undoubtedly premeditated on Chaucer’s part. Establishing yet another implied connection between the lovers’ affair and the fated destruction of Troy, and reinforcing the poetic themes of secrecy and idolatry, the parallel confirms the appropriateness of what I have been calling the ‘sanitation’ reading of these lines. This reference to Pandarus’s privy is commensurate with other moments in Chaucer’s poetry where a reminder of coarse bodily functions is used to undercut the idealizing rhetoric of fin amors. The chivalric erotics of the Knight’s Tale are ironically mocked by the bawdiness of the Miller’s Tale, even

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more so if, as Peter Brown has recently suggested, the ‘shot-wyndowe’ of John and Alison’s house (I.3695) is really the window of a latrine, ‘accentuat[ing] the wide disparity between the sublimity of Absolon’s pretensions and the risible circumstances in which he enacts them.’30 Another sordid deflation of the self-deluding idealizations of lovepoetry occurs in the Merchant’s Tale when May reads her lover’s letter in the privy (IV.1950–4).31 Yet Pandarus’s mention of the privy may have another dimension to it as well. Recent work on the social history of latrines and sewers consistently emphasizes the role played by such mechanisms of waste disposal in reinforcing categories of social distinction, especially in preindustrial societies. Such research builds on Norbert Elias’s cultural history of the civilizing process in terms of the elaboration of rules of etiquette; on Mary Douglas’s anthropological analysis of pollution as a means of policing important categorical distinctions between what is ‘inside’ a culture and what remains ‘outside’; and on the psychoanalytic attention to the symbolic power of excrement, including Jacques Lacan’s assertion that ‘civilization is shit, cloaca maxima.’32 Richard Neudecker emphasizes how the visibility of luxury latrines in ancient Rome was an important ingredient in establishing the urbanitas of patrician Romans, a way ‘to celebrate defecation with status and dignity.’33 Douglas Biow reveals the extent to which the new urban cultures of late medieval and Renaissance Italy (including the world of Boccaccio, the author upon whom Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde depends) were preoccupied with cleanliness, a preoccupation for which new latrine designs were crucial.34 Dominique Laporte finds similar implications in the development of latrines and municipal sewers in the early modern period, when a new discourse of social and sanitary discipline took hold in the political sphere and when a symbolically laden interest in ancient Rome elevated the cloaca maxima ‘as the signifier of civilization par excellence.’35 Especially from the reign of Henry III, England should be seen as actively refiguring the semiotics of civilizing hygiene.36 During the fourteenth century, London experienced considerable public debate about the disposal of waste. At the Assize of Nuisances, in place since the beginning of the century, ‘the largest group of complaints concerned drains, gutters, and water-disposal.’37 After some London householders gained permission, in 1374, to have a local stream drain their privies, ‘the practice of so building private latrines continued unchecked for the greater part of a century.’38 The first attempt to legislate the latrines

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in London came in 1388. Chaucer’s own familiarity with the infrastructure of drainage systems would show itself when, as clerk of the king’s works between 1389 and 1391, he oversaw the draining of fields at the royal manors,39 and again in 1390 when he was a member of the commission to oversee the repair of ‘walls, ditches, gutters, sewers, bridges, paths, channels, and trenches’ between Woolwich and Greenwich.40 Moreover, modern excavations have revealed that an addition to a Custom House on the Billingsgate quay, added while Chaucer worked as Controller of Customs, included ‘a small chamber for a latrine’ and ‘a timber latrine drain running south to the river; the excavators were proud to claim that Chaucer himself probably used it.’41 This up-to-date latrine and gutter were built in 1383, when Chaucer was at work on Troilus and Criseyde. One literary function of having a privy in Troilus and Criseyde is to suggest to a fourteenth-century audience just how fashionable Pandarus’s house must have been; only the more elite householders in London had their own privies, and only those who were well-connected could get permission to dump their waste into the common gutters, let alone to divert a gutter through their own properties.42 From this perspective, Pandarus’s mention of his latrine operates within two competing discursive patterns: first, in relation to the lovers’ courtly and sublimated amorous discourse, mention of a privy appears to be an element of ridicule or deflationary irony; and second, in relation to the discourse of cosmopolitan urbanity, Pandarus might feel encouraged to draw attention to his state-of-the-art facilities. Besides reinforcing an interpretation of the phrase ‘thorough a goter, by a pryve wente’ as referring to an actual latrine, this parallel with the exploit of Diomedes and Ulysses further establishes Fleming’s argument that the theme of idolatry in the poem is manifest through the ‘careful and sustained parallel between the most famous idol of antiquity [the Palladium], and the woman Criseyde.’43 At the very moment when Troilus finally obtains the object of his desire, Criseyde, it is as if he were plucking the Palladium from its shrine, while with tragic irony we are reminded of how the Palladium will be stolen by Diomedes, the same Greek who will take Criseyde away from Troilus. As Hector characterizes Troilus’s love in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, ‘’Tis mad idolatry’ (2.2.60). Even while furthering a satire of sexual idolatry, however, this particular correspondence with Trojan history complicates the theme.44 The link between erotic passion and pagan idolatry is here achieved by

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calling attention to a privy attached to the Trojan sewage system, and this evocation shades the theme of sexual idolatry in two main ways. In the first place, mentioning the privy associates Troilus’s escapade with human filth, allowing a quasi-scatological form of irony by which the poem might engender in its readers a temporary reaction of disgust. Such a strategy of ‘attempting to instil aversion to sinful behaviour by showing it as proximate to the disgusting’ is common in medieval writing.45 In Troilus and Criseyde, such a strategy of disgust is limited to a very few moments where the veneer of delicacy falls away, and it is for the most part contained by having such moments verbalized by Pandarus, such that any aversion toward the lovers is mediated by complex and contradictory responses to the character of Pandarus. In this sense, it is important to recall that we do not know if Troilus actually entered the house through the gutter: we only have Pandarus’s words to that effect. Several other speeches by Pandarus have the effect of associating the love affair with other kinds of disreputable or polluting behaviour (incest, say, and rape), even while insulating Troilus’s and Criseyde’s own identities from Pandarus’s way of seeing things. The second way that the privy complicates the theme of sexual idolatry is more complex, and in fact it has the potential to undermine the simple association of pagan idolatry, sexual passion, and excremental filth just described. When Diomedes and Ulysses enter Troy through the sewer, the channel that is meant to flow in only one direction turns out to be a two-way passage; the very system set up for expelling refuse becomes an avenue through which the city’s antagonistic others may enter. In much medieval thought, idolatry (whether religious or erotic) is a semiotic system that deludes one into thinking one is safely in control, while in fact, idolatry, because it corresponds to an overly focused desire, will eventually be undone by its own blindnesses. Idolatry is thus beset by a kind of double movement: an attempt to differentiate some object or place as sacred by setting it apart from polluting outsiders is inevitably matched by the inability to maintain the boundary that would keep the idol inviolable from external forces. This double movement finds a symbolic corollary in the privy, a channel for expelling refuse that is also a vulnerable opening to the outside. If corporeal waste is relegated to the far side of a boundary that distinguishes order from disorder, and thus represents, as Julia Kristeva puts it, ‘the objective frailty of the symbolic order,’ then it is the privy that encapsulates the mechanisms by which the symbolic order is maintained and yet at the same time rendered vulnerable.46 Ulysses and Diomedes clamber

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up the Trojan privy to seize the inviolable Palladium; Troilus is portrayed working his way upstream through the gutters to enter secretly into a different kind of (un)protected space. In both cases, a process of exclusion undergoes a reversal. In Christian hagiographic traditions, the symbolism of sewers and latrines often carried a similar emphasis on the unexpected return of persons who, as symbolic others, posed a threat to the ancient polis. The Romans hid the corpse of Saint Sebastian in the cloaca maxima so that it could not be found by fellow Christians and treated with reverence, but a vision revealed to the Christians how to find the body and give it proper burial.47 Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale employs this same symbolic logic of the privy: the corpse of the ‘little clergeon’ is cast into the pit of a ‘wardrobe’ in a ‘privee place,’ yet the body is discovered, since ‘murder will out’ (VII.572–6). These hagiographic traditions re-inscribe harsh categories of rejection and inclusion in order to distinguish nonChristians from Christians. In so doing, they run the risk of setting up a mechanism of symbolic expulsion, despite the fact that the tales show the vulnerabilities and reversals to which the logic of the privy is subject. We could take this line of thought even further: if medieval satires of idolatry distinguish between a pagan past and a Christian present in terms of the Christian rejection of (expulsion of) worthless idols (waste), then the disposal of unwanted waste through the sewer exists as a kind of homology to this process. Policing the unstable boundaries between the acceptable and the rejected is not only characteristic of pagan idolatry, it is also characteristic of Christianity (and, in particular, of Christian satires of pagan idolaters). Purifying Christianity from the religious filth of pagan idol-worship permits the establishment of a cultural difference, but perhaps, as with the two-way passage of the sewer, it harbours a potential for similarly unanticipated reversals. If this is the case, then Chaucer’s satire of Trojan eroticism as analogous to pagan idolatry is perhaps tempered by a sense that clear boundaries between categories of sameness and otherness such as ‘Christian’ and ‘pagan’ are tricky to police. Chaucer’s satire of sexual idolatry in this passage of Troilus and Criseyde is complicated by its intertextual context. The poet here digs into the past in order to diagnose idolatry as characteristic of a prior, pagan civilization. Yet as he does so, he also hints at a double movement that might haunt the Christian desire to relegate paganism to the dungheap of history. There is more than a passing resemblance between this dynamic of idolatry and the psychoanalytic notion of the return of the

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repressed, and thanks to this resemblance Chaucer’s literary ‘archaeology’ invites comparison with Freud’s psychoanalytical ‘archaeology.’ In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud famously compares the human psyche to the city of Rome with all of its ancient monuments still intact; in other writings by Freud, the discovery of Troy served as a ready metaphor for successful therapy, ‘as if Schliemann had once more excavated Troy.’48 Freud’s concern was not primarily to discover moments of beauty, cleanliness, and order – in his view, the three markers of the civilizing process – but rather to uncover what the psyche, or civilization, had hidden or expelled; for this practice of looking ‘archaeologically’ into the unwanted refuse of the past as a key to personal and cultural anxieties, Freud coined the neologism dreckology.49 ‘Waste matter is key to Chaucer,’ Susan Signe Morrison has recently claimed, with respect to the Canterbury Tales.50 Interested at times in scatological effects, Chaucer is also interested in the space and function of the privy, as the Prioress’s Tale and the Merchant’s Tale explicitly show: the privy is conceived of not just as a container of the end-products of human waste but as a mechanism whereby filth is separated out and removed so that order can be maintained. Troilus and Criseyde is not exempt from this concern, as we see once we accept the meaning of Pandarus’s words that Troilus ‘Is thorough a goter, by a pryve wente, / Into my chaumbre come in al this reyn’ (3.787–8). Chaucer manages here to be not only a literary archaeologist, but also what we might call a poetic dreckologist. He registers here some of his own culture’s anxieties about carnality and its sublimation, about religious difference and its articulation, about the civilizing process and its unwanted remainders. In this fleeting moment of a great imaginative enterprise, he diagnoses a strangely fraught nexus of sewage, idolatry, and love. notes 1 On Heinrich Schliemann, see Heinrich Schliemann, Ilios, the City and Country of the Trojans (New York: Arno, 1976); and Michael Siebler, Troia – Homer – Schliemann: Mythos und Wahrheit (Mainz: von Zabern, 1990). 2 The large number of critics who have discussed Chaucer’s attitudes toward Trojan history include J.S.P. Tatlock, ‘The Epilog of Chaucer’s Troilus,’ Modern Philology 18 (1921): 625–59; C.S. Lewis, ‘What Chaucer Really Did to the Filostrato,’ Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 1 (1932): 56–75; Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘Chaucer’s Sense of His-

Troilus in the Gutter  105 tory,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 51 (1952): 301–13 [reprinted in Essays and Explorations: Studies in Ideas, Language and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 13–26]; John P. McCall, ‘The Trojan Scene in Chaucer’s Troilus,’ ELH 29 (1962): 263–75; John Frankis, ‘Paganism and Pagan Love in Troilus and Criseyde,’ in Essays on ‘Troilus and Criseyde,’ ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1979), 57–72; Alastair J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982); Winthrop Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Alastair J. Minnis, ‘From Medieval to Renaissance? Chaucer’s Position on Past Gentility,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 205–46; Barry Windeatt, ‘Classical and Medieval Elements in Chaucer’s Troilus,’ in The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 111–31; C. David Benson, Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 60–71; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); A.C. Spearing, ‘Classical Antiquity in Chaucer’s Chivalric Romances,’ in Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan J. Ridyard (Sewanee: University of the South Press, 1999), 57–73; Sylvia Federico, ‘Chaucer’s Utopian Troy Book: Alternatives to Historiography in Troilus and Criseyde,’ Exemplaria 11 (1999): 79–106; Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002); Dominique Battles, The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the Old French ‘Roman de Thèbes,’ Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate (New York: Routledge, 2004), 115–44; Suzanne Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 130–58; and Barbara Nolan, ‘Chaucer’s Poetics of Dwelling in Troilus and Criseyde,’ in Chaucer and the City, ed. Ardis Butterfield (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 57–75. 3 The theme of sexual idolatry in Troilus and Criseyde was first suggested by D.W. Robertson, ‘The Concept of Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval Texts,’ in The Meaning of Courtly Love, ed. F.X. Newman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1968), 1–18 [reprinted in D.W. Robertson, Jr, Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 257–72]. This Robertsonian genealogy has been enough to render the argument suspicious for several other scholars, such as Minnis. 4 John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 127. 5 Ibid., 138. 6 I cite from the edition of Troilus and Criseyde by Stephen A. Barney in The

106  William Robins Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 471–585. Citation of other works by Chaucer, given in the text, are also to the Riverside edition. 7 Robert Kilburn Root, ed., The Book of Troilus and Crisedye, by Geoffrey Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 479. 8 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. ‘went(e).’ 9 H.M. Smyser, ‘The Domestic Background of Troilus and Crisyde,’ Speculum 31 (1956): 297–315, esp. 310. Cf. D.S. Brewer and L. Elisabeth Brewer, eds, Troilus and Criseyde (Abridged), by Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 117: ‘goter: even though Pandarus is lying, the implication is of a gutter, which, like a similar one in Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, 2705, needs a hole in a room’s wall big enough for a man to squeeze through: perhaps it was a sort of drain, or even a latrine.’ 10 Middle English Dictionary, s.v. ‘goter n. (1).’ The entry also cites Chaucer’s Legend of Hypermnestra: ‘He shal awake and ryse, and gon his way, / Out at this goter, or that it be day’ (LGW 2704–5). 11 A roof is implied in Pandarus’s earlier comment to Criseyde that if she sleeps in his ‘closet’ the noise of the rain will not disturb her; this would seem to mean that Pandarus’s chamber is not in fact directly under a roof (3.659–65). 12 Smyser, ‘Domestic Background,’ 310. 13 Saul N. Brody, ‘Making a Play for Criseyde: The Staging of Pandarus’s House in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,’ Speculum 73 (1998): 115–40, esp. 128. Brody, 128 n. 36 contests Smyser’s comment that latrines could serve as ‘as a means of surreptitious ingress to, or egress from, medieval buildings,’ objecting that most latrines in medieval London drained into cesspits through chutes that were too narrow (only about a foot and a half or two feet wide) to make Pandarus’s words really plausible; yet there is ample documentation of thieves entering through gutters and latrines, and of owners adding bars or doors to prevent their entry. 14 Margaret Wood, The English Mediaeval House (London: Dent, 1965), 378. 15 See especially figures 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 32, 34, and 35 in P.A. Faulkner, ‘Domestic Planning from the Twelfth to the Fourteenth Centuries,’ in J.T. Smith, P.A. Faulkner, and Anthony Emery, Studies in Medieval Domestic Architecture, ed. M.J. Swanton (London: Royal Archaeological Institute, 1975), 84–117. For examples of latrines in medieval architecture, see T. Hudson Turner, Some Account of Domestic Architecture in England from the Conquest to the End of the Thirteenth Century, 3 vols (Oxford: Parker, 1851–9), 1:113–15, 184–6; J.H. Parker, Some Account of Domestic Architecture in England from Edward I to Richard II (Oxford: Parker, 1859); C.L. Kingsford,

Troilus in the Gutter  107 ‘A London Merchant’s House and Its Owners, 1360–1614,’ Archaeologia 74 (1925): 137–58, esp. 156–7; Sidney Oldhall Addy, The Evolution of the English House, rev. ed. (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933); Ernest L. Sabine, ‘Latrines and Cesspools of Mediaeval London,’ Speculum 9 (1934): 302–21; W.A. Pantin, ‘Medieval English Town-House Plans,’ Medieval Archaeology 6–7 (1962–3): 202–39, esp. 207–8; Wood, The English Mediaeval House, 377–89; Louis F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540: A Documentary History, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), esp. 276–84; Anthony Quiney, Town Houses of Medieval Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), esp. 90–4; John Schofield, Medieval London Houses, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), esp. 86–7. 16 The London will from 1324 is described by Sabine as bequeathing a cellar, ‘with certain rooms built over it; namely, a small hall, a room called a parlor, a chamber with a chimney, an alley leading to a cloaca, and the cloaca itself. This alley was evidently one of those narrow passages such as lead to garderobes situated in towers and turrets.’ Sabine ‘Latrines and Cesspools,’ 313–14. 17 Schofield, Medieval London Houses, 219; Sabine, ‘Latrines and Cesspools,’ 312. 18 See John W. Draper, ‘Chaucer’s “Wardrobe,”’ Englische Studien 60 (1926): 238–51, esp. 250–1. 19 Paul F. Baum, ‘Chaucer’s Puns: A Supplementary List,’ PMLA 73 (1958): 169. 20 ‘Quod cum totum esset perfectum in muris et non superesset nisi construi solum tectum, ex celo quoddam mirabile signum et quedam res nimium uirtuosa descendit, et iuxta magnum altare diuino ministerio seipsum affixit in muro, ubi ex tunc semper stetit ibidem et a nemine se baiulari permittit a loco scilicet ubi est, nisi a custodibus suis tantum, et nunc a solo suo custode uidelicet sacerdote tantum, qui illud in diligencia magna custodit … Dea uero Pallas, cuius beneficio Troyanis dicitur attributum, edixit qualis uirtus in ipso signo consistat, que talis est vt donec ipsum signum sit intus in templo uel infra menia ciuitatis, Troyani nunquam ipsam ciuitatem amittent nec Troyani reges nec heredes eorum. Hec est enim spes certissima Troyanorum, propter quam securi uiuunt Troyani, non timentes urbis excidium aut ruinam. Huius autem signi nomen, pro eo quod a dea Pallade creditur esse datum, Palladium communiter appellatur.’ Guido delle Colonne, Historia destructionis Troiae, ed. Nathaniel Edward Griffin (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1936), 227. Translation is mine. 21 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Classics,

108  William Robins 1990), 39. ‘Omnis spes Danaum et coepti fiducia belli / Palladis auxiliis semper stetit. impius ex quo / Tydides sed enim scelerumque inventor Ulixes, / fatale adgressi sacrato avellere templo / Palladium, caesis summae custodibus arcis, / corripuere sacram effigiem manibusque cruentis / virgineas ausi divae contingere vitas: / ex illo fluere ac retro sublapsa referri / spes Danaum, fractae vires, aversa deae mens.’ Virgil, Aeneid, 2.162–70, ed. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed., 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1:304. 22 ‘PALLADIUM: Helenus apud Arisbam captus a Graecis est et indicavit coactus fata Troiana, in quibus etiam de Palladio. unde dicitur a Pyrrho regna meruisse: quamquam praestiterit Pyrrho, ut per terram rediret, dicens omnes Graecos, quod et contigit, naufragio esse perituros. (alii dicunt Helenum non captum, sed dolore, quod post mortem Paridis Helena iudicio Priami non sibi, sed Deiphobo esset adiudicata, in Idam montem fugisse, atque exinde monente Calchante productum de Palladio pro odio prodidisse.) tunc Diomedes et Ulixes, ut alii dicunt, cuniculis, ut alii, cloacis ascenderunt arcem, et occisis custodibus sustulere simulacrum.’ Maurus Servius Honoratus, In Vergilii carmina commentarii, ad loc. 2.166, ed. Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen, 3 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881–92), 1:247–8. Translation is mine. 23 Furthermore, it should be noted that in medieval Latin both cuniculum and cloaca are capable of carrying strong sexual innuendoes. 24 There is some evidence of Roman sewers in England, although they were probably not in use in the Middle Ages. In some continental cities, such as Pavia, the Roman sewer continued to be used. See J.B. Whitwell, ‘The Church Street Sewer and an Adjacent Building,’ The Archaeology of York 3/1: The Legionary Fortress (London: Council for British Archaeology, 1976); Carlamaria Tommaselli, Il sistema di fognature romane di Pavia (Pavia: Collegio Costruttori Edili, 1978). 25 See especially the description of the ‘cloacamque maximam, receptaculum omnium purgamentorum urbis, sub terra agendam,’ in Livy, Ab urbe condita, 1.56.2, ed. B.O. Foster et al., 14 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1:192. The ancient sources that speak of the cloaca maxima are surveyed in P. Reimers, ‘Opus omnium dictu maximum: Literary Sources for the Knowledge of Roman City Drainage,’ Opuscula Romana 17 (1989): 137–41. 26 ‘Per medium autem ciuitatis ipsius quidam fluuius, Xantus nomine, decurrebat, qui, diuidendo ciuitatem ipsam in geminas partes equales, perhenni cursu habitantibus in ciuitate ipsa multa commoda conferrebat … Hic etiam fluuius per meatus artificiose compositos et subterraneas catharactas

Troilus in the Gutter  109 per latentes ductus aquarum neccessaria fecunditate decurrens ciuitatem ipsam ordinatis incursionibus mundabat, per quarum lauacrum congeste immunditie purgabantur. Ad huius itaque fluminis instar ordinatus extitit Tyber Rome, qui, per medium Rome erumpens, per Troyanum Heneam ad similitudinem Troye factam vrbem Rome geminas distincxit in partes.’ Guido delle Colonne, Historia Destructionis Troiae, 48–9. Translation is mine. 27 The Gest Hystoriale of the Destruction of Troye, vv. 1606–9, ed. G.A. Panton and D. Donaldson, 2 vols, EETS 39, 56 (London: Trübner, 1869–74), 1:54. 28 John Lydgate, Lydgate’s Troy Book, 2.741–68, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols, EETS 97, 103, 106, 126 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 1:165–6. 29 Incidentally, recent excavations at Troy have unearthed a sewer from Troy’s heyday, ‘an integrated drainage system with deep foundations and massive mudbrick facing covering the whole.’ Manfred O. Korfmann, Die Arbeiten in Troia/Wilusa 2003; Work at Troia/Wilusa in 2003, Studia Troica 14 (2004): 17–18. 30 Peter Brown, ‘“Shot wyndowe” (Miller’s Tale I.3358 and 3695): An Open and Shut Case,’ Medium Aevum 69 (2000): 96–103 at 99. 31 See Christine Rose, ‘Woman’s “pryvetee”: May, and the Privy: Fissures in the Narrative Voice in the Merchant’s Tale, 1944–86,’ Chaucer Yearbook 4 (1997): 61–77. 32 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966); the quotation from Jacques Lacan is from an address given at MIT, quoted in Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 238. See also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, ‘The Sewer, the Gaze, and the Contaminating Touch,’ in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 125–48; and Michelle Allen, ‘From Cesspool to Sewer: Sanitary Reform and the Rhetoric of Resistance, 1848–1880,’ Victorian Literature and Culture 30 (2002): 383–402. 33 ‘Die Latrine als Mittel zur städtischen Entsorgung wird veredelt, um den Stuhlgang mit Rang und Würde zu zelebrieren.’ Richard Neudecker, Die Pracht der Latrine. Zum Wandel öffentlicher Bedürfnisanstalten in der kaiserzeitlichen Stadt (Munich: Verlag Dr. Friedrich Pfeil, 1994), 153. See also Emily Gowers, ‘The Anatomy of Rome from Capitol to Cloaca,’ Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995): 23–32; and Ann O. Koloski-Ostrow, ‘Roman Latrines: How the Romans Did Their Business,’ Archaeology Odyssey 7.3 (2004): 48–55. 34 Douglas Biow, The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca: Cornell

110  William Robins University Press, 2006). See also Roberta Mucciarelli, ‘Igiene, salute, e pubblico decoro nel medioevo,’ in Vergonosa immunditia: Igiene pubblica e privata a Siena dal medioevo all’età contemporanea, ed. Roberta Mucciarelli, Laura Vigni, and Donatella Fabbri (Siena: Siena Ambiente, 2000), 15–84. 35 Dominique Laporte, The History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Ro­dolphe el-Koury (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). See also Lawrence Wright, Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and Water Closet (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 47–54; Claude Gaignebet and Marie-Claude Perier, ‘L’homme et l’excretum,’ in Histoire des moeurs, vol. 1, Les coordonnées de l’homme et la culture matérielle, ed. Jean Poirier (Paris: Éditions Gallimards, 1990), 831–93; and Ralph A. Lewin, Merde: Excursions in Scientific, Cultural, and Socio-Historical Coprology (New York: Random House, 1999). 36 On the Middle Ages in general, see Lynn Thorndike, ‘Sanitation, Baths, and Street-Cleaning in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,’ Speculum 3 (1928): 192–203; Ernest L. Sabine, ‘City Cleaning in Medieval London,’ Speculum 12 (1937): 19–43; Meredith Parsons Lillich, ‘Cleanliness with Godliness: A Discussion of Medieval Monastic Plumbing,’ in Mélanges à la mémoire du père Anselme Dimier, vol. 3, Architecture cistercienne, ed. Benoît Chauvin (Pupillin: Benoît Chauvin, 1982): 123–49; and Roberta J. Magnusson, Water Technology in the Middle Ages: Cities, Monasteries, and Waterworks after the Roman Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). On the symbolic implications of new structures of hygiene in England, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Filthy Rites,’ Daedalus 111 (1982): 1–16; David DeVries, ‘And Away Go Troubles Down the Drain: Late Medieval London and the Poetics of Urban Renewal,’ Exemplaria 8 (1996): 401–18; Michael Camille, ‘Glossing the Flesh: Scopophilia and the Margins of the Medieval Book,’ in The Margins of the Text, ed. D.C. Greetham (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 245–67; Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim, eds, Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Emily Cockayne, Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England 1600–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Paul Strohm, ‘Sovereignty and Sewage,’ in Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture, ed. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 57–70; and Susan Signe Morrison, Excrement and Filth in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 37 Schofield, Medieval London Houses, 59. 38 Sabine, ‘Latrines and Cesspools,’ 310. 39 See the 1389 indenture for a delivery of supplies to Chaucer at Eltham manor: ‘pro officio plumbarii i dragga ferrea pro mundacione stagni i

Troilus in the Gutter  111 crowdewayn i corda pro ponte vertibili i pipa vacua pro aqua intus carianda.’ Chaucer Life-Records, ed. Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 408. 40 ‘Rex dilectis et fidelibus suis Ricardo Stury chivaler Johanni Wadham Willelmo Skrene Galfrido Chaucer Henrico Vanner et Johanni Culpepir salutem. Cum walli fossata guttere sewere pontes calceta gurgites et trenchee super costeram aque Thamisie inter villas de Wolwyche et Grenwyche et ibidem in comitatu Kancie per impetum aque predicte ac refluxus et inundaciones eiusdem aque in diversis locis inter dictas villas et ibidem adeo diruta sint et confracta … ad hoc provideritis predicta wallias, fossata gutteras seweras pontes calcetas et gurgites supervideatis et premissa omnia et singula faciatis et expleatis in forma predicta.’ Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-Records, 490–1. 41 John H. Schofield, The Building of London from the Conquest to the Great Fire (London: British Museum Publications, 1984), 104. See T. Tatton-Brown, ‘Excavations at the Custom House Site, City of London, 1973,’ Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeology Society 25 (1974): 117–219 and 26 (1975): 103–70. 42 The Chaucer family property in the Vintry backed onto Walbrook, a stream used to divert waste to the Thames; the more fashionable houses in the immediate area had latrines jutting out over the stream. See Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 18. 43 Fleming, Classical Imitation, 153. 44 Similarly, Robert Edwards, treating of a related episode (5.540–53) in Troilus and Criseyde, accepts Fleming’s basic argument about the theme of sexual idolatry in the poem while finding intertextual connections that complicate the theme in interesting ways: ‘The conclusion he reaches is, I think, generally the right one – namely, that Chaucer exploits the theme of sexual idolatry. But the Ovidian influence that Besserman and Fleming observe is itself framed by a larger literary context. The poem’s reproval of sexual idolatry emerges out of a network of textual allusions that forges a critique much more powerful than parody and elegiac satire.’ Robert Edwards, ‘The Desolate Palace and the Solitary City: Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Dante,’ Studies in Philology 96 (1999): 394–416. 45 Carolynne Larrington, ‘Diet, Defecation and the Devil: Disgust and the Pagan Past,’ in Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola McDonald (York: York Medieval Press, 2006), 138–55 at 141, 145. See also Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

112  William Robins 46 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 70. See also Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, 74–5. 47 See the life of Saint Sebastian (a famous destroyer of idols) in the Legenda aurea: ‘And the tyrants threw his body into a great privy, because the Christian men should make no feast to bury his body, ne of his martyrdom. But S. Sebastian appeared after to S. Lucy, a glorious widow, and said to her: In such a privy shalt thou find my body hanging at an hook, which is not defouled with none ordure, when thou hast washed it thou shalt bury it at the catacombs by the apostles. And the same night she and her servants accomplished all that Sebastian had commanded her.’ The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints, as Englished by William Caxton, ed. F.S. Ellis, 7 vols (London: Dent, 1900), 2:245. 48 The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985), 391; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 16–17. See also Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, ‘Freud und die Archäologie,’ in Bausteine der Freud-Biographik, ed. Siegfried Bernfeld and Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), 237–59; S.R.F. Price, ‘Freud and Antiquities,’ Austrian Studies 3 (1992): 132–7; and Sabine Hake, ‘Saxa loquuntur: Freud’s Archeology of the Text,’ Boundary 2 20 (1993):146–73. 49 Freud and Fliess, Complete Letters, ed. Masson, 290–1. See Dietmar Schmidt, ‘Refuse Archaeology: Virchow, Schliemann, Freud,’ Perspectives on Science 9 (2001): 210–32, esp. 228. 50 Morrison, Excrement in the Late Middle Ages, 3.

6 The Suicide of the Legend of Good Women julia marvin

At the beginning of the prologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, the narrator presents himself as fundamentally a reader, one devoted to old books and ready to accept what they say. From the start, the poem draws on the reader’s own habits of acceptance of literary convention: it is easy to take for granted the fact that the narrator’s musings and reminiscences take the form of rhyming couplets, set in a world built out of elements of courtly poetry and dream vision.1 Even after the narrator has interpolated a complete ballade into the story of his dream, it may come as a shock to find his accuser, the god of Love, addressing him not primarily as a reader, devotee of the daisy, or dreamer – the identities he has already explicitly assumed in the text – but as a writer, one whose works are significant enough to be worth criticizing, punishing, and correcting for what they seem, by Love’s reading, to suggest about love and women. Much work on the Legend of Good Women has followed Love’s lead to investigate the ways in which the poem raises and addresses questions of love and writing – of gender, desire, sexual politics, genre, and social, political, theological, and philosophical context, as well as Chaucer’s own relation to the many literary traditions evoked in the poem.2 Over the past century of criticism, the Legend of Good Women has come to seem less a pentitential exercise, ironized or otherwise, than a Chaucerian bid for canonical, authoritative status as a writer, with Chaucer (in the most extreme formulation) bursting ‘out of the naïve-scholar persona like Superman from a phone booth.’3 The question of reading, however, is not presented in the poem only to be abandoned in favour of that of writing. In this essay, I will consider the ways in which the notions of both reading and writing advanced by the characters of the Legend of Good Women’s F prologue are tested

114  Julia Marvin

and reconstituted, in the prologue itself and in the particularly telling case of the legend of Dido. Close attention to the structural and thematic development of the two reveals a work saturated by – and often constituted by – issues surrounding the relationship among readers, writers, and texts. The thoroughness, complexity, and unsparingness of Chaucer’s treatment suggests that this relationship is one of the dominant concerns of the F text. The prologue’s narrator begins with a credulous and lengthy confession of faith in books as reliable sources of truth in the absence of personal experience: Men shal not wenen every thing a lye But yf himself it seeth or elles dooth; For, God wot, thing is never the lasse sooth, Thogh every wight ne may it nat ysee. Bernard the monk ne saugh nat all, pardee! Than mote we to bokes that we fynde, Thurgh whiche that olde thinges ben in mynde, And to the doctrine of these olde wyse, Yeve credence, in every skylful wise, That tellen of these olde appreved stories Of holynesse, of regnes, of victories, Of love, of hate, of other sondry thynges, Of whiche I may not maken rehersynges. And yf that olde bokes were aweye, Yloren were of remembraunce the keye. Wel ought us thanne honouren and beleve These bokes, there we han noon other preve.     And as for me, though that I konne but lyte, On bokes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence.

(F12–31)

These praises, framed in the language of religious devotion, bring to mind the difficulties posed by old books. As Rowe remarks, ‘Though these lines ask for belief, they evoke skepticism.’4 The preservation of books is the province of fortune as well as fame: we ‘fynde’ only some of them, as was well known in a world for which the Greek classics were so many names. From books we extract ‘doctrine,’ that which is taught and requires learning, which itself comes through books. We ‘yeve credence’: we must choose to believe. And we learn of ‘olde appreved

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stories,’ proved, apparently only through the books themselves ‘there we han noon other preve.’ To this is added the issue of the reader who ‘konne but lyte’ yet still gives books ‘feyth and ful credence’ – partial understanding, but full belief, appropriate perhaps for scripture, but here applied to all kinds of writing. Even while declaring simple trust in old stories as bearers of truth, the narrator complicates the conditions for belief in them.5 Still, the injunction to give books the benefit of the doubt implies that readers need do no more than accept what they say: that they themselves might require discrimination or interpretation is not yet at issue.6 The untenability of such a simple model of reading will be illustrated throughout the rest of the prologue. Considerable critical attention has already been paid to the complications introduced by the daisy-loving narrator’s lament ‘that I ne had Englyssh, ryme or prose, / Suffisant this flour to preyse aryght,’ and his invocation (as well as imitation) of past love poets, who give him material from which to glean and repeat – he has, as it turns out, by no means abandoned his old books when he turns to the daisy.7 More complications arise as the narrator listens to the song of the springtime birds, who     in hir song despise The foule cherl that, for his coveytise, Had hem betrayed with his sophistrye. This was hire song: ‘The foweler we deffye, And al his craft.’

(F135–9)

The ‘sophistrye’ of the birdcatcher’s calls marks an acknowledgment that language can be used not only to transmit truth but to manipulate and trap its audience. And as the birdcatcher speaks the birds’ language, they now sing in ours, it appears, defying ‘craft’ themselves while manifesting the craft of the narrator, who purports only to report their speech while, obviously enough, interpreting or inventing it.8 Over the course of the subsequent description of the birds, the discourse moves with startling speed from one of transparency to one of indeterminacy. The birds ‘diden hire other observaunces / That longeth onto love and to nature; / Construeth that as yow lyst, I do no cure’ (F150–2). This coy gesture evading the birds and the bees, thoroughly conventional as it is, suddenly throws responsibility for interpretation of the birds’ ‘observaunces’ onto the reader, with the speaker abdicating responsibility for, much less control over, the meaning of the text. He now freely

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admits to, and seems to be unconcerned by, the possibility of multiple interpretations of the same words. In the F prologue, all this has happened before the narrator falls asleep and meets his reader, the god of Love: their encounter will bring into the open the issues tacitly raised at the poem’s beginning. Love considers the narrator his enemy: ‘And thow my foo, and al my folk werreyest, And of myn olde servauntes thow mysseyest, And hynderest hem with thy translacioun, And lettest folk from hire devocioun To serve me, and holdest it folye To serve Love.’

(F322–7)

As far as Love is concerned, the dreamer is another birdcatcher, using ‘missaying’ to ensnare readers and prevent the proper observation of love – this time not by falsely leading them towards it with his calls, but by steering them away from it. It is not immediately apparent what Love sees as the nature of the dreamer’s missaying and translation. Is it that he has perniciously altered good texts, or made bad ones too easily accessible? Is he lying, or telling truths that Love would prefer to leave untold? When Love proceeds to the cases of the Romance of the Rose and Troilus and Criseyde, it becomes clear that the problem is the transmission of certain stories, not only their misrepresentation, in which case clarity merely exacerbates the offence:     ‘Thou maist yt nat denye, For in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose, Thou hast translated the Romaunce of the Rose, That is an heresye ayeins my lawe, And makest wise folk fro me withdrawe; And of Creseyde thou hast seyd as the lyste, That maketh men to wommen lasse triste, That ben as trewe as ever was any steel.’

(F327–34)

The Love of the F prologue (unlike the Love of the G prologue) will acknowledge no story that does not fit with what he already believes: for him, a text that does not obviously celebrate love and women is ‘heresye,’ and its writer or translator a heretic, not only a believer in,

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but a promulgator of, dangerous falsehood, and responsible for his work’s effects on its readers.9 Love’s companion Alceste leaps to the dreamer’s defence before he can make any response of his own, with a scattershot attempt to absolve him of responsibility. Her first try simply eliminates writer and text from consideration: ‘This man to yow may falsely ben accused’ (F350). Next, she reinstates the guilty text but denies the writer discernment: ‘Hym rekketh noght of what matere he take’ (F365). Next, she posits an author writing against his will: ‘Or him was boden maken thilke tweye / Of som persone, and durste it nat withseye’ (F366–7). Finally, she supposes that ‘him repenteth outrely’ (F368) and recalls that even if he knew what he was saying, at least he did not originate the stories. The stronger the author’s presence in the process of creation, the guiltier he becomes. And the guilt of the texts in question, after the initial attempt to throw Love’s case out, never comes into question. After Love has forgiven the offence, not on the merits of the case but out of affection for Alceste, and has assigned the compensatory task of writing about true women, the dreamer attempts a stronger defence of himself and his books, one that controverts both his passive and Love’s aggressive theories of reading: ‘But trewly I wende, as in this cas, Naught have agilt, ne doon to love trespas. For-why a trewe man, withouten drede, Hath nat to parten with a theves dede; Ne a trewe lover oght me not to blame Thogh that I speke a fals lovere som shame. They oghte rather with me for to holde For that I of Creseyde wroot or tolde, Or of the Rose; what so my auctor mente, Algate, God woot, yt was myn entente To forthren trouthe in love and yt cheryce, And to ben war fro falsnesse and fro vice By swich ensample; this was my menynge.’

(F462–74)

His presentation of his works as legitimate negative exempla violates Love’s precept that a story of a false woman must itself be false. More significantly, in his self-defence as writer, the dreamer has finally, explicitly, denied the simple truth of old books and their reception that he has previously espoused as reader. In laying claim to his own interpretation

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of his author’s words, he has opened up the possibility of interpretation for all.10 As a reader, he has chosen an interpretation that he acknowledges may differ from his author’s intent, while as a writer, he argues for a particular meaning to his own words, so that he simultaneously attempts to become an authority in his own right and to discount the authority of the past. Try as he may, he cannot prove what even his own words mean: he cannot win a privilege for himself as writer that he denies to other writers. Books and the words that constitute them can no longer constitute transparent self-sufficient evidence in the absence of contrary experience. Over the course of the prologue, the narrator has moved from a declaration of ‘feyth and ful credence’ to an admission of scepticism, by way of Love’s accusation of ‘heresye’ and his own story’s constant, if quiet, illustrations of the necessity of readerly engagement in the making of meaning (F31, F330). But after this admission that simple faith in books is untenable and interpretation of them essential, the dreamer is, in (or perhaps as) his penance, forced by Love’s commandment back into a naive relationship with old stories.11 First, Love asserts equivalence between good women and the books about them. This happens first with Alceste herself. When the dreamer admits that he does not know who his intercessor is, but ‘I see well she is good,’ Love begins to reify her as a literary construct (which, of course, she is) with the response, ‘That is a trewe tale, by myn hood!’ (F506–7).12 Love continues, ‘Hastow nat in a book, lyth in thy cheste, / The grete goodnesse of the quene Alceste?’ (F510–11). Love’s question conveys a degree of surprise that the dreamer should so long have failed to recognize what he already has in his book. For Love, the book, the dreamer’s ‘cheste,’ and Alceste herself all serve as repositories, and mutually confirming evidence, of the lady’s goodness. She is a tale, and the book is she. Love himself immediately provides occasion for the refutation of such easy identification of person and text when he blames the dreamer for omitting Alceste from the ballade ‘Hyd, Absolon’ (F537–43). Some three hundred lines earlier in the F prologue, the narrator sings this ballade as he recalls the daisy-lady’s first appearance (F249–69): Alceste is not only in this ballade, she is its subject, for the dreamer offers it in her praise. But at that point, she is an Alceste as yet nameless, presented only as ‘my lady’ who surpasses all the other figures named.13 In a sense, Love’s critique is foolish: he fails to recognize that if Alceste were named among the poem’s paragons of beauty and fidelity, it would

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be for purposes of unfavourable comparison to ‘my lady.’ He cannot be faulted, however, for failing to recognize that the ballade is about Alceste, for the poem’s reader, not Love, is the audience for the performance that takes place in the F prologue. Love lacks the context necessary to know that Alceste is ‘my lady,’ just as the dreamer at first lacks the context necessary to know that ‘my lady’ is Alceste. For Alceste is the subject of the ballade not essentially, but only circumstantially: if the phrase ‘my lady’ is directed to another woman (for instance, ‘the quene, / … at Eltham or at Sheene’ (F496–7), she will vanish entirely, replaced by another who will now become supreme. Both the performer and the hearer have a role to play in assigning the subject of the ballade, as they decide who ‘my lady’ is on any given occasion. Like so much love poetry, the ballade becomes a template in which any lady may be inscribed. Love seems to subscribe to the notion that there exists a standard model of womanly virtue, ascribable not only to the famous, but to ‘twenty thousand moo’ (F559).14 He tells the dreamer, ‘Thise other ladies sittynge here arowe Ben in thy balade, yf thou kanst hem knowe, And in thy bookes all thou shalt hem fynde.’

(F554–6)

Love describes the women of his retinue as contained, even constituted, by books. But as he commends books as receptacles of truth, he simultaneously admits to the enormous gap between literary representation and its subject, for he does not expect the dreamer to so much as recognize the women who populate his own ballade. Nevertheless, Love commends old books to the dreamer as all he needs for his lives of good women: ‘Suffiseth me thou make in this manere: That thou reherce of al hir lyf the grete, After thise olde auctors lysten for to trete.’

(F573–5)

So the dreamer, who in the F text picks up his books and goes to work without ever waking up, is to praise women simply by repeating what old books say. He will labour under two constraints. The first is the re­adoption of his earlier posture as trusting recipient and faithful transmitter of old stories. The second is that the old stories must now be taken to self-evidently say what Love wants them to say. The dreamer

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is now committed both to a lack of interpretation, and to a highly particular interpretation, of his sources. In the poem’s own framing, however incomplete, the narrator, who opens by enthusiastically advocating acceptance of old books, is speaking after having had the dream that drives him to the declaration of his readerly and authorial autonomy. Chronologically, that is, his declaration represents a retreat from the sceptical position arrived at over the course of the prologue, so that the narrator appears to begin his prologue without recognizing, or admitting to, its own implications. But the order in which the reader experiences the prologue is the opposite of the narrator’s, and it offers a progression from credulousness to critical-mindedness. Though the narrator may revert to a naive stance under Love’s orders, the reader of the poem will find it difficult to do so in reading the legends that follow. In this way as in so many others in the Legend of Good Women, the reader’s own experience becomes constitutive.15 It is necessarily distinct from and cannot be subordinated to the reported experience of the narrator or any of the work’s other characters. The F prologue thus offers a progression from declared adherence and loyalty to ostensibly true and stable sources, to deviation from a simple, passive model of reading, to outright abandonment of and rebellion against the authority of old stories – all followed by an attempt to slam shut Pandora’s box. This progression sets a pattern for the telling of at least some of the legends themselves, as the legend of Dido shows. The legend’s varieties of correspondence to and difference from its sources have been often and well analysed.16 Rather than retrace them in detail, here I will examine a few moments in the legend that encapsulate what happens when the dreamer tries to put Love’s literary precepts into practice. It has long been noted that even as the narrator asserts his fidelity to his sources, he begins to put a tendentious spin on the Aeneid, with the bland declaration that he will follow Virgil to tell ‘how Eneas to Dido was forsworn’ (927).17 As Baswell remarks, this characterization is more Ovidian than Virgilian, and the legend as a whole offers ‘a text that is openly, even provocatively Virgilian … and a plot that is largely Ovidian.’18 Already the reader who knows Virgil and Ovid is put on guard: the literary gamesmanship of the rest of the legend is most, but by no means exclusively, accessible to a reader familiar with these texts (and the many other literary traditions engaged in the Legend of Good Women) and prepared to notice what is being done with them.19

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The narrator starts with the second book of the Aeneid, at the beginning of the story of the end of Troy: his first modest adaptation then, is to make narrative and chronological order correspond.20 He then proceeds by means of abbreviatio and occupatio to tell of Eneas’s coming to Carthage.21 After recounting at length Eneas’s interview with Venus on the Libyan coast, the narrator admits to the first, most basic problem of sticking to his sources: ‘I coude folwe, word for word, Virgile, / But it wolde lasten al to longe while’ (1002–3). From acknowledged selectivity, he moves to dubious commentary: Whan he [Eneas] was in the large temple come, I can nat seyn if that it be possible, But Venus hadde hym maked invysible – Thus seyth the bok, withouten any les.

(1019–22)

Even the apparent reassertion of the authority of ‘the bok’ is fairly cagey here, since it is unclear whether the narrator is reporting only that the book really does say this, or that the book tells the truth in saying this.22 From this point on, the legend of Dido departs more frequently and pointedly from the Virgilian text.23 The narrator makes shifts by way of translation. His Eneas sees the mural of the Troy story in the temple and mourns, ‘Thourghout the world oure shame is kid so wyde, / Now it is peynted upon every syde’ (1029–30). This is a translation, and yet not one, of ‘quis iam locus … quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris’ (What land, … what tract of earth is now not full of our sorrow? [Aen. 1.459–63]), for the Aeneas of Virgil takes the mural as a sign of sympathy, not fingerpointing.24 The narrator also begins to elaborate, taking Virgil’s brief statement that Dido was of ‘forma pulcherrima’ (Aen. 1.496) as occasion for a seven-line description of her beauty (1008–14) – one that replaces Virgil’s description of her good governance (Aen. 1.503–8).25 More subtle games begin. At the moment corresponding to a nineline passage in Virgil when Aeneas gives Dido presents from Troy (Aen. 1.647–55), nine lines of gifts are duly listed: There nas courser wel ybrydeled non, Ne stede, for the justing wel to gon, Ne large palfrey, esy for the nones, Ne jewel, fretted ful of ryche stones, Ne sakkes ful of gold, of large wyghte,

122  Julia Marvin Ne ruby non, that shynede by nyghte, Ne gentil hawtein faucoun heroner, Ne hound for hert or wilde bor or der, Ne coupe of gold, with floreyns newe ybete, That in the land of Libie may be gete, That Dido ne hath it Eneas ysent.

(1114–24)

Only at the end of the list is it revealed that these are Dido’s gifts to Eneas, not the reverse.26 At last, the narrator is provoked not merely to question or tweak his source, but to reject it outright, when he reports Venus’s strategem of substituting Cupid for Ascanius:     Oure autour telleth us, That Cupido, that is the god of love, At preyere of his moder hye above, Hadde the liknesse of the child ytake, This noble queen enamored to make On Eneas; but as of that scripture, Be as be may, I take of it no cure.

(1139–45)

These last words, ‘I take of it no cure,’ mark the exact halfway point of the text of the legend, the 222nd of its 444 lines. Just as in the prologue, the narrator has travelled from a declaration of simple allegiance to the old story, through compromise (by way of strategic omission, tendentious translation, addition, and eventually out-and-out revision), to open rebellion. It sounds as if he is now going to assert himself, as he grandly continues, ‘But soth is this’ (1146). But what is this truth? That Dido makes an extraordinary fuss over the child and thanks him for the presents he brings (1146–9)? A feeble blow for narrative liberty, and one that will deflate any readerly expectations that may have arisen. Within seven more lines, the legend has returned not only to paraphrase but to unmistakable translation of Virgil, though it is translation that continues to manifest the distinction between legend and source, for the first section of the legend ends with an account of Dido’s lovesickness that is a translation of the beginning of Book Four of the Aeneid.27 The narrator then starts over: ‘Now to th’effect, now to the fruyt of al, / Whi I have told this story, and telle shal. / Thus I begynne’ (1160–2). What begins again is the same pattern of adherence, deviation, elaboration,

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and rejection, this time with ever more of the clichés of romance tradition filling in the gaps left by the unassimilable parts of Virgil.28 At the moment of consummation comes what may be the legend’s most virtuosic gesture. Where the Aeneid says, ‘ille dies primus leti primusque malorum / causa fuit’ (that day was the first day of death, that first the cause of woe [Aen. 4.169–70]), the legend says, ‘this was the firste morwe / Of hire gladnesse, and gynning of hire sorwe’ (1230–1). Behind the transformation of death into gladness lies a change in the construal of the Latin from letum, with the genetive leti, to laetitia, or more precisely, its adjectical form laetus, with the genetive laeti. Leti and laeti would be spelled identically in a medieval text of Virgil: much can be done to a text while following it not just word for word, but letter for letter.29 By the time Eneas leaves Dido, the narrator has abandoned Virgil to speak for himself, in his apostrophe to ‘sely wemen, ful of innocence’ (1254). The independent summary he here offers of the tragedy of Dido and the appeal he makes to the reader’s own judgment constitute the legend’s moment most sympathetic to Love, while most blatantly violating Love’s rules of composition: There as he was in peril for to sterve For hunger, and for myschef in the se, And desolat, and fled from his cuntre, And al his folk with tempest al todryven, She hath hire body and ek her reame yiven Into his hand, there as she myghte have been Of othere lande than of Cartage a queen, And lyved in joye ynogh; what wole ye more?

(1277–84)

In the end, Dido dies in a mercifully quick two lines, without the suffering described in Virgil’s account, or, for that matter, the detail typical of legends of Christian martyrs (1350–1). But by way of an open switch to Ovid (who has been insinuated into the legend over its last sixty or so lines) as ‘myn auctour’ (1352), the narrator can resurrect her, pulling her backwards in time, ‘Or she was hurt, byforen or she deyde’ (1353). Just as the first part of the legend ends with the beginning of Book Four of the Aeneid, the entire legend ends with a close translation of the beginning of the seventh of the Heroides. Promised early and appearing late, it rescues Dido from death by ending before she can die. About to kill herself for the loss of her good name, what does Dido tell the reader

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and Eneas? Depressingly enough, that words are cheap: ‘“But syn my name is lost thourgh yow,” quod she, / “I may wel lese on yow a word or letter”’ (1361–2).30 This seems to be a hard lesson for the narrator, who at last wholly abandons the attempt to tame his sources. In a final abdication of responsibility for transmitting the classical story according to Love’s rule, he hands Dido over entirely to Ovid, and to the reader, concluding: ‘But who wol al this letter have in mynde, / Rede Ovyde, and in hym he shal it fynde’ (1366–7). That is, at the end of the legend, the narrator tells his readers to take up their old books much as Love tells him to take up his old books at the end of the prologue. But there is a crucial difference: what they find in Ovid is up to them, not him. Pandora’s box remains open. The legend of Dido begins modestly yet confidently as a recounting of its sources, from which the narrator will ‘take / The tenor, and the grete effectes make’ (928–9). It ends despondently yet mischievously with the recommendation that the reader go back to Ovid. In this final breakdown from retelling to reference, the legend has committed suicide much as Dido herself has, ceasing to exist, in so far as it ever has, in anything like its own right. It remains largely within the letter of Love’s law, but rather than solving the problems posed by Virgil and Ovid, it brings them into high relief for the reader, compelling the kind of discrimination that both the prologue’s narrator and Love in their own ways eschew. Although the legend’s structure and rhetoric can unsettle even a reader unversed in its sources, the reader steeped in Virgil and Ovid is placed to appreciate just what knowledge of tradition is required for Chaucer to travesty it so completely through his mix of assimilation, manipulation, and dismissal. What replaces the prologue’s intial celebration of old books is a performance in which Chaucer shows that, while aping subservience to his authors, he can turn beginnings into endings, and death into gladness. A display of literary mastery, to be sure. In a real sense, Chaucer is here presenting himself as an authority (and artist) on a par with a Virgil or an Ovid. But readings of the Legend of Good Women that stop at this conclusion may be stopping short, for Chaucer’s victory is Pyhrric: the notion of writerly authority itself suffers considerably over the course of the poem. As Copeland argues, ‘Chaucer … has appropriated an exegetical method … as the point of invention for his own text,’ in a way that, along with the act of translation itself, I would argue, enables a vernacular text to ‘refuse and resist the authority of the sources.’31

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But exegesis is at least as much a matter of reading as it is of writing, and what Chaucer does to past writers, he equips later readers to do to him. Seen from one side, the beleagured teller of the legend of Dido is rebelling against his authors; seen from the other, he is surrendering exegetical authority to his own eventual readers. Early in the prologue, the narrator protests the interpretation, especially the cynical interpretation, of one word to signify another: But I ne clepe nat innocence folye, Ne fals pitee, for vertu is the mene, As Etik seith; in swich manere I mene.

(F164–6)

The advocacy of clarity and the rejection of doubleness are here rendered fraught by the presence of the word mene itself, terminating both lines of the couplet, so that it must be read in two completely different senses. The very assertion of what the speaker means – a statement of intention and a bid for authority – has the effect of highlighting the fundamental role of the reader in making meaning. That is the Legend of Good Women’s burden, as a cautionary tale for writer and reader alike. Chaucer may well be working to create readers who exert their power more wisely and less despotically than Love. But power remains in their hands nonetheless. His text exists as yet another kind of mene, an intermediary between the reader and something of the reader’s own making. It plays a role far less honoured than that given to the ‘olde appreved stories’ of the poem’s beginning (F15), one more akin to that of Pandarus in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (a work that Love condemns), when Pandarus indulges in the same double rhyme and leaves his interlocutor Troilus to do the work of construal: That is to seye, for the am I bicomen, Bitwixen game and ernest, swich a meene As maken wommen unto men to comen; Al sey I nought, thow wost wel what I meene.

(Tr. 3.253–6)32

Notes 1 In this essay, I will limit myself to consideration of the F version, rather than the more frequently examined G version, of the prologue. Quotations of The Legend of Good Women and Chaucer’s other works, cited in the text,

126  Julia Marvin are taken from Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 2 Treatments include Suzanne C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, and Chaucer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 159–86; Christopher Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 220–2, 249–69; Marilynn Desmond, Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval ‘Aeneid’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 152–62; Donald W. Rowe, Through Nature to Eternity: Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Lisa Kiser, Telling Classical Tales: Chaucer and the ‘Legend of Good Women’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); John Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 96–123; and Robert W. Frank, Chaucer and the ‘Legend of Good Women’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), esp. 11–36, 57–78. 3 Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 57; Delany sees a progression over Chaucer’s career from a ‘passive or receptive’ position as readerly narrator to ‘an active and self-conscious authorial position’ (13, 14). See also Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 221–2, 249; and Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 186–202. Catherine Sanok offers a history of ironic readings of the Legend of Good Women in ‘Reading Hagiographically: The Legend of Good Women and Its Feminine Audience,’ Exemplaria 13 (2001): 344–52; for an overview of the poem’s critical history, see also Carolyn P. Collette’s introduction in ‘The Legend of Good Women’: Context and Reception, ed. Carolyn P. Collette (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), vii–xii. 4 Rowe, Through Nature to Eternity, 16. 5 See Jesse M. Gellrich’s reading of the G prologue in The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 202–23, esp. 203–9. 6 The reverse has occasionally been claimed: Peter L. Allen, in an article that argues that the poem advocates readerly autonomy grounded in the independent assessment of ‘the fates of Chaucer’s women,’ takes the narrator’s default position to be scepticism rather than faith, and the G prologue’s beginning to be an explicit warning against trusting books; ‘Reading Chaucer’s Good Women,’ Chaucer Review 21 (1987): 419–32 at 420. Likewise, though more mildly, Sanok, ‘Reading Hagiographically,’ 331–2. See Delany, Naked Text, 45–56, for a lengthy consideration of contemporary medieval thought on the evidentiary value of texts.

The Suicide of the Legend of Good Women  127 7 F66–7; see also F78–82. See, for example, Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, 169–70; Baswell, Virgil, 252–3, on the G text; and Delany, Naked Text, 57–8. 8 Delany makes an elaborate reading of the passage; Naked Text, 75–85. 9 Cf. G264–312. For an extended reading of Love as ‘incompetent literary critic,’ see Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, 71–94 at 71. See also Allen, ‘Reading Chaucer’s Good Women,’ 422–5. 10 As Gellrich says, ‘the defense itself redefines the idea of intent by relocating it from the mind of the author to the act of interpreting that is ongoing in the process of reading and writing’; Idea of the Book, 221. 11 For a thoughtful, informed discussion of Love’s order and the rhetoric of its enactment in the legends, see Eleanor Winsor Leach’s still-significant dissertation, ‘A Study in the Sources and Rhetoric of Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Ovid’s Heroides’ (PhD diss., Yale University, 1963), 42–96. 12 Baswell notes that as intercessor for the dreamer, she is in a ‘double situation as reader and as what is read’; Virgil in Medieval England, 254. 13 In the G prologue, Alceste rather than ‘my lady’ is named, the ballade is sung by the women accompanying Love, and Love does not critique it (G199–233). 14 Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, 166, suggests that the Legend of Good Women as a whole rebels against the ‘unified stylization of discourse’ of courtly tradition; Sanok, ‘Reading Hagiographically,’ 328, considers the constraints imposed in reading by both antifeminist antiphrastic and hagiographic discourse, with analysis of ‘the agency of the audience’ in situating a work in cultural and generic context (see also 329–30, 340–1). 15 See Gellrich, Idea of the Book, 213–14. 16 See, for example, Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, 171–86; Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 256–69; Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, 125–9; Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 111–15; and Leach, ‘Study in the Sources,’ 149–65, which takes up many of the passages discussed below. For other earlier work, see Desmond, Reading Dido, 269 n. 63. 17 See Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, 172–5, for an especially thorough consideration. 18 Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 257. 19 See Desmond, Reading Dido, 155–6; Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid, 99. 20 As Louis Brewer Hall notes, recasting in ordo naturalis was common in medieval versions of the Troy story; ‘Chaucer and the Dido-and-Aeneas Story,’ Mediaeval Studies 25 (1963): 149–54. 21 See the discussion of the use of occupatio in Frank, Chaucer and the ‘Legend,’ 199–206.

128  Julia Marvin 22 Baswell nicely characterizes the moment as a ‘refusal to verify this detail’ and links it to lines 1139–45, discussed below; Virgil in Medieval England, 259. 23 Götz Schmitz remarks on the increasing independence of the narrator over the course of the legend; The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 37–9. 24 Latin quotations and translations of the Aeneid, cited by book and line number in the text, are taken from Virgil, Aeneid, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed., 2 vols, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). This passage is noted also by Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, 179–80; Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 258; and Kiser, Telling Classical Tales, 126. 25 See Desmond, Reading Dido, 156–8, for further consideration of the initial representation of Dido. 26 Baswell, Virgil in Medieval England, 264, further notes the ‘nasty edge’ imparted by the succeeding lines, in which Eneas sends for ‘riche thynges’ for gifts, but also for his own use. 27 Cf. LGW 1156–9 and Aen. 4.1–2. 28 Hagedorn, Abandoned Women, 179–85, makes careful note of these clichés. 29 Walter Skeat mentions this shift in the notes to his edition; The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Walter Skeat (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894), 3:323. Subsequent commentators have taken it to be a genuine error in translation; Bruce Harbert, ‘Chaucer and the Latin Classics,’ in Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. Derek Brewer (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 146; Leach, ‘Study in the Sources,’ 158; and Edgar Finley Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), 202. 30 Cf. Ovid, Heroides, 7.1–8, ed. and trans. Grant Showerman, rev. ed., ed. G.P. Gould, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 82–3; note especially line 6, ‘perdere verba leve est’ (the loosing of words is a matter slight indeed). 31 Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 190, 198. With focus on the G prologue and legend of Dido, Copeland connects much of Chaucer’s approach in the Legend of Good Women to the particulars of academic commentary tradition, especially on Ovid. 32 Cf. LGW F333.

7 Sacred Commerce: Chaucer, Friars, and the Spirit of Money robert epstein

Thanks in large part to the dedicatee of this volume, we think we understand Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale. In an influential pair of articles drawing on his expertise in Franciscan and antifraternal literature, John Fleming demonstrated ‘how Chaucer incorporates traditional antimendicant materials into his most extended satire of the friars,’ and revealed the friar of the Summoner’s Tale as ‘a kind of “stage friar” who sums up everything that is wrong with the mendicant orders from a fourteenthcentury English secular point of view.’1 As such, the friar embodies the perversion of Francis’s apostolic ideals, in his extravagant lechery, his brazen hypocrisy, the theological sophistry of his self-serving ‘glosyng,’ and, centrally to the Summoner’s Tale, his avarice. All this exegesis was thoroughly successful and saved the tale from being dismissed as merely a scurrilous joke, but it has never resulted in greater critical popularity. As John Fleming noted in 1983, ‘Even a quick survey of criticism of the Summoner’s Tale reveals its two salient characteristics, paucity and excellence,’ and the same can be said more than twenty-five years later.2 While interest in their arch-rivals on the other end of the ideological spectrum, the Lollards, has skyrocketed, interest in the friars, about whom Chaucer has vastly more to say, remains stagnant. I would hypothesize that Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale has to some extent been the victim of its explicators’ success. That is, Fleming and others have so thoroughly elucidated the symbolic and theological framework of Franciscan ideals and antifraternal invective in the Canterbury Tales that the Friar’s portrait and the Summoner’s Prologue and Tale have come to seem completely interpreted and understood, lacking therefore the ambiguity and polyvalence in which literary criticism

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traffics – in a word, over-determined. The friar of the Summoner’s Tale grasps at an imagined money bag, and receives an enormous fart. The ancient and widespread equivalence of money to excremental filth and the metonymic use of money as the essence of matter and the opposite of spirit is here so manifest that it seems hardly to merit critical comment. My purpose is to encourage a greater appreciation of Chaucer’s antifraternal tale by looking more closely at its representation of money. Money is not a simple thing, and never reducible to mere material. Rather, money – in theory and in practice, in early Franciscan literature, in fourteenth-century philosophy, and in the Summoner’s Tale in particular – is complex and ambivalent. Most important, far from being grossly material, money is abstract; it is an object of study that rewards sincere contemplation with ever more advanced understanding of the social and natural worlds. It comes as no surprise that the filthy lucre friars ostensibly reject figures prominently in antifraternal literature like the Summoner’s Tale. But the representation of money is often just as integral to the writings of the Franciscan intellectual tradition, even works advancing the ideal of religious poverty. A prime example is Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Paupertate, a brief but beautiful, sophisticated, and artful work of Franciscan literature.3 John Fleming has described it as ‘perhaps the single most brilliant example of the simple but lapidary allegory which was to become a major mode of spiritual writing in the later Middle Ages.’4 The authorship and the date of the work are subjects of debate, though the most recent scholarship places it in the late 1230s, a little more than a decade after Francis’s death.5 It would then pre-date the most virulent period of polemics against fraternal materialism and hypocrisy and reactionary counterattacks in defence of absolute poverty, centred in Paris in the mid-thirteenth century. Clearly, though, the Sacrum commercium is intended to reaffirm, in the aftermath of the founder’s death, the centrality of poverty to Franciscan spirituality. Nonetheless, in articulating these ideals it conspicuously and intentionally invokes commercial and mercantile images and vocabulary. As its title suggests, the Sacrum commercium tells of how Francis searches out Lady Poverty in the mountainous wilderness where she lives. In the subsequent dialogue, Lady Poverty explains her history and leads Francis and his brethren to true spiritual enlightenment. At a crucial moment early in the text, Francis exhorts his companions to join him in climbing the mountain of the Lord to find Lady Poverty. ‘Mirabi-

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lis est, fratres, desponsatio Paupertatis’ (the espousal of Poverty, brothers, is wonderful [137, trans. 533]), he cries to them.6 In six of the eight early manuscripts of the work, however, the word Francis uses here is not desponsatio, ‘espousal,’ but rather dispensatio, ‘dispensation’ or ‘management.’7 Francis seems to exclaim that the business of Poverty is wonderful. Francis continues, ‘Nullus est qui e regione clamare audeat, nullus qui se nobis opponat, nullus est qui iure hoc salutare commercium prohibere valeat’ (There is no one of our region who would dare to cry out, no one who would oppose us, no one who would be able to prohibit by law this salvific exchange [137, trans. 533]). The word ‘commercium’ is used here for the only time in the work except in the title. The ‘salvific exchange’ it refers to is obviously in context a verbal exchange with Lady Poverty, but the word seems deliberately to have been chosen to evoke commercial exchange. Modern translators tend to render the title of the work as the Sacred Exchange … or the Sacred Covenant between St Francis and Lady Poverty, and the various potential connotations of ‘commercium’ make these valid interpretations. But the most literal translation is equally valid: Sacred Commerce. In fact, one fourteenth-century reference gives it the title Commercium paupertatis, or ‘The Business of Poverty.’8 There is, naturally, an element of deliberate inversion in such evocations of commerce. The sacred commerce of religious poverty is contrasted to the profane commerce of the marketplace, just as in the magnificent climax of the Sacrum commercium Lady Poverty and the friars partake of a banquet of poverty. They ceremoniously dine on crusts of barley bread, wild herbs, and cold water, after which they are ‘exsaturati … magis ex tante inopie gloria quam essent rerum omnium abundantia’ (satisfied more by the glory of such want than by an abundance of all things [173, trans. 552]). But this passage depends for its effect on the genuine allure of the true feast, and similarly the work’s commercial references depend on the allure of the marketplace and the world of business and money. In his important study of the economic contexts of religious poverty, Lester Little has shown that the mendicant orders arose from the urbanized, monetized, market-oriented economy of Mediterranean Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Francis and his followers were products of Europe’s urban centres and their commercial culture. This explains the friars’ reaction against the wealth and materialism of the life of the city, but it also informs their theology and their rhetoric. Little notes the friars’ ‘frequent use of a monetary vocabulary, a practice

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that gained authority and impetus from that one-time cloth merchant, Francis of Assisi.’9 More significant are the contributions of scholastic friars in the thirteenth century, including Aquinas, to the moral and intellectual justification of the profit economy and incipient capitalism. Fraternal scholars were naturally interested in questions of profit and usury, but given their mostly urban origins, they also had some understanding of commercial practices and the practical uses of money, and they ‘formulated an ethic that justified the principal activities of the dominant groups in urban society.’10 They took great care in delineating improper practices of, for instance, moneylending and charging fees for intellectual services, but as a result they also identified proper commercial practices. ‘The friars, and a few of their contemporaries who were not friars,’ Little writes, ‘by building on intellectual developments already under way in the schools of the late twelfth century, began to consider the problems of private property, fair prices, money, professional fees, commercial profits, business partnerships, and moneylending. In each case they came up with generally favourable, approving views, in sharp contrast to the attitudes that had prevailed for six or seven centuries right up to the previous generation.’11 In short, it would be much too simplistic to characterize Franciscan thought – even in its ideal and theoretical form, as opposed to the local realities or the hyperbolical caricatures of its critics – as flatly reviling money as filth. It may seem that the Summoner’s Tale does just that, and does so in graphic terms. This constitutes the most conventional way of reading the Summoner’s Tale: in aspiring for material reward rather than spiritual poverty, the friar gets what he seeks in the ‘unexpected gift.’ Money is thus cast as the opposite of spirit and the essence of matter: excrement. And the fact is that this idea can be found in Franciscan literature as well. The Sacrum commercium praises ‘qui, terrenis omnibus renuntians, omnia velut stercora reputat’ (those who renounce the things of the earth and consider them all as dung [130, trans. 529]). As John Fleming has noted, the Sacrum commercium ‘is built phrase by phrase with biblical words.’12 In this case, the words are St Paul’s: ‘propter quem omnia detrimentum feci, et arbitror ut stercora’ (for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count but as dung [Phil. 3:8; Douay-Rheims translation]). But the association of money with excrement can just as easily be found in Freud; it may be as ancient and as widespread as the dualist cast of Western thought itself, though anthropologists have identified it in non-Western cultures as well.13 A text like the Summoner’s Tale, there-

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fore, seems to rely for its ironic effect on the opposition of material and spiritual values, of God and Mammon. I would maintain, however, that both the Sacrum commercium and the Summoner’s Tale, rather than maintaining an absolute dichotomy between money and spirituality, in fact analogize the two. The fact is that money is not excrement. Gold or wealth or possessions may be conceived as excrement, but even to such a rigorously dualistic moral perspective money is not, because money is not material. I make this flat assertion despite the fact that no one really knows what money is, and even the philosophers who have considered it in greatest depth end up admitting their perplexity in terms very much like those Augustine used when describing time: we are in money, but we know not what money is.14 But one thing money definitely is not is essentially material. Money, after all, is what intercedes so that people do not have to exchange one material directly for another material. There was, theoretically, a time when money had inherent value that allowed it to be traded for a variety of commercial commodities. But, despite elaborate fictions that societies for ages have maintained to make it seem otherwise, money long ago became a mere symbol of relative value rather than an object with inherent value of its own. Significantly, one of the most crucial steps in this process occurred, as Lester Little has shown, in Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries – in the world of St Francis. In the preceding centuries, the economy of medieval society had moved from one in which wealth was hoarded or displayed as ornament to one in which wealth was circulated and used for transactions – the use of money, as Little says, ‘as tool instead of as treasure.’15 But while vast amounts of precious metal were minted into coins and entered into circulation in economies throughout Europe, the value of a coin was still determined by its weight and metal content. The innovation of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries was the issuance of a great variety of new coins whose values were not intrinsic but were instead set and assured by the city-state or principality that issued them.16 Other more complex developments soon followed. As money circulated beyond its realm of issuance, its value fluctuated in relation to other currencies. Unlinked from the physical possession of material objects, money could be deposited, borrowed, and held on account, laying the groundwork for the rise of banking. Money could be transferred from one account in one city to another account in another city – where its value might actually be greater in relation to the local currency. (Lat-

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er, the merchant of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale would profit from just such circumstances.) As Little notes, ‘Banking thus served the new economy in still another way by creating fiduciary money. Such money was never minted by governments, but on the basis of public confidence in the institutions that said it existed and had value, it was just as useful as if it had been minted.’17 One can imagine a merchant of the time – perhaps a cloth merchant of a newly wealthy commercial centre in the Apennines – exclaiming, ‘The dispensation of money is a wonderful thing!’ All of these monetary advancements represent the incremental, but quite accelerated, abstraction of money. Little cites an observation of Max Weber: ‘Money is the most abstract and impersonal element that exists in personal life.’18 In Italy at the turn of the thirteenth century, money was transmuted from the material into the insubstantial. This made possible an almost unprecedented accumulation of material wealth among urban dwellers, which is precisely what the early mendicants reviled. But the money itself was a sophisticated philosophical abstraction. The Sacrum commercium denigrates wealth, but it also invokes the vocabulary and the concepts of the commercial economy, in order to accrue to poverty – which is really a simple topic and a ubiquitous condition – the abstract and very potent qualities inherent in the operation of money. Lady Poverty, in her sacredness, is the opposite of wealth, but she is simultaneously analogous to money. It is therefore significant that the ‘unexpected gift’ that Thomas gives the friar in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale is not material excrement – a turd. The fart that the friar receives instead is the ideal metonym for money, not because it is material, but on the contrary, because it is insubstantial. This is not to deny that the Summoner’s Tale is an antifraternal satire. It quite patently is an epitome of the genre.19 But if we take the object of its satire to be the friar’s materialism or his avarice or even his essentially economic imagination, we miss the greater part of its purpose. Chaucer’s real target is that arch-vice of the friars in the view of their critics – hypocrisy. The friar stands as the culmination of the entire intellectual project of mendicancy, which seeks to obscure and deny its own economic foundation. The beleaguered invalid of the tale, ‘doubting’ Thomas, is often credited for his scepticism and for his robust and ingenious rejection of the friar’s importunity, as if he ‘sees through’ the hypocrisy of the greedy and literal-minded friar. When he manages to get a word in edgewise to the voluble friar, however, Thomas’s own thinking is revealed to be remarkably commercial and materialist:

Sacred Commerce  135 As help me Crist, as I in fewe yeres, Have spent upon diverse manere freres Ful many a pound; yet fare I never the bet. Certeyn, my good have I almoost biset. Farwel, my gold, for it is al ago!

(III.1949–53)20

What Thomas doubts is not the value of paid prayer for the deliverance of his soul, but rather the friar’s promise of better health in return for his money. This Thomas is as literalistic as his Gospel namesake. The friar has encouraged this perspective in Thomas by claiming that he and his brothers have been praying unstintingly for Thomas’s recovery: ‘In our chapitre praye we day and nyght / To Crist, that he thee sende heele and myght / Thy body for to weelden hastily’ (III.1945–7). In response to Thomas’s complaint, the friar explains that his donations have been too piecemeal to have been institutionally effective – that is, he brazenly asserts, Thomas just has not given enough money to any one friar. Both Thomas and the friar are breaking the rules of the game. They are violating what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘the taboo of making things explicit.’21 They are cutting corners in the process by which economic capital is converted into symbolic capital, the process that Bourdieu labels ‘euphemization,’ the elaborate social performances that we all unconsciously engage in, which have the function of disguising the economic bases of social transactions. Bourdieu’s prime project was to show how social power was distributed in an economic fashion even, or especially, in arenas where economic motivations themselves are ostensibly denied or rejected: tribal villages; the nineteenth-century artistic avant-garde; twentiethcentury academia. Like all of these, the field of religion is an example of an ‘anti-economic sub-universe.’22 Religious institutions and their representatives profit materially from the commercial economy, and they also profit symbolically from obscuring and denying their participation in any economy at all. ‘The truth of the religious enterprise,’ writes Bourdieu, ‘is that of having two truths: economic truth and religious truth, which denies the former.’23 Key examples of this process of obfuscation can be found in any of the rituals surrounding religious donations. These are offered with expectations of compensation, whether in immediate benefit or in more dilated and abstracted terms, but elaborate practices are always developed in order to make the donation seem less like a purchase or commercial

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exchange. Instead, the donation is euphemized as pure self-sacrifice, and the object of the gift figured as transcending negotiation. Thus, the recipient of a religious offering – say, a mendicant friar receiving a gift from a penitent after confession – benefits materially from the transaction, and benefits symbolically from maintaining the pretence that he is not interested in any material gain and completely separate from the monetary economy. Bourdieu terms this ‘the economy of the offering.’ But he also borrows from Jacques Gernet a more evocative name for it: ‘sacred commerce.’24 The brunt of the satire of the Summoner’s Tale is not merely the friar’s greed. Rather, the prime object is his self-serving role in obfuscating this ‘sacred commerce.’ As the tale progresses, his self-righteousness becomes increasingly extravagant in equal measure to his ever more desperate greed. As his hypocrisy becomes hilariously obvious, euphemization of the ‘economy of the offering’ breaks down entirely, and Thomas climactically presents him with the unexpected donation that epitomizes the hidden truth of the enterprise. Chaucer’s friar, therefore, is not ridiculed precisely for his fascination with money as such. The greater fact, borne out throughout the Canterbury Tales, is that Chaucer himself is fascinated by money and its operation to a degree equalled by few other authors. Indeed, the Summoner’s Tale is as much about the fascinating qualities of money as it is about the hypocritical desire for it. These qualities account for the tale’s seemingly desultory structure, which has so often confused and frustrated readers. While Thomas’s ‘unexpected gift’ is the obvious climax of the tale, after this point fully a quarter of the tale remains. This exceptionally long denouement involves the friar’s consternation at having to fulfil Thomas’s demand to divide his gift into equal twelfths. Ultimately, the squire offers the inventive solution of using a wheel with a friar’s nose at the end of each spoke – a bizarre image that has been explicated as a burlesque of the Pentecost.25 In between, though, come the odd and unexplained roles of an anonymous lord and lady, who express, at curious length, shock and confusion at the friar’s predicament. The lord in particular seems to give the problem more attention than it deserves. The friar ‘was alwey confessour’ (III.2164) to the lord, but other than that there seems little reason for the lord to take this preposterous problem seriously. Some readers, therefore, have taken the lord to be a participant in the satire, merely pretending to give the problem of division serious consideration in order to ridicule the friar publicly. The actual

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words of the lord, however, suggest that, to the contrary, he is genuinely frustrated with the problem presented by the division of flatulence: The lord sat stille as he were in a traunce, And in his herte he rolled up and doun, ‘How hadde this cherl ymaginacioun To shewe swich a probleme to the frere? Nevere erst er now herde I of swich mateere. I trowe the devel putte it in his mynde. In ars-metrike shal ther no man fynde, Biforn this day, of swich a question. Who sholde make a demonstracion That every man sholde have yliche his part As of the soun or savour of a fart? O nyce, proude cherl, I shrewe his face! Lo, sires,’ quod the lord, ‘with harde grace! Who evere herde of swich a thyng er now?’

(III.2216–29)

The lord continues in this vein for another thirteen lines beyond this point. The Benson edition of the Canterbury Tales quoted here, like virtually all modern editions, places open quotation marks at line 2218 and closing quotation marks at line 2242, the very end of the lord’s speech, so that the entire passage appears to be spoken aloud by the lord. But Chaucer prefaces the passage by telling us that at first the lord ‘sat stille as he were in a traunce, / And in his herte he rolled up and doun.’ Clearly, the first part of this passage represents the lord’s internal monologue as he ponders the quandary of the division of the fart. Line 2228 – ‘“Lo, sires,” quod the lord …’ – marks when the lord begins to speak aloud to the people assembled in his court. He is not, therefore, intentionally mocking the friar. Instead, ridiculous though it may seem, he is seriously considering a philosophical problem posed by Thomas’s bequest. Specifically, he is contemplating a problem of divisibility and measurement, of how, as the friar says, ‘To parte that wol nat departed be / To every man yliche’ (III.2214–15). The immediate object of inquiry is Thomas’s fart, but by extension it is a problem of money and economy, and it leads to profound speculations in natural philosophy, from arithmetic to acoustics. In an important recent study of medieval intellectual history, Joel Kaye has tried to construct a social context for a remarkable school of thought in the first half of the fourteenth century. The thinkers of this

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school are known today as the ‘Oxford Calculators,’ or as the ‘Merton School,’ since many of the most prominent members – including Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury, John Dumbleton, Richard Swineshead, and Walter Burley – were fellows of Merton College. These scholars, along with contemporaries at the University of Paris, engaged in a range of studies of measurement and quantification of a wide variety of social and natural phenomena.26 Their work constitutes, according to John Murdoch, a ‘near frenzy to measure everything imaginable.’27 Yet there has never been a satisfactory explanation for the source of this development, nor any major claims for its intellectual legacy. Kaye seeks to provide both. The impetus for this ‘measuring mania,’ he demonstrates, was money. Scholars were already engaged in debates on Aristotelian theories of money, business, and ethics, as well as problems of measurement of a physical universe they conceived as existing along series of continua not divisible into discrete units. Their practical experience with money in the commercial economy exposed them to a system that made equivalencies among widely disparate objects and ideas – commodities and products; time and effort; labour and expertise; scarcity and demand. Further, although the value measured by money clearly existed on a continuum, practical use of money broke values down into units. These units were often extremely small – standing for no circulating coins of real value – but they allowed for very exact and very flexible measurement. Kaye maintains that a particularly important quality of money for these fourteenth-century scholars was that, in its practical use, it was essentially abstract – the same quality that facilitated thirteenthcentury commerce and engaged the imaginations of early Franciscans. By the early fourteenth century, ‘money of account’ was in common use in Western Europe. ‘Money of account,’ Kaye explains, ‘functioned as an idealized monetary scale of artificially fixed ratios of named coins that were often no longer in circulation, against which the actual value of the coin in circulation was measured.’28 Despite little precedent for the formal study of economics as well as its dubious moral status, these schools of philosophers in Oxford and Paris produced treatises of considerable subtlety and complexity, which they then shared and debated. Most important, such economics inspired these scholars to analyse a range of phenomena and systems in the social and natural worlds, applying from economics methods of measurement with abstract but discrete units. ‘Every “quality” capable of increase or decrease, whether physical or mental, came to be visual-

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ized as a divisible, continuous magnitude in the process of expansion or contraction,’ Kaye explains. ‘In Oxford and Paris, elaborate logical and mathematical languages were devised to describe and conceptually measure quantified qualities now conceived as divisible continua.’29 This application of analytical measurement to the natural world, Kaye concludes, laid the foundation for the scientific advances of subsequent centuries. Chaucer, of course, was no ‘Oxford Calculator.’ He did not attend university; he was a layman and a secular poet; he wrote in the second half of the fourteenth century. On the other hand, as J.A.W. Bennett has demonstrated, Chaucer was deeply familiar with contemporary Oxford – as an institution, as a cultural force, as a repository of knowledge, and as a geographical location – and he had personal and intellectual associations specifically with Merton College. ‘Philosophical’ Ralph Strode was a Merton logician before becoming a London lawyer. Chaucer mentions Bradwardine alongside Boethius and Augustine in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (VII.3241–2). This reference, granted, is in a jocose vein, but Bradwardine’s influential mathematical analysis was developed as a gloss on Boethius’s Ars Metrica, which Chaucer also alludes to in the ‘ars-metrike’ (III.2222) of the Summoner’s Tale.30 To Bennett, Chaucer’s citations and references suggest that his learning resembled that of the most sophisticated of his contemporaries, and that it therefore reflects what was being read and taught at the time at Oxford, and would have been informed by Merton scholars.31 But even if Chaucer were not directly familiar with the mathematical and scientific analysis of the Merton School, the mechanism that Kaye posits for the initiation of economic thought among the earlier fourteenth-century scholastic philosophers applies thoroughly to Chaucer as well. Although university scholars were presumably removed from the world of the marketplace, these thinkers could not help being immersed in the thoroughly monetized society of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.32 Kaye demonstrates the degree to which college and university administration, and its exigencies of accounting and commerce, dominated the careers of scholars like Nicole Oresme at Paris and Bradwardine at Merton.33 Kaye concludes: ‘As inhabitants of bustling cities and market towns; as account keepers, tax assessors, fee collectors, and treasurers within the university; as victualers to their fellow students; as benefice holders and office seekers within religious and civic bureaucracies – scholars of the fourteenth century were required to experience, comprehend, and often accommodate their thinking to

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the insistent realities of money and market exchange … Bureaucratic techniques developed to impose order on social life, and generally recognized as being successful in doing so, became part of the intellectual arsenal of the scholar seeking to find order in nature.’34 It is hard to miss the parallels in this description to the professional career of Chaucer, who served the royal administration in positions very similar to those in the academic bureaucracy occupied by the scholars. While writing his poetry, Chaucer served in a series of bureaucratic positions involving bookkeeping and purchasing, from Controller of Customs for the port of London to Clerk of the King’s Works. Indeed, the eagle of the House of Fame claims that Chaucer’s two kinds of labour are hardly distinguishable: For when thy labour doon al ys, And hast mad alle thy rekenynges, In stede of reste and newe thynges Thou goost hom to thy hous anoon, And, also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another book Tyl fully daswed ys thy look.

(652–8)

This passage prefaces the lengthy disquisition on acoustics.35 This is one of the many occasions in Chaucer’s poetry when he demonstrates his interest in science, technology, and the measurement of natural phenomena. Another conspicuous instance is the Treatise on the Astrolabe. (Bennett notes that Merton was in Chaucer’s time a significant centre for the study of astronomy in general and of the astrolabe in particular.)36 Just as evident in Chaucer’s work as his interest in science and measurement is his fascination with the world of money and commerce, and economic transactions both everyday and abstruse, as for instance in the Shipman’s Tale. In the Summoner’s Tale, these two interests merge. When Thomas complains that all his gold has not purchased him better health, the friar responds that this is a problem of division: Youre maladye is for we han to lyte. A, yif that covent half a quarter otes! A, yif that covent foure and twenty grotes! A, yif that frere a peny, and lat hym go! Nay, nay, Thomas, it may no thyng be so! What is a ferthyng worth parted in twelve?

(III.1962–7)

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That last line, of course, contains a pun, and a brilliant foreshadowing of the conclusion, in which the friar will have to part a ‘farting’ in twelve. It is also an example of the tale’s attention to the divisibility of money. There is an obvious, literal answer to the friar’s rhetorical question: a farthing parted in twelve is one forty-eighth of a penny. The friar is perfectly aware of this, not only because the farthing – a quarter of a penny – was a common unit for small, local commercial exchanges, but also because this kind of monetary division, real and imagined, is something the friar would do every day, as part of his communal life. Note that the friar imagines Thomas giving another convent ‘foure and twenty grotes’ (III.1964). A groat was equivalent to a shilling: twelve pennies. There were twenty shillings in a pound, but the friar imagines a gift of twenty-four groats: two twelves of twelve pennies each. He reflexively imagines money grouped into twelves. When the friar is offered a gift of what he imagines to be money on the condition that he divide it evenly into twelfths, he readily agrees: ‘Lo, heer my feith; in me shal be no lak’ (III.2139). When the friar asks, ‘What is a farthyng worth parted in twelve?’ what he means, of course, is that such a small donation is of too little value to merit his consideration. He is therefore so focused on material wealth that any potential problem of abstract division is not of philosophical interest to him. The obligation to divide the fart into twelfths infuriates him as an insult and as an impossible abstraction. Not so the lord. He falls into a ‘traunce’ (III.2216) as he contemplates the ‘ymaginacioun’ (III.2218) that invented such a problem: ‘In ars-metrike shal ther no man fynde, / Biforn this day, of swich a question’ (III.2222–3). ‘Ars-metrike’ is another of Chaucer’s rich puns, but it also encapsulates the method of the tale. Thomas’s challenge is simultaneously scatological, economical, arithmetical, and physical – a thought-experiment of arse-measuring. Thus, the problem of dividing a fart among the twelve friars is, like economics, a social phenomenon involving equal dispensation, ‘That every man sholde have yliche his part’ (III.2225). In recognizing this, the lord realizes that the problem is one of physics and acoustics, requiring the division of ‘the soun or savour of a fart’ (III.2226). But like money, the fart seems to be pure abstraction, the echoing of empty air: ‘The rumblynge of a fart, and every soun, / Nis but of eir reverberacioun’ (III.2233–4). As such, its changes seem to occur along an endless and indivisible continuum that defies measurement: ‘And evere it wasteth litel and litel awey. / Ther is no man kan deemen, by my fey, / If that it

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were departed equally’ (III.2235–7). The nature of the task Thomas has set the friar challenges the lord’s understanding of the physical universe, which is not at all naive, but rather quintessentially Aristotelian. In this conventional model, Kaye explains, ‘quantities were composed of parts and were divisible. Qualities, though admitting of variation in degree, were not in themselves composed of parts and therefore not divisible, either conceptually or actually.’37 The lord therefore dismisses Thomas’s challenge a priori as ‘an inpossible; it may nat be’ (III.2231). So unorthodox a philosophical challenge leads the lord to characterize Thomas as a ‘demonyak’ (III.2240). The answer provided by the squire is indeed a burlesque of the Pentecost and a profane insult of the friar. At the same time, though, it intentionally mimics the equal distribution of wealth among a cell of friars. Further, as the squire emphasizes, it is an empirical demonstration of the divisibility into equal measure of intangible qualities and physical phenomena: ‘And ye shul seen, up peril of my lyf, / By preeve which that is demonstratif, / That equally the soun of it wol wende, / And eke the stynk, unto the spokes ende’ (III.2271–4). This demonstration is persuasive. In the end, Thomas is praised as a man of brilliant insight, and the squire, whose clerical philosophizing he has inspired, is hailed as a new genius of empirical observation and scientific measurement: The lord, the lady, and ech man, save the frere, Seyde that Jankyn spak, in this matere, As wel as Euclide [dide] or Ptholomee. Touchynge the cherl, they seyde, subtiltee And heigh wit made hym speken as he spak; He nys no fool, ne no demonyak.

(III.2287–92)

All of this is undeniably satirical and comical. But what is the object of the satire? Not primarily, I believe, the proto-science of the lord’s and the squire’s responses. The friar is humiliated through his reception of the sound and stink of a fart and for the image of his providing the same in equal measure to his brethren. But the tale’s complex economics and natural philosophy stand in opposition to the friar’s shallow fixation on material wealth and his hypocritical commitment to conventional social euphemisms that obscure the economic nature of his vocation. The other characters in the tale, objectively regarded, are just as important, and to them the observation of economic processes reveals a world of comprehensible social and natural systems. Flatulence is indeed a metonym for money in the tale, but as such it is

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not the opposite of spirituality but in some essential regards analogous to it. Wealth is the friar’s object of misplaced desire, but money, and the wonder of its dispensation, is something that, like spirituality, he ultimately fails to grasp. notes 1 John V. Fleming, ‘The Antifraternalism of the Summoner’s Tale,’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 (1966): 688, 700; ‘The Summoner’s Prologue: An Iconographic Adjustment,’ Chaucer Review 2 (1967): 95–107. See also Arnold Williams, ‘Chaucer and the Friars,’ Speculum 28 (1953): 499–513; and Arnold Williams, ‘Two Notes on Chaucer’s Friars,’ Modern Philology 54 (1956): 117–20; Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 37–54; and Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1986), 231–46. John Fleming’s work on Franciscan literature itself includes An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977); From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); and ‘The Friars and Medieval English Literature,’ in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 349–75. 2 John V. Fleming, ‘Anticlerical Satire as Theological Essay: Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,’ Thalia 6 (1983): 5–22 at 5. 3 Citations of the Latin text are taken from Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Paupertate, ed. Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1990); translations are from ‘The Sacred Exchange between Saint Francis and Lady Poverty,’ in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, vol. 1, The Saint, ed. Regis J. Armstrong, J.A. Wayne Hellmann, and William J. Short (New York: New City Press, 1999), 529–54. 4 Fleming, Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages, 78. 5 In their introduction to the text, Armstrong, Hellman, and Short make the case for a date of 1238 and for the authorship of Caesar of Speyer; ‘Sacred Exchange,’ 526–7. 6 Sacrum commercium, 137. 7 Armstrong, Hellman, and Short, eds, ‘Sacred Exchange,’ 533 n. b. 8 Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 200. 9 Ibid.

144 Robert Epstein 1 0 Ibid., 216. 11 Ibid., 181. 12 Fleming, Bonaventure to Bellini, 25. 13 Little, Religious Poverty, 34. 14 Geoffrey Ingham, for instance, at the beginning of his own very comprehensive study of the history, philosophy, and sociology of money confesses his puzzlement ‘that such a commonplace as money should give rise to so much bewilderment, controversy and, it must be said, error. It is not well understood.’ The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 5. 15 Little, Religious Poverty, 18. 16 Ibid., 17. 17 Ibid., 18. 18 Max Weber, ‘Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C.W. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 331; quoted in Little, Religious Poverty, 33. See also Ingham, The Nature of Money, 111–12. 19 For a revisionist reading, defending Chaucer’s Friar as ‘a multi-faceted friar-character, whose actions and interactions do not convey a strictly negative appraisal of mendicancy’; see G. Geltner, ‘Faux Semblants: Antifraternalism Reconsidered in Jean de Meun and Chaucer,’ Studies in Philology 101 (2004): 357–80 at 358. 20 Citations of the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer’s other poetry refer to Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). 21 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 96. 22 Ibid., 113. 23 Ibid., 114. 24 Ibid. Bourdieu cites Grenet, Les Aspects économiques du bouddhisme dans la société chinoise des Ve et Xe siècles (Saigon: École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 1956). 25 See Bernard S. Levy, ‘Biblical Parody in the Summoner’s Tale,’ Tennessee Studies in Literature 11 (1966): 45–60; Alan Levitan, ‘The Parody of the Pentecost in Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale,’ University of Toronto Quarterly 40 (1971): 236–46; and Glending Olson, ‘The End of The Summoner’s Tale and the Uses of Pentecost,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 209–45. 26 Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2–3. 27 John Murdoch, ‘From Social into Intellectual Factors: An Aspect of the

Sacred Commerce  145 Unitary Character of Late Medieval Learning,’ in The Cultural Contexts of Medieval Learning, ed. John Murdoch and Edith Sylla (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1975), 287; quoted in Kaye, Economy and Nature, 3. 28 Kaye, Economy and Nature, 190. 29 Ibid., 166–7. 30 J.A.W. Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford and at Cambridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 58–85 [for Merton College], 63–5 [for Strode], and 62–3 [for Bradwardine]. See also Kaye, Economy and Nature, 165–6. 31 Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford, 69. 32 Kaye, Economy and Nature, 173–81. 33 Ibid., 28–36. 34 Ibid., 36. 35 Chaucer’s acoustical observations derive largely from Vincent of Beauvais and Robert Grosseteste. See John M. Fyler’s note in the Riverside Chaucer, ed. Benson, 983. See also W.O. Sypherd, Studies in Chaucer’s ‘House of Fame’ (London: L. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1907; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1965), 95–100. Bennett remarks that Chaucer ‘could hardly have made that poetical survey of the starry regions and the laws of sound but for the impetus given by the Merton School’; Chaucer in Oxford, 62. 36 ‘Thus one by one every astronomical trail in Chaucer leads us to Oxford, and in Oxford to Merton’; Bennett, Chaucer at Oxford, 75. Bennett adds that Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe ‘itself became an Oxford text inasmuch as at least one copy of it (MS Bodley 619) was made by an Oxford astronomer’ (75). 37 Kaye, Economy and Nature, 176.

8 How (Not) to Preach: Thomas Waleys and Chaucer’s Pardoner martin camargo

Medieval arts of preaching (artes praedicandi) survive in great numbers, but most of them offer little or no guidance on how to deliver a sermon to a live audience.1 Typically, the chief concerns in such treatises are formal: how to select and divide the theme of a sermon and how to structure and amplify the development of that theme. Most arts of preaching also address the qualifications of the preacher, including his credentials and his moral suitability, and some of them treat such topics in considerable detail.2 It is not unusual for the authors of the arts of preaching to issue brief warnings against potential abuses of style and delivery, but it is rare for them to develop those remarks to any degree or to balance them with positive instruction on effective strategies for oral performance.3 An important exception is On the Method for Composing Sermons (De modo componendi sermones; after 1336) by the Englishman Thomas Waleys, OP (fl. 1318–49).4 A Dominican friar and Bachelor of Theology at Oxford by 1318, Waleys was sent to Bologna as a lector in 1326 and in 1331 became chaplain to the Dominican cardinal Matteo Rosso Orsini at Avignon. His preaching against the Francisan position on poverty and Pope John XXII’s theory of the beatific vision resulted in his imprisonment by the Inquisition in 1333. Though he was released in 1334, he was not allowed to leave Avignon until after the accession of the new pope, Clement VI, in 1342. He returned to Oxford, where he last appears in the records as a sickly old man in 1349. He may have been among the many Oxford Dominicans who succumbed to the Black Death in that year.5 Waleys wrote On the Method for Composing Sermons – sometimes called On the Method and Form of Preaching (De modo et forma praedic-

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andi) – at the request of Cardinal Matteo’s nephew Tebaldo Orsini, after the latter became archbishop of Palermo in 1336.6 The treatise itself is divided into nine chapters, eight of which are devoted to the normal predilections of the artes praedicandi: the selection and division of the theme (chapters 2–8) and the methods for amplifying a sermon (chapter 9). Less typical and hence more interesting is the first chapter, ‘On the Quality of the Preacher’ (De qualitate praedicatoris), in which Waleys offers twelve ‘lessons’ (documenta), nine of them directly concerned with the practicalities of speaking in public. As Claire Waters observes, compared to the other surviving artes praedicandi, On the Method for Composing Sermons is ‘striking for its unusually lengthy and detailed attention to delivery.’7 Waleys thoughtfully scrutinizes such elements of the preacher’s performance as costume, gestures, pace, and quality of voice, providing specific advice on what is appropriate and what is not. His unusually rich account of delivery is valuable as a rare perspective on fourteenth-century standards of oral performance in preaching. As such, it also can provide us with a useful interpretive framework in which to view Chaucer’s portrait of the Pardoner in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and especially in the Pardoner’s self-portrait as preacher in the prologue and opening passage of his tale. In the hopes of making it available to a wider audience, I have provided an English translation of the entire chapter at the end of the present article. Though Waleys probably wrote On the Method for Composing Sermons at Avignon, most of the surviving manuscripts are English.8 Thus, while there is no conclusive proof that Chaucer knew the work, it is at least possible that he did. Among the many studies that investigate the Pardoner’s relationship to medieval preaching theory and practice are several that cite Waleys.9 However, they typically cite him in the company of other authorities who articulate a particular doctrine that the Pardoner violates. Hence, the focus of the citations is on the preacher’s moral qualifications rather than his rhetorical preparation,10 whereas what makes Waleys distinctive among authors of artes praedicandi is his emphasis on training in the practical exigencies of oral performance. Anthony F. Luengo traces a detailed correspondence between the Parson’s sermon and the fourteen ways of linking biblical sententiae that Waleys enumerates in chapter 9,11 but no one has paid comparable attention to the special relationship between the Pardoner’s preaching and the detailed advice on delivery that Waleys offers in chapter 1. Waleys approaches the subject of his opening chapter – the qualities that one must have in order to succeed as a preacher – in the same way

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that one of his sources, Book One of Vegetius’s Epitoma de re militari, enumerates the qualities that make a successful Roman soldier. In both cases, the necessary qualities are moral as well as physical, internal as well as external, innate as well as acquirable by training. After asserting the importance of the office of preaching, characterizing preachers as God’s messengers – the equivalents not only of the evangelists but also of the angels themselves – Waleys devotes his first three ‘lessons’ (documenta) to the qualities that the preacher should cultivate ‘in private with respect to himself’ (secretius quoad seipsum [331]). The first of these lessons has a positive and a negative component: ‘in the purity of his living the preacher should excel those he is supposed to inform’ (decet praedicatorem munditia quaedam vitae ultra homines quos habet informare [329]) and ‘one who would preach should be completely free from the stain of mortal sin’ (praedicaturus sit ommino [sic] immunis a macula peccati mortalis [330]). While it is not uncommon for medieval preaching handbooks to ‘externalize’ this requirement by observing that the preacher’s way of life functions as a kind of sermon without words,12 Waleys chooses not to make this move but to keep the focus exclusively on the preacher’s inner state rather than the direct effect his morality (or immorality) might have on the public.13 Likewise, his second lesson, that the preacher should ‘assign a proper end to his preaching, so that he preach not for his own ostentation but for the praise of God and the edification of his neighbour’ (statuat sibi rectum finem sermonis, ne videlicet ad sui ostentationem praedicet sed ad Dei laudem et proximi aedificationem [330]), emphasizes the preacher’s eternal reward or punishment rather than the practical efficacy of his preaching. While the third lesson is similarly focused on the preacher’s interior disposition, it serves as a transition to the second set of lessons by relating that disposition to practical success. Since ‘all wisdom is from the Lord God’ (omnis sapientia a Domino Deo est) and ‘since in a sermon the gift of wisdom is especially needed’ (cum in sermone specialiter requiritur donum sapientiae), Waleys argues syllogistically, ‘the preacher also should pray for wisdom with which he might properly instruct the people’ (praedicator sapientiam postulet qua possit populum recte instruere [331]). Should he fail to do so, he risks losing his ability to speak, since his task exceeds the capacities of human skill. In these first three lessons there is an apparent progression from the more general to the more specific and from qualities necessary to the preacher’s salvation to those necessary for successful performance of his duty as preacher. At the same time, an emphasis on the preacher as

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medium rather than agent links all three lessons. The preacher should lead a pure life because God speaks through him and might choose to withhold that speech if the spokesman is stained with mortal sin. The only improper intention Waleys considers in his second lesson is ‘vain glory’ (inanem gloriam [330]), a condition in which the preacher mistakes himself for the source of his own eloquence. The third lesson is really a more specific and more pragmatic restatement of the second: since God is the source and the preacher is only the medium, prayer for guidance and inspiration is a practical necessity for successful preaching. Pride is the chief vice against which Waleys warns the prospective preacher – a special danger because of the quasi-divine eminence his office imparts – and humility is the chief virtue he inculcates in him. When Waleys progresses from the lessons the preacher should observe in private to those he should observe in public, his advice becomes more concrete and overtly pragmatic and often draws on his own experience. The message of humility continues to underlie everything he says and at times is stated explicitly. More often it is conveyed indirectly, through the basic principle that underlies Waleys’s instructions for speaking effectively to a live audience: the need to avoid extremes and to practice moderation. All of these features are evident in the fourth lesson – the first of those concerning the preacher’s external behaviour – on the clothing that is appropriate for a preacher. Waleys’s main concern is to admonish the preacher against wearing ‘clothing that is too elaborate and flashy’ (vestibus nimis curiosis et fulgentibus [331]), but he spends even more time discussing the opposite extreme, clothing that is too cheap and shabby. While he cites approvingly the model of St Augustine, whose ‘clothes were so moderate that they were neither very elegant nor very mean’ (vestimenta ejus sic erant moderata quod nec nimis erant nitida nec plurimum abjecta [331]), he hesitates to condemn preachers who wear cheap clothing, in part because as a Dominican friar he is enjoined by statute to do so himself. In the end, he leaves it to the preacher’s discretion to decide whether to wear noticeably cheap clothing, with the single proviso that such garb is always inappropriate when affected by a hypocrite. In other words, while moderate clothing is always acceptable for a preacher, cheap clothing is never acceptable when it serves the same purpose as fancy clothing: to express the preacher’s pride by drawing attention to himself. In similar fashion, Waleys draws on his own experience as a preacher and attentive observer of preachers to preach the doctrine of moderation in the remaining eight lessons. The preacher should not be immo-

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bile like a statue, but neither should his gestures resemble those of a madman (fifth lesson). His manner of speaking should not be extremely loud or extremely quiet or, what is worst of all, an alternation between the two extremes, ‘in the way that the Passion is read in the church’ (eo modo quo Passio legitur in ecclesia [333]) (sixth lesson). The seventh and eighth lessons both stress the importance of thinking about the meaning of what one is saying, but they do so in the form of practical advice for delivering a sermon. Listeners understand best if the preacher speaks at a moderate, measured pace, which he cannot do if he tries to cover too much material and does not distinguish the most important points he wishes to make (seventh lesson). Like the preacher who becomes too attached to every idea that occurs to him and ends up speaking too quickly to be understood, the preacher who becomes too attached to stylistic artifice and the exact words he has chosen risks failure through a lapse of memory caused by the distractions that are common in live performances (eighth lesson). Both problems can be avoided if the preacher thinks less of his own pleasure in what he has to say and more of the message he is trying to communicate and the needs of his hearers. The message of humility is more explicit in the ninth and tenth lessons, which also form a complementary pair. On the one hand, the preacher should not make it his goal to please the sermon connoisseur (ninth lesson), but neither should he say anything that is likely to offend a particular hearer (tenth lesson). As with the earlier advice about wearing cheap clothing, the second extreme is not as categorically proscribed as the first. Indeed, Waleys cites a number of authorities to the effect that the preacher sometimes is obliged to draw public attention to an individual’s wrongdoing and should not refrain from this duty out of fear. Moreover, some kinds of criticism are appropriate for one audience but not for another. If the preacher must use his discretion when it comes to criticizing, however, he is never justified in flattering, whether it is himself or another that he flatters. Once again, the mean between two extremes is inflected by the overriding need to avoid pride. The principle of moderation is applied more evenly in the eleventh lesson, on the need to recognize the limits of the hearer’s endurance, though as usual one extreme is discussed in much more detail than the other and is thus presumably to be taken as the greater danger. Waleys recognizes that a preacher may end his sermon before the hearers are satisfied, sending them away still ‘hungry,’ but he worries more about preachers who do not know when to stop and so go on until their hear-

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ers are ‘overfed’ to the point of vomiting. Once again his point is that the preacher should consider the needs of others rather than his own pleasure in what he is saying. If he cannot stop himself, he can ask someone else to let him know when he has spoken long enough. Humility, in the form of recognizing and addressing one’s own limitations as a preacher, is central to the twelfth and final lesson, which advises the would-be preacher to practise in private before he preaches in public. Waleys underscores both the challenge of the task and the humble spirit in which it should be approached by comparing neophyte preachers to the raw recruits described by Vegetius. As Waleys does throughout his practical lessons on delivering sermons, he cites his own experiences alongside the auctoritates. If it is difficult to correct speech defects and other faults of the voice, for example, it is not impossible as long as one exerts the necessary effort: Waleys knows this not only from the examples of the greatest orators of the past but also from his own experience and that of personal acquaintances. However, practice does not always make perfect, and one whose defects cannot be overcome should accept his limitations and choose a different calling from that of the preacher. Even one who through practice and innate ability is able to overcome his fear and preach with confidence should do so in a spirit of humility, Waleys concludes, ‘trusting more in the help of God, whose angel and spiritual messenger he is, than in his own skill or strength’ (plus de auxilio Dei cujus est angelus et nuntius spiritualis quam de proprio ingenio seu virtute confidens [341]). A preacher who wears his state of mortal sin on his sleeve, boasts of preaching for all the wrong motives, and puts all his faith in his own rhetorical abilities, the Pardoner pointedly rejects every tenet of Waleys’s moral instruction. Beyond this obvious level of ironic reversal – the level at which the Pardoner’s sense of self operates – close comparison of Waleys on the practical aspects of delivery with the Pardoner’s self-presentation as pulpit orator deepens the irony of Chaucer’s characterization by revealing discrepancies that escape the Pardoner’s own cynical self-assessment. The Pardoner is willing to be condemned as a bad man, as long as he is admired as a good rhetorician. The perspective that Waleys provides raises the possibility of self-delusion in the Pardoner’s self-promotion as a bad man, skilled in speaking.14 The ironic gap between intent and outcome is fundamental to the ethos that the Pardoner creates for himself as pilgrim-rhetor: For though myself be a ful vicious man,

152  Martin Camargo A moral tale yet I yow telle kan, Which I am wont to preche for to wynne.

(CT VI.459–61)15

Indeed, the Pardoner takes great pains, both in his words and actions, to substantiate his ‘vicious’ persona. He boasts about his signature vice, cupiditas, by which he chiefly means avarice but which also entails the complementary vices of lust and gluttony (VI.452–3). At the same time, he ostentatiously performs each of the component vices, through his love duet with the Summoner (I.672–4), his pre-speech ‘draughte of corny ale’ (VI.456; also VI.321–2, 327–8), and his concluding call for the pilgrims in general and the Host in particular to open up their purses (VI.919–45). His carefully constructed ethos is of course at odds with what Waleys (first and second lessons), like every other medieval expert on preaching, says about the preacher’s necessary moral qualifications. The Pardoner knows this and clearly revels in the irony. Rhetorically, the point of his ‘confession’ is to magnify his own skills as a rhetor: in excluding ethos from his available means of persuasion, he will be like the champion who fights and wins with one hand tied behind his back. The Pardoner’s prideful self-sufficiency is evident in his enthusiastic praise of his performance methods, but Waleys helps us to see that the Pardoner’s rhetorical delivery may not be nearly as powerful as he thinks it is. The Pardoner describes his pulpit histrionics in two instalments that bracket his account of the false relics he hawks. In the first, he emphasizes the loud voice in which he pronounces his memorized script: ‘Lordynges,’ quod he, ‘in chirches whan I preche, I peyne me to han an hauteyn speche, And rynge it out as round as gooth a belle, For I kan al by rote that I telle.’

(VI.329–32)

The unrelentingly loud voice, resounding like a church bell, in which the Pardoner takes such pride is ironically one of the extremes against which Waleys warns preachers in his sixth lesson: The loud manner of speaking is hateful by its nature because an excessive object of sensation damages and offends the sense, according to the teaching of the Philosopher and common experience. Also, a loud outcry

How (Not) to Preach  153 is more like confused sound than like speech that is articulate and divided in the proper way. Wherefore, a preacher who violently exerts himself in shouting is not heard or understood clearly. [Modus enim [loquendi] clamosus est naturaliter odiosus quia excellens sensibile corrumpit et [offendit] sensum, secundum doctrinam Philosophi et communem experientiam. Clamor etiam magnus magis assimilatur sono cuidam confuso quam voci articulatae et debito modo distinctae. Qua propter praedicator vehementer ad clamandum se exserens non distincte intelligitur nec auditur. (333)]

The Pardoner’s misplaced pride in his ‘hauteyn speche’ becomes doubly ironic if we recall that ‘A voys he hadde as smal as hath a goot’ (I.688). An overly loud voice is counterproductive in any preacher, according to Waleys, but a preacher bleating at top volume, as we must imagine the Pardoner doing, is simply ridiculous. In fact, the Pardoner’s goatish voice is probably to be reckoned among those irremediable speech defects that Waleys believes should cause an aspiring preacher to choose a different profession (twelfth lesson). Equally damaging, from Waleys’s perspective, is the Pardoner’s boast that he preaches entirely from a script that he has memorized verbatim.16 To do so is to ‘speak like a magpie, who speaks from practice alone, not understanding himself’ (Nec loquatur quasi pica, quae ex solo usu loquitur, non intelligens semetipsam [336]) (eighth lesson). Another result of this practice is that the preacher almost inevitably speaks too fast, a flaw that Waleys criticizes in language that resonates especially well with Chaucer’s depiction of the Pardoner (seventh lesson): For it does not suit the preacher, nor is it useful to his hearers, that he speak like a boy who recites his Donatus, not knowing or understanding what he says or what it means. And what do the hearers conclude, when they hear a preacher speaking in this way? They are liable to say two things: ‘This one never composed the sermon that he’s preaching but took it from someone else,’ and: ‘He recites it to us just like a young boy would recite.’ [Non enim decet praedicatorem, nec etiam est auditoribus utile, ut sic loquatur sicut puer qui suum Donatum recitat, non sciens nec intelligens ea quae loquitur aut quae dicit. Et quid judicant auditores, quando praed-

154  Martin Camargo icatorem audiunt sic loquentem? Consueverunt enim duo dicere: Iste sermonem quem praedicat nunquam composuit, sed ab alio accepit, et: Sic eum nobis recitat sicut puer juvenis recitaret. (334)]

The Pardoner’s use of the schoolroom phrase ‘kan al by rote,’ the metonymic regularity of the iambs in the line in which he compares his speaking to the tolling of a bell, and the image of a beardless preacher (I.689–90) reciting rapidly in a loud, high-pitched voice combine to reinforce the apt analogy between a preacher like the Pardoner and a schoolboy reciting his elementary grammar lessons. Again we are left to wonder whether the audience is more annoyed than impressed or entertained by what the Pardoner regards as his virtuoso performance. While the first instalment of the Pardoner’s self-advertisement focuses mainly on voice, the second instalment focuses more on gesture, the other component of rhetorical delivery: Thanne peyne I me to strecche forth the nekke, And est and west upon the peple I bekke, As dooth a dowve sittynge on a berne. Myne handes and my tonge goon so yerne That it is joye to se my bisynesse.

(VI.395–9)

Here the Pardoner’s words echo those of Waleys especially closely, even in evoking the compass directions to capture the grandiose quality of the gestures (fifth lesson):17 Let him [i.e., the preacher] especially beware of tossing his body about with disordered movements, now suddenly stretching his head up high, now suddenly lowering it, now turning himself to the right, now suddenly with marvellous speed turning himself to the left, now extending both hands at once as if he could embrace east and west at the same time, now suddenly joining them together, now extending the arms excessively, now suddenly drawing them back. [Valde tamen caveat ne motibus inordinatis jactet corpus suum, nunc subito extollendo caput in altum, nunc subito deprimendo, nunc vertendo se ad dextrum, nunc subito cum mirabili celeritate se vertendo ad sinistrum, nunc ambas manus sic extendendo simul quasi posset simul orientem occidentemque complecti, nunc vero subito eas in unum conjungendo, nunc extendendo brachia ultra modum, nunc subito retrahendo. (332)]

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Extreme gestures are ineffective rhetorically because they draw attention to the speaker and so distract the audience from the message. Waleys has similar reasons for counselling the preacher against overly elaborate clothing: There is accordingly a fourth lesson, having to do with the dress of the preacher, namely that he not display himself, when preaching to the people, in clothing that is too elaborate and flashy, lest a regard for the vanity of vanities shine forth and be embroidered on the apparel of one whom it behooves to induce the people to flee the vanity of this world. [Sit igitur quartum documentum, pertinens ad ipsius praedicatoris habitum, ut videlicet non se ostendat populo, dum praedicat, in vestibus nimis curiosis et fulgentibus, ne reluceat et scribatur in ejus vestimento vanitas vanitatum observanda quem oportet inducere populum ad fugiendum saeculi vanitatem. (331)]

Although Chaucer does not comment on the Pardoner’s garments, as the Miller does for the golden-haired parish clerk Absolon (I.3312–24), the point made by Waleys is implicit in Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner’s yellow hair, which is accentuated by his calculated gesture of dispensing with a customary article of clothing: This Pardoner hadde heer as yelow as wex, But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex; By ounces henge his lokkes that he hadde, And therwith he his shuldres overspradde; But thynne it lay, by colpons oon and oon. But hood, for jolitee, wered he noon, For it was trussed up in his walet. Hym thoughte he rood al of the newe jet: Dischevelee, save his cappe, he rood al bare.

(I.675–83)

On horseback, as at the pulpit, the Pardoner is eager to make a spectacle of himself, but the narrator’s dismissive tone makes it clear that the gaze that the Pardoner succeeds in attracting is not as admiring as he would like to believe it is. The Pardoner also tries to impress his audience with the rapid pace of his preaching. Not only do his hands move at great speed (‘so yerne’), but so does his tongue (VI.398). In other words, he is guilty of

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the exceedingly rapid speech that Waleys identifies as inimical to effective preaching: The seventh lesson is that the preacher should beware that his speech not run too quickly, but let him speak with good separation and measured pauses, by pondering the things that should be pondered and reciting again the things that should be recited. [Septimum documentum est quod caveat praedicator ne nimis velociter currat sermo ejus, sed cum bona distinctione et pausis moderatis, ponderando ea quae sunt ponderanda et iterum recitando ea quae sunt recitanda, loquatur. (334)]

Before the Pardoner begins to speak, he tauntingly plays at the careful ‘pondering’ of his words that, Waleys observes, a more measured pace allows: ‘but I moot thynke / Upon som honest thyng while that I drynke’ (VI.327–8). However, he has memorized his script already and apparently performs it at speed once he gets started. Consistent with his self-proclaimed appetites for money, women, food, and drink, the Pardoner’s rhetorical credo is ‘nothing in moderation.’ Measured by the standards of an experienced preacher like Waleys, he talks too loud and too fast and gesticulates too wildly to qualify as a skilled pulpit orator. Like many who talk too fast, the Pardoner probably talks too much, as well. Despite his repeated insistence that his ‘theme is alwey oon, and evere was’ (VI.333), the Pardoner goes beyond his favourite theme of ‘coveitise’ to discourse at length about the evils of gluttony, gambling, and swearing (VI.483–660). In trying to cover too much material in one sermon, he commits another fault against which Waleys warns would-be preachers (seventh lesson): ‘the preacher should not strive to say many things, but a few things suffice, and those will be more efficacious if they are spoken in a suitable manner’ (praedicator non debet ad hoc niti ut dicat multa sed sufficiant pauca, et illa plus proderunt si congruo modo dicantur [334]). The Pardoner says too much because he loves the sound of his own voice but also because he has failed to assess his audience properly. Instead of focusing on what is common to all members of his audience, as Waleys counsels in the tenth lesson, the Pardoner tries to appeal to the presumably sophisticated and undeniably diverse pilgrims who are his immediate audience, while retaining elements aimed at his more usual audience of ‘lewed’ rural

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people, and perhaps even catering to specific members of his present audience, such as the urban innkeeper Harry Bailey with his extended account of the sins associated with taverns.18 As in his rave review of his performing skills, so in his audience assessment, the self-professed virtuoso comes across as a tyro in ways precisely anticipated by an expert fourteenth-century preacher and teacher. A more sinister flaw in the Pardoner’s audience relations also may have contributed to his overloading his sermon. When the Pardoner lists the various bad intentions that can motivate preaching, he elaborates on only one of them – hate – and boasts that he preaches from that motive whenever he thinks he has suffered a personal slight from some member of the local community: For certes, many a predicacioun Comth ofte tyme of yvel entencioun; Som for plesance of folk and flaterye, To been avaunced by ypocrisye, And som for veyne glorie, and som for hate. For whan I dar noon oother weyes debate, Thanne wol I stynge hym with my tonge smerte In prechyng, so that he shal nat asterte To been defamed falsly, if that he Hath trespased to my brethren or to me. For though I telle noght his propre name, Men shal wel knowe that it is the same, By signes, and by othere circumstances. Thus quyte I folk that doon us displesances; Thus spitte I out my venym under hewe Of hoolynesse, to semen hooly and trewe.

(VI.407–22)

Given the excursus on the sins of the tavern that opens the Pardoner’s sermon and the mocking invitation to the Host to ‘offre first anon’ as the one who ‘is moost envoluped in synne’ (VI.943, 942) that closes it, these words sound like the Pardoner’s thinly veiled warning of the retaliation to come, probably for the Host’s having slighted his masculinity by addressing him as ‘Thou beel amy’ (VI.318). Though Waleys warns potential preachers against each of the other ‘evil intentions’ that the Pardoner enumerates (and of which he is guilty), he devotes special care to the delicate subject of criticizing one’s hearers. His chief lesson is that one should rebuke the audience as a group for failings that they

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are likely to have in common. Only rarely is it licit to single out an individual for criticism, namely when that person’s trespasses create a serious threat to the common good: The tenth lesson is that the preacher should strongly beware of saying anything from which anyone present or absent could be defamed or accused of evil, unless perhaps it were someone so harmful to the commonwealth, and whose sin was so notorious, that it would be right to preach against him. [Decimum documentum est ut praedicator vehementer caveat aliquid dicere unde aliquis praesens vel absens posset infamari vel de malo notari, nisi forsan esset aliquis ita nocivus reipublicae, et cujus peccatum esset notorium, quod merito esset contra illum praedicandum. (337)]

The Pardoner inverts Waleys’s teaching, encouraging the vices of his auditors (especially those that match his own) while reserving his rebukes for those whose ‘trespasses’ are against only him and his familiars. Just as his flamboyant, self-indulgent delivery serves more to magnify his public image than to communicate the sermon’s message, so his ad hominem arguments are meant to protect his projected ethos by punishing any real or imagined threats to its integrity. What is consistent – and most at odds with the teaching of Waleys – is the Pardoner’s focus on his own fantasies and desires rather than the needs of his auditors, a fact that he recognizes and even proclaims (VI.423–33), but whose impact on his rhetorical success he consistently fails to grasp. Having proclaimed at length his consummate rhetorical skill, more­ over, the thoroughly self-absorbed Pardoner leaves no opening for the constructive criticism that Waleys encourages the appropriately humble and temporarily self-oblivious preacher to solicit (twelfth lesson): If indeed he should blunder in public, it is advantageous that he have a friend who can acquaint him with his mistake after the sermon, so that he can correct it in the future, because the preacher, while he is intent on instructing others, does not pay much attention to himself and therefore does not consider his own mistakes. [Si vero erraverit in publico, expedit ut amicum habeat qui defectum suum sibi insinuet post sermonem, ut se possit corrigere in futurum; quia praedicator, dum circa alios instruendos est intentus, non multum ad seipsum attendit, et ideo defectus proprios non perpendit. (340)]

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The Pardoner’s message – that his rhetoric is irresistible because he is its source – leaves little space for responses other than either enthusiastic acceptance or harsh rejection. Since his speech is inseparable from his persona, criticism of one is criticism of the other. Thus, the criticism the Host offers in response to the Pardoner’s preaching inevitably turns personal and is received not with gratitude but with still more hatred. Openness to constructive criticism, like all of the advice Waleys offers, will resonate only with preachers who sincerely desire to teach moral truths and move others to virtuous action. That is the Parson’s intent, and he accordingly declares that he ‘wol stonde to correccioun’ (X.60); but it is emphatically not the Pardoner’s goal: ‘For myn entente is nat but for to wynne, / And nothyng for correccioun of synne’ (VI.403–4). His ‘entente’ in the particular performance we witness is clearly ‘to wynne’ the tale-telling contest, though his strategy for achieving it is not so obvious. The kind of pulpit histrionics the Pardoner boasts of practising – and presumably demonstrates on the road to Canterbury – could be very effective with certain kinds of audiences. Even despite his off-putting appearance and goatish voice, the Pardoner might well have dazzled his typically unsophisticated, rural audiences with his over-the-top delivery. The popular susceptibility to such techniques and the powerful temptation to abuse them helped elicit the antihistrionic strictures of authorities on preaching, among them Thomas Waleys. Moreover, the story of the three ‘riotoures’ who would slay Death that is the core of the Pardoner’s tale is powerful enough to overcome the distraction of the Pardoner’s delivery, whether his audience consists of ‘lewed peple’ who particularly ‘loven’ such ‘ensamples’ (VI.435–7) or a more mixed group such as the company of Canterbury pilgrims. The rhetorical power of this exemplum has sufficed to persuade most modern critics to accept the Pardoner’s enthusiastically positive selfrepresentation as rhetor, especially since we encounter his tale as written text rather than oral performance. Had the Pardoner dispensed with his boastful prologue, or perhaps even had he stopped speaking at line 906 or line 918, he might have achieved his intended goal of telling the winning tale. That he did not or perhaps could not restrain his self-advertisement and his vindictiveness calls into question his ability to assess both audience and occasion and opens the possibility that he overrates his rhetorical performance in other respects, as well. Reading Waleys alongside the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale helps us to recognize some of the ways in which the Pardoner may have been deluded about his rhetorical prowess, all of which come down to one

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grand delusion, namely, that he is so adept a speaker that through his own skill he can ‘maken oother folk to twynne / From avarice and soore to repente’ (VI.430–1). While he flagrantly violates nearly all of Waleys’s practical rules and openly flouts the first two of his moral rules (the preacher should excel in virtue and preach for God’s glory rather than his own), the Pardoner completely ignores the third lesson: ‘that one who would preach the word of God should consider that all wisdom is from the Lord God’ (ut praedicaturus verbum Dei consideret quod omnis sapientia a Domino Deo est [330–1). In place of the humble prayer for wisdom and guidance that ought to precede a sermon, the Pardoner provides its opposite, an exordium consisting entirely of self-flattery. His unconfessed but all-too-evident pride, more than his eagerly admitted avarice, lust, and gluttony, is the Pardoner’s defining sin. In positing himself as the source of the quasi-divine powers that are channelled through the preacher, he repeats the error of Lucifer, and Waleys predicts the form that his inevitable fall will take (third lesson): Therefore, since the preacher is about to perform not trivial actions but the greatest ones, which exceed human skill, it is thoroughly advantageous that he pray for the help of the deity, trusting more in divine aid than in his own skill, lest perhaps God take away or rather not offer him speech. [Cum igitur praedicator, non de rebus minimis sed de maximis, et quae excedunt humanum ingenium, sit acturus, omnino expedit ut precetur ad auxilium divinitatis, plus confidens in divino auxilio quam in proprio ingenio, ne forte Deus subtrahat seu potius non tribuat sibi verbum. (331)]

Undone by his rhetorical excess but even more by the self-love it symptomizes, the Pardoner earns not the applause he expected but a stern reminder that any unintended good that attends his preaching comes from God’s grace rather than his own words and gestures, and to this rebuke there can be no clever response: This Pardoner answerde nat a word; So wrooth he was, no word ne wolde he seye.

(VI.956–7)

Notes A shorter version of this essay was presented at the Sixteenth International Con-

How (Not) to Preach  161 gress of the New Chaucer Society (Swansea, July 2008). For their helpful advice on specific details in the present version, I wish to thank Rita Copeland, Bruce Holsinger, Marjorie Curry Woods, and Charles D. Wright. 1 Good, concise accounts of the medieval artes praedicandi are provided by James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 269–355; Marianne G. Briscoe, Artes Praedicandi, Typologie des sources du moyen âge occidental 61 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992), 11–76; and Siegfried Wenzel, ‘The Arts of Preaching,’ in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages, ed. Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 84–96. 2 An excellent example from the thirteenth century is Humbert of Romans’s Liber de eruditione praedicatorum; see ‘Humbert of Romans’ Treatise on the Formation of Preachers,’ in Early Dominicans: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Simon Tugwell, Classics of Western Spirituality 33 (New York: Paul­ ist Press, 1982), 179–370. 3 Claire M. Waters characterizes such remarks as ‘almost ritualistic warnings’ that are ‘concise but seemingly indispensable’; Angels and Earthly Creatures: Preaching, Performance, and Gender in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 85. Waters provides an excellent survey of the treatment of style and delivery in the artes praedicandi on 84–95, 209–13. Beryl Rowland also collects references to delivery from the artes praedicandi in ‘Pronuntiatio and Its Effect on Chaucer’s Audience,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 33–51. Also see Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ‘Medieval Sermons and Their Performance: Theory and Record,’ in Preacher, Sermon and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 2002), 89–124, esp. 94–103. 4 Thomas Waleys, De modo componendi sermones, in Artes praedicandi: Contribution à l’histoire de la rhétorique au moyen âge, ed. Thomas-M. Charland, Publications de l’institut d’études médiévales d’Ottawa 7 (Paris and Ottawa: J. Vrin, 1936), 328–403. Latin quotations from Waleys’s treatise are from this edition. 5 On the life and works of Thomas Waleys, see esp. Beryl Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 75–108; and Simon Tugwell, ‘Waleys [Wallensis], Thomas,’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 56 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 800–1. 6 See the dedication in Artes praedicandi, ed. Charland, 328. Alastair Minnis dates the treatise ca. 1338; ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner and the “Office of Preacher,”’ in Intellectuals and Writers in Fourteenth-Century Europe, ed. Piero

162  Martin Camargo Boitani and Anna Torti (Tübingen: Gunter Narr; Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986), 98. Smalley thinks it was written shortly after Waleys was released from house arrest in 1342; English Friars, 78. The alternative title, which Tugwell prefers to the one used by Charland and most other scholars, is taken from the dedication to Archbishop Tebaldo. 7 Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures, 92. 8 Harry Caplan, Mediaeval Artes Praedicandi: A Hand-List, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 24 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1934), 10; Harry Caplan, Mediaeval Artes Praedicandi: A Supplementary Hand-List, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 25 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1936), 7; and Artes praedicandi, ed. Charland, 94–5. The number of surviving copies of De modo componendi sermones (six) is comparable with those of other well-known English artes praedicandi. See Susan Gallick, ‘Artes Praedicandi: Early Printed Editions,’ Mediaeval Studies 39 (1977): 477–89. 9 The index to Marilyn Sutton, Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale’: An Annotated Bibliography 1900 to 1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), lists 30 items under ‘preachers’ and 55 under ‘preaching’ (437). The most important work published after the period covered by Sutton’s bibliography is Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures, chapter 2. 10 A good example is Minnis, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner,’ 88–119, who cites Waleys’s treatise along with two other English artes praedicandi that treat the issues of authority, knowledge, and personal character that define scholastic controversy regarding the preacher’s office (98–9), and again at several points in the course of his analysis of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, in which he focuses on the Pardoner’s open sin and improper motives for preaching (100–19). 11 Anthony F. Luengo, ‘Synthesis and Orthodoxy in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale: An Analysis of the Concordance of Different Authoritative Sententiae according to the Principles of the Medieval Artes praedicandi,’ Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 50 (1980): 223–32. 12 This tradition goes back at least as far as Augustine’s influential De doctrina christiana. See, for example, Martin Camargo, ‘“Non solum sibi sed aliis etiam”: Neoplatonism and Rhetoric in Saint Augustine’s De doctrina christiana,’ Rhetorica 16 (1998): 393–408. Waters shows how Chaucer dramatizes this issue through the contrast between the Pardoner and the Parson as preachers: Waters, Angels and Earthly Creatures, 31–56, 187–97. Frank V. Cespedes, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner and Preaching,’ ELH 44 (1977): 1–18, treats the same contrast with reference to the prominent use of Paul’s Epistle to Timothy by both preachers. Stephen Knight speculates on the shock the Pardoner’s ‘publicly performed privacy’ (35) would have imparted to a

How (Not) to Preach  163 contemporary audience; ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner in Performance,’ Sydney Studies in English 9 (1983–4): 21–36. 13 The only place in chapter 1 where Waleys comes close to making the point about public perceptions of the preacher’s morality is in his fourth lesson, when he worries that a preacher’s ostentatious clothing might distract the members of his audience. 14 Cf. the widely repeated definition of an orator, attributed to Cato the Elder: ‘a good man, skilled in speaking’ (vir bonus, peritus dicendi). By contrast, the Pardoner defines himself as, in effect, a ‘vir malus, peritus dicendi.’ 15 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 196. All Canterbury Tales quotations are from this edition. 16 It does not matter whether the Pardoner composed his script himself or took it from some other source, since the point Waleys is making has to do with audience perception. 17 Alan J. Fletcher also notices that the Pardoner’s ‘extravagant gestures … are exactly comparable to those condemned by Thomas Waleys in his De modo componendi sermones’; ‘The Preaching of the Pardoner,’ Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 23 n. 24. See also Cespedes, ‘Chaucer’s Pardoner,’ 6–7, who cites an anonymous ars praedicandi’s strictures against the sort of ‘histrionic pulpit style’ and ‘theatrical delivery’ of which the Pardoner boasts. 18 On the Pardoner’s alternations between the first two audiences, see especially Anthony Luengo, ‘Audience and Exempla in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale,’ Chaucer Review 11 (1976): 1–10. Fletcher, ‘Preaching of the Pardoner,’ 15–35, suggests that the form of the Pardoner’s ‘sermon’ could have reminded a sophisticated London audience of popular preaching that easily shaded into demagoguery aimed at manipulating and exploiting the lower orders.

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Appendix Thomas Waleys, ‘On the Quality of the Preacher’:   Chapter 1 of On the Method for Composing Sermons1 Translated by Martin Camargo [First Lesson] The office of the preacher is more angelic than human, for preachers have the evangelical and indeed the angelic office of God’s word. Wherefore the greatest preacher, St Paul, says in 1 Corinthians 1: ‘Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel,’2 and on the same topic he says in Galatians 2: ‘To me has been entrusted the gospel of the uncircumcised just as to Peter that of the circumcised.’3 Hence, in the purity of his living the preacher should excel those he is supposed to inform, so that just as he is set above other men by his office of preaching, so is he also by his outstanding way of life. For the Lord enjoins him, in Isaiah 40: ‘Climb the highest mountain, so that there you may preach to Sion.’4 The ‘highest mountain’ that the preacher is ordered to climb is the celestial eminence of the life he is obliged to lead. Thus, the preacher stands on the mountain with Christ, who, ‘seeing the crowds’ to whom he was about to preach, ‘went up the mountain.’5 If perchance he is not able or is not pleased to climb the mountain, let him stand at least on the plain, ‘on a level place,’ with those who hear his speech. For Christ is said to have stood ‘on a level place’ with the ‘great multitude’ that heard him preaching.6 Nowhere is it read that Christ stood in a valley when he would preach and the people on a mountain when they would hear him. Likewise it is unacceptable that the preacher be of lower and more degraded life than the people. Therefore, let the preacher beware lest he approach the performance of so divine an office in some mortal sin, lest perchance on account of his sin his speech be taken from him or his speech be less efficacious. And let him ponder what the doctors of theology teach, namely that one who preaches in a state of mortal sin also commits a mortal sin in that very act of preaching. Whence the Lord reproves such persons in the Psalm: ‘To the sinner the Lord said: “Why do you recite my statutes and profess my covenant with your mouth? … If you saw a thief, would you run with him?” etc.’7 And the Apostle says in Romans 2: ‘You who teach another do not teach yourself, who preach against theft commit theft yourself, who say that one should not commit adultery commit

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adultery yourself.’8 Let this therefore be the first lesson, that one who would preach should be completely free from the stain of mortal sin. [Second Lesson] The second lesson is similar to this one, namely that he assign a proper end to his preaching, so that he preach not for his own ostentation but for the praise of God and the edification of his neighbour. Let him avoid vain glory, which commonly originates from good works and presents itself most importunately in those [good works] which are performed in public, in the presence of many. For this reason, the preacher wages war especially against the movements of vain glory. He would do well to consider that those who preach with a proper end and pure intention earn not only the essential reward that is called ‘aurea’ and is promised to all the just, but also a certain special reward that is called ‘aureola’ and is reserved for doctors of the church.9 However, if a doctor preaches for the sake of vain glory and his own ostentation, he should know that he earns for himself neither ‘aurea’ nor ‘aureola.’ Rather, the Judge who rewards good work will say to him: ‘Amen I say to you, you have received your reward,’10 namely glory from men on earth, and therefore you are not worthy of eternal glory in heaven. [Third Lesson] The third lesson is that one who would preach the word of God should consider that all wisdom is from the Lord God. And therefore, since in a sermon the gift of wisdom is especially needed, let him direct himself through devout prayer to the fount of wisdom, in accordance with James 1: ‘If anyone lacks wisdom, let him beseech God, who gives abundantly to all and does not reproach.’11 Whence also Solomon, who would rule the people of God, asked God especially for the wisdom with which he might rule the people.12 Thus the preacher also should pray for wisdom with which he might properly instruct the people. For this reason it is not prudent that a preacher betake himself to preach unless he first pray devoutly both for himself and for the people who will hear him. For even among the Gentiles, when they were preparing to begin any task, they first offered a prayer. Accordingly, Plato says in the Timaeus that it is customary for nearly everyone, when they are about to perform even the most trivial actions, to pray for the help of

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a deity.13 Therefore, since the preacher is about to perform not trivial actions but the greatest ones, which exceed human skill, it is thoroughly advantageous that he pray for the help of the deity, trusting more in divine aid than in his own skill, lest perhaps God take away or rather not offer him speech. [Fourth Lesson] The aforementioned lessons should be observed by the preacher in private with respect to himself. However, he should observe many others in public, while he preaches to the people. There is accordingly a fourth lesson, having to do with the dress of the preacher, namely that he not display himself, when preaching to the people, in clothing that is too elaborate and flashy, lest a regard for the vanity of vanities shine forth and be embroidered on the apparel of one whom it behooves to induce the people to flee the vanity of this world. Therefore, let the clothing not be too bright, lest the external splendour of the clothing darken the splendour of conscience that should appear to the people. I do not see that great shabbiness in clothing is persuasive either, because we do not read of Christ that he affected great shabbiness in his clothing, and concerning Saint Augustine, the greatest of preachers, we read that his clothes were so moderate that ‘they were neither very elegant nor very mean.’14 Nonetheless, I dare not criticize shabbiness of clothing, unless it has to do with hypocrisy, which the preacher should avoid not only in his clothing but also in everything else, and indeed he should beware lest anything appear in him that could rightly be ascribed to hypocrisy. Nonetheless, as I said, I do not criticize shabbiness in a preacher. For concerning John the Baptist, the herald of Christ and an excellent preacher, it is read in Matthew 3 that ‘he had a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt,’15 and concerning the discovery of his head it is read that it was found wrapped in the garment of haircloth that he is believed to have worn in the desert.16 Also, in the Order of Preachers the brothers are required by statute to wear cheap cloaks. Therefore, I think the extent of this cheapness [and] what sort of preacher he ought to be should be left to the judgment of the prudent man. [Fifth Lesson] The fifth lesson has to do with the gestures and bodily movements of the preacher, namely that while he preaches he should observe due

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modesty in these, not that he should be like a motionless statue, but that he should display some suitable movements. Let him especially beware of tossing his body about with disordered movements, now suddenly stretching his head up high, now suddenly lowering it, now turning himself to the right, now suddenly with marvellous speed turning himself to the left, now extending both hands at once as if he could embrace east and west at the same time, now suddenly joining them together, now extending the arms excessively, now suddenly drawing them back.17 For I have seen some persons who, though they handled the other elements of their sermons in the best manner, yet so threw themselves about in the motions of their body that they seemed to have engaged in a duel with someone, or rather to have gone insane, to the extent that they would have toppled themselves along with the pulpit in which they were standing unless others came to the rescue. Such movements do not suit the preacher. For if it is proper that the preacher of God’s word so comport himself in every place and time that ‘in gait, posture, deportment and in all movements he do nothing that would offend anyone’s sight,’18 how much more should he observe these practices who displays himself in the presence of the people like a light beamed down from on high and like an angel and a messenger descended from heaven. The preacher therefore should know how to adjust his movements and gestures, while he presents himself to the people, so that his hearers are not scandalized by the extreme disorder of his motions. [Sixth Lesson] The sixth lesson and those that follow it concern the very act of preaching and addressing the people. In this regard the preacher should know with the greatest certainty that the chief strength of a sermon, in terms of its effect, which is to edify the people and draw them to devotion, is the manner in which it is delivered and spoken. Whence it happened in my homeland that when an old and thoroughly reverent master of theology, a preacher more useful and agreeable to the people than any I recall having seen, had preached to the people on a given day and his sermon had been received with the greatest applause and favour, some other person, having obtained a supply of his sermons, later preached that same sermon at another time, and though he hoped he would be praised and celebrated by many because of his sermon, no one was found who would grant him glory of any sort. Therefore he

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returned to the master and said: ‘Reverend father, I marvel greatly that you preached at such a time and your sermon was most agreeable to everyone who heard it, but I later preached exactly the same sermon and there was no one who would thank me. What could be the reason for this?’ The aforesaid master replied: ‘Dearest one, I handed you my fiddle, but you did not have the bow with which I touch the strings of my fiddle, and that is the reason.’ The master wished to say that, although the other had his sermon, yet he did not have his tongue and his manner of speaking. Let the preacher therefore take care, along with all the rest, especially to have an intelligible and attractive manner of speaking, because the manner of speaking will be no less evident to hearers than the things that are said. As regards the manner of speaking and discoursing, let the preacher beware that he not speak too loudly or too softly or that he not use what is the worst manner of speaking for this purpose, now lowering his voice, now raising it, in the way that the Passion is read in church.19 The loud manner of speaking is hateful by its nature because an excessive object of sensation damages and offends the sense, according to the teaching of the Philosopher and common experience.20 Also, a loud outcry is more like confused sound than like speech21 that is articulate and divided in the proper way. Wherefore, a preacher who violently exerts himself in shouting is not heard or understood clearly. However, a very low voice will not be readily discernible by large groups or by those at a distance. The one who now raises his voice to the heights, now lowers it to the depths annoys all hearers, not only because nature abhors such sudden changes from extreme to extreme, but also because, when he raises his shout to the stars, he annoys those who sit or stand nearby and alongside him; but when he lowers his voice too much, he annoys those at a distance, because he seems to want to communicate some secret mystery to those who are near him and to whisper in their ears what he wants to conceal from those who are farther away. Therefore, though one’s manner of speaking should not be kept completely uniform, it should at least not be very dissimilar as regards high and low volume. [Seventh Lesson] The seventh lesson is that the preacher should beware that his speech not run too quickly, but let him speak with good separation and measured pauses, by pondering the things that should be pondered and

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reciting again the things that should be recited. For it does not suit the preacher, nor is it useful to his hearers, that he speak like a boy who recites his Donatus, not knowing or understanding what he says or what it means. And what do the hearers conclude, when they hear a preacher speaking in this way? They are liable to say two things: ‘This one never composed the sermon that he’s preaching but took it from someone else,’ and: ‘He recites it to us just like a young boy would recite.’ And indeed, those who preach in this way cannot be understood by their hearers. For they fill the ears of the hearers with sound, but their hearts remain completely empty, because words upon words proliferate in so imperceptible an interval that they cannot sink into hearts, or, even if they should sink in, they come with such force that they cannot abide there; but rather, just as they come suddenly, so they depart suddenly and vanish. Those who preach in this way seem to be like those who speak in foreign and unknown languages, whom the Apostle reproves in 1 Corinthians 14, saying: ‘He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself,’22 as if to say: ‘and not others.’ And soon afterward the Apostle further says: ‘If the trumpet makes an uncertain sound, who will prepare himself for battle? Thus also you, unless you produce clear speech with your tongue, how will that which is spoken be known? For you will be speaking into the air.’23 The Apostle says this. The master of whom I spoke above was accustomed to teach in the following way anyone who wished to preach and to speak in his own native language: ‘Dearest one, you should put a little in your mouth and express that suitably and appropriately,’ meaning that the preacher should not strive to say many things, but a few things suffice, and those will be more efficacious if they are spoken in a suitable manner. Whence the Apostle says in the place cited above: ‘I want to speak five words with my understanding, so that I might also instruct others, rather than ten thousand words in a tongue.’24 Therefore, let the preacher ponder his words and offer them with due weight, because, if he does not ponder them himself, how will others ponder them? He also should know how to distinguish between those things that should be pondered more and those less, and he should linger more on those that should be pondered more. And if there are some that should be pondered very much, he should not only say them once with greater weight, but he should inculcate them in his hearers two or three times. What might be more and what less worth pondering cannot be encompassed in a general statement but is left to the judgment and the pru-

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dence of the preacher. However, it is true in general that the theme itself and the division of the theme, as well as the other things upon which depend much of what will subsequently be said and the progression of the sermon, should be spoken with great weight, lest, because these things have been misunderstood, it should happen that what follows be misunderstood. The reason why some do not weigh their discourse, nor in speaking make any pause, but pour out everything in a rush and without separation, sometimes and indeed often is the one that was touched upon above, namely because they are preaching a sermon composed by others and recall its words more than its meaning. Another reason is the vile practice and evil custom of speaking so abruptly outside the sermon. And this evil practice should be abolished by those who wish to preach. A third reason and explanation is the opposite explanation, that there are some to whom many things occur which strike them as beautiful and useful to say, some of which ought to be left out on account of shortness of time, if there is to be any chance of pondering others. And thus, since this seems harsh to them, as if they said this from Job 4: ‘Who will be able to hold back the speech he has conceived?’25 they prefer not to think about what needs to be said rather than leave anything out. And thus, while they select and prefer to offer many things (which in themselves would be useful if they were spoken in a useful way) in public without due deliberation and thought about how to say a few good things both usefully and well, the whole sermon is rendered useless and almost entirely fruitless. These preachers are like an imprudent farmer who, seeing that he has an abundance of good seed, scatters so much of it on the land he is sowing that the seeds, when they have sprouted, press upon and oppress each other and take away nourishment from each other to such an extent that the whole field is rendered fruitless; thus both the seed that has been sown is lost, and the fruit that could have been expected in that year does not follow, and the whole field is made worse for bringing forth the fruits of the following year. The same happens to the preacher who, because of the abundance of the many good words that he has conceived, scatters them all to his hearers in a kind of rush. [Eighth Lesson] The eighth lesson is that one should not confine26 himself excessively to fixed and determined words. For words easily fall from memory, and the memory of a speaker can be disturbed by a slight action such

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that the words that he had previously conceived do not come to him. Indeed, often a dropped syllable causes everything to drop. Then the preacher is confounded because he tied himself to the words more than the meaning. And such forgetfulness of words frequently happens and the said confusion results when the whole sermon is composed in rhythmical cadences or in too polished a style and with superfluous divisions of quotations from authors. And then such forgetfulness happens not without fault on the part of the preacher who is striving to excel in refinement. The same thing also happens often when verbose quotations of saints are adduced. Wherefore, lest such danger befall the preacher, he always should take care that, whatever might happen with the words of this sort of quotation, he recall fully and clearly the meaning of the quotations. And if there are any words in these quotations that are rightly worth pondering in particular, he should try particularly to keep them in memory and say them, worrying less about the others. And he should regard it as certain that there are many authoritative sayings of saints that it is better and more useful to paraphrase than to recite verbatim on account of their prolixity or obscurity. And granted that they may be recited verbatim, where the quotations are entirely obscure their meaning should be expounded in other, clear words, lest, because they are not understood by the hearers, they lack all fruit. In speaking, therefore, the preacher always should pay diligent attention to the meaning of the things he says. He should not speak like a magpie, who speaks from practice alone, not understanding himself. If indeed he pays diligent attention to the meaning, in the end he will fulfil this command from Isaiah 40: ‘Speak to the heart of Jerusalem,’27 for words fill ears, but the meaning of words is perceived by the heart alone. And therefore, when he pays attention above all to the meaning of the words that he preaches, he speaks above all not to the ears but ‘to the heart of Jerusalem.’ And one who is inexperienced should know, putting his faith in those with experience, that when a preacher preaches fruitfully and usefully, as he ought when he is in the heat of his spirit, his heart is so closely joined to the hearts of his hearers that he perceives neither that he has a tongue nor his hearers ears, but it seems to him that his word proceeds from his heart and flows into the hearts of his hearers as if without any intermediary. [Ninth Lesson] The ninth lesson is that the preacher should not strive to please men in his preaching such that he follows the vanity of those who gratify

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the curiosity of the frequent attenders of sermons. For many preachers have endeavoured to please such persons, and for that reason they have introduced many things that are vain and frivolous and that harm rather than help; and others have followed them, not because this sort of emptiness pleased them but because they feared that their sermons would be valued less if they deviated from the previous custom. And without doubt hardly anything is praised by such frivolous hearers unless it smacks of vanity. But it does not profit the preacher to be moved by the praises and criticisms of such hearers. So that he nonetheless preaches in such a way that he will be able to benefit good hearers, let him consider this from the Psalm: ‘God has scattered the bones of those who please men. They are confounded because the Lord spurned them.’28 [Tenth Lesson] The tenth lesson is that the preacher should strongly beware of saying anything from which anyone present or absent could be defamed or accused of evil, unless perhaps it were someone so harmful to the commonwealth, and whose sin was so notorious, that it would be right to preach against him. In such a case, if it were advantageous or necessary to the church or the people or the commonwealth, he should speak the truth steadily, with all fear set aside, and not equivocate, knowing for a fact that he has obligated himself to this by the very fact that he has taken up the office of preaching. Wherefore, the preacher who equivocates for fear of telling the truth is a betrayer of the truth, according to Chrysostom, On Matthew. For he says ‘that a betrayer of the truth is not only one who speaks falsehood in place of truth, but one who does not freely proclaim the truth that it is necessary to proclaim, or who does not freely defend the truth that it is necessary to defend.’29 Whence such a preacher is one of the number of those watchmen of whom the Lord speaks through Isaiah, in Isaiah 65 [sic]: ‘His watchmen are all blind, all ignorant: they are mute dogs unable to bark.’30 Therefore, let the man fear more this from Isaiah 6: ‘Woe unto me, because I was silent, because I am a man corrupted in my lips,’31 and this from Ezechiel 33: ‘Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel … If when I have said to the wicked man: “O wicked one, you shall die in death,” you have not told him to take heed for himself … that wicked man will die in his iniquity, but I will ask for his blood from your hand.’32 Therefore, let the preacher speak the word of God with confidence

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and not invent reasons for keeping silent when nothing but fear is the cause, because God also looks into hearts. For Chrysostom says, in On the Praises of Paul, Homily 6: ‘Whoever has taken up the office of preaching should not be at all soft and weak but strong and thoroughly hard. For a person should not so much as sample the enjoyment of this outstanding gift unless he is a soldier prepared to give up his soul in death.’33 Chrysostom says this. But it is necessary that he have discretion in speaking, in accordance with the diversity of his hearers. For if he preaches to clergy only, it is permitted and profitable that he rail harshly against them or their vices and those that are particular to clerics, as are simony, the desire for preference, the unjust holding of many benefices, evil distribution of the church’s goods, and such like, and that he show them in what matters they are worse than laypersons. But he should not reprove the vices that are particular to laypersons, as are the evil withholding of tithes, irreverence toward clergy, and such like, where there is only clergy and not laypeople. For34 where there is no hearing, a sermon should not be squandered, nor should one curse a deaf person, that is one who is absent, who does not hear. Likewise, where there only are laypeople, one should not inveigh against the clergy or against vices that have typically afflicted only clerics, because that would be to exhort the laity to condemn the clergy. Where clerics and laypersons come together for the sermon, one should inveigh against the vices that are common to both, and the vices that are particular to clerics, and which it is not profitable for laypersons to know, should be left out. By observing discretion, if he should inveigh sharply against vices and someone is disturbed by this, the fault is not the preacher’s. What is the fault of a soldier target-practising in the place assigned for that purpose, if, though due precaution was taken, he should wound or kill someone by accident? He should blame himself who went to a place where he ought not to go. The same is true in the case at hand. For the place assigned for the practice of the preacher is a place fit for preaching; the target at which he shoots arrows is sin or the devil. Therefore, no one should stand there or nearby, and no one will be wounded or harmed. Let the preacher also beware lest he say something that might seem to proclaim his own praise or the flattery of another, especially the approval of another’s sin. Also, even if he wants to exalt with praises someone who is holy, nonetheless he should not go to extremes such that he says untrue or doubtful things about that person, which could not only be reproved rightly by God and his saints but also be laughed at by men.

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Also, those things that surpass the capacity of the hearers should rather be passed over in silence than spoken, lest one seem to preach to show off his knowledge and not to seek the profit of the people. [Eleventh Lesson] The eleventh lesson is that the preacher should take care not to exhaust his hearers with the prolixity of his sermon, such that he causes an aversion in them, because such prolixity in a sermon causes great harm. For, just as in the consumption of bodily food, there is a fixed measure that it is not good to exceed, but rather it is better to come a little short of it, namely that one not consume to the point of satiety. Whence Gregory says: ‘Foods that are less than sufficient are consumed more eagerly,’35 and without doubt they also are digested better. If anyone exceeds that measure, he is harmed doubly or triply, because the food that is consumed beyond measure does not benefit the one consuming it, and thus it is wasted. Likewise, it causes nausea and is cast out of the stomach, perhaps together with other food that was previously consumed usefully. Whence it is said in Proverbs 24 [sic]: ‘You have found honey: eat what is sufficient for you, lest perchance when you have eaten your fill you vomit it up.’36 Also, sometimes excessive digestion of a certain food breeds an aversion for that food, so that one shudders at such food ever afterward. So also is it with the hearing of God’s word, which is a kind of consumption of spiritual nourishment. For if the word of God is served to hearers over and above the manner and the measure that suffices for their capacity and disposition and is force fed to them with a certain violence, three evils follow: (1) even lovely sermons that are put into the ears of hearers over and above their measure and satiety are wasted, because they do not profit them; and (2) sometimes the hearers are driven to nausea by such superfluity, so that they vomit up what they previously heard usefully, so that the sermons depart from their memory because their memory does not suffice to retain so many things and digest them well; and (3) an aversion to hearing the word of God is often and commonly generated in them, and they do not freely come to sermons on other occasions, or at least to a sermon by the person who detained them with such force. If, on the other hand, one should end the sermon before the public is satisfied, everything happens in the opposite way. Therefore, one should take pains to finish his sermon at the best time so that the public leaves consoled. And in order that this

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might be, one should always strive to end the sermon on some delightful and devout subject matter. So that he not be deceived about the passage of time, as the preacher often is deceived because he has brought great attention to bear on the things that he is saying or because the subject matter about which he is speaking is very pleasing to him, it is to his advantage to designate someone who, as the time for finishing the sermon approaches, can make him some kind of sign, warned by which he might understand that it is time that he put an end to the sermon. [Twelfth Lesson] The twelfth lesson is that the new preacher, or the one who sets himself to preach for the first time, before he exposes himself to preach in public, first should betake himself to a place hidden from the sight of men, where no mocker can be feared, and there among the trees and stones let him begin to preach and to practise. There let him take pains to compose the movements of his body, and let him practise in private the sorts of movements and gestures that he intends to exhibit afterward in public. There also let him think intensely about the manner of delivering and of weighing his words and the other matters that have been touched upon above, and let him study them by himself and apply them as it were in a performance. For such practice does much good. Whence Vegetius recounts, in Book One, that among the Romans new soldiers always trained with certain inanimate things, for example, by fighting with a certain stake fixed in the ground, by mounting wooden horses, and the like, where there could not be a danger even if they should fail at these things.37 There was practise before they would have been sent on any expedition where there could be danger. The same is true in the present case. If a preacher makes a mistake when practising in private, there is neither danger nor any confusion, and there is the place for correction. It is worse in public. If indeed he should blunder in public, it is advantageous that he have a friend who can acquaint him with his mistake after the sermon, so that he can correct it in the future, because the preacher, while he is intent on instructing others, does not pay much attention to himself and therefore does not consider his own mistakes. Among the other things he should do when practising in private, the preacher should take pains to correct faults of the tongue, if he should suffer any such defect, as for instance if he cannot pronounce well

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the letter R or S or some other, or if his tongue is too hasty and swift, or his voice hoarse by nature and less audible, or it has some other defect whereby it does not seem very fit for the office of preaching. Nor should the preacher lose hope that this could happen, even if it does not happen immediately. For we read of the greatest orators that at first they struggled with a marked defect of the tongue or voice, and yet afterward they brought such force to bear on themselves to remove the fault that presently they lacked that defect entirely. And I have experienced this both in myself and in others dwelling with me. However, if someone suffers a marked defect of the tongue or voice that he cannot correct with any practice, I would advise that he not betake himself much to pursuing the office of preaching, even though he have skill in preaching, because even though no defect is found in the appearance of a powerful ruler, nonetheless the handicap of his minister seriously weakens his performance.38 Let the preacher take pains to observe the foregoing lessons diligently. Otherwise, without doubt every sermon of his will be less pleasing either to God or to men. If, on the other hand, he observes the aforementioned lessons, he will put aside his timidity and fear when he goes forth to preach. For timidity seriously upsets the memory and causes forgetfulness, on top of which it hinders the functions not only of the tongue but also of the body’s other members. But the aforementioned practice conducted in secret sharply reduces it or dispels it altogether, because, as Vegetius says, ‘no one fears to do what he believes he has learned well.’39 Therefore, let the preacher go forth to pursue such a great duty with devotion and purity of mind, as if he believed he were going forth to celebrate the heavenly mystery, trusting more in the help of God, whose angel and spiritual messenger he is, than in his own skill or strength. notes 1 Thomas Waleys, De modo componendi sermones 1: ‘De qualitate praedicatoris,’ in Artes praedicandi: Contribution à l’histoire de la rhétorique au moyen âge, ed. Thomas-M. Charland, Publications de l’institut d’études médiévales d’Ottawa 7 (Paris and Ottawa: J. Vrin, 1936), 329–41. Besides translating Charland’s Latin text, I have added, clarified, and occasionally corrected information on the sources used by Waleys. 2 1 Cor. 1:17.

How (Not) to Preach  177 3 Gal. 2:7. 4 Is. 40:9. 5 Matt. 5:1. 6 Luke 6:17. 7 Ps. 49(50):16, 18. 8 Rom. 2:21–2. 9 Both ‘aurea’ and ‘aureola’ mean ‘golden,’ though the latter can be used to designate a ‘golden crown.’ 10 Cf. Matt. 6:2, 5, 16. 11 James 1:5. 12 1 Kings 3:6–9. 13 Plato, Timaeus 27c. 14 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, chapter 124 (28 August): ‘Vestimenta ejus et calceamenta et ornamenta alia nec nitida nimium nec abjecta plurimum, sed ex moderato et competenti habitu erant.’ Jacobi a Voragine Legenda aurea: Vulgo Historia Lombardica dicta, ed. J.G. Theodor Graesse, 3rd ed. (Breslau: W. Koebner, 1890; repr. Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1969), 554–5. 15 Matt. 3:4. 16 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, chapter 125 (29 August), attributes this detail to [Petrus Comestor], Historia scholastica. However, Comestor’s account of the invention makes no mention of the haircloth (PL 198.1575). Similarities in wording suggest that Waleys took as his source the Legenda aurea, written by a fellow Dominican: ‘caput ejus invenerunt saccis cilicinis involutum vestibus, aestimo, quibus in deserto fuerat involutus’; Legenda aurea, ed. Graesse, 572. 17 I accept Charland’s emendation of (MS) ‘extrahendo’ to ‘retrahendo.’ 18 Regula Sancti Augustini 4.21. 19 Cf. Durandus, Rationale diuinorum officiorum 6.68.6, on the way to read Christ’s Passion in church: ‘Also, it is not read entirely in the tone of the Gospel, but the music of Christ’s words is intoned more softly, to signify how much more sweetly Christ’s words sounded in his own mouth than in the mouth of whichever evangelist is speaking, whose [own] words are pronounced in the tone of the Gospel. By contrast, the words of the most wicked Jews [are read] loudly and with a harsh voice, to designate how they spoke harshly to Christ.’ (Non legitur etiam tota sub tono euangelii, sed cantus uerborum Christi dulcius modulatur, ad notandum quanto dulcius uerba Christi in ipsius ore resonabant quam in ore cuiuslibet euangeliste referentis, cuius uerba in tono euangelii proferuntur. Verba uero impiisimorum Iudeorum, clamose et cum asperitate uocis, ad designandum quomodo ipsi Christo aspere loquebantur.) Guillelmi Duranti Rationale

178  Martin Camargo diuinorum officiorum, ed. A. Davril and T.M. Thibodeau, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis 140–140B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995–2000), 140A:329. 20 Aristotle, De anima 3.13.435b13–15, 3.4.429a31–b 2. 21 I accept Charland’s emendation of (MS) ‘fuso’ to ‘voci.’ 22 1 Cor. 14:4. 23 1 Cor. 14:8–9. 24 1 Cor. 14: 19. 25 Job 4: 2. 26 I emend Charland’s ‘alleget’ to ‘alliget.’ 27 Is. 40: 2. 28 Ps. 52(53):6. 29 Pseudo-Chrysostom, Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, Hom. 25, supra Matt. 10:27 (PG 56.762). 30 Is. 56:10. 31 Is. 6:5. 32 Ez. 33:7–8. 33 Chrysostom, De laudibus sancti Pauli apostoli, Homilia 6 (PG 50.507). In place of Waleys’s ‘miles’ (soldier), the Latin translation of Chrysostom reads ‘millies’ (a thousand times), which accurately translates the Greek ‘mb.’ 34 I accept Charland’s emendation of (MS) ‘autem’ to ‘enim.’ 35 Gregory I, XL Homiliarum in evangelia libri duo 2.23 (PL 76.1182B). 36 Prov. 25:16. 37 Vegetius, Epit. de re mil. 1.11.18. 38 I read ‘actio’ here in its broad sense (performance); but the possible pun on its meaning as a term in technical rhetoric (delivery) is lost in translation. 39 Vegetius, Epit. de re mil. 1.1.

9 The Radical, Yet Orthodox, Margery Kempe fiona tolhurst

Since its first publication in 1934, The Book of Margery Kempe has elicited critical reactions ranging from categorical rejection to complete acceptance – acceptance that became tangible when it gained a place in the Norton Anthology of English Literature in 1986, thereby entering the canon of English literature.1 One way of accounting for this profound change in the reception of The Book of Margery Kempe is to trace how developments in medieval studies, particularly the advent of feminist scholarship within the field, made this unusual spiritual autobiography a legitimate object of study for both scholars and students. Nancy Bradley Warren’s recent survey of Margery Kempe scholarship demonstrates that feminist approaches to religious texts in Middle English brought this mystic from the periphery of medieval studies, where she had resided between 1934 until 1980, to its centre by the 1990s.2 Although the increasing variety of critical approaches to medieval English literature has enabled scholars and general readers alike to appreciate Margery Kempe’s contribution to the tradition of mystical writing as well as her significance as a woman writer of the Middle Ages, the post-1990 critical climate has made Margery Kempe the radical much more visible than Margery Kempe the orthodox Christian. Two of the most influential interpretations of The Book of Margery Kempe explore its transgressive and potentially radical content: Karma Lochrie’s Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (1991), which presents Kempe as a challenger of, and victor over, patriarchal oppression, and Lynn Staley’s Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (1994), which presents her as a subversive social critic.3 By using these two arguments for Kempe’s radicalism as a point of entry into The Book of Margery Kempe, readers are better prepared to discover that Kempe is not only an orthodox and

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conventional fifteenth-century Englishwoman but also a problematic recipient of critical praise. Although Lochrie focuses on literary and mystical contexts and Staley on social and historical ones, both scholars produce readings of The Book of Margery Kempe that highlight its radical elements while acknowledging its underlying orthodoxy. Translations of the Flesh documents Kempe’s ‘displac[ing] the secret text of ecclesiastical culture with her own bodily reading of Christ’s Passion’ (196), an achievement that not only allies her with the subversion Lochrie defines as inherent in late medieval female mysticism but also makes Kempe a transgressor within the traditionally male world of Latinity – a world she finally ‘rejects’ (3, 119). Lochrie locates within Kempe’s narrative voice a transgressive, female, and empowering laughter, and she highlights within The Book imitations of the Virgin Mary’s sorrow for the dead Christ that ‘are proclamations of [Kempe’s] own privileged reading of Christ’s body’ (194). According to Lochrie, Kempe, through her public weeping which silences the language of male ecclesiastics, ‘arrogates to herself these [clerical] prerogatives while remaining outside the sites of their practice: the cloister, the pulpit, the anchorage’ (196–7). Nevertheless, Lochrie underscores the fact that Kempe’s uncontrollable weeping and crying out – although these actions seem bizarre to today’s readers – are fully orthodox within a late medieval cultural context because they are ‘quite close to fifteenth-century representations of the Virgin at the Crucifixion’ in medieval drama; therefore, these cryings are proof of Kempe’s ‘reading of the body of Christ,’ and of how ‘Christ’s body … authorizes and embodies her own speech’ (7–8). Furthermore, Kempe’s portrait of herself as a terrible sinner who, after conversion, becomes the best of Jesus’ lovers – though extreme from a post-modern point of view – likewise reflects late medieval Christian practice. Through this portrait she emulates Mary Magdalene’s seeking ‘the body of Christ in mystical experience’ and the saint’s popular image, particularly Mary’s ‘role as penitent sinner’ and ‘her superior love of Christ’ (73). Lochrie also underscores Kempe’s orthodox approach to the contentious issue of women as teachers. By distinguishing between teaching (which happens outside the pulpit) and preaching (which is the prerogative only of ordained priests) Kempe, echoing the fifteenth-century treatise Speculum Christiani (Mirror of Christians), distances herself from Lollards who made no such distinction (111–12). Lynn Staley focuses on the radical social critique that she argues is implicit in Kempe’s book; however, Staley’s introduction to Dissenting

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Fictions acknowledges that Margery Kempe ‘creates a work that is open to radically opposed readings’ (5), and her analysis acknowledges the possibility of Kempe’s orthodoxy. Because Staley credits Kempe with a talent that Lochrie does not, that of ‘deliberate self-fashioning’ (9), Staley interprets The Book of Margery Kempe as ‘designed to be a disturbing and difficult reading experience’ (3–4) and as achieving a ‘profoundly radical investigation into the core of human social existence’ through the consistent deployment of the figure of ‘Margery,’ who gradually achieves an identity as an individual (193). According to Staley, through this protagonist, Kempe ‘expand[s]’ the categories of ‘sacred biography and devotional prose’ in order to critique English secular and ecclesiastical authorities for fragmenting society (4, 199); as a result, Kempe can ‘scrutiniz[e] the very foundations of community’ and construct an alternative, non-hierarchical community based upon true charity (4, 198). In short, Dissenting Fictions likens Kempe to authors traditionally credited with self-conscious artistry, such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, but does not argue that Kempe’s possible use of orthodoxy as a cover for subversive social critique makes her a Lollard or any other kind of heretic. In fact, Staley carefully acknowledges the possible orthodoxy of both ‘Margery’ and ‘Kempe.’ When discussing the trial of ‘Margery’ before the archbishop of York, Staley notes that it can be seen as orthodox or socially radical, ‘either as an instance of Margery’s successful rebuttal of charges of heresy or as a slyly subversive commentary upon the English church’ (5). When discussing the subversive ‘implications of [Margery’s] actions and beliefs,’ Staley confirms that ‘her views are orthodox’ (150). Similarly, when arguing that The Book of Margery Kempe refers to religious controversy during the first quarter of the fifteenth century, Staley explains that ‘the references may, as Meech and Allen suggest, be intended to guarantee Margery’s orthodoxy’ (161). Furthermore, despite her interest in Kempe’s subversive actions, Staley includes both the socially normative behaviour of ‘Margery’ and the possible orthodoxy of ‘Kempe’ in her analysis. In the case of ‘Margery,’ her ‘willingness’ to pay her husband John’s debts in order to free herself from marital relations ‘signifies her identity as a creature bound to him, and through him to the greater community’ (63). Therefore, with an identity grounded in her role as wife, ‘Margery’ fits some social norms. Furthermore, Margery’s purchase of a pardon, ‘as any Christian should’ do, likewise marks her as conventional despite Staley’s interest in the subversive potential of the book’s portrait of a divided England

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– a portrait that contrasts with the image of social unity King Henry V tried to construct through a royal progress celebrating his victory at Agincourt (165–9). In the final chapter of Dissenting Fictions, however, Staley acknowledges Kempe’s possible orthodoxy. Because Margery Kempe attempts to displace Saint Bridget in the minds of East Anglians, Staley adds, ‘it is tempting to say that Kempe’s orthodoxy is confirmed by her persistent focus upon pilgrimage’ (179, 190). This attempt to displace a fellow holy woman is one that might lead readers to conclude that sainthood is Kempe’s ultimate goal in writing her life story. Thus Staley, like Lochrie, offers readers a detailed and convincing interpretation of Margery Kempe as socially radical; however, both Translations of the Flesh and Dissenting Fictions leave readers wondering how much evidence of the mystic’s orthodoxy The Book of Margery Kempe might contain. Given that Kempe reports several incidents in which she is accused of, and is sometimes arrested for, Lollardy (1.13.901, 1.46.3690–2, 1.52.4114–16, 1.54.4413–16, 1.55.4538–9), any discussion of Kempe’s orthodoxy must clarify her relationship with this English form of heresy.4 Lochrie and Staley encourage further consideration of this issue, for Lochrie asserts that ‘Kempe’s own preaching and teaching raise the specter of Lollardy,’ a spectre that forces Kempe to ‘assert her own orthodoxy as a Christian’ (108); and Staley labels the story ‘Margery’ tells about a bear that consumes and then excretes flowers as ‘all too like Lollard attacks on the doctrine of transubstantiation’ (8). Because scholarly definitions of Lollardy vary, the specificity of Andrew E. Larsen’s definition provides a useful starting point when considering Kempe as a possible Lollard. Larsen defines a Lollard as ‘someone in the period after 1377 who shares a significant number of beliefs associated with John Wyclif and his identifiable followers.’5 The data that both Larsen and Maureen Jurkowski present, however, define a Lollard more specifically as someone who rejects medieval Christian doctrines and practices including the doctrine of transubstantiation, the veneration of saints, the worship of images, the swearing of oaths, the observance of special days, confession, pilgrimage, fasting and abstinence, tithing, and the granting of papal indulgences.6 Certainly, Kempe reports acting in ways that left her open to heresy charges and possible execution: her book presents her as speaking of the Gospel, behaviour which one clerk interprets as preaching; criticizing others for oathswearing; playing the role of a bride of Christ despite having borne fourteen children; and embracing an ascetic lifestyle as a pilgrim rather

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than a nun.7 Nevertheless, Kempe’s participation in the Lollard movement is unlikely given that her social position, marital situation, markedly female piety, and self-identification as a prophet all violate the norms of English Lollardy. Shannon McSheffrey has documented both that the movement ‘provided new opportunities for … a very small number of elite women’ and that ‘Lollards viewed the married state as both natural and virtuous’ while ‘most virulently attack[ing] precisely those aspects of late medieval Catholicism that most reflected popular creativity, and thus women’s devotion.’8 Based on the testimony of her book, Kempe embodies the opposite of Lollard norms: she is solidly middle-class,9 implicitly rejects the married state when she chooses celibacy, and enacts an extreme version of women’s devotion through her cryings that reflect medieval representations of the Virgin Mary’s grief. Because Kempe positions herself as a prophet, her potential Lollardy becomes an even more remote possibility, for ‘Lollard women were not prophets or mystics, and they … acted only in ways that were traditionally open to women.’10 Furthermore, if Kempe relied upon ‘living holy books’ – upon spoken rather than written access to scripture – she would not have posed a serious threat to church teachings about laypeople’s reception of the Word.11 Assessing the meaning of actions that Kempe attributes to her fictional self is difficult: her narration provides little interpretive information, and episcopal records fail to corroborate her claims to being tried at Leicester and preaching in London.12 Nevertheless, given the necessity of relying upon The Book of Margery Kempe for information regarding its author, it is worth noting that Kempe appears to have supported most of the aspects of Christian practice that Lollards abhorred. Despite her sharing with Lollards a willingness to be critical of dishonest clerics, a passion for criticizing swearing, and a desire to explicate scripture, her reported activities position her as thoroughly orthodox. In her book, Kempe neither ‘denie[s]’ the ‘special powers’ that priests acquired through ordination nor ‘repudiate[s] other elements of medieval Catholicism, such as fasting, pilgrimages, the adoration of images, the invocation of saints, and the keeping of holy days’ as lacking scriptural origins.13 In fact, Kempe appears to have strictly adhered to the Christian faith as practised by most of the English laity of her time: she presents herself as fasting, using pilgrimage as a way to prove her devotion to God, adoring images of Christ as well as people who resemble those images, invoking and receiving aid from saints and her good angel, and keeping holy days.14 Her statement that she

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kept vigil, wore a hair-shirt, and was shriven up to two or three times a day while bearing children characterizes her as extraordinarily orthodox in her Christian practice (1.3.367–79). Nowhere does The Book of Margery Kempe explicitly criticize any of the abovementioned orthodox activities. Kempe even reports owning relics – a staff made with a piece of Moses’s rod, which she says she valued highly (1.49.3910–12), and ‘many gret relykys’ she received from the Friars of the Temple (1.30.2439–40). Although Staley argues that Kempe’s discussion of pilgrimage has a potentially subversive subtext (192–3), the number and variety of conventional Christian practices in which Kempe’s fictionalized self participates leave Kempe little Lollard-like space to inhabit. Kempe’s claims to have been arrested as a heretic in Leicester, at the Humber, in Beverly, and twice in York could be interpreted as evidence of heresy; however, as Staley has noted, surviving ecclesiastical records do not confirm these claims (173–4). Therefore, despite the impossibility of knowing what Margery Kempe actually believed, the lack of episcopal notice of her suggests that authorities did not see her as heterodox: otherwise they would presumably have noted her as a threat and responded to her as such. Because ‘A woman derided by the London priesthood who nonetheless to all intents and purposes preached her way through the city followed and esteemed by the common people might be expected to excite a certain amount of official concern at a time when Lollard trials were not yet a distant memory’ (74), the lack of recorded interest in Kempe suggests a rather mundane scenario: perhaps she fancied herself, or chose to portray herself, as more of a social threat than she was. As a result, there could be truth in the claim in The Book of Margery Kempe that the mystic proved to the satisfaction of authorities that she was not a heretic through reciting the articles of faith – especially that of transubstantiation (1.48.3799–818, 1.51.4068– 73, 1.52.4163–71) – and by retelling tales she had told while travelling (1.54.4495–523). Furthermore, whatever Kempe might have believed about women and preaching, her fictionalized self underscores that she neither used a pulpit nor preached (1.52.4213–14). This distinction invokes the ecclesiastical definition of preaching – ‘teaching Christian doctrine in public’ – and therefore reinforces respect for a distinction between preaching and informal discourse about theology.15 Given that most Lollards ‘preferred to use the vernacular as a matter of principle,’16 knowing Kempe’s attitude toward speaking Latin, as opposed to English, in a theological debate would clarify to what extent she shared beliefs with Lollards. Unfortunately, however, Kempe’s

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book does not comment directly upon the issue of language. Although Kempe informs the steward of Leicester that he must speak English, not Latin, to her if he expects her to answer ‘resonabely’ (1.47.3733), this comment is not necessarily a marker of heterodoxy. According to Anne Hudson, Lollard ‘heretics … held that the use of the common language that all could understand was the only proper instrument of christian instruction.’17 It is, therefore, possible that Kempe’s comment to the steward of Leicester is an indirect expression of such a belief, but her narration of this incident does not disparage Latin in any way. Alternatively, Kempe’s declaration could be a straightforward admission regarding her linguistic competence: perhaps she could understand little Latin, or perhaps she knew the church’s language to an extent but was incapable either of holding a conversation in Latin or of participating in a theological debate in Latin. Therefore, given the uncertain meaning of this comment, readers cannot learn from it whether Kempe’s attitude toward the communication of scripture in English was Lollard-like; however, the weight of the evidence in her book supports an interpretation of Margery Kempe as orthodox. Kempe’s disturbingly literal visions of the life of Christ in which she alters iconic biblical scenes might at first appear to border on heresy, but their context makes them safely orthodox. Because The Book of Margery Kempe relies upon several contemplative texts, it ‘fits neatly into the visionary narrative genre.’18 By grounding her book in texts such as the Stimulus Amoris (The Prick of Love) and the Latin and English versions of the Meditationes passionis Christi (Meditations on the Passion of Christ), Kempe locates her visions within the ‘meditative tradition of projecting oneself into, and empathising with, the scenes of Christ’s life.’19 In addition, as she projects herself into these scenes, Kempe puts her interactions with sacred figures into an appropriate visionary context. When she describes how she serves as the Blessed Virgin Mary’s nursemaid and then as the archangel Gabriel in the Annunciation, Kempe is careful to explain that Jesus ‘answeryd to hir mende’ – and through that answer made it possible for her to have a vision of Mary’s birth (1.6.545, 547–53). Similarly, when Kempe plays Gabriel’s role, that event happens within the context of Jesus’ answer; therefore, it is marked as an imagined – rather than literal – link with the Holy Family. As this sequence continues, however, Kempe risks profaning the scriptural account of Jesus’ birth because, after line 559, she fails to remind readers about her being ‘in contemplacyon’ (1.6.559). Given Kempe’s detailed description of how she acts as Jesus’ hand-

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maid in a literal sense (first begging for swaddling clothes for the baby Jesus and preparing a bed for him and his mother, and then begging to obtain food for them), it is easy for readers to forget that Kempe is not claiming literal participation in biblical events (1.6.580–5). Nevertheless, Kempe continues to operate within the bounds of the meditative tradition when Jesus ‘answeryd to hir sowle’ (1.32.2658) regarding their physical union. As a result, when the Lord says to Kempe, ‘“thu mayst boldly take me in the armys of thi sowle and kyssen my mowth, myn hed and my fete as swetly as thow wylt”’ (1.36.2956–7, my emphasis), even apparent copulation with Jesus remains safely within the bounds of orthodoxy. Although Jesus says, ‘“I nedys be homly wyth the and lyn in thi bed wyth the”’ (1.36.2950), Kempe’s visionary framework is entirely orthodox. This literalism might, however, raise a question of a different sort in readers’ minds: if Kempe is as sophisticated an author as she is so often taken to be, why does the narration of these visions not offer a clearer and more meaningful interpretive context for them? Whether or not readers attribute narratorial sophistication to Margery Kempe, they are likely to see implicit challenges to male ecclesiastical authority in both the authoritative narrative voice she constructs and her positioning herself above powerful men. However, the authoritative tone of the narration has a conventional source, for it reflects Kempe’s increasing confidence in the correctness of her behaviour as well as in the power she derives from God’s gifts to her: And so sche was evyrmor strengthyd in the lofe of owyr Lord and the mor bold to suffyr schamys and reprevys for hys sake in every place ther sche cam, for the grace that God wrowt in hir of wepyng, sobbyng, and crying, the which grace sche myth not wythstonde whan God wold send it. And evyr sche prevyd hir felyngys trewe, and tho behestys that God had behyte hir whil she was in Inglond, and in other placys also, thei fellyn to hir in effect lych as sche had felt beforn, and therfor sche durst the bettyr receyven swech spechys and dalyawns, and the mor boldly werkyn theraftyr. (1.30.2418–27)

Because of this confidence, Kempe categorizes men based on their acceptance or rejection of her cryings, thus underscoring the correctness of her own position. In order to prove herself justified, Kempe carefully distinguishes between ‘Other gostly men [that] lovyd hir and favowrd hir the mor’ (1.28.2249–50) and those who cursed her, said she cried out because of an evil spirit, sickness, or drunkenness, or desired

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her to be in heaven or ‘in the se in a bottumles boyt’ (1.28.2245–9). Kempe implicitly challenges the authority of men who criticize her by first noting how ‘Sum gret clerkys’ have said that neither the Virgin Mary nor the other saints cried so much and have told her that she is capable of restraining herself (1.28.2250–3), and then demonstrating the clerics’ wrongheadedness. Kempe even implies that God demands that she disobey such narrow-minded clerics when she explains how her attempts to suppress the cryings result only in her crying ‘wondyr lowde’ (1.28.2261). Because her amanuensis receives the gift of tears following his decision not to trust in the truth of Kempe’s feelings, he learns not only that God gives this gift to whomever he wishes but also that Kempe ‘felt meche mor plente of grace than evyr dede he, wythowtyn any comparison’ (1.62.5150–1). Through this contrast between herself and her amanuensis, Kempe challenges the authority of the very man whose recording of her story bestows authority upon it. In short, the narrative voice Kempe constructs is not that of a typical mystic, for ‘the mystic always doubts her own speech and her receptivity to divine speech.’20 Kempe, however, does not appear to doubt her own speech and, even when she doubts whether it is God who speaks to her, finally reinforces an image of herself as a mystic who has a singular relationship with the divine. For example, when Kempe doubts that it is God telling her to wear white (1.30.2470–6), he simply reassures her by saying he will always help her, has never deceived her, would never ask her to do anything that does not honour God and benefit her soul, and will pour grace upon her (1.30.2477–82). Even Kempe’s potentially generous resistance to the idea that some people will be damned – an idea God teaches her – finally strengthens the readers’ impression that Kempe is in a separate category from her fellow Christians and is superior to them. Despite offering a lengthy account of how God punishes her harshly for twelve days because of her disobedience (1.59.4842–909), Kempe ends this account of her resistance to the idea of damnation by reaffirming her extraordinary link with God: ‘owr Lord spekyn to hir as he was wone to don’ (1.59.4911–12). By presenting her intimacy with God as a return to normalcy, Kempe reasserts her unique ‘receptivity to divine speech’ indirectly but effectively. This superior tone, and its implicit challenge to the authority of all clerics, is likewise detectable when Kempe uses divine authority to position herself above both her German-speaking confessor and her amanuensis, men whose worldly power exceeds her own. Although her confessor has required Kempe to stop dressing as a bride of Christ

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in order to prove her obedience to him (1.34.2760–7), both Kempe’s suffering after she begins to wear black and the Lord Christ’s directive that she ignore a priest who approves of her ceasing to wear white reinforce one message: she was wrong to obey her German confessor when her Lord wanted her to behave otherwise (1.34.2768–94). When Jesus commands Kempe to ask her confessor for permission to wear white again, this message becomes obvious (1.37.2997–3001).21 Furthermore, the superior tone in which Kempe reports her confessor’s response to her request suggests that the power she possesses – because of her intimate relationship with God – trumps that of her spiritual advisor: ‘And whan sche teld hym the wyl of owr Lord, he durst not onys sey “nay”. And so weryd sche white clothys evyr aftyr’ (1.37.3001–3). Although Kempe’s invocation of divine authority here allows her to ignore God’s representative on earth, this episode also demonstrates a fundamental Christian truth: that Christ’s authority supersedes that of any of his church’s representatives. Chapter 24 of The Book of Margery Kempe challenges male ecclesiastical authority even more aggressively than the episodes discussed above because it demonstrates the superiority of Margery Kempe’s knowledge compared to that of her amanuensis. Kempe explains how the priest serving as her amanuensis bullies her into praying for this knowledge, ‘yet he wold not alwey yevyn credens to hir wordys, and that hyndryd hym in this maner that folwyth’ (1.24.1773–5). In fact, he suffers twice for his unbelief. In the first instance, the priest tries to get alms for a young man who has spun a good story of woe but whom Kempe feels is dishonest; when Kempe dissuades potential patrons from aiding the charlatan, the priest gives him silver. After the young man departs with the money and then fails to return, Kempe moralizes, ‘And than he repentyd hym that he had not don aftyr hir cownsel’ (1.24.1838–9). In the second instance, an older confidence man offers to sell a portable breviary to the priest. The priest insists he knows better than Kempe, who declares that the seller ‘“is not to trustyn upon”’ (1.24.1847–8). By failing to believe Kempe a second time, her amanuensis receives another disappointment – for the bookseller never returns – but learns he should do as Kempe advises: ‘the man wold nevyr comyn at the preste aftyr, and than the preste knew wel that the forseyd creaturys felyng was trewe’ (1.24.1876–7). Nevertheless, despite the fact that these two episodes highlight the power Kempe presents as justifying her challenge to men in positions of authority, she never undermines male ecclesiastical authority directly.

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In fact, Kempe validates her own right to speak by invoking ecclesiastical authority in a deferential and respectful manner. In her preface, she explains that only repeated validation from church officials enabled her to believe her visions came from the Lord and to act in accordance with them: Than had this creatur mech drede for illusyons and deceytys of hyr gostly enmys. Than went sche be the byddyng of the Holy Gost to many worshepful clerkys, bothe archebysshopys and byshoppys, doctowrs of dyvynyte and bachelers also. Sche spak also wyth many ankrys … And thei alle that sche schewed hyr secretys unto seyd sche was mech bownde to loven ower Lord for the grace that he schewyd unto hyr, and cownseld hyr to folwyn hyr mevynggys and hyr sterringgys, and trustly belevyn it weren of the Holy Gost and of noon evyl spyryt. (Preface, lines 65–75)

It is noteworthy that Kempe lists her advisors’ ranks (archbishop, bishop, doctor of divinity, bachelor, anchorite) – presumably to legitimize her visions through their authority. Having defined male ecclesiastics as supporting her words and actions, Kempe then invokes that support several times (1.9.676–85, 1.15.1055–72, 1.68.5560–603). Because these invocations of institutional authority do not appear to be in any way ironic or mocking, they suggest Kempe’s acceptance of male ecclesiastical authority – or at least a willingness to defer to churchmen as experts in the workings of God. Lochrie has argued of mystical texts in general that ‘Without the recourse to institutional authority, the mystical text must continually renew its claim in divine utterance’ (83), and of Margery Kempe specifically that she ‘exhibits an obvious irreverence for the very authority she seeks’ (135). Yet The Book of Margery Kempe has ‘recourse to institutional authority’ and often exhibits reverence for the ‘institutional authority’ (83) of the church that reinforces her claim to divine utterance. Kempe’s request to have the letter and seal from the archbishop of York ‘into recorde that I have excusyd me ageyn myn enmys, and nothyng is attyd ageyns me, neithyr herrowr ne heresy’ is emblematic of her recourse to such authority (1.54.4511–12). In short, Kempe appears to hedge her theological bet: she relies upon Jesus’ reassurance that she is God’s prophet and Christ’s bride as well as upon the church’s validation of those roles. When Margery Kempe – a laywoman – appropriates the title of prophet, she infringes upon male ecclesiastical power by receiving and interpreting the Word of God without a priest as intermediary. Kempe

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gains the status of prophet when Lord Jesus tells her, ‘“thei that heryn the, thei heryn the voys of God”’ (1.10.702). Furthermore, when Jesus explains, ‘“I have ordeyned the to knele befor the Trynyte for to prey for al the world, for many hundryd thowsand sowlys schal be savyd be thi prayers”’ (1.7.611–13), Kempe takes on one of the prophet’s functions – asking God for mercy on behalf of sinners. She then takes on another one, that of leading sinners back to God, when the Lord says to her, ‘“Dowtyr, ther is no so synful man in erth levyng, yf he wyl forsake hys synne and don aftyr thi cownsel, swech grace as thu behestyst hym I wyl confermyn for thi lofe”’ (1.10.703–5). In addition, like a prophet she is privy to information regarding who is in purgatory and who will live or die (1.19.1492–5, 1.23.1723–46), and, according to the words of Jesus himself, she has been ‘“ordeynd … to be a merowr amongys hem”’ (1.78.6242) to provide an example that can lead others to salvation. To develop her self-portrait as a prophet, Kempe contrasts the warm welcome she receives from foreign peoples with the emotional abuse the English inflict upon her, even paraphrasing the New Testament’s definition of a prophet: ‘And sche fond alle pepyl good onto hir and gentyl, saf only hir owyn cuntremen’ (1.30.2443–4).22 Because of this combination of narrative details, Kempe appears to be what Jesus calls her: one of his chosen souls (1.14.988–9). Within the context of medieval rethinking of female sanctity, however, neither Kempe’s role as prophet nor her role as bride of Christ is necessarily subversive. Certainly the increasing proportion of female saints during the later Middle Ages made Kempe’s desire to join the ranks of holy women more conventional than it would have been earlier in the medieval period. This expansion of the ranks of the saints had a scriptural precedent in female prophets such as Miriam (Exodus 15:20–1), Deborah (Judges 4:4–10), Huldah (2 Kings 22:11–20), and Anna (Luke 2:36–8). In addition, because Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend had integrated the legends of female saints into mainstream Christian culture during the thirteenth century,23 Kempe’s likening herself to a prophet would not have seemed fundamentally transgressive to late medieval readers. Furthermore, in the mid-thirteenth century, Eustace of Arras had offered a way around the contradiction between the church’s doctrine forbidding women to teach and the ‘apostolic activities’ of female saints: ‘a woman could speak authoritatively if she were gifted with prophecy and if she herself followed an exemplary and pure lifestyle.’24 Given these developments in the perception of holy women, Kempe’s careful construction of her image as both God’s

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prophet and a woman living in purity keeps her within the bounds of orthodoxy; as a result, she embodies a medieval norm for female holiness. Kempe’s invocation of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary as a model for her loud cryings likewise integrates her into the spiritual mainstream (1.62.5173–4), for Elizabeth’s life as a married woman did not prevent her from earning sainthood. Even Kempe’s becoming a travelling bride of Christ, although unusual for an English mystic, likens her to female saints of the Continent such as Saint Mary of Oignies, Blessed Angela of Foligno, and Blessed Dorothea of Montau, women who sought to become spouses of Christ outside of the convent and yet received official validation as holy women.25 Examination of Kempe’s apparent social attitudes – even in episodes in which she uses one man’s power to neutralize another’s – reveals her to be conventional, for she works within and displays an acceptance of her society’s power structure. For example, when the mayor of Leicester challenges Kempe’s right to wear white clothes, she challenges his authority by invoking that of ‘thes worthy clerkys’ (1.48.3845) – the only men to whom she will explain her behaviour (1.48.3840–6). She then invokes the authority of her confessors, her ‘gostly faderys’ (1.48.3853), to gain the approval of these clerks. In this sequence, Kempe twice uses one male power to neutralize another, but her continual deference to men suggests her acceptance of their authority. Kempe’s account of the archbishop of Canterbury’s investigation into her new lifestyle fits the same pattern, for she uses clerical authority to facilitate her questionable actions. Nevertheless, she makes sure to mention that the archbishop ‘aprevyd hir maner of levyng’ in order to show that the church hierarchy accords with Christ’s support of her manner of dress and public weeping (1.16.1172), again suggesting her acceptance of ecclesiastical authority. When the archbishop of York wants to get Kempe out of his diocese, she invokes her confessor’s authority in order to remain in the city long enough to speak with him, thereby overriding the power of the archbishop using the power of the sacrament through which the church regulated the laity’s everyday behaviour (1.52.4189– 93). Nevertheless, her action suggests her respect for the orthodox practice of confession. Kempe even gets a doctor of divinity, who is her friend, to convince his colleague to accept her annoying and strange outcries during sermons (1.68.5580–93). Here again she seeks and gains the support of a learned man whose knowledge of theology the church recognizes (1.68.5594–603). Therefore, by invoking and manipulating male ecclesiastical authority, Kempe always works within the church’s

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male-controlled hierarchy despite her tendency to obey both clerics and Jesus Christ selectively.26 Furthermore, the freedom Kempe attains through manipulating men with power enables her to adopt a saint’s lifestyle – an entirely orthodox goal for the late medieval period. Kempe’s engaging in business ventures (1.2.275–310), confronting various authorities, and bargaining with her husband for her freedom from marital relations (1.11.727–86) have earned her praise as a social rebel, as a woman who acts like a man.27 Nevertheless, these same actions could indicate Kempe’s social conformity, for they are likely to be functions of her upbringing in the town of Bishop’s Lynn. In this town the wealth generated by commercial success led to a class struggle between members of the middle class and aristocrats, a struggle that in 1377 resulted in the ‘riotous expulsion of the bishop in 1377 by the armed populace of Lynn’ and one that continued well into the fifteenth century.28 Although Kempe’s brewing and milling businesses might have made her the primary breadwinner in her household, she was not socially radical: there were plenty of other women in both Kempe’s town and era who participated in the trades.29 Maureen Fries describes Kempe’s behaviour with members of the clergy and town officials as like that of a man:30 she instructs a monk who then reforms (1.12.833–56), lectures the bishop of Worcester’s men into silence and acquiescence after rebuking them for using foul language (1.45.3607– 10, 3605), and rebukes the mayor of Leicester (1.48.3831–9). Nevertheless, within the context of the ongoing social strife in Bishop’s Lynn, these encounters could be functions of Kempe’s class-based loyalty. Like her debates with powerful men, Kempe’s negotiating her way out of marital relations with her husband John enables her to strengthen her position within the social hierarchy. She sounds like an empowered woman when – after her husband John proposes that she lie in his bed as she used to, pay his debts, and eat and drink with him on Fridays in exchange for her chastity (1.11.746–50) – Kempe makes a counter­ offer: payment of his financial debts and eating with him on Fridays in exchange for her freedom from physical relations (1.11.778–84). Nevertheless, the fact that she needs John’s permission reveals Kempe’s identity as ‘a creature bound to him [her husband].’31 In addition, John’s acceptance of his wife’s counteroffer suggests that she had significant power in their relationship, perhaps derived from her status as the daughter of John Brunham, five-time mayor of Lynn.32 The way in which she presents this negotiation indicates both Kempe’s awareness of her social status and her willingness to use it. Furthermore, if John

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Kempe’s statement to his wife, ‘“As fre mot yowr body ben to God as it hath ben to me,”’ is sarcastic, it could reflect his resentment of her using this power (1.11.785–6). Kempe’s comments regarding her father’s prestige and her husband’s supposed lack thereof define her, early on in her spiritual career, as fully invested in a social hierarchy that positions her above her husband (1.2.263–74).33 It is also possible, however, that Kempe never saw her husband as anything but her inferior: when she describes caring for her husband after he has become both mentally unfit and physically unable to control his bowels, she defines him as a repulsive hindrance to her contemplation and as God’s means of punishing her for her earlier lust (1.76.6066–80). Kempe’s account contains no words of compassion for John. Furthermore, when she prays that John might live for another year, she does so because she wants to escape the slander that she would suffer if he died as a result of her living separately from him at the time of his accident (1.76.6022–48). This is not the concern of a social rebel. Although the episodes in which Kempe interacts with her fellow pilgrims offer readers an apparent realism that they are likely to find engaging, these same episodes reveal how strongly she embraces a socially sanctioned role: that of martyr-saint. A number of Kempe’s assertions suggest a passionate desire to earn sainthood through suffering: that the only purgatory she will know is that of slander while on earth (1.22.1640–2); that Jesus has promised her the same grace he promised to Saint Paul and to the three virgin martyr-saints Catherine of Alexandria, Margaret, and Barbara (1.22.1667–8) – all of whom died violent deaths for their faith; that although slander lowers her name now, her name will be raised up later (1.63.5231–48); and that she is willing to die a martyr’s death (1.14.949–52). Kempe admits that she does not suffer the type of physical pain that Christ did (1.53.4333–8), but she presents herself as inviting social martyrdom by annoying her fellow pilgrims so greatly that they punish her. She describes how her crying fits in response to holy communion and sacred sites interrupt both the worship of fellow Christians (1.26.1961–5, 1.28.2215–23) and the meals of fellow pilgrims and finally annoy or anger one pilgrim group so much that they will not allow her to eat with them (1.29.2382– 7); she also describes how her refusal to eat meat and using the dinner table as a place to lecture about God or recite scripture greatly annoy her companions (1.26.1972–6, 1.27.2057–139). In response to her actions, Kempe’s fellow pilgrims take mean-spirited revenge upon her: a priest steals Kempe’s sheet (1.28.2167–72), the pilgrims who refused to eat

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with her neglect to get provisions for her when they place their order (1.28.2151–2), and some ‘cuntremen’ abandon her (1.30.2460–1). This social persecution becomes extreme when – in addition to causing her to suffer ‘mech shame and mech reprefe’ as they travel – her companions first cut her gown short and dress her as a fool to ruin her ‘reputacyon,’ and then force her to sit in silence when at table (1.26.2004–10). Nevertheless, Kempe’s social martyrdom underscores her exceptional status when the innkeeper gives her his own food and offers kindness, demonstrating she has ‘mor worshep’ than her companions (1.26.2011– 16). Kempe again reinforces her bid for future sainthood by describing how, when people accuse her of hypocrisy because her cryings have become less violent than before, the Lord reassures her: ‘“In this chirche thu hast suffyrd meche schame and reprefe for the yyftys that I have yovyn the, and for the grace and goodnes that I have wrowt in the, and therefore in this cherche and in this place I schal ben worschepyd in the … Dowtyr, I schal werkyn so mech grace for the, that al the werld schal wondryn and merveylyn of my goodnes”’ (1.63.5251–7). B.A. Windeatt’s note about this episode likewise positions it in terms of Kempe’s desire for the church’s ultimate validation: ‘Margery perhaps looks forward here to her own sainthood.’34 Whether or not the events Kempe describes actually happened, they achieve two goals: they demonstrate how much her devotion to God exceeds that of her travelling companions, and they enable the fictionalized Kempe to suffer the humiliation on earth necessary to earn sainthood after her death. Her sainthood sounds guaranteed when the Lord assures her, ‘“Dowtyr, I schal makyn al the werld to wondryn of the, and many man and many woman schal spekyn of me for the lofe of the, and worshepyn me in the”’ (1.29.2395–7). Kempe’s accounts of her interactions with various officials, neararrests, and arrests likewise facilitate her future sainthood by depicting the physical threats and constant humiliation she endures (1.16.1141– 56, 1.46.3661–47.3778, and 1.52.4090–55.4608). During her examination by the archbishop of York, a ‘gret clerke’ reportedly suggests that the archbishop imprison her for forty days so that she will love God better for the rest of her life (1.54.4491–4). Then, when Kempe avoids going to prison, the archbishop wonders at her great suffering, saying, ‘“I leve ther was nevyr woman in Inglond so ferd wyththal as sche is and hath ben”’ (1.54.4506–7). The threat of imprisonment seems both constant and imminent in her book because Kempe escapes it after her arrest at the Humber only through the testimony of someone who saw her

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examination before the archbishop of York (1.55.4538–43), and escapes it in Ely only because of the archbishop’s letter she carries (1.55.4591–7); nevertheless, she does not escape being ‘cruely rebukyd’ (1.55.4594). When she goes to visit the archbishop of Canterbury and immediately criticizes the men there who swear oaths and speak inappropriately, Kempe suffers both humiliation and anxiety because a woman curses her and declares that Kempe should be burnt (1.16.1149–53). Kempe’s reported homecoming to Lynn is likewise traumatic, for ‘sche suffryd meche despite, meche reprefe, many a scorne, many a slawndyr, many a bannyng, and many a cursyng’ (1.55.4601–3). It is the danger of rape, however, that seems to worry Kempe the most – perhaps because she believed that such a physical violation would destroy her identity as a bride of Christ. She claims that the steward of Leicester leads her to his private chamber, speaks lewdly to her, and seems intent on raping her – causing her to beg for mercy and to experience ‘meche drede and meche sorwe’ (1.47.3739). Her fear of rape is so great, however, that she reveals to the evil steward information he is unworthy to receive (1.47.3748–52), and this fear reportedly remains constant even when she is an old woman: ‘sche was evyr aferd to a be ravischyd er defilyd’ (2.7.8114–15). Kempe’s many references to getting raped on the road or burnt as a heretic suggest her awareness of the possible reprisals unusual behaviour could bring,35 but they also suggest her awareness of how martyrdom – whether it might result from a heresy trial or victimization while travelling – could qualify her for sainthood.36 Although critics have celebrated Kempe for resisting both the antifeminist tradition and the hierarchical structure of medieval society,37 she attains the status of a bride of Christ by means that reveal both her orthodoxy and her distinctly unsaintly egocentricity. While it is true that Kempe escapes from the lowly position of wife on Saint Paul’s purity ladder, it is striking that she is the only exception God makes to the rule. Kempe makes her first move up the purity ladder through achieving chastity, overcoming her status as a wife. Then, she moves up from pseudo-widow to virgin status – and thus manoeuvers around church doctrine regarding women’s bodies – by claiming that Jesus himself authorizes her new rank. The Lord assures Kempe that he will protect her ‘“fro alle wykked mennys power”’ (1.15.1017–18), explains that the only purgatory she will suffer will be the ‘“slawndyr and speche of the world”’ (1.22.1641–2), orders her to wear white to please him (1.15.1018–19), and finally makes her an honorary virgin. Crucially, the Lord’s words to Kempe make wives the equivalent of

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virgins: ‘“Ya, dowtyr, trow thow rygth wel that I lofe wyfes also, and specyal tho wyfys whech woldyn levyn chast, yyf thei mygtyn have her wyl, and don her besynes to plesyn me as thow dost”’ (1.21.1568–70). Nevertheless, Kempe develops this theological position to elevate herself, not all wives, and certainly not all women. She claims that her seat near Jesus is already prepared (1.8.621–2) and that she alone protects the world from the Lord’s wrath (1.64.5322–8). The personal benefit Kempe derives from her revision of Christian theology is most evident when she, a mother of fourteen children, becomes the measure of her sex. Kempe’s Jesus allows her desire for chastity to substitute for the state of virginity. The Lord assures Kempe not only that he loves her ‘“as wel as any mayden in the world”’ (1.21.1573–4) but also that her lack of virginity will have no impact on her life after death: Jesus promises Kempe protection from bodily and spiritual harm, as if she were a virgin martyr-saint, full access to God in heaven, for she will see him face to face, and the joy of dancing in heaven ‘“wyth other holy maydens and virgynes”’ (1.22.1644–85). By becoming ‘a mayden in [her] sowle’ (1.22.1682), Kempe removes the barrier the church had erected between sexually active women and brides of Christ, thus redefining the body of a wife and mother as having the same value as a virgin’s. Because the wife/mother body contains a soul that is virginal in its intent, the difference between virgin and wife/mother no longer matters within Kempe’s theological framework – a revision that threatens the core of church doctrine regarding women. It is essential to note, however, that Christ makes only one exception to the purity rule here; therefore, a desire for personal freedom and perhaps aggrandizement – not a desire to transform church doctrine – appears to motivate Kempe’s revisionist theology.38 In addition, this revisionist theology finally reinforces medieval society’s normative, orthodox categories for female bodies by working within them. The Book of Margery Kempe reflects its author’s knowledge of church teachings based upon Saint Paul’s privileging of virginity and acceptance of marriage merely as a means of avoiding fornication.39 Jesus himself, the ultimate authority, articulates what the medieval church taught: on the ladder of female perfection, chaste widows stood below virgins, and wives much lower still. Jesus declares that he loves Kempe ‘“as wel as any mayden in the world”’ – therefore using maidenhood as the standard of measurement – immediately after he explains, ‘“the state of maydenhode be more parfyte and mor holy than the state of wedewhode, and the state of wedewhode mor parfyte than

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the state [of] wedlake”’ (1.21.1573–4, 1571–3). This phrasing suggests Kempe’s acceptance of the church’s categories for female bodies. When she discusses one of her pregnancies, Kempe works within traditional categories for women in order to appropriate the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary. First the Lord himself – playing the role of the archangel Gabriel – tells her, ‘“Dowtyr, thow art wyth childe”’ (1.21.1555). Then Kempe replies that she is unworthy either to hear the Lord speak or to have intercourse with her husband – expressing an earthly version of Marian humility (1.21.1560–2). Finally, Jesus assures Kempe that her pregnancy marks her as fruitful rather than sinful, again likening her to the Blessed Virgin: ‘“it is no synne to the, dowtyr, for it is to the rathar mede and meryte, and thow schalt have nevyr the lesse grace, for I wyl that thow bryng me forth more frwte”’ (1.21.1563–5). In response to this reassurance, Kempe defines herself as a blessed maiden by declaring, ‘“Lord Jhesu, this maner of levyng longyth to thy holy maydens”’ (1.21.1566–7). Here, then, Kempe inserts herself into the category of virgin, finally reinforcing Saint Paul’s hierarchy of virgin, widow, and wife. Thus, even Kempe’s most radical idea proves her to be an orthodox medieval Christian, as does her striving to earn sainthood through chastity.40 Certainly the current political climate in the Western world encourages scholars to locate and celebrate progressive voices in medieval texts, but there are several reasons why Margery Kempe is not necessarily such a voice. First, the freedom to travel and to worship God uninhibitedly is something she wants for herself, not for all of womankind, let alone all humankind. Furthermore, a number of the visions and other signs she receives from God provide suspiciously convenient authorization for her wearing of white clothes, cryings, and travel.41 Second, Kempe’s appropriation of the role of bride of Christ makes her an exception to Saint Paul’s hierarchy of female bodies that finally validates that hierarchy, replacing Margery Kempe the mother of fourteen with Margery Kempe the honorary virgin. Third, Kempe’s egocentricity results in her praying to God conditionally; for example, when she asks the Lord to protect her from rape, she says that – if she does get violated – she will not return to England as long as she lives (1.27.2109–12). Fourth, the model prayers at the end of The Book of Margery Kempe – ones that purport to record how she prayed – lead readers to conclude that Kempe might have had a more basic and more orthodox purpose for writing than critics often suggest: that is, to be accepted as a female prophet and gain the church’s recognition as a saint. Furthermore, because these

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model prayers reinforce the idea of Kempe’s superiority to her fellow Christians, they are proud to the point of being un-Christian. Although she prays that her tears will benefit her fellow Christians, Kempe also wants these tears to increase her merit in heaven and justify her so that all people believe her tears are a gift from God (2.10.8372–88). She then prays that the Lord will make her confessors fear God in her and love God in her, that all of her confessors and children (spiritual and biological) will receive mercy, and that the Lord will drive away all her enemies so that she may stand alone next to him (2.10.8398–521). The egocentricity of these requests clashes spectacularly with the principle of Christian humility. The final words of these prayers likewise reveal Kempe’s primary concern – her own status: ‘And for alle tho that feithyn and trustyn, er schul feithyn and trustyn, in my prayerys into the worldys ende, sweche grace as thei desiryn, gostly er bodily, to the profite of her sowlys, I pray the, Lord, grawnt hem for the multitude of thi mercy. Amen’ (2.10.8533–6, my emphasis).42 Margery Kempe’s prayers for others are, therefore, conditional on their belief in her extraordinary status. In addition, these prayers are consistent with a vision in which the Virgin Mary tells Kempe that plenary indulgence will be granted ‘“to alle tho that belevyn, and to alle tho that schul belevyn into the worldys ende, that God lovyth the and schal thankyn God for the”’ (1.73.5897–9). Not only does this vision position Margery Kempe as a conduit for plenary indulgences but it also reveals her to be lacking in Christian spirit: she cares most about those fellow Christians who increase her glory. Given the analysis offered above, the claims of some critics that female mysticism is inherently subversive might require some modification.43 Scholars can only guess at Margery Kempe’s motives for writing her book and for attributing particular actions to her fictionalized self. However, by attributing to Kempe both intellectual sophistication and social subversion, some modern critics could be reading complexity of motive and generosity of spirit into The Book of Margery Kempe that it does not possess. If Margery Kempe had wanted to integrate ideas into her book that did not concur with church doctrine, she could have either restated some of Julian of Norwich’s radical ideas – among them that God is incapable of anger at mankind and that female souls are not inferior to male ones – or tried to validate her own resistance to the idea of damnation by noting that Julian’s visions revealed no one who sinned or was damned.44 Instead of reporting anything of Julian’s speculative theology, however, Kempe selects from their ‘many days’ (1.18.1380–

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1) of conversation the material that justifies her own behaviour: she quotes Julian to confirm that, given the ‘tokenys’ Kempe has received from God, ‘“the Holy Gost dwellyth in [her] sowle”’ (1.18.1360–1). If readers assume that Margery Kempe means what she says, rather than uses language to hide her true intentions, then she emerges as a thoroughly orthodox Christian and a woman whose social attitudes make her normative for both her time and her home city of Bishop’s Lynn. In addition, it is precisely Kempe’s fervent pursuit of orthodox Christian practice and of the ultimate goal for a medieval Christian – sainthood – that causes her to care more about herself than about the members of the various communities she enters. Because she fails to express true charity for her fellow Christians or true humility when discussing her supposedly unique connection with God, Margery Kempe does not belong in the same category as her fellow English mystic Julian of Norwich. These failings help to account for pre-1990 critical assessments of The Book of Margery Kempe as lacking spiritual depth.45 Julian’s desire to assure her fellow Christians that God’s gift to her of a series of visions does not change the reality of God’s continuous and equal love of all his people could not be more different from Kempe’s desire to prove herself superior to her fellow Christians.46 Given that during the last fifty years Margery Kempe’s reputation among literary critics has evolved from that of an ‘egregious’ embarrassment to a self-conscious critic of her church and country, future study of The Book of Margery Kempe might benefit from exploring the contradictory readings to which it is open. Such exploration might reveal Margery Kempe to be more of a would-be martyr-saint than a radical social critic. Notes I gratefully acknowledge Ross G. Arthur, Robert Epstein, D. Thomas Hanks, Jr, Janet Jesmok, Sandra Opravil, William Robins, Margery M. Schib, and the anonymous readers at the University of Toronto Press for their generous and very helpful responses to earlier versions of this essay. 1 The Butler-Bowdon manuscript was published as Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe: The Text from the Unique MS. Owned by Colonel W. Butler-Bowdon, vol. 1, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS os 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940; repr. 1961, 1997).

200 Fiona Tolhurst For The Book of Margery Kempe’s first appearance in the Norton Anthology, see The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5th ed., ed. M.H. Abrams et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1986), 1:368–78. For the current edition of the anthology, see The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 8th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). Before the discovery of the Butler-Bowdon manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe in 1934, the only version of Kempe’s book known was Wynkyn de Worde’s sevenpage quarto pamphlet containing twenty-eight brief extracts (ca. 1501), which was then reprinted in 1521 by Henry Pepwell, who gave Kempe the label of anchoress. The pamphlet’s title, ‘A Shorte Treatyse of Contemplacyon Taught by Our Lorde Jhesu Cryste, or Taken Out of the Boke of Margerie Kempe of Lynn,’ prepares readers for selections Wynkyn de Worde deemed appropriate for women pursuing the contemplative life outside of the cloister – selections in which Jesus advises Margery Kempe to embrace ‘prayer, tears of compassion, and patient endurance’; Barry Windeatt, preface to ‘A Shorte Treatyse,’ in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000), 429, citing Sue Ellen Holbrook, ‘Margery Kempe and Wynkyn de Worde,’ in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1987, ed. Margaret Glasscoe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1987), 27–46. The pamphlet appears in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Windeatt [Longman edition], 429–34. 2 Nancy Bradley Warren, ‘Feminist Approaches to Middle English Religious Writing: The Cases of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich,’ Literature Compass 4/5 (2007): 1378–96. 3 Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991); Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Further references to these two books are cited in the text. 4 All citations are to Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow, England: Longman, 2000). 5 Andrew E. Larsen, ‘Are All Lollards Lollards?’ in Lollards and Their Influence in Late Medieval England, ed. Fiona Somerset, Jill C. Havens, and Derrick G. Pitard (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), 59–72 at 69. 6 Larsen states that Lollards commonly rejected ideas such as the veneration of saints, the worship of images, the keeping of special days, the swearing of oaths, transubstantiation, confession, pilgrimage, fasting and abstinence, and tithing; Larsen, ‘Are All Lollards Lollards?’ 70–1. Maureen Jurkowski provides the example of Thomas Compworth, Sr, who rejected the worship of images as well as the efficacy of either pilgrimage or papal indulgences; ‘Lollardy in Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire: The Two Thomas Comp­

The Radical, Yet Orthodox, Margery Kempe  201 worths,’ in Lollards and Their Influence, ed. Somerset, Havens, and Pitard, 73–95 at 77. 7 Maureen Fries explains how ‘The very number of her children, fourteen, might have reminded her more learned hearers of Saint Paul’s injunction against fertility as a necessary preparation for the parousia. And this especially in England, where mystics were by tradition enclaustrated as well as celibate.’ Maureen Fries, ‘Margery Kempe,’ in An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, ed. Paul Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 217–35 at 229. 8 Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 109, 82, 138. 9 Windeatt notes that ‘by birth and marriage Margery Kempe thus belonged to the prosperous middle class’; introduction to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Windeatt, Longman edition, 3. Kempe’s status makes it unlikely that she was a Lollard given that ‘Lollard groups enabled artisan men and a few elite women to undertake independent religious activity and community leadership, already available to elite men in orthodoxy’; McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy, 45. 10 McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy, 66. 11 Emily Steiner, ‘Lollardy and the Legal Document,’ Lollards and Their Influence, ed. Somerset, Havens, and Pitard, 155–74 at 171, citing Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, The Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitution of 1409,’ Speculum 70 (1995), 822–64 at 842. 12 Staley, Dissenting Fictions, 173–4. 13 McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy, 8. 14 See, for example, 1.1.186–8, 1.3.367–8, 1.5.508–10, 1.11.749–74, 1.36.2924–32, 1.66.5417–20 (fasting); 1.27.2026–45.3660, 1.54.4380–537, 2.3.7707–8.8178 (pilgrimage); 1.30.2524–35, 1.39.3078–89, 1.46.3661–71 (images); 1.65.5384– 93, 1.81.6540–665, 1.86.7075–93, 1.89.7368–75, 2.10.8337–55, 2.10.8496–515 (saints), 1.59.4895–905 (angel); and 1.35.2810–18 (holy days). 15 Sara S. Poor, ‘Mechthild von Magdeburg: Gender and the “Unlearned Tongue,”’ in The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, ed. Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 57–80 at 66–7. 16 Anne Hudson, ‘“Laicus litteratus”: The Paradox of Lollardy,’ in Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 222–36 at 223. 17 Ibid., 230.

202 Fiona Tolhurst 18 Hugh Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience: The Westminster Text and Fifteenth-Century Reception of Julian of Norwich,’ Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York and London: Garland, 1998), 257–89 at 269. 19 Windeatt, introduction, The Book of Margery Kempe, Longman edition, 11. 20 Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, 83. 21 One way of interpreting this struggle over clothing is as a sign that Kempe’s religious practice was ahead of her time in its display of the ‘new “mixed life” tradition’ of lay piety; Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience,’ 264. 22 Kempe paraphrases the Bible’s statement that a prophet is despised only in his own country and house (Matthew 13.57). Variants of this statement appear in Mark 6.4 and John 4.44. Kempe documents her mistreatment in 1.26.1988–2010, 1.28.2149–56 and 2167–72, and 1.44.3536–46. 23 Alcuin Blamires, ‘Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy, and Saints’ Lives,’ Viator 26 (1995), 135–52 at 142. 24 Poor, ‘Mechthild von Magdeburg,’ 67. 25 Fries explains that Kempe’s travels, lack of virginity, many children, and separation from her husband ‘all seem more acceptable’ in the context of the Continental mystics; ‘Margery Kempe,’ 233. For an introduction to Kempe’s continental models, see B.A. Windeatt, introduction, The Book of Margery Kempe, translated by B.A. Windeatt (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 9–28 at 15–22. 26 Fries notes that after Christ orders Margery Kempe to wear white clothes, she does not obey his command until she is ‘on her way home from Jerusalem’; ‘Margery Kempe,’ 355 n. 18. 27 Fries, ‘Margery Kempe,’ 231–2. 28 Sheila Delany, Writing Woman: Women Writers and Women in Literature, Medieval to Modern (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 80 and 208 n. 6. 29 For information about working women between 1200 and 1500, see Benjamin R. McRee and Trisha K. Dent, ‘Working Women in the Medieval City,’ in Women in Medieval Western European Culture, ed. Linda E. Mitchell (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 241–56. 30 Fries, ‘Margery Kempe,’ 232. 31 Staley, Dissenting Fictions, 63. 32 According to Windeatt, Kempe’s assertiveness might have derived from ‘an underlying sense of her status by birth – as well as the fearlessness born of her commitment to otherworldly values,’ and he notes her father’s five terms as mayor between 1370 and 1391; introduction, The Book of Margery Kempe, Longman edition, 4 and 2. 33 Margery Kempe’s investment in that hierarchy becomes even more

The Radical, Yet Orthodox, Margery Kempe  203 problematic in light of Susan Dickman’s assertion that John Kempe was ‘a brewer and scion of a family only slightly less successful than her own’; ‘A Showing of God’s Grace: The Book of Margery Kempe,’ in Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 1997), 159–76 at 159. 34 Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe, Penguin translation, 323, note 3 for 1.63. 35 Fries says that ‘Margery’s unorthodoxy made her a prime candidate for attack’; ‘Margery Kempe,’ 231. 36 See 1.27.2109–12, 1.47.3736–42, 1.54.4444–6, 2.6.7965–71, 2.7.8113–18 (rape); 1.16.1149–56, 1.52.4114–17, 1.53.4323–6, 1.54.4413–16 (burning). 37 Karma Lochrie has celebrated Margery Kempe for ‘overturn[ing] orthodox antifeminism’ (43), noting how Kempe rebels against her husband by overdressing (40–1), ‘calls into question the antifeminist tradition which forbids women to preach’ (42), and ‘overturns the accepted tradition’ through reinterpreting the words of Saints Paul and Jerome (48) in ‘The Book of Margery Kempe: The Marginal Woman’s Quest for Literary Authority,’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (1986), 33–55. Lynn Staley has celebrated Kempe for creating a community based on true charity and thereby redefining the meaning of community within her society in Dissenting Fictions, 195–9. 38 Dickman comes to a similar conclusion: ‘Though it is tempting to see Margery’s Christ as a spokesperson for the more positive view of marriage (and sexuality) which was in the process of establishing itself in the late medieval church, his loving liberality does not seem to flow from such abstract principles but (more simply) from a desire to support Margery’s vocation’; ‘A Showing of God’s Grace,’ 170. 39 ‘Si non se continent nubant melius est enim nubere quam uri’ (But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry. For it is better to marry than to be burnt [with lust]); 1 Cor. 7.9; Douay-Rheims translation. 40 Dickman asserts that chastity was ‘the virtue’ that raised saints above ordinary Christians; ‘A Showing of God’s Grace,’ 169. 41 See 1.34.2789–98, 1.37.2997–3003, 1.44.3417–48 (white clothes); 1.41.3261–9, 1.73.5872–904 (cryings); and 1.43.3355–9, 1.84.6815–39, 2.1.7499–507, 2.4.7791–824 (travel). 42 Staley’s comment about the resolution that The Book of Margery Kempe provides is consistent with an interpretation of Kempe as profoundly selfish: ‘What resolution Kempe provides has nothing to do with Margery’s reintegration into her community, but, instead, depends upon our acceptance of her achieved status as a singular figure’; Dissenting Fictions, 4.

204 Fiona Tolhurst 43 Lochrie, Translations of the Flesh, 3, citing André Vauchez, Les laïcs au Moyen Âge: Pratiques et expériences religieuses (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1987), 202. 44 For Julian’s redefinition of God’s nature, celebrating him as incapable of anger and always ready to forgive, see A Revelation of Love 45.11–27 and 49.1–18 in 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: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). For Julian’s articulation of the likeness of male and female souls and acknowledgment of no hierarchy among the saved, see Revelation 58.6–14, 35.26–31, and 44.1–12. For Julian’s statements about her visions revealing to her neither sinners nor the damned, see Revelation 28.1–3, 32.31–50 and 33.1–22, passages which contrast strongly with The Book of Margery Kempe 1.65.5350–69. The contrast between Julian’s theology and that of Saint Augustine is profound: Augustine not only defines Eve as inherently inferior to Adam but also describes heaven as a strict hierarchy in which no one resents his position in it; Augustine of Hippo, Civitate dei [The City of God against the Pagans], Book XIV, chapter 11 and Book XXII, chapter 30 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957–72). 45 For examples of critics who see Margery as a lesser mystic, see Martin Thornton, Margery Kempe: An Example in the English Pastoral Tradition (London: SPCK, 1960), 11, and Patricia Deery Kurtz, ‘Mary of Oignies, Christine the Marvelous, and Medieval Heresy,’ Mystics Quarterly 14.4 (1988), 186–96 at 195. 46 Unlike Margery, Julian states that her visions do not make her superior to her fellow Christians; she is merely the receiver of good news (Vision 6.11–12). This attitude is consistent with the inclusive language in her books: ‘God shewed me fulle grete plesance that he has in alle men and women that mightelye and mekelye and wyrshipfullye takes the prechinge and the techinge of haly kyrke’ (Vision 16.1–3, my emphasis; restated in Revelation 34.12–14).

10  Preface to Fleming steven justice

The position advanced in this little piece (part essay, part memoir, part encomium) is that John Fleming’s scholarship was intellectually more independent than our field is quite comfortable with, and that his achievement has therefore been only imperfectly understood; that he adheres to principles of historical interpretation different not only from most contemporaries and successors, but also from his most immediate predecessors, including (in certain important ways) his teacher D.W. Robertson, Jr; that these principles held him aloof from a literary ‘historicism’ that some, my younger self included, expected him to find sympathetic, and that they were prescient of the corners into which that historicism would paint itself. His choices were good ones: his books and essays are fresh and energizing today, when many celebrated historicist studies contemporary with and subsequent to them have developed with the passing years a certain kitschy period feel. This, I will suggest, is because his principles allowed to authors studied the conditions of thought that all scholars claim for themselves; this pronouncement, which I trust is sufficiently oracular, should become clear by the end of this piece. The privilege of having studied with Fleming yields me no privilege interpreting his work: I received no intellectual confidences, no special information beyond what I inferred from obiter dicta, a few of which are related here. So the following is not his characterization of his scholarship but mine, which he might repudiate. This reveals in part no more than a social fact about my student years – though I revere him, we were never close. It reveals in part a fact about his teaching. His training stayed close to the ground: he expected his students to develop scholarly skills and to use them, but not to adopt his position on anything. The

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only prescriptive thing he ever said to me was that regularly consulting only English-language serial bibliographies would prove self-stupefying. Though Chaucer studies at Princeton was assumed by others to be a dogmatic affair, I am not sure how many prominent medievalists in this period chaired dissertations with the variety of theoretical and political commitments that he did. Some theoretical developments of the time he took seriously, others not: he seemed to find Harold Bloom silly, but discouraged my glib and youthful mockery of deconstruction – which, a quarter century later, looks about right. Most to the point, however, my uncertainty about how he would describe his critical theory displays a fact about his critical practice. His one extended ‘methodological’ discussion appeared in 1973.1 It counsels historians about the importance of literary idioms and the pitfalls of ignoring them; its one literary-theoretical claim, hardly belaboured, is that the ‘text in itself,’ that New-Critical object of desire, does not exist. I doubt that either of these would meet much resistance now. Most noticeable is the essay’s anecdotal and propaedeutic manner: the real work was not going to be done here, and he concerned himself more with the grounds for undertaking historical research than with the means by which one would do so. Though Fleming attended to topics of theoretical concern, he did not pretend that they enjoyed any privilege among the topics of ideation, or treat the means of inquiry as the most interesting object of inquiry; and he declined to treat interpretation as a mechanism that could either derive itself from or derive from itself schematic accounts of its historical moment. All of which is to say that he declined to play the game that early literary studies has preferred to play for the last quarter century. He had published An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages in 1977; ten years later, the sort of material he there treated with such mastery – hagiography, polemic, preachers’ handbooks, popular verse – were becoming the material of choice for younger scholars. He did continue to work on Franciscan studies in later years, and produced an astonishing essay on Christopher Columbus.2 But just when literary studies was ceasing to think historical research quaint, he turned, with an impassive expression, back to major canonical literary works of the European vernaculars, the Roman de la rose and the Troilus, and to a great renaissance painting, Bellini’s St Francis, for his book-length studies. At the time, I thought it inexplicable that he wilfully should refuse to join a game he would be bound to win. Graduate students in the early 1980s could see what was coming: the ‘New Historicism’ had not

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quite arrived, but the nouvelle histoire had, and at Princeton one had a close view of it. An air of intellectual excitement was stirred, and, along with it, more mercenary instincts. No mantic gift was needed to see how these commodities could profit the literary critic. Like thousands of other American youths taught by New Critics, we had long since discovered the great, endlessly productive trick of close reading: isolate a figure in a literary work, analyse it, and then redeploy it as a metonymic expression of the work’s tacit conceptual structure. Once historians and anthropologists began to treat cultures as having narrative or figurative coherence, a whole new path was opened to literary-critical ambition: generalize a figure to an appropriately complex degree of abstraction, and you could flourish it, not as merely the secret structure of the literary work, but the secret structure of a whole historical moment. Pay the small price of discarding the literary as a distinctive category, and the techniques of literary criticism could colonize historical study. And indeed this is substantially what happened.3 What it required for virtuoso execution was an archive of historical knowledge broad enough to supply the telling analogies, the mastery of detail to render them with resonant vividness, and the conceptual fluency to draw quick distinctions and move between scales of thought. With these, you could start with a reading and end with a master account of a historical culture. (And ally it with even the most elementary notion of ideology, and you could do it in a satisfying tone of political knowingness.) No one was better prepared to do this than John Fleming: his seminars – most memorably for me seminars on Franciscan history and on medieval Ovidianism – were mesmerizing and unbalancing, pushing the very idea of ‘close reading’ to an almost hallucinatory lucidity and rigour, driving the reading down through the structure of the literary work to the structure of its words and of the literary inheritance through which they had been transmitted. With his quick and exact memory, he could make a single detail stand out in relief (the hoopoe, ‘a dirty bird’), and starting from there would turn a literary history one thought one knew – the Troilus, the Metamorphoses – inside-out before one’s eyes. I was enchanted with recent French historiography at the time; these were the years after Montaillou and Pour un autre moyen âge. I remember reflecting during one seminar what he could do if only he would familiarize himself with this. A few days later, Fleming memorably explained, in a few sentences, the social-historical and economic-historical character of Annales historiography, which we young enthusiasts were notably vague about.

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Without missing a beat or breaking a sweat, Fleming could have dominated that new moment of historicist scholarship. He just (well, this is how it felt) preferred not to. I blamed Princeton, and thought that Fleming’s weakness was an aversion to systematic reflection caught from his context. But his conceptual first principles were his own. He gets his first book underway by insisting that, despite the maxim, art actually is not long: barely longer than a single human life; it just leaves ‘a much more durable corpse.’4 Certainly this sounds like his teacher; Robertson had no patience with pieties about ‘man’s unconquerable mind,’ and insisted that modernity was cognitively estranged from the Middle Ages. But for Robertson, this estrangement was, so to speak, of recent production. Before that had been a period of long continuity: Pope (‘Mr. Pope’) was closer to Chaucer, and both of them to Boethius and Augustine, than we were to Pope. Somewhere around the French Revolution was a great gulf fixed.5 Fleming’s formulation in which conditions of understanding are always as the grass of the field, is at once starker and less lurid: it offers no point of respite from the evanescence of historical experience; on the other hand, it has no need to imagine a cultural catastrophe at the moment of the Enlightenment. The brute fact of continuous cultural change implicit must in the nature of the case be as much the lot of the Middle Ages as it is ours. This view of the past may be quieter, but it is also as disenchanted as such things get. So is his metaphor for the scholarly process that can recover some of what historical change has occulted. D.W. Robertson often spoke of the ‘assumptions’ of Western modernity as an obstacle to understanding: interpreting medieval works meant borrowing the conceptual framework within which, he says, they were produced. Fleming’s habitual metaphor pointed in a different direction, more modest and more disruptive: his image for transhistorical understanding was not borrowing a subjectivity, but looking up words – labourious, unromantic, piecemeal, and utterly unpredictable. His first book used manuscript illustrations of the Roman de la rose to understand the poem itself. He began explaining his rationale by quoting Chaucer’s dream-encounter with the Roman ‘both text and glose,’ which in its context can only refer to the text and its pictures.6 He treats the illustrations as an acknowledged gloss on the poem, something that can refine and specify the understanding of poetic expressions whose contexts and connotations had become obscured. The image of the lexicon is a powerful one for him: against some common New-Critical pedagogical currency about

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the literary work’s autonomy, he poses the instance of a work in a language one understands not at all – nothing autonomous there.7 In this first book, Fleming was less precise and less rigorous in application of this philological orientation than he would later become, and there are moments when his approach becomes loosely metaphorical, when what the pictures illustrate is an attitude toward the moral components of the stories the words tell, rather than any explanation of how those words came to tell this story, or what precisely they mean.8 He quickly imposed on himself a greater consistency. Though he had some stern words for the ‘pseudo-science’ of philology as it had dominated academic study in the early twentieth-century Anglophone world, his work came more and more to resemble what philology had been in a different, continental context – less Furnivall than Spitzer. While medieval studies was briefly entertaining itself with thoughts of a ‘new philology,’9 Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ set to work in a manner that would be fully recognizable and congenial to generations both before him and after, but was out of step with the celebrations of mouvance as a bonum in se. By construing the materials of scholarship as words not merely in their material posterity but in the specific, and equally though not exclusively material, history of their literary deployment, isolating the literary transmission through which particular locutions and terms funnelled down and found themselves transformed, Fleming reinvigorated a classic relation between philology and literary history. His discussion of the poem’s ‘ambages’ and ‘amphibologies’ shows how much and how precisely the poem, from its opening infinitive phrase, is a poem of and about double meanings.10 And he gets his most surprising and cliché-busting results by attending to the most elementary of questions: what did Chaucer mean by these neologisms and where did they come from? Their general sense was clear enough, and could be discovered in a few seconds by use of a Lewis and Short. But this established only what the words meant, not what Chaucer meant by them. For that, moving out from Lewis and Short’s citations into the works from which they were drawn, and the literary history of Roman poetry, and from there to Dante and Nicolas Oresme, he isolated a specific literary history that Chaucer reconstructed, by a kind of preparatory scholarship, and that he incorporated by means of these vernacular coinages. He did show, dramatically, what these words meant, in the ‘pagan’ self-critique of that tradition and Dante’s and Chaucer’s use of it: they meant more than just ‘ambiguity, double-meaning’ (Lewis and Short’s sense of amphibolia): they meant an

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ambiguity in which you could lose not only the thread of understanding, but your self and your world. And he showed that Chaucerian meaning, in this and in other places, was not a property of ‘usage,’ but of use – specifically, the use of these words in Vergil, Statius, and Dante, and more specifically, the excavation each performs on its predecessor. The literary filiation he uncovered needs to supplement more ordinary lexicographical procedures simply in establishing the meanings of the words. But while lexicography can rely on literary history, it can also discover unwritten chapters in it. Discussing the Wife of Bath’s phrase ‘bele chose,’ by way of a technical lexicographical dispute with Larry D. Benson, he finds Chaucer using etymological derivation as a species of imaginative fantasia that resolves itself into a sharp literary-historical focus. ‘Chose’ is Latin causa, ‘bele’ is Latin bellus (adj. = ‘pretty’); but the latter’s m/n genitive (belli) is identical with the genitive of bellum (n. = ‘war’). And thus, starting from Horace’s terrible dictum about the Trojan War (‘fuit … cunnus taeterrima causa / belli’ [the cunt was a shameful cause of war]), the ‘belli causa’ becomes a ‘bele chose,’11 and philology of a poker-faced simplicity yields a literary allusion otherwise unsignalled but probably present and unarguably apt. Criticism has long known how literary allusions can signal deference or critique or parody, how authors can use them gesturally to honour or mock literary predecessors; allusion can invoke an earlier text as a normative context or reduce it to a plaything. Fleming uses a practice that he never systematically describes, but which is subtler than the former and pursues a wholly different program from the latter: that the reading of an authoritative source implied interpretation of, and reflection upon, that source – both an understanding of what that source in fact does and says, and an assessment of it. How Chaucer uses his classical and medieval predecessors judges those predecessors, yes, but only after thinking through them. Chaucer’s allusions acknowledge authority, but in making them do so Chaucer develops the terms on which authority can be conceded, declares how far it does and does not extend, and on what ground. Chaucer’s use of classical sources, and his use of Dante’s use of them, becomes in Fleming’s description a quite remarkable ‘deep classicism’: Chaucer himself pursued a kind of philological research that became a commentary on aspects of what he presented as ‘classical culture’ not known to itself – an explanation of classical culture in which its coherence is drawn from what it does not know. The role Fleming finds Chaucer here playing is one he has consistently

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refused to assume himself: from the first, and with especial care starting with the Introduction to Franciscan Literature, Fleming refused to instruct history in what it was too innocent or too compromised to know about itself. He has refused also to depute an allegorical entity (like ‘culture’) as the real possessor of subjective attributes once thought to belong to humans. In so refusing, Fleming refused (as if wilfully, I said earlier) to execute the coup he was positioned for, to sweep visibly ahead of a historicist wave that in learning and conceptual shrewdness was well behind him in any case. At the bottom of most late twentieth-century historicism lay a single device: the recursive reapplication of literary design to its cultural context, taken as the origin (partially recognized at most) and the referent (partially conscious at most) of that design; the literary work, as the intentional product of an author, is less a work than a metonymic index or symptom of the culture whose structures it embodies and makes visible. In practice this means excavating a set of ‘archival’ terms that can be promoted to a redefinition of the historical period. And since Fleming had not only his vast reserve of learning but also the rhetorical skill of investing details drawn from it with luminous immediacy, he was always in range of performing this trick, and never performed it. Instead, he focused the more resolutely on single works, single productions. What he did with the Troilus in the 1990 book helps to show what he did with the Romance of the Rose eight years earlier,12 which in turn shows something about his relation to the species of literary historicism in which he did not participate. In Reason and the Lover, he moves chronologically forward from Augustine and Boethius toward the book’s topic, the Reason episode, but then chooses apparently to overshoot the target, concluding with a chapter on Petrarch as a collateral heir of Jean de Meun. The choice baffled some reviewers. This was not the cursory epilogue tying off the main line of the story; this was almost a quarter of the book, and it moved the focus squarely past the book’s notional focus into the fourteenth century. Doing so gave life and meaning to a sober and simple point too often unremarked (one of Fleming’s favourite maxims was that ‘What goes without saying too often goes unsaid’): what one sort of scholar likes to study as ‘source’ and what one sort (usually different) likes to study as ‘reception’ are simply the same thing, the continuous history of reading, construction, interpretation, and response: choosing a topic merely focalizes, selects one tranche in which to study a process that is always heuristically and opportunistically selected. It is an approach that stresses at once the bookishness

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of literature and its continual history of self-transformation. Viewed from one side, it was a model too disenchanted to appeal widely at its moment, or perhaps even now, resisting as it does the solace of beginnings and endings. Viewed from another, it was too dedicated to the dignity, or even simply the coherence, of authorial and intellectual work. Reason and the Lover memorably introduced Marrou’s description of the Ciceronian dialogue to characterize Augustine’s imitation of it in his early Cassiciacum dialogues: unsettle the mind to exercise it, through the strenuous practice of argument that never comes to rest and doubts that are never resolved.13 Tracing the theory of reference in the context of self-examination, moving from Augustine (the De magistro and the Soliloquies) and Boethius (the Consolation) to Amant’s squeamishness about coilles and viz in Jean’s Roman, he finds that the chief purpose of the ‘theory’ of reference is less to create a theory of reference than to unsettle the mind’s contentment with its enacted principles: its point is doubt in the substance of the argument, which often is not just unresolved but anticlimactic. This was the point at which I grew most impatient with him: why would he not make the move so easily made – a mere redirection of an analytic vocabulary – to use this form as a springboard for the characterization of medieval culture, ethnographically, as defined by a commitment to the cultivation, rather than the elimination, of doubt, taking the philosophical form as a metonym for the culture that produced it? Had I understood his work better, I would have seen that he could not do so and would rightly have no desire to. He had not signed up for the more modest generalizations about ‘the medieval mind’ conventional in older scholarship: he sometimes seems barely to keep countenance with vague zeitgeistlich gestures toward undifferentiated cultural ‘background,’14 and while he would sometimes treat medieval doctrinal commonplaces as plausible initial hypotheses, he always assumed that the hypotheses then needed demonstrating.15 And so it was hardly to be expected that he would treat historical cultures as having the more extravagant subjective dynamics that recent historicisms tacitly and inadvertently assigned them. This tendency is the unintended consequence of literary procedures that such historicists inherited from the New Criticism. Among the properties New Critics most valued in literary works were a plenary unity of design and a capacity for selfcommentary. The latter followed naturally from the former: the very completeness of formal unity meant that any piece of the work could in theory be persuaded to reveal in miniature its principles of design: the

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work, then, ‘knows’ itself, by virtue of its perfection as an intentional design.16 One of the services that historicist criticism did was to give this way of thinking a new lease on life, by freeing the interpretative gesture of self-reflective metonymy from the straitened bounds of the work’s relation to itself to speak of the work’s relation to its place and moment: particular organized expressions – historians, at first, particularly liked ritualized actions, and literary critics liked literary works; both eventually acquired more spacious tastes – as the metonymic selfreflection of culture itself, moments in which historical communities bared the device of their common life. All conceptual vehicles have their characteristic vices, ditches toward which they swerve when their alignment wobbles. The bad habit of most cultural studies is tacitly and inadvertently to treat culture as either an intentional object or an intending subject, to assume that it has meanings not only the way words have meanings but the way utterances and utterers have meanings – to imagine, in brief, that culture can be the object not merely of explanation but of interpretation. When we started attributing that capacity of ‘baring the device’ to literary works or social conventions as elements of a cultural system – as the system’s own representation of itself to itself – we treated that system itself as a composition, as not only systematic but intentional. (Whether such intention is not a ghost in the machine of all ideas of culture or society as system is an open question, to my mind.) It sidled always toward treating ‘culture’ as something that had either the coherence of an intentional action or the shaping dynamism of an intention itself.17 Robertson anticipated this aspect of the historicism that succeeded his own. Indeed, Fleming’s unfashionable uninterest in large cultural claims was not due to Robertson’s old-fashionedness, but in contrast to Robertson’s precocious currency in this regard. What was truly radical in Robertson’s work were not his claims that Jean de Meun and Chaucer accepted an Augustinian understanding of sexual desire, or even that as poets they were didactic spokesmen for that understanding. The former is hard to deny, the latter hard to maintain; but neither, plausible or not, had to be upsetting. Inevitably upsetting, when made with Robertson’s learning and élan, was the claim that medieval poets had to think that way, and that we just had to misunderstand them without the corrective discipline of exegetical historicism. The Augustinian anthropology of the human animal as the desiring animal was not just a doctrine to Robertson, even an overwhelmingly influential one; it was the appropriate and adaptive regulation of the medieval self to its social

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circumstances, the vocabulary by which medieval people adequately explained themselves to themselves. Coherent and functional participation in their world required the employment of this lexicon and the program of understanding and reform that went with it. And so he did not claim that medieval people could not or did not think unorthodox or undisciplined thoughts, but that they could not coherently and responsibly think such thoughts – that such thoughts were lapses rather than actions of the mind, self-destructive impulses rather than moments of intellection: to speak such thoughts was less like speaking dissent than like speaking nonsense.18 When I was a student, I heard Fleming joke about the ‘anxiety of influence’ that had driven him to write the Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages and From Bonaventure to Bellini – it was all, he said, his response to ‘a single footnote of Robertson’s.’ I think I know which note: in it, Robertson concedes that many friars rejected what he presents as an unvarying medieval consensus about the utility of literary allegory but denies that their rejection calls the consensus into question. Antihumanistic friars, he says, had ‘developed an attitude toward literature and the arts very much like that of the Puritans of the sixteenth century.’19 The argument would seem to be that these attitudes were debilitatingly ahead of their time: they might have proved functional two centuries later, but simply had no utility to the Middle Ages, and therefore no traction on its cultural productions. This position, if it is Robertson’s position, shows more clearly than anything else how the Middle Ages itself has a mind for him: its coherence is dynamic, expelling that which does not fit as that which does not matter. This, surely, is why Robertson could quote exegetical works of the fourth or seventh or twelfth century to explain Jean de Meun and Chaucer without troubling to argue that Jean or Chaucer knew these works, directly or indirectly. His point is that these are not the poets’ sources; they are witnesses that speak aloud what the Middle Ages collectively and necessarily thought, what its poets were called to repeat in allegorical obscurity. What is most important in them is not their thoughts or their personal knowledge – that is what Robertson does not bother to establish – but the system of understanding he treats as generically medieval. Though he is too sensible to put it this way, the medieval thoughts Robertson thinks worth recovering were thought, not by Jean de Meun or Chaucer, but by the Middle Ages. For Robertson, as for much of the historicism of my generation, what literary works have to offer is what they manifest of their cultural

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moment – necessarily, unconsciously, or both – rather than what they say about it. They are indices, symptoms whose intentional structures reveal a cultural ‘imaginary’ largely beyond their apprehension. (If it were not largely beyond their apprehension, they would have no indexical use.) It would be tendentious simply to identify Robertson with the habits of these later critics: he imagined his authors’ transmission of their thought-world to be a conscious and a wholly voluntary act, and at no point did his interpretations offer to move behind the deliberate design of what they say to examine the unconscious social conditions of the utterance or the design. But since what is not a part of the medieval structure of thought is not a real thought, as Robertson conceives it, any deliberation to which ‘real thoughts’ might be subjected is already shaped by a functionalist determination that precedes them, that guarantees their pertinence, and that, by definition, they could not reflect upon. Treating a historical period as a certain kind of thought-world, in terms of cognitive habits believed to be constitutive of it, has the effect of creating the historical period as a kind of supersubject, as the real source of the ideation that is precipitated into what ordinary subjects vainly imagine they say by their own will and thought and who, in turn, tend to become instances of, or even the instruments of, their period. It is utterly unsurprising, from that perspective, that it should have been so hard to imagine medieval writers or actors as the true subjects of the thoughts they think in informed and self-aware good faith. Fleming took much from Robertson, but left much also. The most immediately visible difference from his teacher, and the one likely to be most appealing to those of my generation, is his clarity that serious medieval thought was a matter not just of participation in ‘quiet hierarchies,’ in Robertson’s famous phrase, but also of conflict; and the separate but related point that developments in style are developments also in substance.20 These both showed themselves first and most dramatically in that work on Franciscan literature, where he traced the upshot of the Franciscan poverty controversies, a history ‘written in blood as well as ink.’21 A less visible difference seems me at least as important; it is a form of independence maintained not only against some of Robertson’s habits but against the whole drift of literary criticism from the 1970s on. I mentioned that casualness of Robertson’s, his unconcern with whether authors knew the exegetical passages he was adducing to explain them (did Chaucer know the Glossa ordinaria?). Fleming was never casual about this. This focus became more intense over his career; the most

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daring and deeply researched elements of Reason and the Lover and Classical Imitation and Interpretation were not claims about what the Rose and the Troilus ‘meant,’ but about the literary filiations they constructed for themselves. As I suggested above, Fleming does not seem to accept, or at least he never uses, Robertson’s totalizing account of the Middle Ages, the assertion that medieval subjects had to think in Augustinian terms; he seems simply to have been persuaded by Robertson that often they did.22 He sometimes uses that persuasion to establish initial probabilities, but then knows that those must be demonstrated. Probably no one will think any of this a bad thing; but I want to suggest that his insistence on it marks what has been both most healthful and, by comparison with his contemporaries and students, most eccentric about his work, because it means that he will not speak of literary works as if they are symptoms. The importance of that is quite simple: a symptom has no right to an opinion. It can function as a symptom only by having no designs to be such; insofar as it functions so, any conscious designs producing it are scribble of no eventual account. Those conscious designs may themselves be treated as symptoms, of course, but the same logic will then apply to them: in the end, the literary work that is treated as a symptom witnesses against its will to what the researcher finds in it. This is the device that Fleming refused, and with good reason. His greatest essay, to my mind, is the 1981 article on St Francis’s autograph blessing for Brother Leo. (The journal listed its author as ‘John V. Fleming, O.F.M,’ which presumed commitments that must have surprised his wife Joan.) As a reading of the chartula, it is a slam-dunk: he shows that the ‘tau’ St Francis drew, identified as such in Leo’s note, functions both as an icon (of the Cross, of the sign of repentance described in Ezekiel 9:4 and recalled in Revelation 7:2) and as the letter t. Read without that letter t the written blessing says one thing (‘May the Lord bless you, Brother Leo’); read with it, another (‘Well may the Lord say “Weep!”’). The general sense of this complex of image and words is easy enough to make out, once Fleming has explained them: the reminder of sin, death, and redemption in the skull and the cross of Golgotha, their penitential response in the tau, the call to enact that penitence in tears, the identity of those tears with God’s blessing – he could have left it there. But he presses toward a more precise understanding of it, which he reads back into Francis’s blessing from a later source, the Legenda major that the Chapter General of the order commissioned from St Bonaventure in 1260. He makes the claim explicitly – the Legenda major offers ‘an accurate formulation of Francis’s own self-image’ – a claim he

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realizes ‘may prove controversial.’23 It is almost an axiom in some scholarship, especially the most glibly historicizing kind, that a later text cannot explain an earlier one. Some such axiom must indeed be true if works are taken chiefly as indices to the situations that produced them. In that case, Bonaventure’s book could at most witness the effects, or reception, of Francis’s works and words, not their initiating meaning. And there is a habitual suspicion that an official work like Bonaventure’s, intended as it was to supplant, and to enable the suppression of, all previous biographies, would be in any case fundamentally compromised by a kind of built-in bad faith. Again, such a conclusion is hard to avoid if it is axiomatic that a work’s meaning will be mortgaged to its interests. Conversely, by insisting on his suggestion in the face of the objections he anticipates, Fleming emphasizes that Bonaventure had to think through Francis, that various interpretations would have suggested themselves to Bonaventure; that Bonaventure got Francis right; that, therefore, Bonaventure might have gotten Francis wrong. Fleming must in all consistency allow Bonaventure those possibilities, because he claims them for himself, as anyone must do who makes an argument. If his claims might prove ‘controversial,’ that is because some will think him wrong; and they will think him wrong because he may in fact be wrong, which is a condition without which it would be impossible to be right. To allow to authors of the past the chance to be more or less wrong, more or less right, does not mean denying the importance of ideology, presupposition, or mediation. Academics of our time and place (of any time or place) can hardly imagine that we are less mortgaged to our interests than those we study, and yet we make arguments that ask to be believed. Fleming’s stubborn unfashionability has remembered this, and resisted devices that would deny to medieval authors the privileges modern scholars routinely claim for themselves. He has consistently refused to treat historical culture as a subject, refused to imagine that historical contexts have intentions, execute projects, or make meaning. He treats them rather as repertories, resources, with which artists and writers and everyone else do their work – work of which they must be partly unconscious, undeniably, but of which they must, also undeniably, be partly conscious. When Fleming has finished a discussion, he has not made a claim about the medieval mind (or the late medieval imaginaire); he has made a claim about Augustine, Francis, Boethius, Bonaventure, Bellini, or Chaucer. The one privilege that most of our historicisms, well intended as they are, consistently deny to those we write about is a privilege we often

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reserve to ourselves – of taking intellectual risks, trying to find a more adequate explanation while facing the hazard of offering a less adequate one. That is why I stress the parallelism Fleming quietly draws between Bonaventure, who had to work out his understanding of Francis and might have mistaken him, and himself, who has had to work out his understanding of both and might have mistaken either. One reason why his work remains fresh when that of his contemporaries seems perfumed with a period scent, and why he was able to keep riveted even those students who most resisted following his lead is that he allows his subjects to think. notes 1 John V. Fleming, ‘Historians and the Evidence of Literature,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1973): 95–105. 2 John V. Fleming, ‘The “Mystical Signature” of Christopher Columbus,’ in Iconography at the Crossroads: Papers from the Colloquium Sponsored by the Index of Christian Art, Princeton University, 23–24 March, ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton: Index of Christian Art, Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993), 197–213. 3 And it has been remarkably successful in doing so. Though I differ in many details, the easiest locus for the discussion of this tendency is the trenchant polemic in David Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 4 The ‘Roman de la Rose’: A Study in Allegory and Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 4. In the essay on method a few years later, he says that even the greatest works of art are ‘time’s relics’; Fleming, ‘Evidence of Literature,’ 105. 5 D.W. Robertson, Introduction to Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), xi–xx. 6 Fleming, ‘Roman de la Rose,’ 9ff. 7 ‘The limitations of literary autonomy might have become apparent if Richard’s Practical Criticism had published, in addition to English poems, a few in Telegu or Choctaw’; Fleming, ‘Evidence of Literature,’ 100. 8 ‘It is certainly true that each age achieves for itself not only a language appropriate to its needs, but also a vocabulary of patterns large and small by means of which it may describe the conventions of its own society and

Preface to Fleming  219 communicate its ideas about those conventions’; D.W. Robertson, Jr, Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 5. 9 Bernard Cerquiglini’s polemic appeared in 1989: Éloge de la variante: histoire critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989). The next year saw publications of the Speculum issue devoted to the ‘new philology,’ Speculum 65 (1990), and of Fleming’s book on the Troilus. 10 Tr. 4.1406 and 5.897. Fleming’s discussion is in John V. Fleming, Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 49–68. 11 Horace, Satires 1.3.107–8; Fleming, Classical Imitation, 16–21. 12 John V. Fleming, Reason and the Lover (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 13 Ibid., chapter 3. 14 ‘It is not necessary, however, to appeal to a vague “mythographic tradition,” for the Christian understanding of the Golden Age was above all the gift of two influential writers, Lactantius and Boethius.’ Ibid., 115. 15 See, for example: ‘I believe a priori that from an historical point of view, it is nearly impossible that Jean de Meun could have espoused such an idea’ as the total depravity of postlapsarian humanity; but this is followed by close investigation of a case in the Roman de la rose incompatible with the thought that he did; ibid., 6. 16 The great theoretical essay of the New Criticism, W.K. Wimsatt and M.K. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy,’ in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 3–18, does not affect the status of the literary as a product of intention. This essay presupposed, as all critical discourse presupposed, the intentional status of the literary object, but disallowed recourse to extrinsic statements of intention, precisely because of the perfectly realized status that intention by definition enjoyed in the literary work. 17 It is not important for my argument here to explain the distinction between these, but it might help exemplify the point to say that Foucault’s ‘archaeological’ work tended to treat a historical moment as having the character of an intentional artefact: plenary, systematic, and the totalized realization already in place of whatever artefacts might be used to explain it. In the first volume of the History of Sexuality, the historical moment, united under the personification ‘Power,’ had the ability to reshuffle itself, to choreograph responses and embody its own responses. Here, culture has become a thinking and acting being.

220  Steven Justice 18 At the same time, he was not altogether consistent in this position. Everything I say about Robertson in these paragraphs is developed more fully in a forthcoming essay. 19 Robertson, Preface to Chaucer, 353 n. 151. 20 Ibid., 51. On the differing understandings of style, compare chapter 3 of this book with John V. Fleming, An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977), chapter 6. 21 Fleming, Franciscan Literature, 73. On the disputes about Franciscan poverty, see also John V. Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 22 David Lawton seems to claim that one could consistently accept any of Robertson’s readings only by accepting the totalizing account: ‘You cannot in theory pick or choose from the local aperçus while declining the burden of the argument’; ‘Donaldson and Irony,’ Chaucer Review 41 (2007): 234. He acknowledges that in practice one did, but even ‘in theory’ the assertion is obviously wrong. You can be persuaded, say, that the Summoner’s garlic, onions, and leeks (CT 1.634) recall Numbers 11:5, and that this allusion constitutes a commentary on his spiritual orientation, without accepting that Chaucer and all his readers would have believed that his poem was meant to teach charity by allegorical indirection. The allusion to Numbers 11:5 was noted by Robert E. Kaske, ‘The Summoner’s Garleek, Onions and eek Leekes,’ MLN 74 (1959): 481–4. 23 John V. Fleming, ‘The Iconographic Unity of the Blessing for Brother Leo,’ Franziskanische Studien 63 (1981): 203–20 at 204.

Bibliography of the Scholarship of John V. Fleming

Books The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Morris and Mediaevalism: A Bibliography. London: William Morris Centre, 1976. An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977. Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore. With Marjorie Reeves. Princeton: Pilgrim Press, 1978. From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis. Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1982. Reason and the Lover. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Edited with Thomas J. Heffernan. Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Proceedings, No. 2, 1986: Fifth International Congress, March 1986, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Knoxville: New Chaucer Society, 1987. Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s ‘Troilus.’ Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. 1492: An Ongoing Voyage. With Ida Altman and John Hebert. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1992. The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Articles, Essays, and Chapters ‘Browning’s Yankee Medium.’ American Speech 39 (1964): 26–32. ‘The Figure of Chaucer’s Good Parson and a Reprimand by Grosseteste.’ Notes and Queries ns 11 (1964): 167.

222 Bibliography of John V. Fleming ‘Chaucer’s “Syngeth Placebo” and the Roman de Fauvel.’ Notes and Queries 210 (1965): 17–18. ‘The “Collations” of William of Saint-Amour against S. Thomas.’ Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale 32 (1965): 132–8. ‘The Moral Reputation of the Roman de la Rose before 1400.’ Romance Philology 18 (1965): 430–5. ‘The Rustic Fete in Floridan et Elvide.’ Romance Notes 7 (1965): 68–70. ‘The Antifraternalism of the Summoner’s Tale.’ JEGP 65 (1966): 688–700. ‘The “Dream of the Rood” and Anglo-Saxon Monasticism.’ Traditio 22 (1966): 132–8. ‘Chaucer’s Squire, the Roman de la Rose, and the Romaunt.’ Notes and Queries 14 (1967): 48–9. ‘A Middle English Treatise on the Nature of Man.’ Notes and Queries 14 (1967): 243. ‘The Summoner’s Prologue: An Iconographic Adjustment.’ Chaucer Review 2 (1967): 95–107. ‘Hoccleve’s “Letter to Cupid” and the “Quarrel” over the Roman de la Rose.’ Medium Ævum 40 (1971): 21–40. ‘Historians and the Evidence of Literature.’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (summer, 1973): 95–105. ‘The Old English Manuscripts in the Scheide Library.’ Princeton University Library Chronicle 37 (1976): 126–38. ‘Toward an Iconography of Medieval Poetic Forms.’ Studies in Iconography 2 (1976): 3–10. ‘Medieval Manuscripts in the Taylor Library.’ Princeton University Library Chronicle 38 (1977): 107–19. ‘The Pilgrim Press, Sometimes Called Prince Fred Printers.’ Private Library 10 (1977): 121–31 ‘Chaucer’s Ascetical Images.’ Christianity and Literature 28 (1979): 19–26. ‘A Poetic Gambit in the Roman de la Rose.’ Romance Philology 35 (1979): 518–22. ‘Carthaginian Love: Text and Supertext in the Roman de la Rose.’ Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 1 (1981): 51–72. ‘The Centuple Structure of the Pearl.’ In The Alliterative Tradition in the Fourteenth Century, edited by Bernard Levy and Paul Szarmach, 81–98. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1981. ‘Chaucer and the Visual Arts of His Time.’ In New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, edited by Donald Rose, 121–36. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1981. ‘Daun Piers and Dom Pier: Waterless Fish and Unholy Hunters.’ Chaucer Review 15 (1981): 287–94.

Bibliography of John V. Fleming  223 ‘The Iconographic Unity of the Blessing for Brother Leo.’ Franziskanische Studien 63 (1981): 203–20. ‘The Major Source of Bernat Metge’s Libre de Fortuna e Prudència.’ Journal of Hispanic Philology 7 (1982): 5–13. ‘Anticlerical Satire as Theological Essay: Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale.’ Thalia: Studies in Literary Humor 6 (1983): 5–22. ‘Further Reflections on Oiseuse’s Mirror.’ Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 100 (1984): 26–40. ‘Gospel Asceticism: Some Chaucerian Images of Perfection.’ In Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, edited by David L. Jeffrey, 183–95. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984. ‘Chaucer and Erasmus on the Pilgrimage to Canterbury: An Iconographic Speculation.’ In The Popular Literature of Medieval England, edited by Thomas J. Heffernan, 148–66. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985. ‘Deiphoebus Betrayed: Virgilian Decorum, Chaucerian Feminism.’ Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 182–99. ‘The Garden of the Roman de la Rose: Vision of Landscape or Landscape of Vision?’ In Medieval Gardens, edited by Elisabeth MacDougall, 199–234. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986. ‘Obscure Images by Illustrious Hands.’ In Text and Image, edited by David Burchmore, 1–26. Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1986. ‘Editor’s Preface.’ In Studies in the Age of Chaucer: Proceedings, No. 2, 1986: Fifth International Congress, March 1986, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ed. John V. Fleming and Thomas J. Heffernan, vii–viii. Knoxville: New Chaucer Society, 1987. ‘Response to Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. “Solomon’s Wife: Deceit, Desire, and the Genealogy of Romance.”’ In Space, Time, Image, Sign: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, edited by James A.W. Heffernan, 37–40. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. ‘Augustine and – and in – Medieval Literature.’ In Saint Augustine and His Influence in the Middle Ages, edited by Edward B. King and Jacqueline T. Schaefer, 59–67. Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1988. ‘Chaucer on Language, Truth, and Art: A Liar’s Paradox.’ In Essays in Honor of Edward B. King, edited by Robert G. Benson and Eric W. Naylor, 73–85. Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1991. ‘Christopher Columbus as a Scriptural Exegete.’ Lutheran Quarterly 5 (1991): 189–203. ‘Jean de Meun and the Ancient Poets.’ In Rethinking the ‘Romance of the Rose’:

224 Bibliography of John V. Fleming Text, Image, Reception, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot, 81–100. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. ‘The fidus interpres, or From Horace to Pandarus.’ In Interpretation: Medieval and Modern, edited by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti, 189–200. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993. ‘The “Mystical Signature” of Christopher Columbus.’ In Iconography at the Crossroads, edited by Brendan Cassidy, 197–214. Princeton: Index of Christian Art, Dept. of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, 1993. ‘Bernard, Chaucer, and the Literary Critique of the Military Class.’ In Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages, edited by Susan Ridyard, 137–50. Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1994. ‘Natura ridens; Natura lachrymosa,’ In Man and Nature in the Middle Ages, edited by Susan J. Ridyard and Robert G. Benson, 1–35. Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1995. ‘Sacred and Secular Exegesis in the Wyf of Bath’s Tale.’ In Retelling Tales: Essays in Honor of Russell Peck, edited by Thomas Hahn and Alan Lupack, 73–90. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997. ‘The Friars in Medieval English Literature.’ In The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, edited by David Wallace, 349–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ‘Ovid and the Poles of Medieval Love.’ In Earthly Love, Spiritual Love, Love of the Saints, edited by Susan J. Ridyard, 121–36. Sewanee, TN: University of the South Press, 1999. ‘The Personal Appropriation of Iconographic Forms: Two Franciscan Signatures.’ In Image and Belief: Studies in Celebration of the Eightieth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, edited by Colum Hourihane, 205–12. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. ‘The Round Table in Literature and Legend.’ In King Arthur’s Round Table: An Archaeological Investigation, edited by Martin Biddle, 5–30. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000. ‘The Pentecosts of Four Poets.’ In Speaking Images: Essays in Honor of V.A. Kolve, edited by Robert F. Yeager and Chalotte C. Morse, 111–41. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2001. ‘The Best Line in Ovid and the Worst.’ In New Readings of Chaucer’s Poetry, edited by Robert G. Benson and Susan J. Ridyard, 51–74. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003. ‘Madame Eglentyne: The Telling of the Beads.’ In Chaucer and the Challenges of Medievalism: Studies in Honor of H.A. Kelley, edited by Donka Minkova and Theresa Lynn Tinkle, 205–37. Frankfurt: P. Lang, 2003. ‘Muses of the Monastery.’ Speculum 78 (2003): 1071–106.

Bibliography of John V. Fleming  225 ‘Criseyde’s Poem.’ In New Perspectives on Criseyde, edited by Cindy Vitto and Marcia Smith Marzec, 277–98. Ashville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2004. ‘The “Truth” about Jan Valtin.’ Princeton University Library Chronicle 67 (2005): 68–80. ‘The Flight of Geryon.’ In One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism: Studies in Christian Ecclesiality and Ecumenism in Honor of J. Robert Wright, edited by Marsha L. Dutton and Patrick Terrell Gray, 68–98. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2006. ‘An Introduction to Bikeman.’ In Bikeman: An Epic Poem, by Tom Flynn, xi–xv. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2008. Reviews Review of The Kiss Sacred and Profane by Nicolas James Perella. Italica 48 (1971): 497–9. Review of Blameth Nat Me: A Study of Imagery in Chaucer’s Fabliaux by Janette Richardson. Speculum 47 (1972): 797–9. Review of Damoiselle Christine de Pizan, Veuve de Me. Étienne de Castel (1364– 1431) by Françoise du Castel. Speculum 50 (1975): 488–9. Review of Der scholastiche Wortschatz bei Jean de Meun: Die Artes Liberales by Gisela Hilder. Speculum 50 (1975): 502–3. Review of The Medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in Literature of the English Middle Ages by Mary Flowers Braswell. Speculum 60 (1985): 649–50. Review of The Shepheardes Calender: An Introduction by Lynn Staley Johnson. Christianity and Literature 41 (1992): 212–13. Review of Blake by Peter Ackroyd. Sewanee Review 105 (1997): xl–xli. Review of Blake and the Idea of the Book by Joseph Viscomi. Sewanee Review 105 (1997): xxxviii–xl. Review of Seeing Through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory by Suzanne Conklin Akbari. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 28 (2006): 271–3. Dissertation ‘The Roman de la Rose and Its Manuscript Illustrations.’ 2 vols. Vol. 1, Text. Vol. 2, Illustrations. PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1963.

Notes This bibliography lists scholarly works published in the forty-six years

226 Bibliography of John V. Fleming between John V. Fleming’s 1963 dissertation and his recent 2009 book. It does not include works that are forthcoming or in progress, nor does it attempt to cover the wide range of non-scholarly, occasional or journalistic writings. Two sorts of para-academic publications deserve special mention.  From the handpresses in his home, Fleming printed a variety of posters, books, and pamphlets, including several volumes published in the 1970s under the imprint of Pilgrim Press. See Fleming’s own account, ‘The Pilgrim Press, Sometimes Called Prince Fred Printers,’ Private Library 10 (1977): 121–31, as well as O.J. Rothrock, ‘A Year of Contemporary Collecting in Graphic Arts,’ Princeton University Library Chronicle 38 (1976): 60–4.  In the last decade or so of his teaching, Fleming may have been best known among undergraduates at Princeton for his regular column in The Daily Princetonian, ‘Gladly Lerne, Gladly Teche,’ for which he wrote hundreds of pieces between February 1995 and May 2006. Through the humour and wit of this column he engaged with the students and the wider university community to a degree rarely matched among scholars of his standing: My learned books and essays mined with strenuous labor over months and years from the hidden chambers of the world’s great libraries got me tenure and respectful footnotes in other learned books and essays. Only my ‘Prince’ columns, often written in an hour on trains or airplanes, have involved me in a large weekly international correspondence. They have been anthologized, blogged, plagiarized, refuted, excoriated, stretched upon the cruel rack of the Internet and even fatwaed. Through them I have made life-changing connections. This is not a bad showing for a professor of medieval literature, but it is one enabled only by the special genius of this place. (‘Professor Fleming’s Last Column,’ The Daily Princetonian, 16 May 2006)

  Since April 2009 the column has continued as an independent blog: see www.johnvfleming.com.

Contributors

Martin Camargo is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books include Ars Dictaminis, Ars Dictandi and Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English ‘Artes Dictandi’ and Their Tradition. Robert Epstein is Associate Professor of English at Fairfield University. His essays and articles have appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Exemplaria, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and A Companion to Gower. Jamie C. Fumo is Associate Professor of English at McGill University. She is the author of The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics, forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press. David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor University. Among his recent books are People of the Book: Christian Identity and Literary Culture and Houses of the Interpreter: Reading Scripture, Reading Culture. Steven Justice is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. His books include Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 and, with Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Written Work: Langland, Labor, and Authorship. Julia Marvin is Associate Professor in the Program in Liberal Studies and the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Her publications include The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle: An Edition and Translation.

228 Contributors

William Robins is Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He is editor, with Attilio Motta, of Antonio Pucci: I cantari della Reina d’Oriente, edizioni critiche. Lynn Staley is Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of Humanities and Medieval and Renaissance Studies in the Department of English at Colgate University. Her most recent book is Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II, and she is the editor and translator of the Norton Critical Edition of The Book of Margery Kempe. Fiona Tolhurst teaches at the University of Geneva. Her essays and articles have appeared in Arthuriana, Studies in Philology, Studies in Malory II: Malory and Christianity, and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady.

Index

Abelard, Peter, 46, 62n2 Addy, Sidney Oldhall, 107n15 Adonis, 36, 37 adultery, 23, 31, 32, 33, 36, 46, 48, 50, 164, 165 Aers, David, 18, 28n29, 63n19, 71, 72, 85nn14, 16 Agamben, Giorgio, 9, 10, 27nn15, 17 Agincourt, 182 Alan of Melsa, 49, 63n21, 65n30 Allen, Hope Emily, 181 Allen, Michelle, 109n32 Allen, Peter L., 126n6, 127n9 Alter, Robert, 43n1 Ambrose, Saint, 46, 47, 56, 61n2 Amour courtois. See courtly love Andreas Capellanus, 16 Andretta, Helen Ruth, 87n28 Angela of Foligno, 191 Anglicanism, 58 Annunciation, 46, 185 Antwerp, 40 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 75, 76, 87n30, 88nn31, 32, 132; Thomism, 75, 82, 87n30 archbishop of Canterbury, 191, 195 archbishop of Palermo, 147

archbishop of York, 181, 189, 191, 194, 195 Aristotle, 138, 142, 168, 178n20 Armstrong, Regis J., 143nn3, 7 Arundel, Thomas, 54–6 Asad, Talal, 4, 26n4 Augustine of Canterbury, Saint, 66n37 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 11, 12, 18, 26n5, 27n20, 31, 33, 36, 43nn3, 9, 44n20, 46, 61n2, 62n5, 66n37, 71, 76, 133, 139, 149, 162n12, 166, 204n44, 208, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217 Augustus Caesar, 9 Avignon, 146, 147 Aylett, Robert, 60, 61, 67n50 Babylon, 46, 47, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 69; Babylonian Captivity, 46, 57, 61 Balbus, Johannes, 7, 8, 10, 27nn11, 18 Bankert, Dabney Anderson, 76, 85n13 Barbara, Saint, 193 Barney, Stephen A., 86n21 Baswell, Christopher, 120, 126nn 2, 3, 127nn7, 12, 16, 18, 128nn22, 24, 26 Battles, Dominique, 105n2

230 Index Baum, Paul F., 107n19 Beardsley, M.K., 219n16 Bede, 57 Beidler, Peter G., 86n16 Belleau, Richard, 44n21 Bellini, Giovanni, 21, 206, 214, 217, 220 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 27n17 Bennett, J.A.W., 139, 140, 145n30 Benson, C. David, 105n2 Benson, Larry D., 210; Benson edition of Chaucer’s works, see Riverside Chaucer Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 62n4, 114 Bernfeld, Suzanne Cassirer, 112n48 Bersuire, Pierre, 48, 63n16 biblical figures: Abraham, 11; Adam, 204n44; Adonijah, 32; Anna, 190; Bathsheba, 23, 30–45; Daniel, 40, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 56, 61n1, 64n29, 65n32, 66n42; David, 23, 30–41, 44n21, 45n23; Deborah, 190; Eve, 204n44; Gabriel, 185, 197; Huldah, 190; Joachim (husband of Susanna), 46, 47, 51, 52, 60, 61; John the Baptist, 166; Joseph, 46; Joseph of Arimathea, 66n37; Mary, 46, 180, 183, 185, 187, 197, 198; Mary Magdalene, 180; Miriam, 190; Nathan, 30; Nebuchadnezzar, 56, 57; Solomon (Lemuel), 31, 32, 165; Susanna, 23, 38, 40, 46–61, 61nn1, 3, 65nn32, 34, 66n35; Thomas, 134, 135; Uriah, 30, 31, 32, 41; Whore of Babylon, 56 Bible Moralisée, 34 Bilney, Thomas, 60 Biow, Douglas, 100, 109n34

Bishop, Ian, 84n8 bishop of Hereford, 56 bishop of Worcester, 192 Bishop’s Lynn, 192, 199 Black Death, 146 Blamires, Alcuin, 84n11, 202n23 Bloom, Harold, 206 Bloomfield, Morton, 92, 104n2 Blumenberg, Hans, 6, 27n8 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 48, 61, 63n17, 92, 100 Boethius, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83n2, 84n2, 87n28, 139, 208, 211, 212, 217, 219n14 Bologna, 146 Bonaventure, Saint, 32, 43n5, 216, 217, 218 books of hours, 14, 34, 44nn13–15 Bourdieu, Pierre, 135, 136, 144nn21, 24 Bradwardine, Thomas, 138, 139, 145n30 Brewer, D.S., 106n9 Brewer, L. Elisabeth, 106n9 Bridget, Saint, 182 Briscoe, Marianne G., 161n1 British Museum, 47 Brody, Saul, 94, 106n13 Brother Leo, 216 Brown, Peter, 100, 109n30 Brueggemann, Walter, 45n23 Brut, Walter, 56–9, 65–6n35, 66n36 Buc, Philippe, 47, 62n9 Bunyan, John, 11, 12, 27n21 Burley, Walter, 138 Bynum, Carolyn Walker, 12, 27n22 Caesar of Speyer, 143n5 Calvin, John, 33, 34, 43n11; Calvinism, 36

Index  231 Camille, Michael, 110n36 Canning, J., 63n20 capitalism, 9, 132 Caplan, Harry, 162n8 Caravaggio, 42 Carley, James P., 62n7 Catherine of Alexandria, Saint, 193 Cato the Elder, 163n14 Caxton, William, 62nn12, 13, 112n47 Cerquiglini, Bernard, 219n9 Cespedes, Frank V., 162n12, 163n17 Charles V of France, 47 chastity, 46–50, 54, 59, 61, 192, 195–7, 203n40 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 17, 21, 23, 24, 25, 49, 50, 181, 206, 208, 209, 210, 214, 215, 217; as clerk of the king’s works, 101, 140; connections to Merton College, Oxford, 139, 140, 145n30; as Controller of Customs, 101, 140; property in London, 111n42; relationship to literary canon, 113 – Canterbury Tales: General Prologue, 129, 147, 152, 220n22 Clerk’s Tale, 51 Knight’s Tale, 99 Man of Law’s Tale, 49, 50, 54, 63n23, 64n24 Merchant’s Tale, 64n24, 100, 104 Miller’s Tale, 99, 100, 155 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 139 Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, 25, 147, 151–60 Parson’s Tale, 49, 50, 52, 147, 159, 162n11 Prioress’s Tale, 103, 104 Shipman’s Tale, 134, 140 Summoner’s Tale, 21, 25, 129, 130,

132–7, 139–43 Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 210 – other works: Boece, 80; Book of the Duchess, 208; House of Fame, 140; Legend of Good Women, 24, 89n49, 95, 106n9, 113–25; Treatise on the Astrolabe, 140, 145n36; Troilus and Criseyde, 24, 68–83, 91–6, 99–104, 116, 125, 206, 207, 209, 211, 216; ‘Canticus Troili,’ 72–6, 86n24, 87nn26, 27, 90n53 Christine de Pizan, 48, 63n18 Chrysostom, Saint John, 172, 173, 178n33; Pseudo-Chrysostom, 178n29 Ciccone, Nancy, 87n29 Cicero, 9, 26n5, 212; Ciceronian dialogue, 212 Cistercians, 49 Cixous, Hélène, 45n22 Clement VI, Pope, 146 Cockayne, Emily, 110n36 Cogler, Johannes, 36, 37, 44n18 Colish, Marcia L., 89n45 Collette, Carolyn P., 85n16, 126n3 Collingwood, R.G., 21, 22, 29n34 Colombe, Jean de, 44n13 Colonne, Guido delle, 96, 98, 107n20, 108n, 108–9n26 Columbus, Christopher, 21, 206 confession, 5, 12, 13, 14, 55, 136, 182, 184,187, 188, 191, 198, 200n6 Copeland, Rita, 124, 126n3, 128n31 Courtenay, William J., 87–8n30, 89n45 courtly love, 17, 18, 37, 99,101 Cranach, Lucas, 36 Crocker, Holly A., 85n16 Crusades, 13 Cuffel, Alexandra, 111n45

232 Index Cursor Mundi, 32, 43n4 Dante, 209, 210 David, Alfred, 90n52 David, Jan, 36 Delany, Sheila, 87n27, 113, 126n3, 127n8, 202n28 Dent, Trisha K., 202n29 Desmond, Marilynn, 126n2, 127nn16, 19, 128n25 Deütsch Catechismus, 34, 35, 44n17 DeVries, David, 110n36 Diana, 44n21 Dickman, Susan, 202n33, 203nn38, 40 Dido, 48, 114, 120–5, 126n2, 127n16, 128n25 Disce mori, 90n53 Dominicans, 25, 146, 149, 166 Donovan, Claire, 62n3 Dorothea of Montau, 191 Douglas, Mary, 100, 109n32 Doyle, Kara, 90n54 Draper, John W., 107n18 Dubuisson, Daniel, 4, 26n3 Dumbleton, John, 138 Dumont, Louis, 6, 27n8 Dunning, T.P., 71, 84n10 Duns Scotus, John, 80, 89n46 Durandus, Guillelmus, 177n Durkheim, Emile, 3, 5, 26n1 Edwards, Robert R., 105n2, 111n44 Eldredge, Laurence, 86n20, 87n28, 88n32 Eleutherius, Pope, 57, 66n37 Eliade, Mircea, 4, 5, 26n2 Elias, Norbert, 100, 109n32 Elizabeth I of England, 60 Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint, 191

Enlightenment period, 5, 24, 208 Eriugena, John Scot, 80, 89n47 Erler, Mary C., 46, 62n3 Eucherius, Saint, 32 Eustace of Arras, 190 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 4 exegetical criticism, 23, 25, 213, 214, 215 Fabre, Marie-Louise, 62n3 Farrell, Thomas J., 84n4, 88n33 Faulkner, P.A., 106n15 Federico, Sylvia, 105n2 fin amors. See courtly love Fisher, John, 59 Fleming, John V.: approaches to the hermeneutics of medieval literature, 20; on the Dream of the Rood, 21; on Franciscan literature, 21, 28n30, 130, 132, 211, 214, 216–18; historicism, 21–3, 25–6, 208–9; intellectual independence of his scholarship, 205–8, 210–11, 217–18; and D.W. Robertson, 213–16; on the Romance of the Rose, 21, 211, 216; on the Summoner’s Tale, 129; on Troilus and Criseyde, 24, 70, 71, 72, 77, 92, 101, 111nn43, 44, 216 Fletcher, Alan J., 163n17 Fliess, Wilhelm, 112nn48, 49 Fortescue, Sir John, 47, 52, 53, 60, 62n10 Foucault, Michel, 219n17 Foxe, John, 58, 59, 66nn37, 44, 67n45 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 21, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 216, 217; Franciscans, Franciscanism, 129, 130, 132, 138, 146, 207, 215; Franciscan literature, 21, 25, 129, 130, 131, 132, 206, 211, 214, 215, 217

Index  233 Frank, Robert W., 126n2, 127n21 Frankis, John, 105n2 fraternalism, 25, 129, 130, 131, 132, 214; antifraternalism, 21, 129, 130, 134 Freud, Sigmund, 104, 112nn48, 49, 132 Fries, Maureen, 76, 88n35, 192, 201n7, 202nn26, 27, 30, 203n35 Furnivall, Frederick J., 209 Fyler, John, 126n2, 127n16, 145n35 Gaignebet, Claude, 110n35 Gallick, Susan, 162n8 Gantze bible. See Zurich Bible Garter, Thomas, 60, 67n48 Gauchet, Marcel, 6, 27nn8, 9 Gellrich, Jesse M., 126n5, 127n10 Geltner, G., 144n19 Gernet, Jacques, 136 Ginzberg, Louis, 43n2 Giotto, 42 Glossa ordinaria, 32, 215 Gower, John, 17, 57, 64n24, 89n49 Gowers, Emily, 109n33 Greenblatt, Stephen, 110n36 Gregory the Great, Saint, 32, 43n6, 57, 58, 66n37, 174, 178n35 Gregory of Nyssa, Saint, 80 Grennen, Joseph E., 87n28 Grosseteste, Robert, 145n35 Haahr, Joan G., 88n36 Hagedorn, Suzanne, 105n2, 126n2, 127nn14, 16, 17, 128n28 Haidu, Peter, 14, 28n23 Hake, Sabine, 112n48 Hall, Louis Brewer, 127n20 Hanna, Ralph, 65n32 Helding, Michael, 36

Helding Catholic Catechism, 36 Hellman, J.A. Wayne, 143nn3, 5 Heng, Geraldine, 64n24 Henry III of England, 100 Henry V of England, 182 Henry VIII of England, 33, 46, 47 Heytesbury, William, 138 Hildegard of Bingen, 46, 62n6, 66n42 Hill, Thomas E., 87nn28, 30, 88n39, 89nn42, 43 Hilton, Walter, 82, 90n56 Homer, 24, 91 Horace, 9, 27n14, 210 Howard, Donald R., 85n16 Hoyle, Matilde, 62n3 Hudson, Anne, 66n35, 185, 201n16 Hulst, Roger Adolf d’, 44n21 Humbert of Romans, 161n2 idolatry, 24, 56, 71, 82, 92, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105n3, 111n44, 112n47 Imagines elegantissimae, 36, 37, 44n18 Ingham, Geoffrey, 144nn14, 18 Inquisition, 146 Isidore of Seville, Saint, 26n5, 32, 66n40 Islam, 11, 13 Jean de Meun, 21, 28n33, 144n19, 211, 212, 213, 214, 219n15 Jeffrey, David Lyle, 54, 65nn32, 34 Jerome, Saint, 9, 203n37 Jews, Judaism, 11, 13, 31, 33, 46, 47, 177n19 John, king of England, 49, 63n20 John XXII, Pope, 146 Julian of Norwich, 90n56, 198, 199, 202n18, 204n44 Julius Caesar, 21

234 Index Jurkowski, Maureen, 182, 200n6 Kaplan, M. Lindsay, 60, 67n51 Kaske, Robert E., 220n22 Kaye, Joel, 137, 138, 139, 142, 144n26, 145n28 Kaylor, Noel Harold, Jr, 74, 87n26 Kellogg, Alfred, 64n25 Kempe, Margery, 25, 179–199; amanuenses, 187, 188; arguments for her radicalism, 179–81; John Brunham, father, 192; John Kempe, husband, 181, 192, 193, 202n33; and Lollardy, 182, 183, 184; and saints and prophets, 190, 191, 193–9; trials, 65n34, 182, 184, 191, 192, 194, 195; virginity, 196, 197; visions, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 195, 198 Kempster, Hugh, 202n18, 202n21 Kendall, Ritchie D., 65n34 Kerby-Fulton, Kathryn, 66n35 Kienzle, Beverly Mayne, 161n3 Kingsford, C.L., 106–7n15 Kinney, Clare Regan, 88n35 Kiser, Lisa, 126n2, 127nn9, 16, 128n24 Knight, Ione Kemp, 65n35, 66nn38, 40 Knight of Tour Landry, The, 47, 48, 53, 62n13 Knight, Stephen, 162n12 Koff, Leonard Michael, 86n19 Koloski-Ostrow, Ann O., 109n33 Kolve, V.A., 64n24 Korfmann, Manfred O., 109n29 Kornbluth, Genevra, 47, 62n8 Kristeva, Julia, 102, 112n46 Kurtz, Patricia Deery, 204n45

Lacan, Jacques, 100, 109n32 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 207 Lambert, Mark, 84n5 Laporte, Dominique, 100, 110n35 Larrington, Carolynne, 111n45 Larsen, Andrew E., 182, 200n5 Lateran Council of 1215, 13, 14 Latimer, Hugh, 60 Lavezzo, Kathy, 49, 63–4n23 Lawton, David, 220n22 Leach, Edmund, 4 Leach, Eleanor Winsor, 127n11, 128n29 Legenda major, 216 Le Goff, Jacques, 207 Leicester, 66n35, 183, 184, 185, 191, 192, 195 Lent, 46, 57 Levitan, Alan, 144n25 Levy, Bernard S., 144n25 Lewin, Ralph A., 110n35 Lewis, C.S., 16, 17, 18, 28n26, 92, 104n2 Lillich, Meredith Parsons, 110n36 literary archaeology, 22, 24, 91, 92, 96, 104, 219n16 Little, Lester, 131, 132, 133, 134, 143n8, 144nn13, 15 Livy, 108n25 Lochrie, Karma, 179, 180, 181, 182, 189, 200n3, 202n20, 203n37 Lollardy. See Wycliff, Wycliffism London, 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 106n13, 107n16, 139, 140, 163n18, 183, 184 Lonergan, Bernard J.F., 88n32 Lothar II, 47 Lucius, king of Britain, 57, 66n37 Luengo, Anthony F., 147, 162n11, 163n18

Index  235 Luther, Martin, 33–6, 38, 43n10, 44n16 Lydgate, John, 98, 109n28 Macrobius, 5, 26n5 Magnusson, Roberta J., 110n36 Mann, Jill, 143n1 Margaret, Saint, 193 Marrou, Henri-Irénée, 212 Mary of Oignies, Saint, 191 Massys, Jan, 36, 38 Massys, Quentin, 36 McCall, John P., 105n2 McKenzie, Stephen, 45n23 McRee, Benjamin R., 202n29 McSheffrey, Shannon, 183, 201nn8, 9, 10, 13 Medieval Academy of America, 21 Meditationes Passionis Christi, 185 Meech, Sanford Brown, 181 Melancthon, Phillip, 33, 36 Memling, Hans, 34, 38 Menagier de Paris, Le, 47, 53, 63n14 Merton School. See Oxford Calculators Mèziéres, Philippe de, 48 Mieszkowski, Gretchen, 84n9, 85n16, 90n54 Miller, J. Hillis, 8, 27n12 Minnis, Alastair J., 17, 28n27, 71, 83, 85n12, 87n28, 89n42, 105nn2, 3, 161n1, 162n10 monasticism, 5, 6, 21 Montchréstien, A., 44n21 Moore, Marilyn Reppa, 85n13 Morrison, Susan Signe, 104, 110n36, 112n46 Mucciarelli, Roberta, 110n34 Murdoch, John, 138, 144–5n27

Murphy, James J., 161n1 Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, 34, 43–4n13, 44n14 Myles, Robert, 89n45 Neudecker, Richard, 100, 109n33 New Chaucer Society, 17, 83unnumbered note New Criticism, 206, 207, 208, 212, 219n16 New Historicism, 26, 206 Newman, Barbara, 84nn5, 6, 89n48 Nicene Creed, 56 Nicholas of Lyra, 47 Nolan, Barbara, 105n2 Ockham, William of, 79, 89n45 Olson, Glending, 144n25 Oresme, Nicole, 139, 209 Orsini, Matteo Rosso, 146, 147 Orsini, Tebaldo, 147, 161n6 Osiander, Andreas, 44n19 Otto, Rudolf, 4 Ovid, 36,111n44, 120, 123, 124, 126n2, 127nn11, 19, 128nn30, 31, 207 Oxford University, 60, 146; Oxford Calculators, 138–40 Ozment, Steven, 88n32 Pape, A., 44n21 Paris, 130; University of Paris, 138, 139 Parker, J.H., 106n15 Parsons, Mikeal, 45n23 Pasnau, Robert, 88n31 Passion of Christ, 150, 168, 177n19, 180, 185 Patterson, Lee, 105n2 Paul, Saint, 71, 132, 162n12, 164,

236 Index 169, 173, 193, 195, 196, 197, 201n7, 203n37 Pearsall, Derek, 72, 82, 86n17, 111n42 Peck, Russell A., 65n31 Peele, George, 44–5n21 Pepwell, Henry, 200n1 Perier, Marie-Claude, 110n35 Peter, Saint, 164 Peter Comestor, 34, 43n13, 177n16 Petrarch, Petrarchan, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 86n24, 211 philology, 209, 210 pilgrimage, 19, 20, 55, 182, 183, 184, 193, 200n6, 201n14 Pistel of Susan, 24, 49, 50, 52, 53, 54, 56, 61, 63n21, 64n25, 65nn31, 32 Plato, 165, 177n13 Plautus, 9 Poor, Sara S., 201n15, 202n24 Pope, Alexander, 208 Price, S.R.F., 112n48 Princeton University, 25, 206, 207, 208 profane, 3, 4, 6–26, 82, 131, 142 Pseudo-Dionysius, 80, 82 Puritans, 58, 214 Quiney, Anthony, 107n15 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 60, 67n47 Raybin, David, 64n24 Reformation, 14, 33 Reichl, Karl, 87n28 religious, 3–7, 9, 11–14, 16–23, 25, 40, 41, 68, 73, 74, 76, 77, 92, 102, 103, 104, 114, 130, 131, 135, 136, 139, 179, 181, 202n21 Rembrandt van Rijn, 23, 34, 40, 41, 42, 45nn22, 23; Hendrikje, second wife, 45n22

Rhodes, Jim, 90n57 Ricardian period, 91 Richardson, H.G., 63n20 Ridley, Nicholas, 60 Riga, Peter, 33, 43n8 Riverside Chaucer, 93, 137 Robertson, D.W., 17, 18, 25, 26, 27n20, 28n28, 43n3, 73, 86n22, 88n39, 105n3, 205, 208, 213–16, 218n5, 219n8, 220n19 Roche, Robert, 60, 67n48, 52 Romance of the Rose, The, 21, 28n33, 116, 117, 206, 208, 211, 216, 218nn4, 6, 219n15 Roman de Thèbes, 69, 105n2 Root, Robert Kilburn, 93, 106n7 Rose, Christine, 109n31 Rowe, Donald W., 85n16, 88n36, 89n44, 114, 126n2 Rowland, Beryl, 161n3 Rubens, Peter Paul, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44n21; Helene Fourment, second wife, 40 Sabine, Ernest L., 107n15, 110n36 Sachs, Hans, 44n21 sacred, 3–19, 21, 23–6, 61, 71, 82, 102, 131, 134, 136, 181, 185, 193 Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Paupertate, 130–4, 143n3 Sallust, 9 Sanok, Catherine, 126n3, 127n14 Schama, Simon, 45n22 Schibanoff, Susan, 64n24 Schliemann, Heinrich, 91, 92, 104, 112n49 Schmidt, Dietmar, 112n49 Schmitz, Götz, 128n23 Schofield, John, 107n15, 110n37, 111n41

Index  237 scholasticism, 13, 14, 70, 89n45, 132, 139, 162n10 Sebastian, Saint, 103, 112n47 secular, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 40, 48, 50, 58, 129, 139, 181 Sells, Michael A., 89n47, 90n56 Servius, 26n5, 97, 98, 99, 108n22 Shakespeare, William: Romeo and Juliet, 94; Troilus and Cressida, 101 Shannon, Edgar Finley, 128n29 Shields, Christopher, 88n31 Short, William J., 143nn3, 5, 7 Siebler, Michael, 104n1 Simpson, David, 218n3 Skeat, Walter, 128n29 Slaughter, Eugene, 76, 87n30 Smalley, Beryl, 161nn5, 6 Smyser, Hugh, 94, 96, 106n9 Somerset, Fiona, 66n66 Spearing, A.C., 105n2 Speculum Christiani, 180 Spitzer, Leo, 209 Staley, Lynn, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 203n42 Stallybrass, Peter, 109n32 Statius, 91, 210 Steiner, Emily, 201n11 Stevenson, Jane, 62n3 Stillinger, Thomas C., 89n43 Stimulus Amoris, 185 Strode, Ralph, 89n49, 139, 145n30 Strohm, Paul, 63n19, 110n36 Susanna Crystal, 47 Swineshead, Richard, 138 Sypherd, W.O., 145n35 Szittya, Penn R., 143n1 Tatlock, J.S.P., 104n2 Tatton-Brown, T., 111n41

Taylor, Charles, 5, 27n6 Taylor, Jeremy, 60, 67n46 Taylor, Paul Beekman, 86n23 Tertullian, 46, 61n2 Thomson, Patricia, 73, 86n24 Thorndike, Lynn, 110n36 Thornton, Martin, 204n45 Thorpe, William, 54–6, 59, 65n33 Titian, 38 Tommaselli, Carlamaria, 108n24 transubstantiation, 56, 60, 182, 184, 200n6 Tugwell, Simon, 161n2 Turner, T. Hudson, 106n15 Ullmann, Walter, 63n20 Utz, Richard J., 87n28 Valois kingship, 55, 56 Vandenven, M., 44n21 Varro, 8–9, 27n13 Vegetius, 148, 151, 175, 176, 178n37 Venus, 36, 38, 121, 122 Vincent of Beauvais, 145n35 Virgil, Virgilian, 91, 96, 97, 107–8n21, 108n22, 120–4, 126n2, 128nn22, 24, 210 Vitto, Cindy L., 87n30 Voragine, Jacobus de, 177nn14, 16, 190 voyeurism, 23, 30, 34, 40, 41, 42 Waleys, Thomas, 25, 146–60, 164–76 Walworth, William, 95 Warren, Nancy Bradley, 179, 200n2 Warren, W.L., 63n20 Waters, Claire, 147, 161n3, 162n7 Watson, Nicholas, 15, 28n25, 201n15, 204n44 Weber, Max, 6, 27n7, 134, 144n18

238 Index Wenzel, Siegfried, 161n1 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 64n24, 77, 83unnumbered note, 85n16, 86n19, 88nn33, 36, 39, 89nn41, 43, 90nn50, 51, 105n2 Whetstone, George, 60 White, Allon, 109n32 Whitwell, J.B., 108n24 Wilkins, Ernest H., 73, 86n24 Williams, Arnold, 143n1 Williams, David, 83unnumbered note Wiltrudis, 62 Wimbledon, Thomas, 56–9, 65–6n35, 66nn38, 39, 40, 67n44 Wimsatt, W.K., 219n16

Windeatt, Barry, 105n2, 194, 200nn1, 4, 201n9, 202nn19, 25, 32, 203n34 Wood, Chauncey, 84n11 Wood, Margaret, 106n14, 106–7n15 Worde, Wynkyn de, 200n1 Wright, Lawrence, 110n35 Wyclif, John, 48, 65nn32, 34, 182; Wycliffism (Lollardy) , 54, 55, 58, 60, 66n35, 129, 180–5, 200nn5, 6, 201nn8, 11; Wycliffite Bible, 52, 53, 62n3 York, Yorkshire, 49, 184 Zephirus, 44n21 Zurich Bible, 36